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The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great Interpreters

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Title: The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great Interpreters

Author: Bliss Perry


        
Release date: September 1, 2002 [eBook #3410]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE: A CHRONICLE OF GREAT INTERPRETERS ***

The American Spirit in Literature
By Bliss Perry
A Chronicle of Great Interpreters

Volume 34 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys

Abraham Lincoln Edition



New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1918

Copyright, 1918
by Yale University Press







                   CONTENTS
Chapter         Chapter title                Page
        Introduction
I.      The Pioneers                            1
II.     The First Colonial Literature          25
III.    The Third and Fourth Generation        43
IV.     The Revolution                         66
V.      The Knickerbocker Group                86
VI.     The Transcendentalists                109
VII.    Romance, Poetry, and History          143
VIII.   Poe and Whitman                       187
IX.     Union and Liberty                     206
X.      A New Nation                          234
        Bibliographical Note                  269
        Index                                 273

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE

∴
CHAPTER I.

The Pioneers

The United States of America has been from the beginning in a perpetual
change. The physical and mental restlessness of the American and the
temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the
experimental character of the exploration and development of this
continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies
were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and
inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the
experiment. It is a story of faith, of

   Effort, and expectation, and desire,
   And something evermore about to be.

An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the
Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its permanence. The most
clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element
of uncertainty in our American adventure when he declared: "We are now
testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure." More than fifty years have passed since
that war rearmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently
sealed the perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social
changes now in progress are serving to show that the United States has
its full share of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in
this daily altering world.

"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger
Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the perishable
nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the
gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan citizens who emigrated from
England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of
that Elizabethan period which had followed with such breathless interest
the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared
alike by a saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John
Smith. Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they
have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all
our fathers were.

This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and
thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness in
emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness of
materials, boundless hope and confidence in the morrow, are
characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say
that the "good American" has been he who has most resembled a good
camper. He has had robust health--unless or until he has abused it,--a
tolerant disposition, and an ability to apply his fingers or his brain
to many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own
trail. He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of keeping
his tent or his affairs in better order than they seem. Above all, he
has been ever ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to wander.
He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does not build his roads as solidly
as the Roman roads were built, nor his houses like the English houses,
it is because he feels that he is here today and gone tomorrow. If he
has squandered the physical resources of his neighborhood, cutting the
forests recklessly, exhausting the soil, surrendering water power and
minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he
expects, like Voltaire's Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden
tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When New York State grew too crowded
for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he shouldered his pack, whistled to his
dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line for the Mississippi.
Nothing could be more typical of the first three hundred years of
American history.

The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of
the American in action. The memories of successive generations have
tended to stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone who
has enjoyed the free life of the woods will confess that his own
judgment upon his casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and
almost exclusively, upon their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the
woods, these gentlemen may be more or less admirable divines, pedants,
men of affairs; but the verdict of their companions in the forest is
based chiefly upon the single question of their adaptability to the
environment of the camp. Are they quick of eye and foot, skillful with
rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, ready to do a little more than
their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them.

Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the
classification of our representative men. The building of the nation and
the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have
called forth the strength of a great variety of individuals. Some of
these men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service,
irrespective of the question of their general intellectual powers, or
their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same
field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of
frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he
had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency.

The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American
sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the
spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have frequently
won the recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of
prose and verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical
standards. Neither Longfellow's Excelsior nor Poe's Bells nor Whittier's
Maud Muller is among the best poems of the three writers in question,
yet there was something in each of these productions which caught the
fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of the
national mind in a given historical period.

The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of
literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of successive
generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the
student of the literature produced in the United States. Is this
literature "American," or is it "English literature in America," as
Professor Wendell and other scholars have preferred to call it? I should
be one of the last to minimize the enormous influence of England upon
the mind and the writing of all the English-speaking countries of the
globe. Yet it will be one of the purposes of the present book to
indicate the existence here, even in colonial times, of a point of view
differing from that of the mother country, and destined to differ
increasingly with the lapse of time. Since the formation of our Federal
Union, in particular, the books produced in the United States have
tended to exhibit certain characteristics which differentiate them from
the books produced in other English-speaking countries. We must beware,
of course, of what the late Charles Francis Adams once called the
"filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" qualities of our literature
must be judged in connection with its conformity to universal standards
of excellence. Tested by any universal standard, The Scarlet Letter is a
notable romance. It has won a secure place among the literature written
by men of English blood and speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly local
or provincial characteristics of this remarkable story is to miss the
secret of its inspiration. It could have been written only by a New
Englander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch.

Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of the
American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are primarily
concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an
individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch the individuals long
without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that
animate them, the common hopes and loyalties that make up the life of
their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to
understand the "American" note in our national writing.

Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is
an evolution towards political unity. The separatist, particularist
movements are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history,
likewise, we best remember those authors who fall into line with what we
now perceive to have been the course of our literary development. The
erratic men and women, the "sports" of the great experiment, are
ultimately neglected by the critics, unless, like the leaders of
political insurrections, those writing men and women have raised a
notable standard of revolt. No doubt the apparently unique literary
specimens, if clearly understood in their origins and surroundings,
would be found rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. But
these laws are not easy to codify and we must avoid the temptation to
discover, in any particular period, more of unity than there actually
was. And we must always remember that there will be beautiful prose and
verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save as "the literature
of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar Allan Poe.

Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists.
The first book written on the soil of what is now the United States was
Captain John Smith's True Relation of the planting of the Virginia
colony in 1607. It was published in London in 1608. The Captain was a
typical Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class,
for picturesque narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on
American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is
clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase of the
variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American
imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something
peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness,
leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the
wilderness. Most of Smith's companions were unfitted for the ordeal
which he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But
he was of the stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been
made, and it is our recognition of the presence of these qualities in
the Captain which makes us think of his books dealing with America as if
they were "American books." There are other narratives by colonists
temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations which gratify our
historical curiosity, but which we no more consider a part of American
literature than the books written by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells
during their casual visits to this country. But Captain Smith's True
Relation impresses us, like Mark Twain's Roughing It, with being somehow
true to type. In each of these books the possible unveracities in detail
are a confirmation of their representative American character.

In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of
centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and
historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable
than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and
endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated
or even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the
genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler.

Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating
hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger
Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics
of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American"
qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay?
And what an American settler Cromwell would have made!

If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of theological
and political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the
writings of the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which
seem to presage the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor
John Robinson's farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620
contained the famous words: "The Lord has more truth yet to break forth
out of His holy Word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the
reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion.... Luther and
Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated
not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver
Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is identified, none
the less, with the spirit of American liberalism in religion.

In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of
independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a
letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and
feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be traced back for two
hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first
plantations in America." "I have always laughed," he declared in an
earlier letter, "at the affectation of representing American
independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late
invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay
as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should
assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to
Americans from the first settlement of the country."

There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism
which existed long before the United States came into being. Now that
our political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to
be regarded by our own and by future generations as evidence of a state
of mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas
Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of
Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable
error and calamity.

The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood,
in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Plymouth
or at the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along the
seaboard, it is clear that we are dealing primarily with men of the
English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis as
Francis Hopkinson a century later, "We of America are in all respects
Englishmen." Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of
exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America away
from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to live in the old
land. But the student of literature must keep constantly in mind that
these English colonizers represented no single type of the national
character. There were many men of many minds even within the contracted
cabin of the Mayflower. The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the
same variety.

For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive
act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the
Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was
really "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or
John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or
William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist,
Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy
Every Man in his Humour became the standard of action for two whole
generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for
emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton
of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and Anne
Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as
miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army."

It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often
been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New
England represented a digression from English society. There were then,
as now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who,
while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed a
fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the
history of the United States. But to the student of early American
literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing
with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He has
learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile
classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there
were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the
Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and
that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these
general statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always
go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual
person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative
evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each
thinking person becomes a species by himself.

While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial
instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly
English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of
a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how
the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and
moral, as well as their political problems. Among the emigrants from
England, as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status,
religious opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed
the physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage,
the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go
out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly a
searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few
picturesque rascals had the courage to go into exile while a few saints
may have been deterred, it is a truism to say that the pioneers were
made up of brave men and braver women.

It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single,
dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs.
Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was
measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was writing.
But the far more important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under
Winthrop aimed not so much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a
theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men straightway denied
freedom of worship, not only to newcomers who sought to join them, but
to those members of their own company who developed independent ways of
thinking. The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from
missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a commendable
desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a
debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the colonists were rich. Some
were beggars or indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle
class. John Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of
a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were
university bred and were natural leaders of men.

Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the
colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon
their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling.
Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion a
knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for
instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped
on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their
rear. Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange
soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage
over, John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was
much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the
new moon, when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he
had seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with a
new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind
began gradually to change also.

At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn
hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill,"
said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was
Calvinism, then in its third generation of dominion and a European
doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The
emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine
of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel
experience they were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their
theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation
became an immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their intellectual
and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind
blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new
Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from the John Cotton who had
been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire. The
"church without a bishop" and the "state without a king" became a
different church and state from the old, however loyally the ancient
forms and phrases were retained.

If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now
began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of
pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were
intensified. "Fallen" human nature remained the same, whether in the
crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate
shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict
between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical
loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided,
unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of
the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a
mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But
for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent
spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training,
one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and
ever-increasing effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one
another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs.

The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of
the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian.
Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he
partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot
and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the query as to
whether a Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than
the practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any
further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the
colonists were unanimous in the negative.

It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view.
But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior
in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain
qualities demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and
in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at
least that degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was
not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at
Jamestown by the stern edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he
eat." Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of
thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but the
lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their
flavor of homely, experienced truth.

Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the
equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation
from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make
things for himself instead of sending to London for them, and by and by
he grew as impatient of waiting for a political edict from London as he
would become in waiting for a London plough. "This year," wrote one
colonist, "ye will go to complain to the Parliament, and the next year
they will send to see how it is, and the third year the government is
changed." The time was coming when no more complaints would be sent.

One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for
self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel
College of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633.
He grew restless under its theocratic government, being, it was said, "a
person who when he was doing his Master's work would put a king into his
pocket." So he led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to
Hartford, and there helped to create a federation of independent towns
which made their own constitution without mentioning any king, and
became one of the corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638,
Hooker declared in a sermon before the General Court "that the choice of
public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and
"that they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is
in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and
place into which they call them." The reason of this is: "Because the
foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the
people." This high discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty
by Milton. It is a half-century earlier than Locke's Treatise on
Government, a century and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's Contrat
Social, and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the
American Declaration of Independence.

But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the
fact that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied
by an equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of these
conservative traits was the pioneer's respect for property, and
particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke
of possession of the soil as the most important and most operative of
all social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was
disinclined to part with his land without a substantial price for it.
The land at his disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a
very English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.

Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home."
The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in
their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not
at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated
clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn
regard for the Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a
successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held
the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past.

Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the
books written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to
meditate upon the general difference between them and the English books
written during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with
which the conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was
only one hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of
James Second, the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688
the struggles characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came
to an end. A new working basis is found for thought, politics, society,
literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two
generations of American colonists had cleared their forests, fought the
savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their
purses, and lived, though as yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was
beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World. We must
now glance at the various aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it
is revealed in their books.




CHAPTER II.

The First Colonial Literature

The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records
of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from
California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping
Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the
present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the
future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already alluded to, is the
typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager
energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct
for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help
poetizing in his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport"; "and what sport
doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then
angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle,
over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also
capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he
writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When
you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters,
husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of
trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have."

America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but
he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental
energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the
vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen.
Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of
romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first
teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have
an indulgent audience.

But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon
and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to
Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case it is
admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker,
the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present
day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of
the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a
language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness
and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of
"the strong potations," who thinks that "good company is the soul of
this life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the
"crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting that he is escaping
envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace
during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat
later day, since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws
the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith,
and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on
shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would
have delighted Stevenson.

All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most
of them returned to England, where their books were printed and their
remaining lives were passed. But far to the northeast of Virginia there
were two colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William
Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small
things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves
at home again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by
Bradford himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay,
with John Winthrop as governor.

Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles
of adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth.
Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave,
dignified, solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was
learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social
standing than Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's
flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do
Puritan of the Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and
scholars. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation runs from 1620 to
1647. Winthrop's diary, now printed as the History of New England,
begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death,
1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under
pioneer conditions these books are priceless; as human documents, they
illuminate the Puritan character; as for "literary" value in the narrow
sense of that word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought
of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of grave
sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster,
will bear comparison with the best English biographical writing of that
century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter,
but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with "decent
plainness and manly freedom." His best known pages, justly praised by
Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech
before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No
paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have
given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that
Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor,
Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction.

The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two
generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy,"
that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded
and enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate
failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human
nature. But its administration was in the hands of able men. The power
of the clergy was well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the
township depended upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the
right to vote was confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful
was the position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's The
Minister's Black Veil and The Scarlet Letter.

Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton,
had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable
exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's
opinion that "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the
meanest and worst form of government." They were fiercely intolerant.
The precise reason for the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford
in 1636--the very year of the founding of Harvard--was prudently
withheld, but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the
clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today
call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty
though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a
great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have
felt the heavy hand of God ... upon these grounds they build their
hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in
the world to come; I hope the worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the
preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they
shall burn in hell." One of Hooker's successors has called him "a son of
thunder and a son of consolation by turns." The same may be said of
Thomas Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old
Cambridge, who became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge
by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing
themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the truth is
a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason cannot be "the
last resolution of all doubts," which must be sought only in the written
Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be
saved." "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many
mystics, he yearns to be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be
"drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later
we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
Edwards.

John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit,
owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his
literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like
Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship
of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated that
new Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of the
theocracy; a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have
shared some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced
the sentence of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal
and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods,
might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal
for his rôle of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very
name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams.

Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry
Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil
power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to
the existence of a theocratic state dominated by the church. John Cotton
was perfectly logical in "enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness,
but he showed less than his usual discretion in attacking the
quick-tempered Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he
would kindly consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for
Williams loves this game. His Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of
Conscience calls forth Mr. Cotton's Bloody Tenet washed and made white
in the Blood of the Lamb; and this in turn provokes the torrential flood
of Williams's masterpiece, The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr.
Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. There is
glorious writing here, and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting
sentences. But there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in
his old age to his fellow-townsmen of Providence which points the whole
moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought spiritual
liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that same liberty to
others. "I have only one motion and petition," begs this veteran pioneer
who had forded many a swollen stream and built many a rude bridge in the
Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over the black brook
of some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after
you."

It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is
remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the
world has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is
read today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed
which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of Paradise
Lost or the Divine Comedy, has sunk to the bottom of the black brook.
But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit
literature without remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and
pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians properly
insist upon the æsthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that their
rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature
of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had
little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must
never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the
week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These
outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the
very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers,
passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest
of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible,
were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of
emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and
Milton stand unread.

It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can
estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers
themselves. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in the
colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King
James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the
New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a
pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed.
Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm Book provokes a smile. But
the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with
their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem
as Wigglesworth's Day of Doom one must strip oneself quite free from the
twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chimney-corner of a
Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell once
humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier relish" to the poet's
"premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could afford to laugh about
it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for several
generations the boys and girls of New England had read the Day of Doom
as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of
Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to
underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a
trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound like
clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have
imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little
parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror
once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless
gaze into the future of the soul's destiny.

Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other
verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are
not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic
themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the
daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet,
chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England
and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today
the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For
readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in
England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The Simple Cobbler of Agawam
written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a
dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely
more "American" than the satire upon German professors in Sartor
Resartus is "German." Like Charles Dickens's American Notes, Ward's give
the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the
talk and the personages of the transatlantic world.

Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have
lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives
of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has
always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys
and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian
is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier
fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like
Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material
offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with
the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain
narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the
inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native.

The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of
Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled
and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show
close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan
zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves
of the devil" were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned and
labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and
Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim
settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the
narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in
the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously
relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not
long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating
Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A
generation later the storm broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales
of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the
American imagination still. Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's
thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity,
and the loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King
Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in the
deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under
him." They "drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful,
great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head brought only thirty
shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward and poor encouragement," thought
Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of Ipswich, wrote a
comprehensive Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England,
bringing the history down to 1677. Under the better known title of
Indian Wars, this fervid and dramatic tale, penned in a quiet parsonage,
has stirred the pulses of every succeeding generation.

The close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's
Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the development of our
independent life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor
Tyler, "established two very considerable facts, namely, that English
colonists in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance
to the authority of England, and, second, that English colonists in
America could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians
that might be formed against them. In other words, it was then made
evident that English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world,
and also that they would not always be colonists."

While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus
conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the final
quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward
life and the inner temper of the colonists. The "first fine careless
rapture" was over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the
first settlements. Between the founding of Jamestown and the rebellion
under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had
intervened, an interval corresponding to that which separates us from
the Mexican War. Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent
life in the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already
outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty
years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take
stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own
history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves.
"You have better food and raiment than was in former times," wrote the
aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your
forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's Languishing Commonwealth maintains
that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's
election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent
worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and
assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History,
biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that
epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams
and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the
Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of
the services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the
colonies at the close of the seventeenth century. Old England, in one
final paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688.
That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic
struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the First and
in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous
conflict had its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of
the granting and withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly.
The American pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England,
and they praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or
quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while
England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily
forward into their own independent life.




CHAPTER III.

The Third and Fourth Generation

When the eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in the
air. The third generation of native-born Americans was becoming
secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height of
the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, Increase
Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their
implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does
public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring
"to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet
exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by
Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to
force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son.
In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there
are Baptist and Episcopal churches--and a dancing-master. Young Benjamin
Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he
does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the
clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough
to compel that industrious apprentice into piety.

If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and
Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New
Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world.
Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a
paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724,
considers North Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina
"the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat
of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well
nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of
England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the witty
William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing survey of the
Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North Carolina and to Governor
Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a
rainy autumn day, three acts of the Beggars' Opera, just over from
London. So runs the world away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints
it once for all, no doubt, in the opening chapters of The Virginians.

To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn
northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia,
which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened
interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the
chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the
age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to
the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate
intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly
the most perfect exponent of its many-sided life.

When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his sixteenth
year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin,
as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of
flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous
local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less
commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility
was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often
chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he
was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily
such burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a
normal man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books
and pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John
Norton, in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which
brings not forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt
emblem of students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the
"uncessant" sitter, the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who
produced the Magnalia.

Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was
perfect. His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was
absolute. His Diary, which has recently been published in full, records
his concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less
than his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his
agony of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere"
man, then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such
"Jewish old clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage as
makes it difficult, save in the revealing Diary, to see the man himself.

The Magnalia Christi Americana, treating the history of New England from
1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800 pages
in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods
entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors,
of Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events,
of Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the
Mather dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne
and Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found much
honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a
biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in
Paradise.

The Diary of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has been read
more generally in recent years than anything written by Mather himself.
It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in
Mather's Diary, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. As a
picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's Diary is as far
superior to Mather's as Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal in
painting the England of the Restoration. Samuel Sewall was an admirably
solid figure, keen, forceful, honest. Most readers of his Diary believe
that he really was in luck when he was rejected by the Widow Winthrop on
that fateful November day when his eye noted--in spite of his
infatuation--that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been.
Jehovah Jireh!"

One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinctively backward to the
Heroic Age of New England with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel
Sewall as doing the day's work uprightly without taking anxious thought
of either past or future. But Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these
and other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual perfection, in
quest of that city "far on the world's rim," as Masefield says of it,
the city whose builder and maker is God.

The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy.
Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703--the year of
John Wesley's birth--he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the
doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying "the
wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and
enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he
begins his notes on The Mind and on Natural Science. He is graduated
from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the
colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at
Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he
describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical
rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear
unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For
twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win
him the rank of the foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley reads
at Oxford his account of the great revival of 1735. Whitefield comes to
visit him at Northampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher alienates
his church over issues pertaining to discipline and to the
administration of the sacrament. He is dismissed. He preaches his
"farewell sermon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, and many
another still unborn. He removes to Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the
wilderness, preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on theology
and metaphysics, among them the world-famous Freedom of the Will. In
1757, upon the death of his son-in-law, President Aaron Burr of
Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presidency. He is reluctant
to go, for though he is only fifty-four, his health has never been
robust, and he has his great book on the History of Redemption still to
write. But he accepts, finds the smallpox raging in Princeton upon his
arrival in January, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in
March--his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once more thwarted. Close
by the tomb of this saint is the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who
killed Hamilton.

The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards has turned, like the
vicissitudes of his life, upon factors that could not be foreseen. His
contemporary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due to sermons like
those upon God Glorified in Man's Dependence and The Reality of
Spiritual Life, rather than to such discourses as the Enfield sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which in our own day is the best
known of his deliverances. Legends have grown up around this terrific
Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its immediate hearers cannot be
gainsaid, and it will long continue to be quoted as an example of the
length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was compelled by his
own scheme to go. We still see the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his
daily twelve hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow in the
pulpit and reading from manuscript, without even raising his gentle
voice, those words which smote his congregation into spasms of terror
and which seem to us sheer blasphemy.

Yet the Farewell Sermon of 1750 gives a more characteristic view of
Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his
nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain
almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded;
and he hunts objections to their last hiding-place with wearisome
pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the
touch like this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders
whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, so pitiless does it seem. His
treatise denying the freedom of the will has given him a European
reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and
Jefferson in political propaganda. It was really a polemic demonstrating
the sovereignty of God, rather than pure theology or metaphysics.
Edwards goes beyond Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary will
of the Most High and in "denying to the human will any self-determining
power." He has been refuted by events and tendencies, such as the growth
of historical criticism and the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution, rather than by the might of any single antagonist. So, too,
the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice Taney, holding that the slave
was not a citizen, was not so much answered by opponents as it was
superseded by the arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely
thinker has entered deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of
his countrymen, and he will continue to be read by a few of those who
still read Plato and Dante.

"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738,
"that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian
or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I make
such distinctions very little my study." To understand Franklin's
indifference to such distinctions, we must realize how completely he
represents the secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of
worldly adventure it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's
son, who runs away from home, walks the streets of Philadelphia with the
famous loaves of bread under his arm, is diligent in business, slips
over to London, where he gives lessons in swimming and in total
abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and becomes its leading citizen,
fights the long battle of the American colonies in London, sits in the
Continental Congress, sails to Europe to arrange that French Alliance
which brought our Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home at
last, full of years and honors, to a bland and philosophical exit from
the stage!

He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively
late comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths
at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far
away, and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated
huntsmen of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to
have their horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came
out in 1685, more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan
emigration. Young Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors
of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of
Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never
mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To
its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he
thriftily sold his Pilgrim's Progress. He became, in the new fashion of
that day, a Deist. Like a true child of the eighteenth century, his
attitude toward the seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous
superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own
love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old
coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape. Thackeray,
like Burke before him, loved historical associations, historical
sentiment, the backward look over the long road which humanity has
traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would have endorsed his
friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have no rights." He
joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his own lot
was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he became one
of its most perfect representatives.

To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London
of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed
since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then
triumphant, have been tacitly accepted by both political parties; the
Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted
the House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House
of Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a few
rotten boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe and
prosperity at home. England is weary of seventeenth century
"enthusiasm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the
accepted Whig principles a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of
society, a modus vivendi which nobody supposes is perfect but which will
answer the prayer appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us
peace in our time, O Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives
in the seventeenth century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the
prize turnips on Sir Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar,
and the offices at his disposal--these are very real indeed. London
merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly
ruling the country parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere
triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour, and his Essay on Man,
counseling acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the
last word of human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In prose, the style
of the Spectator rules--an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he
imitated it patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own.
And indeed, how much of that London of the third decade of the century
passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's
apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is
the real world, and that nothing succeeds like success; but it never
even whispered to him that sometimes nothing damns like success.

In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin
was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no
liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to
the dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to
believe that the classics had little significance and that they should
be superseded by the modern languages. For the mediæval world he had no
patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must add
some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an
indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue"
was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the
Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and
believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was
only a broad way to the everlasting bonfire.

But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's
son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once
characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the hoax,
and the republic. His contributions to science have to do with
electricity, earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture,
medicine, and hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work of
lasting significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as
formulated in the maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wide
reputation. He attacked war, like Voltaire, not so much for its
wickedness as for its folly, and cheerfully gave up many years of a long
life to the effort to promote a better understanding among the nations
of the world.

It is perhaps needless to add what all persons who love good writing
know, that Benjamin Franklin was a most delightful writer. His letters
cover an amusing and extraordinary variety of topics. He ranges from
balloons to summer hats, and from the advantages of deep ploughing to
bifocal glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He argues for sharp
razors and cold baths, and for fresh air in the sleeping-room. He
discusses the morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, the
evils of smoky chimneys, the need of reformed spelling. Indeed, his
passion for improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an
abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to
propose seriously a new rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous
proposal for a new version of the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold
solemnly held up to reprobation, was only a joke which Matthew Arnold
did not see--the new version of Job being, in fact, a clever bit of
political satire against party leadership in England. Even more
brilliant examples of his skill in political satire are his imaginary
Edict of the King of Prussia against England, and his famous Rules for
Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One. But I must not try to call the
roll of all the good things in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say
that those who know Franklin only in his Autobiography, charming as that
classic production is, have made but an imperfect acquaintance with the
range, the vitality, the vigor of this admirable craftsman who chose a
style "smooth, clear, and short," and made it serve every purpose of his
versatile and beneficent mind.

When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies
out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their
real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven
years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the Union of the
Colonies, but this had not contemplated separation from England. It was
rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the
British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field
from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral
life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in
the colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest
summary may be attempted here.

As to race, these men of the third and fourth generation since the
planting of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first
settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many stocks,
the largest non-English elements being German and Scotch-Irish--that is,
Scotch who had settled for a while in Ulster before emigrating to
America. "About one-third of the colonists in 1760," says Professor
Channing, "were born outside of America." Crèvecœur's Letters from an
American Farmer thus defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of
English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this
promiscuous breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The
Atlantic seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered
by local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political
organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young utopias,
waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a federal union. But
the dominant language of the "promiscuous breed" was English, and in the
few real centers of intellectual life the English tradition was almost
absolute.

The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The
Boston News-Letter, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if we
omit the single issue of Publick Occurrences in the same town in 1690.
By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several
magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that
word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink,
were found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in
1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator,
and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its office collection
of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale
of a Tub. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember that no allusion to
Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial literature of the
seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet
Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of
Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only
recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate
the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can
even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the
conduct of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his
brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to
come.

¹ Cook, E. C. Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750. 
N. Y., 1912.

If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's
American Mercury or to Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, or if we
study the Gazettes of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the
impression is still the same. The literary news is still chiefly from
London, from two months to a year late. London books are imported and
reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of
Philadelphia has two copies of Paradise Lost for circulation in 1741,
whereas there had been no copy of that work in the great library of
Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a
secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed England
as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of its own.

Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted
to London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay
the loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but
fifteen members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town. Yet
Harvard had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a
century. William and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton
in 1746, King's (now Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania
in 1755, and Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the
hands of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based
upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but little in the
different colonies, and this fact helped to produce a feeling of
fellowship among all members of the republic of letters. The men who
debated the Stamp Act were, with a few striking exceptions, men trained
in Latin and Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human history,
accustomed to the discipline of academic disputation. They knew the
ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no
provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences, likewise,
the colonials were but little behind the mother country. The Royal
Society had its distinguished members here. The Mathers, the Dudleys,
John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James Logan, James Godfrey,
Cadwallader Colden, and above all, Franklin himself, were winning the
respect of European students, and were teaching Americans to use their
eyes and their minds not merely upon the records of the past but in
searching out the inexhaustible meanings of the present. There is no
more fascinating story than that of the beginnings of American science
in and outside of the colleges, and this movement, like the influence of
journalism and of the higher education, counted for colonial union.

Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student of the period, summarizes
the characteristics of colonial literature in these words: "Before the
year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many
American peoples.... No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralizing
life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own
fashion." But he adds that with that year the colonial isolation came to
an end, and that the student must thereafter "deal with the literature
of one multitudinous people, variegated, indeed, in personal traits, but
single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies." It is
easy to be wise after the event. Yet there was living in London in 1765,
as the agent for Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland Colonial--an honorary
M.A. from both Harvard and Yale, a D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of St.
Andrews--who was by no means sure that the Stamp Act meant the end of
Colonialism. And Franklin's uncertainty was shared by Washington. When
the tall Virginian took command of the Continental Army as late as 1775,
he "abhorred the idea of independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writing
the second number of the Federalist in 1787, only twelve years later,
could say: "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected
country to one united people; a people descended from the same
ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion,
attached to the same principles of government."




CHAPTER IV.

The Revolution

If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the
passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Constitution in
1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and passion. Its
spirit is not that of "one united people." Washington could indeed
declare in his Farewell Address of 1796, "With slight shades of
difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political
principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington upon what a slender
thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had
been to foresee the end from the beginning.

It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the
literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper
secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action
rather than reflection, of the turning of many separate currents into
one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," runs
Franklin's well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most
assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor!
And that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the keynote of much of
the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in the
state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the
pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in
the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.

We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the
Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written
by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and
Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the
Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the
people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate
was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the
majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the
conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of
course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty
pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old
order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy
letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new home
in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and
literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are
never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork
of the road.

There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate
literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of 
controversy--members, in Crèvecœur's touching words, of the "secret
communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace,
what must I do?" asks Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer.
"I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no
longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired
with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with
so many watchings." Crèvecœur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly
no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
adventure--which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled
What is an American--was ending tragically in civil war. Another
white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose
Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is
finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the
nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural
refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart
enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York,
England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of
Friends.

The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip
Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our
Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as
Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men
of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like
Francis Hopkinson's Battle of the Kegs, a Hudibrastic satire like
Trumbull's McFingal, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's Columbia.
Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British
prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins,
the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There was patriotic
verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and
it reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly
conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The
immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British
bards of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to
verse-writing, but endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The
reader of Burton E. Stevenson's collection of Poems of American History
can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events of the
Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic themes. He will
see how slenderly equipped for song were most of the later
eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the tone
of that hour.

Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the
depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. "An
old college mate of mine," said James Madison--who was by tradition
Freneau's room-mate at Princeton in the class of 1771--"a poet and man
of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When but
three years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another
friend: "Poetry wit and Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much:
but I begin to discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of a
mortal's Time and that something more substantial more durable more
profitable befits our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe age of
twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to
illustrate the "common sense" atmosphere of the age which proved fatal
to Freneau's development. Yet the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot
descent, is a charming figure, and his later malevolence was shown only
to his political foes. After leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the
law, the newspaper, the sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he
writes, like most American poets, far too much for his own reputation.
As the editor of the National Gazette in Philadelphia, he becomes
involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and
Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French Revolution
makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By and by he retires
to a New Jersey farm, still toying with journalism, still composing
verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 1812; but the
public has now forgotten him. He lives on in poverty and seclusion, and
in his eightieth year loses his way in a snowstorm and perishes
miserably--this in 1832, the year of the death of the great Sir Walter
Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his best
lines of poetry.

It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the
Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression of
the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is
civic rather than æsthetic, a sort of writing which has been incidental
to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral purpose, and
which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James Otis's
argument against the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, and
Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, mark
epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported
imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an
assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or
conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and
then have perished beyond resurrection.

Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly
"literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously inadequate
to account for the popular effect of their speeches, it is still
possible to measure the efficiency of the pamphleteer. When John Adams
tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we must take
his word for the impression which Otis's oratory left upon his mind. But
John Adams's own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our
judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles need
not blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness,
candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, "difficult"
person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, and his latest
letters and journals are full of whimsical charm.

John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted,
tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions
followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an
adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to
the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be
breathing the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly
obvious as a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance
of the European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions
of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that there
are certain essential rights of the British constitution of government
which are founded in the law of God and nature and are the common rights
of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of the Colonists (1772) we
are assured that "among the natural rights of the colonists are these,
First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property.... All
men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they
please.... When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent."
Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely
demagogic.

"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting,
but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in
1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his
endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says
Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his
eyes," and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him
as an "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position
on the Pennsylvania Magazine. Before he had been a year on American
soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political
literature, Common Sense, which appeared in January, 1776. "A style
hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph.
Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years
earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt
American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's
death. The Crisis, a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first
was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion
that the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the
sword of Washington." Paine, who was now serving in the army, might have
heard his own words, "These are the times that try men's souls," read
aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged troops just before they
crossed the Delaware to win the victory of Trenton. The best known
productions of Paine's subsequent career, The Rights of Man and The Age
of Reason, were written in Europe, but they were read throughout
America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from
certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was
no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original
thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and to
shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which
transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear as a trumpet.

Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary
services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than
Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of
New York City in 1774 and with The Farmer Refuted, a reply to Samuel
Seabury's Westchester Farmer. They were continued in extraordinary
letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of
the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation.
Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new
Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly
for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788.
Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of
the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the
Federalist. These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature
"Publius" in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April,
1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than
half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial Whig
literature of England, and in political theory they have little in
common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering.
The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by passion
nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The Federalist
remains a classic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary
American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed
as to the past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many
Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with
Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those
writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of
political thinking has been steadying and sound.

In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails
to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill,
but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and
reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us
raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event
is in the hand of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is
back of that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a
national anthem.

One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century,
passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his
country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act.
When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was
still writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We
cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better
than by quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in
September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth
century, but it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep
human feeling: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for
talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for
philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing
consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter
myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences
of your life to be assured, that, so long as I retain my memory, you
will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your
sincere friend, George Washington."

There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age,
the author of words more widely known around the globe than any other
words penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of
his successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of the people, but he
was a man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of
generous power come from the people." On his father's side Jefferson
came from sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a
Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little
mountain"--Monticello--where he built a mansion for his bride and where
he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray-eyed, gifted boy was
reputed the best shot, the best rider, the best fiddle-player in the
county. He studied hard at William and Mary over his Greek, Latin,
French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also frequented the best society of
the little capital. He learned to call himself a Deist and to theorize
about ideal commonwealths. There was already in him that latent
radicalism which made him strike down, as soon as he had the power, two
of the fundamental principles of the society into which he was born, the
principle of entailed property and that of church establishment.

Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp
Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which followed, two
things became clear: first, that there had long existed among the
colonists very radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and
second, that there was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism.
Jefferson illustrates the union of these two tendencies.

He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was only
thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, A Summary
View of the Rights of British America which had been published in
England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics.
Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the Address of the Virginia House of
Burgesses. For these reasons he was placed at the head of the Committee
for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over
the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how
Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how
the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded
to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to
comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of
John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the
charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy
Pickering and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at intervals
ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I gathered my
ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I
turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider
it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer
no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." O wise young man,
and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that
crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts
and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of
him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan reading
and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a
"commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two
years before," into an immortal manifesto to mankind.

Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical, dealing with
"self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths
dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of
derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be
French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very
English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with
consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in
Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after
the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and
enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination
of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the
opinions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national
sentiments and national reasons to a "candid world."

It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted
Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during
the last decades--to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident
truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at
those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of
them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence
of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his phrase,
"all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase about
governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors have
proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the
Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors belong
partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous 
persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on to define them--"whose
languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than an active state of
things." Other objectors to the phrase "all men are created equal" have
had an obvious personal or political motive for refusing assent to the
proposition. But "no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's
biographers, "has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except
intentionally."

Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the
sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British
colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for
all the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that.
It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free
society" which no democracy can safely disregard.

Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the
touch of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia
mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is
needless here to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his
sweetness of spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of
money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern
men," he wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about
Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of
Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His
correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In his
theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time; in his
absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of it. "I am not one
of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It is because of
this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor, that Jefferson
is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in the
inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to
his name as a type and symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the
ultimate powers of society but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson,
and with the people themselves is the depository of his fame.




CHAPTER V.

The Knickerbocker Group

The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was
Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he was already a distinguished
speaker. In the course of his oration he apostrophized John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of that momentous day, fifty
years earlier, which had witnessed our Declaration of Independence. But
even as Everett was speaking, the aged author of the Declaration
breathed his last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that same day
Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, with his latest breath, and as
if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man who hated to be beaten by
his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." But Jefferson was
already gone.

On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two
Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett,
Daniel Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil Hall. Never were
the thoughts and emotions of a whole country more adequately voiced than
in this commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride
over the accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared,
"whether more has not been done to extend the domain of civilization, in
fifty years, since the Declaration of Independence, than would have been
done in five centuries of continued colonial subjection?" Webster
asserted in his peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would
dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era
commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free
representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved
systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an
unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge
through the community such as has been before altogether unknown and
unheard of."

Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American
oratory and soon to be satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit? Or was it
prompted by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast
changes that had come over American life since 1776? The external
changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of
seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the
development of roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in
wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of
the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy.
But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature.
The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It
was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men
who in 1815 founded The North American Review. British critics in The
Edinburgh and The Quarterly, commenting upon recent works of travel in
America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil. Sydney
Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared in
1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have
done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for
literature.... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American
book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or
statue?"

Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived all
of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was
eagerly reading Irving's Sketch Book. In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's Spy
and Bryant's Poems, and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his
rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London and
Paris booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's The Last of
the Mohicans. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new
phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in
labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of these
men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger
company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of
the number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826
Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn to
write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were
settling to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as a
minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which
Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising Tamerlane and Other
Poems which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes
was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first
published poem in the Newburyport Free Press. Walt Whitman was a
barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age,
was watching the birds in the tree-tops of Elmwood. But it was
Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century
England would be interested in American books.

The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's
happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of
New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty
parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave Picture of New York. To read Irving's
chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of
phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is
unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with
laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain
New Yorkers were slow to see the joke.

Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the
Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was
pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much theater-going, and
plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson River. In 1804 he went
abroad for his health, returned and helped to write the light social
satire of the Salmagundi Papers, and became, after the publication of
the Knickerbocker History, a local celebrity. Sailing for England in
1815 on business, he stayed until 1832 as a roving man of letters in
England and Spain and then as Secretary of the American Legation in
London. The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveler are
the best known productions of Irving's fruitful residence in England.
The Life of Columbus, the Conquest of Granada, and The Alhambra
represent his first sojourn in Spain. After his return to America he
became fascinated with the Great West, made the travels described in his
Tour of the Prairies, and told the story of roving trappers and the fur
trade in Captain Bonneville and Astoria. For four years he returned to
Spain as American Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside on
the Hudson, where he died in 1859, he wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith
and of Washington.

Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but little
of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as an
interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard,
Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter about town when New York was only
a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and
sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were passed in
that period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United
States in some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry Adams
and McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education,
religion, and art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the
nascent nation toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812.
The Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our
friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era
of national self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one
expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the
older civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The
self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this
moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of
perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt
that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more.
That was Irving's service as an international mediator. He diffused
sweetness and light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It
was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill.

But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of
the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is
rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the
conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and
Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles
Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles
Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise.
It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite
modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and
sound style upon fresh American material. In Rip van Winkle and The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson,
and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the
exquisite fitness of the language to the images and ideas which Irving
desired to convey. To render the Far West of that epoch this style is
perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in
describing Stratford and Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas,
it becomes again a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for Our Old
Home, and Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own
inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the
Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said,
as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When he described the
Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in
physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world
the quick American appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its
key is sympathy.

Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the
middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England
authors taught the public to demand more thought and passion than were
in Irving's nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the
twentieth century allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full
enjoyment of the Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in
literary fashion scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our
literature. He immortalized a local type--the New York Dutchman--and
local legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the
narrative essay to create something almost like the perfected short
story of Poe and Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an
age when charm was lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be
remembered that some of the most useful ambassadors have had none save
to reveal, with delicacy and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that
foreign persons have feelings precisely like our own.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Journal may remember his account of an
evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in the
height of his European reputation. "So the Scotch and American lions
took the field together," wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous.
The Last of the Mohicans, then just published, threatened to eclipse the
fame of Ivanhoe. Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger than
the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than he
knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century
audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula for
the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers.
Scott had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical
imagination. Both were out-of-doors men, lovers of manly adventure and
of natural beauty. But the American had the good fortune to be able to
utilize in his books his personal experiences of forest and sea and to
reveal to Europe the real romance of the American wilderness.

That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of this
romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of
Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had tried his hand at
the very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the
Gothic romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the
values of the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had
a knack for passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs,
murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had
read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of
fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an
expert in the art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages of
his American Indian stories, Atala and René, the mystery and enchantment
of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden
Brown, is feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers
like a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper,
like Scott, is masculine.

He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his
childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown in
Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a brief and
inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He went to sea for two
years, and then served for three years in the United States Navy upon
Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very scene of some of his best stories.
In 1811 he married, resigned from the Navy, and settled upon a little
estate in Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he
was not in the least a bookman, but a healthy man of action. Then, as
the well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a
stupid English novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself."
Precaution (1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the
unknown English book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the
next year Cooper published The Spy, one of the finest of his novels,
which was instantly welcomed in England and translated in France. Then
came, in swift succession, The Pioneers, the first Leather-Stocking tale
in order of composition, and The Pilot, to show that Scott's Pirate was
written by a landsman! Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the Mohicans
followed. The next seven years were spent in Europe, mainly in France,
where The Prairie and The Red Rover were written. Cooper now looked back
upon his countrymen with eyes of critical detachment, and made ready to
tell them some of their faults. He came home to Cooperstown in 1833, the
year after Irving's return to America. He had won, deservedly, a great
fame, which he proceeded to imperil by his combativeness with his
neighbors and his harsh strictures upon the national character, due
mainly to his lofty conception of the ideal America. He continued to
spin yarns of sea and shore, and to write naval history. The tide of
fashion set against him in the eighteen-forties when Bulwer and Dickens
rode into favor, but the stout-hearted old pioneer could afford to bide
his time. He died in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe was writing Uncle Tom's
Cabin.

Two generations have passed since then, and Cooper's place in our
literature remains secure. To have written our first historical novel,
The Spy, our first sea-story, The Pilot, and to have created the
Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In his perception of masculine
character, Cooper ranks with Fielding. His sailors, his scouts and
spies, his good and bad Indians, are as veritable human figures as
Squire Western. Long Tom Coffin, Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and
Chingachgook are physically and morally true to life itself. Read the
Leather-Stocking books in the order of the events described, beginning
with The Deerslayer, then The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The
Pioneers, and ending with the vast darkening horizon of The Prairie and
the death of the trapper, and one will feel how natural and inevitable
are the fates of the personages and the alterations in the life of the
frontier. These books vary in their poetic quality and in the degree of
their realism, but to watch the evolution of the leading figure is to
see human life in its actual texture.

Clever persons and pedantic persons have united to find fault with
certain elements of Cooper's art. Mark Twain, in one of his least
inspired moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar
school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and
his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize
Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No
doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of
most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly
the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper
seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate planning of his
plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and hero,
predicament and escape, renewed crisis and rescue, mystification and
explanation, worthy of a third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in his
genius for action, the beauty and grandeur of his landscapes, the
primitive veracity of his children of nature.

Cooper was an elemental man, and he comprehended, by means of something
deeper than mere artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity
in the presence of the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy
and sane as Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all
of the purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful
sojourn in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of an
aboriginal imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a moose--an
ungraceful creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has
suddenly realized when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that
whirled to face him in the twilight silence of a northern wood.

Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the
poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white
beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids
might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr.
Bryant's alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he strode down
Broadway to the Evening Post office, suggested little more than a
vigorous and somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous
Democratic newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow
Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was an
immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of letters have
represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the New England
Puritan. To understand his long and honorable public life it is
necessary to know something of the city of his choice, but to enter into
the spirit of his poetry one must go back to the hills of western
Massachusetts.

Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. He came from Mayflower
stock. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound country
physician, with liberal preferences in theology, Federalist views in
politics, and a library of seven hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The
poet's mother records his birth in her diary in terse words which have
the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven
in the evening a son born." Two days later the November wind shifted.
"Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day.
Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large
head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy
spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat
unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his
brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English poetry
from his father's library, used to pray that he too might become a poet.
At thirteen he produced a satire on Jefferson, The Embargo, which his
proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. The youth had nearly
one year at Williams College, over the mountain ranges to the west. He
wished to continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money
for this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the
autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft of
Thanatopsis. He was seventeen, and he had been reading Blair's Grave and
the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke White. He hid his verses in a
drawer, and five years later his father found them, shed tears over
them, and sent them to the North American Review, where they were
published in September, 1817.

In the meantime the young man had studied law, though with dislike of
it, and with the confession that he sometimes read The Lyrical Ballads
when he might have been reading Blackstone. One December afternoon in
1815, he was walking from Cummington to Plainfield--aged twenty-one, and
looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. Across the vivid
sunset flew a black duck, as solitary and homeless as himself. The bird
seemed an image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not lost." Before
he slept that night he had composed the poem To a Waterfowl. No more
authentic inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant wrote verse
for more than sixty years after that crimson sky had paled into chill
December twilight, his lines never again vibrated with such
communicative passion.

Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady purpose, the stoicism, the
reticence of the Puritan. It was highly successful, judged even by
material standards. Thanatopsis had been instantly regarded in 1817 as
the finest poem yet produced in America. The author was invited to
contribute to the North American Review an essay on American poetry, and
this, like all of Bryant's prose work, was admirably written. He
delivered his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, The Ages, in 1821, the year
of Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of the law in Great
Barrington, he entered in 1826 into the unpromising field of journalism
in New York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted their literary
strength on trifles and dissipated their moral energies, Bryant held
steadily to his daily task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he
allowed himself long walks in the country, and he continued to meditate
a somewhat thankless Muse. In 1832 he visited his brothers on the
Illinois prairies, and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awkward
uncouth lad" of racy conversational powers, who was leading his company
of volunteers into the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined to meet
again in 1860, when Bryant presided at that Cooper Union address of
Lincoln's which revealed to New York and to the country that the former
captain of volunteers was now a king of men. Lincoln was embarrassed on
that occasion, it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence.
Not so Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the poet in Rome, two years
before. "There was a weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if he
were tired of seeing things and doing things.... He uttered neither
passion nor poetry, but excellent good sense, and accurate information,
on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant man to associate with,
but rather cold, I should imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart
with one's own." Such was the impression Bryant made upon less gifted
men than Hawthorne, as he lived out his long and useful life in the
Knickerbocker city. Toward the close of it he was in great demand for
public occasions; and it was after delivering a speech dedicating a
statue to Mazzini in Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty-four,
that a fit of dizziness caused a fall which proved fatal to the
venerable poet. It was just seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had
published his boy's verses on The Embargo.

Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any vociferous excitement, it
has enduring qualities. The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless
generation of New England Puritans found a tongue at last in this
late-born son of theirs. The determining mood of his best poems, from
boyhood to old age, was precisely that thought of transiency, "the
eternal flow of things," which colored the imaginations of the first
colonists. This is the central motive of Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl,
The Rivulet, A Forest Hymn, An Evening Revery, The Crowded Street, The
Flood of Years. All of these tell the same story of endless change and
of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the same mighty stream of human
existence. Bryant faced the thought as calmly, as majestically, at
seventeen as when he wrote The Flood of Years at eighty-two. He is a
master of description, though he has slight gift for narrative or drama,
and he rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But everywhere in his verse
there is that cold purity of the winter hills in Western Massachusetts,
something austere and elemental which reaches kindred spirits below the
surface on which intellect and passion have their play, something more
primitive, indeed, than human intellect or passion and belonging to
another mode of being, something "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun."

A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not complete without its portraits
of the minor figures in the literary life of New York up to the time of
the Civil War. But the scope of the present volume does not permit
sketches of Paulding and Verplanck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, of
N. P. Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these are today only
"single-poem" men, like Payne, the author of Home Sweet Home, just as
Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, is today a "single-poem"
man of an earlier generation. Their names will be found in such limbos
of the dead as Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America and Poe's
Literati. They knew "the town" in their day, and pleased its very easily
pleased taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the
eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. As representatives of
passing phases of the literary history of New York their careers are not
without sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to or for the
country as a whole. Two figures, indeed, stand out in sharp contrast
with those habitual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of literary
gatherings, though each of them was for a while a part of Knickerbocker
New York. To all appearances they were only two more Bohemians like the
rest, but the curiosity of the twentieth century sets them apart from
their forgotten contemporaries. They are two of the unluckiest--and yet
luckiest--authors who ever tried to sell a manuscript along Broadway.
One of them is Edgar Allan Poe and the other is Walt Whitman. They shall
have a chapter to themselves.

But before turning to that chapter, we must look back to New England
once more and observe the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths.
During the thirty years preceding the Civil War New England awoke to a
new life of the spirit. So varied and rich was her literary
productiveness in this era that it still remains her greatest period,
and so completely did New England writers of this epoch voice the ideals
of the nation that the great majority of Americans, even today, regard
these New Englanders as the truest literary exponents of the mind and
soul of the United States. We must take a look at them.




CHAPTER VI.

The Transcendentalists

To understand the literary leadership of New England during the thirty
years immediately preceding the Civil War it is necessary to recall the
characteristics of a somewhat isolated and peculiar people. The mental
and moral traits of the New England colonists, already glanced at in an
earlier chapter, had suffered little essential modification in two
hundred years. The original racial stock was still dominant. As compared
with the middle and southern colonies, there was relatively little
immigration, and this was easily assimilated. The physical remoteness of
New England from other sections of the country, and the stubborn loyalty
with which its inhabitants maintained their own standards of life, alike
contributed to their sense of separateness. It is true, of course, that
their mode of thinking and feeling had undergone certain changes. They
were among the earliest theorists of political independence from Great
Britain, and had done their share, and more, in the Revolution. The
rigors of their early creed had somewhat relaxed, as we have seen, by
the end of the seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth there
was a gradual progress toward religious liberalism. The population
steadily increased, and New England's unremitting struggle with a not
too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the seas, and her keenness in
trade, became proverbial throughout the country. Her seaport towns were
wealthy. The general standards of living remained frugal, but extreme
poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the earliest days of the
colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for education, and her
chief seats of learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost
educational centers of America. But there was still scant leisure for
the quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner of
the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, commanded
popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in
1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar audiences
of today in intelligence and in responsiveness. Perhaps they were
superior. Appreciation of the spoken word was natural to men trained by
generations of thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by
participation in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of
secular literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost
non-existent.

Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after
1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term of
"the Renascence of New England." No single cause is sufficient to
account for this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law of
"tension and release," which the late Professor Shaler liked to
demonstrate in all organic life. A long period of strain was followed by
an age of expansion, freedom, release of energy. As far as the mental
life of New England was concerned, something of the new stimulus was due
directly to the influence of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from
Italy had brought the New Learning, which was a revival of the old
learning, into England in the sixteenth century, so now young New
England college men like Edward Everett and George Ticknor brought home
from the Continent the riches of German and French scholarship.
Emerson's description of the impression made by Everett's lectures in
1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of the new
thirst for foreign culture. The North American Review and other
periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a distinctively
national literature, insisted also upon the value of a deeper knowledge
of the literature of the Continent. This was the burden of Channing's
once famous article on A National Literature in 1823: it was a plea for
an independent American school of writers, but these writers should know
the best that Europe had to teach.

The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of
Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and
religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred
an extraordinary type of men and women, it had helped to lay some of
the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined to
have a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern
section of the country where its influence had been most marked there
was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its
pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and
influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had
accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The
movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to
other States. Orthodox and liberal Congregational churches split apart,
and when Channing preached the ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in
Baltimore in 1819, the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with
some misgiving, became the recognized motto of the new creed. It is only
with its literary influence that we are here concerned, yet that
literary influence became so potent that there is scarcely a New England
writer of the first rank, from Bryant onward, who remained untouched by
it.

The most interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little
directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, and
in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional
pattern of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement,
known as Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a
preliminary and liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating
moment of release for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of
New England. Its foremost representative in our literature was Ralph
Waldo Emerson, as its chief exponents in England were Coleridge and
Carlyle. We must understand its meaning if we would perceive the quality
of much of the most noble and beautiful writing produced in New England
during the Golden Age.

What then is the significance of the word Transcendental? Disregarding
for the moment the technical development of this term as used by German
and English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply
this: whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses.
It stressed intuition rather than sensation, direct perception of
ultimate truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's
ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness.
It resembled the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced
this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the
Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a
natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated
in this form, it is evident that we have here a very ancient doctrine,
well known in the literature of India and of Greece. It has been held by
countless persons who have never heard of the word Transcendentalism. We
need go no further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we
find declaring: "I am so certain of the soul's being immortal that I
seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's friend
Swift, a dean of the Church of England and assuredly no
Transcendentalist, defined vision as seeing the things that are
invisible.

Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple of
Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the everlasting things
subjects of argument instead of sight." Theodore Parker declared to his
congregation:

From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of
instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of
justice and futurity.... I found most help in the works of Immanuel
Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one of the
worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not always furnish conclusions
I could rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the right
road. I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which
depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of
consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I
will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion. 1.
The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there is
a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a
consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent of our will, which
we ought to keep. 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the Immortal, a
consciousness that the Essential Element of man, the principle of
Individuality, never dies.

This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to compare
it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical faculties
can give us no realities."

Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his
brother Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and
the Germans between Reason and Understanding? I think it a philosophy
itself, and, like all truth, very practical. Reason is the highest
faculty of the soul, what we mean often by the soul itself: it never
reasons, never proves, it simply perceives, it is vision. The
understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues;
near-sighted, but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the
expedient, the customary." And in 1833, after he had left the Unitarian
pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this curious attempt to reconcile the
scriptural language of his ancestral profession to the new vocabulary of
Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister of the pure Reason. The
beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all utterances of the mind
contemning the phenomenal world.... The understanding can make nothing
of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity.... St.
Paul marks the distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual man.
When Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to
contradict the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific formula the
doctrine of St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity against God.'"

One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman.

No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!

It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this
"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is highly
dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints the words
Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates
equally useful words like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case
type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the
chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic
movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable,
unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was
probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of
staid New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson
Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirmations of these seers
can be neither proved nor disproved. They made no examination and they
sought no validation of consciousness. An explorer in search of the
North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but when a
Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of human
experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their thrones,
you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a
man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness of
the method. Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental
movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary,
philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the
Orient, to mediæval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched
throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic spirit,
by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest of a
fermenting age.

Our present concern is with the impact of this cosmopolitan current upon
the mind and character of a few New England writers. Channing and
Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson, are
all representative of the best thought and the noblest ethical impulses
of their generation. Let us choose first the greatest name: a 
sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods.

The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to
study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On
one side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the other
side it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man. This contrast
between the parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson interprets many a
puzzle in his career. Half a mile beyond the village green to the north,
close to the "rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 1775, is the
Old Manse, once tenanted and described by Hawthorne. It was built by
Emerson's grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, who died of
camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here
Ralph Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many a summer in their
childhood. Half a mile east of the village, on the Cambridge turnpike,
is Emerson's own house, still sheltered by the pines which Thoreau
helped him to plant in 1838. Within the house everything is unchanged:
here are the worn books, pen and inkstand, the favorite pictures upon
the wall. Over the ridge to the north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery
where the poet rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne and the Alcotts,
Thoreau and William James close by.

But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, he was born in Boston, in
1803. His father, named William like the grandfather, was also, like the
Emerson ancestors for many generations, a clergyman--eloquent, liberal,
fond of books and music, highly honored by his alma mater Harvard and by
the town of Boston, where he ministered to the First Church. His
premature death in 1811 left his widow with five sons--one of them
feebleminded--and a daughter to struggle hard with poverty. With her
husband's sister, the Calvinistic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held,
however, that these orphaned boys had been "born to be educated." And
educated the "eager blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin School and
at Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil and want and truth and mutual
faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. Ralph was
thought less persistent than his steady older brother William, and far
less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and
Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was
graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of
irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates
for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help
his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his
studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had examined
me," he said afterward of the kindly professors in the Divinity School,
"they never would have passed me." But approve him they did, in 1826,
and he entered decorously upon the profession of his ancestors, as
associate minister of the Second Church in Boston. His Journals, which
are a priceless record of his inner life, at this and later periods,
reveal the rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which he began
his ministerial career.

But as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson this vocation would not
satisfy. The sexton of the Second Church thought that the young man was
not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, the eccentric Methodist,
whom Emerson assisted at a sailor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered
him "one of the sweetest souls God ever made," but as ignorant of the
principles of the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar.
By and by came an open difference with his congregation over the
question of administering the Communion. "I am not interested in it,"
Emerson admitted, and he wrote in his Journal the noble words: "It is my
desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I
cannot do with my whole heart." His resignation was accepted in 1832.
His young wife had died of consumption in the same year. He now sailed
for Italy, France, and England, a memorable journey which gave him an
acquaintance with Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which
was even more significant in sending him, as he says, back to himself,
to the resources of his own nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman
afterward, "what but oneself is sure?" In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson
occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet
fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to do so, but chiefly
absorbed in a little book which he was beginning to write--a new
utterance of a new man.

This book, the now famous Nature of 1836, contains the essence of
Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but written in
the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its meditation is the soul as
related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all its
bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the
soul; it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to
Deity. Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the
soul Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines
today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; let us
lift up our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular
volume, but Emerson went serenely forward. He had found his path.

In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard on
The American Scholar. Emerson was now thirty-four; he had married a
second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to
make a living by lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, though
it contained no reference to himself, was after all a justification of
the way of life he had chosen: a declaration of intellectual
independence for himself and his countrymen, an exhortation of
self-trust to the individual thinking man. "If the single man plant
himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world
will come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of
the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it had never
been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied precisely the same
doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity
School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A tempest in our washbowl,"
he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more than that. The great
sentence of the Divinity School address, "God is, not was; he speaketh,
not spake," was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician upon the immediacy
of the soul's access to God. It has been the burden of a thousand
prophets in all religions. The young priests of the Divinity School,
their eyes wearied with Hebrew and Greek, seem to have enjoyed Emerson's
injunction to turn away from past records and historical authorities and
to drink from the living fountain of the divine within themselves; but
to the professors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative belittlement
of historical Christianity seemed blasphemy. A generation passed before
Emerson was again welcomed by his alma mater.

The reader who has mastered those three utterances by the Concord
Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was
a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal,
consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted
sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite
of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in
books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him;
he "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He
basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages of
his private Journal, which he called his savings-bank, because from this
source he drew most of the material for his books. The Journal has
recently been printed, in ten volumes. No American writing rewards the
reader more richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's Essays, the
first volume of which appeared in 1841, and the last volumes after his
death in 1882, represent practically three stages of composition: first
the detached thoughts of the Journal; second, the rearrangement of this
material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the essays in
their present form. The oral method thus predominates: a series of
oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical utterance, not
oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but cunningly
designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then the mind
of the auditor.

Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the rise of that Lyceum
system which brought most of the American authors, for more than a
generation, into intimate contact with the public, and which proved an
important factor in the æsthetic and moral cultivation of our people. No
lecturer could have had a more auspicious influence than Emerson, with
his quiet dignity, his serene spiritual presence, his tonic and often
electrifying force. But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also
learned much from them. For thirty years his lecturing trips to the West
brought him, more widely than any New England man of letters, into
contact with the new, virile America of the great Mississippi valley.
Unlike many of his friends, he was not repelled by the "Jacksonism of
the West"; he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force in our national
thought and life. The Journal reveals the essential soundness of his
Americanism. Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he was himself
scarcely a reformer, save upon the single issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps
he was at bottom too much of a radical to be swept off his feet by any
reform.

To our generation, of course, Emerson presents himself as an author of
books, and primarily as an essayist, rather than as a winning,
entrancing speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone than is
commonly recognized. Many of them, like Manners, Farming, Books,
Eloquence, Old Age, exhibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a sort of Yankee
instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds one of Ben Franklin.
Like most of the greater New England writers, he could be, on occasion,
an admirable local historian. See his essays on Life and Letters in New
England, New England Reformers, Politics, and the successive entries in
his Journal relating to Daniel Webster. He had the happiest gift of
portraiture, as is witnessed by his sketches of Montaigne, of Napoleon,
of Socrates (in the essay on Plato), of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, of
Thoreau, and of various types of Englishmen in his English Traits. But
the great essays, no doubt, are those like Self-Reliance, Compensation,
The Over-Soul, Fate, Power, Culture, Worship, and Illusions. These will
puzzle no one who has read carefully that first book on Nature. They all
preach the gospel of intuition, instinctive trust in the Universe, faith
in the ecstatic moment of vision into the things that are unseen by the
physical eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son has pointed out, means
really God-reliance; the Over-Soul--always a stumbling-block to
Philistines--means that high spiritual life into which all men may enter
and in which they share the life of Deity. Emerson is stern enough in
expounding the laws of compensation that run through the universe, but
to him the chief law is the law of the ever-ascending, victorious soul.

This radiant optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as
well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the
singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no
ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh
and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He
ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and
construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of
transforming fact and thought into true beauty. Aldrich used to say that
he would rather have written Emerson's Bacchus than any American poem.

That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson was universal in its
survey of human forces, no one would claim. Certain limitations in
interest and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid burden and impediment of
the soul which the churches call sin," to use John Morley's words,
occupied his attention but little. Like a mountain climber in a perilous
pass, he preferred to look up rather than down. He does not stress
particularly those old human words, service and sacrifice.
"Anti-scientific, anti-social, anti-Christian" are the terms applied to
him by one of his most penetrating critics. Yet I should prefer to say
"un-scientific," "un-social," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which
Plato and Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it would be still nearer the
truth to say, as Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a
technical Christian." He tends to underestimate institutions of every
kind; history, except as a storehouse of anecdote, and culture as a
steady mental discipline. This is the price he pays for his
transcendental insistence upon the supreme value of the Now, the moment
of insight. But after all these limitations are properly set down, the
personality of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a priceless possession to his
countrymen. The austere serenity of his life, and the perfection with
which he represents the highest type of his province and his era, will
ultimately become blended with the thought of his true Americanism. A
democrat and liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like
Lincoln to become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide to
aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are
negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and the soul.

Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the
eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's house
on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled cannily at
the notion that after fifty years their townsman's literary works would
be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics in
his own country and in Europe would rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Yet that is precisely what has happened. Our literature has no more
curious story than the evolution of this local crank into his rightful
place of mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, A Week
on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers--which was even more completely
neglected by the public than Emerson's Nature--and Walden, now one of
the classics, but only beginning to be talked about when its shy, proud
author penned his last line and died with the words "moose" and "Indian"
on his lips.

Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human life,
means many different things to men of various temperaments. Collectors
of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his uniqueness of flavor;
critics, like Lowell, place him, not without impatient rigor. To some
readers he is primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White of
Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a
hermit of the woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate
that his powers of observation were accompanied, like Wordsworth's, by a
gift of emotional interpretation of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of
literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration of phrase. But to
the student of American thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the
courage and consistency with which he endeavored to realize the gospel
of Transcendentalism in his own inner life.

Lovers of racial traits like to remember that Thoreau's grandfather was
an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his
grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and
ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New
Hampshire. It was a high-minded family. All the four children taught
school and were good talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by
good Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was
graduated at Harvard in 1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa
address. Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and
unimpressible," wrote a classmate. "The touch of his hand was moist and
indifferent. He did not care for people." "An unfavorable opinion has
been entertained of his disposition to exert himself," wrote President
Quincy confidentially to Emerson in 1837, although the kindly President,
a year later, in recommending Thoreau as a school-teacher, certified
that "his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches and his morals
and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary."

Ten years passed. The young man gave up school-keeping, thinking it a
loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and
found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all
the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored
rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the
famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay his
poll-tax, and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" from social
obligations. "I, Henry D. Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold
myself responsible to your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil
Government." When his college class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and
each man was asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement,
Thoreau wrote: "My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to
keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may turn
up in heaven or on earth." There is the motto of Transcendentalism,
stamped upon a single coin.

For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier, homelier
version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than
Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder man
had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost what
Thoreau would call a "committed man," with family and household
responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every
professional writer and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his
public. But Thoreau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should
fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own
affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages
of his Journal, from which--and here again he followed Emerson's
example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most loyal
admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very conditions
of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it in Ethan Brand,
and his quaint illustration of the folly of romantic expansion of the
self apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a
dog chasing its own tail. "It is time now that I begin to live," notes
Thoreau in the Journal, and he continued to say it in a hundred
different ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite
captured the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory
has moved every reader of Walden: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse,
and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely what he meant
it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in the
ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He bends doggedly to the
trail, for Henry Thoreau is no quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, and
in the latest volumes of the Journals he seems to realize that he has
been pursuing a phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself, but
somehow he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the
transcendental prophets assured him was to be had at the cost of diving.

This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite
empty-handed. Far from it. The by-products of his toil were enough to
have enriched many lesser men, and they have given Thoreau a secure
fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an
admirable writer he became. "For along time," he says in Walden, "I was
reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has
never seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too
common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this
case my pains were their reward." Like so many solitaries, he
experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition,
and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled
from his notebooks, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day,
not even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more
unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished
scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. He
had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time
possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to be
found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the
seventeenth century. His critical essays in the Dial, his letters and
the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of rich
harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand
manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and
character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies
gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his
life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous measurements of
river currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering of plants and the
migration of birds. The more thoroughly trained naturalists of our own
day detect him now and again in error as to his birds and plants, just
as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for
him unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was not
impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of
his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever stimulated as many men and
women in the happy use of their eyes? He would have had slight patience
with much of the sentimental nature study of our generation, and
certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read and write about
the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his
infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in
nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish,
wolf-like, but it is still communicative.

Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again
to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was
the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry.
The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot.
Instead of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil
Government," Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already
thrown down the gauntlet in Slavery in Massachusetts, which Garrison had
published in the Liberator in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold
of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete
citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the dead hero.
"It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to
die you must first have lived.... I hear a good many pretend that they
are going to die.... Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got
life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred
eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so
have died since the world began." Such passages as this reveal a very
different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have spent his
days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He had, in fact,
one of the highest qualifications for human society, an absolute honesty
of mind. "We select granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our
houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest
on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our
sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more
constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend upon it,
that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters,
proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this
long time."

This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all
enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century
America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His
sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into
dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to
our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who
stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their
seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will.

The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other
members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed
company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The good Alcott," wrote
Carlyle, "with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn
temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return
to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don
Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without loving." These words paint a
whole company, as well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits an
adequate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler in the South,
school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descended upon Concord,
flitted to the queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back to
Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emerson, talked endlessly, wrote
ineffective books, and had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School
of Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty years before his
death in 1888 as the father of the Louisa Alcott who wrote Little Women.
"A tedious archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and it is likely to stand.

Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, analyzed by Emerson, and
painted at full length by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading
figure--a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the first of American
feminists, suggesting George Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, her
clear brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an early-ripe,
over-crammed scholar in the classics and in modern European languages.
She did loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the Dial, which from 1840 to
1844 was the organ of Transcendentalism. She joined the community at
Brook Farm, whose story has been so well told by Lindsay Swift. For a
while she served as literary editor of the New York Tribune under Horace
Greeley. Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's manuscripts at Paris
with trembling, adoring fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with
the young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, with her husband
and child, off Fire Island in 1850.

Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," an admirable Greek scholar,
an idealist and reformer, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in
Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the memories of a few
liberal Bostonians who remember his tremendous sermons on the platform
of the old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's son, with the
temperament of a blacksmith, with enormous, restless energy, a good
hater, a passionate lover of all excellent things save meekness. He died
at fifty, worn out, in Italy.

But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most
representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period
will be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other
types of young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George
William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists
like Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon
poets like Jones Very, Christopher P. Cranch, and Ellery Channing. There
was a sunny side of the whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F. B.
Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to emphasize
in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed also by tragedy
and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one looks back at it, in
the perspective of three-quarters of a century, it seems chiefly
something touchingly fine. For all these men and women tried to hitch
their wagon to a star.




CHAPTER VII.

Romance, Poetry, and History

Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great
generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other
men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the
intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists in
prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable.
Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some
of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement
interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but
personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it.
Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical
abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct
for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.
Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred
to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. So
the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American books were
being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. The
slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then, as
in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was
brought sharply home to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly
golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth,
leisure, books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of
the writers is the spirit of youth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by
inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His
literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists, and
he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his
transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from
Judge Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of
sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in
some measure by a physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He
read Spenser, Rousseau, and the Newgate Calendar, was graduated at
Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem
for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself
the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays
in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a
preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own
words about his first collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, have
often been quoted: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in
too retired a shade." Yet they are for the most part exquisitely
written. After a couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a
residence at the socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the
happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt
in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his
essays, the Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, his second collection
of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his
dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, The
Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he
published The House of the Seven Gables, The Wonder-Book, and The
Snow-Image, and Other Tales. In 1852 came The Blithedale Romance, a rich
ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in the
American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of residence
upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully filled
notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, The Marble Faun.
Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at Concord,
busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never completed
story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and
in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in
Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons.

It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such a
man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare,
delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of his
countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the
writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some
time of his life, The Scarlet Letter, and trembles at its passionate
indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, "Be
true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as
of Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children; to
have missed The Wonder-Book is like having grown old without ever
catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our public has
learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, taught by the daily
journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, physical style, fit for
describing an automobile, a department store, a steamship, a lynching
party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote
with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat old-fashioned,
like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to
be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and
Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds.

Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit
audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His
artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the
soul of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The
child of a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the
precise circumstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying
it. Many of his sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal
with historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of
New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid historical and
psychological stuff as the foundation of his air-castles. His latent
radicalism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism as he
interpreted the moral standards of ancient communities; no reader of The
Scarlet Letter can forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the
unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep
matters of the human conscience was stern enough, but it was a
universalized judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism which
he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate,
fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a moral,
in his finest short stories, such as The Ambitious Guest, The Gentle
Boy, Young Goodman Brown, The Snow Image, The Great Stone Face, Drowne's
Wooden Image, Rappacini's Daughter, the moral, if there be one, is not
obtruded. He loves physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was
poet and Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for
parables; but his true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing,
aspiring, shadowed human heart.

The Scarlet Letter, for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the
problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is
provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without
remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan
reverence for the magistrate-minister--differing so widely from the
respect of Latin countries for the priest--the Puritan preoccupation
with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism,
the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough
present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by a
romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are
hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger
Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living creatures, caught
inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By an incomparable
succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the travail of their souls. In
the greatest scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in the forest,
the Puritan framework of the story gives way beneath the weight of human
passion, and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution
than was actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But
though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no
mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the impotence of
all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense reality
of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in Dimmesdale's ghostly words,
was a more subtle law than can be graven on tables of stone and numbered
as the Seventh Commandment.

The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of The House of the Seven
Gables, which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better book than
The Scarlet Letter. Certainly this story of old Salem is impeccably
written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is beyond
dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the fathers
upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are motives
that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have failed to
rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the no less
masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance
through the love of the light-hearted Phœbe for the latest descendant of
the Maules. In The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne stood for once, perhaps,
too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric effects which he
prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of Zenobia and
powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not quite
focussed. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne comes into his own again. Its
central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: the
influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, the
Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his
love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then
begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power
of the main theme of the book has contributed less to its fame than the
felicity of its descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed,
like Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of
the arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes The Marble Faun,
like Childe Harold, a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City.

All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of psychological
romance, and a rich surface finish of description. His style, at its
best, has a subdued splendor of coloring which is only less wonderful
than the spiritual perceptions with which this magician was endowed. The
gloom which haunts many of his pages, as I have said elsewhere, is the
long shadow cast by our mortal destiny upon a sensitive soul. The
mystery is our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely
endowed mind and heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight,
the soft radiance of truth and beauty, are his own.

A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland
boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him to avoid the
unworthy." Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished
itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin
at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and
secretly ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of
Irving's Sketch Book, he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and
delight." His college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern
languages, and he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He
taught successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen
years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard,
ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two
prose volumes, Hyperion and Outre-mer, Irvingesque romances of European
travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death of his
young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced, "softly
excited, I know not why," The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death.
From that December morning in 1838 until his death in 1882 he was
Longfellow the Poet.

His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren of dramatic incident,
save the one tragic accident by which his second wife, the mother of his
children, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the calamity with
the quiet courage of his race and breeding. But otherwise his days ran
softly and gently, enriched with books and friendships, sheltered from
the storms of circumstance. He had leisure to grow ripe, to remember,
and to dream. But he never secluded himself, like Tennyson, from normal
contacts with his fellowmen. The owner of the Craigie House was a good
neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even interested in local
Cambridge politics. On the larger political issues of his day his
Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his
Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the
hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own
sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate
the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and
Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the lips
of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and
historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred
years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle of the nineteenth
century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as few men have known it,
and he helped to translate Europe to America. His intellectual
receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and landscape, his ear
for folk-lore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made him the
most resourceful of international interpreters. And this lover of
children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and
gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the
richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow
was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the
sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in
large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil
and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil;
his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous
national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to
world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those
deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life
call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his
spirit--these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a
part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of
its rivers."

Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen has thus become a national
asset, and not merely because in his three best known narrative poems,
Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish, he selected
his themes from our own history. The Building of the Ship, written with
full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. "It is a
wonderful gift," said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled
with tears, "to be able to stir men like that." The Skeleton in Armor, A
Ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere's Ride, The Wreck of the
Hesperus, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his skill in
story-telling in verse--witness the Tales of a Wayside Inn--Longfellow
was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy now published under the
title of Christus, made up of The Divine Tragedy, The Golden Legend, and
New England Tragedies, added little to a reputation won in other fields.
His sonnets, particularly those upon Chaucer, Milton, The Divina
Commedia, A Nameless Grave, Felton, Sumner, Nature, My Books, are among
the imperishable treasures of the English language. In descriptive
pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of the Crane, in such personal and
occasional verses as The Herons of Elmwood, The Fiftieth Birthday of
Agassiz, and the noble Morituri Salutamus written for his classmates in
1875, he exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripeness of
his technical skill. But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won
and held his immense audience throughout the English-speaking world. Two
of the most popular of all his early pieces, The Psalm of Life and
Excelsior, have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical
mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond
them. And many readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in
Maidenhood, The Rainy Day, The Bridge, The Day is Done, verses whose
simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as The
Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, The Fire of Driftwood, The Arsenal at
Springfield, My Lost Youth, The Children's Hour, and many another lyric,
lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortunately infinite room
for personal preference in this whole matter of poetry, but the
confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must often be
recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is simple,
graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste,
especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be
running against Longfellow. How soon the tide may turn, no one can say.
Meanwhile he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner of Westminster
Abbey. The Abbey must be a pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland
boy.

Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated and under-experienced
people who affect to patronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf
Whittier an air of deference. This attitude would amuse the Quaker poet.
One can almost see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips tighten in
that silent laughter in which the old man so much resembled Cooper's
Leather-Stocking. Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow was a better
artist than himself, and he also knew, by intimate experience as a maker
of public opinion, how variable are its judgments.

Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but
equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer
of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East
Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount
Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in Cambridge are newer than
this by two generations. The house has been restored to the precise
aspect it had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, lawn, and brook,
even the door-stone and bridle-post and the barn across the road are
witnesses to the fidelity of the descriptions in Snow-Bound. The
neighborhood is still a lonely one. The youth grew up in seclusion, yet
in contact with a few great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My
father," he said, "was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in
the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of
Independence." The taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of
kingcraft and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker
touched with humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this
homestead is veraciously told in The Barefoot Boy, School-Days,
Snow-Bound, Ramoth Hill, and Telling the Bees. It was a chance copy of
Burns that revealed to the farmer lad his own desire and capacity for
verse-writing. When he was nineteen, his sister sent his Exile's
Departure to William Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and the editor of the
Newburyport Free Press. The neighbors liked it, and the tall frail
author was rewarded with a term at the Haverhill Academy, where he paid
his way, in old Essex County fashion, by making shoes.

He had little more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter
college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much
facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he
possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had "done with
poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's
stirring letter bidding him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He
obeyed the call, not knowing that this new allegiance to the service of
humanity was to transform him from a facile local verse-writer into a
national poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and
finding it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained
in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist, of
the ostracism visited upon the active Abolitionists. Whittier entered
the fight with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical
judgment of weapons and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from
those pleasant fields of New England legend and history to which he was
destined to return after his warfare was accomplished. He had read the
prose of Milton and of Burke. He perceived that negro emancipation in
the United States was only a single and immediate phase of a universal
movement of liberalism. The thought kindled his imagination. He wrote,
at white heat, political and social verse that glowed with humanitarian
passion: lyrics in praise of fellow-workers, salutes to the dead,
campaign songs, hymns, satires against the clergy and the capitalists,
superb sectional poems like Massachusetts to Virginia, and, more nobly
still, poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the sensation and image
of country and the human race."

Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. It is true that his style
remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now
uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and
thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil,
his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of
his poems, and here were to be found not merely controversial verses,
but spirited Songs of Labor, pictures of the lovely Merrimac
countryside, legends written in the mood of Hawthorne or Longfellow, and
bright bits of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went
abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading,
and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest
interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and
section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held
its simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning fashion that his hymns
are sung today in all the churches.

When The Atlantic Monthly was established in 1857, Whittier was fifty.
He took his place among the contributors to the new magazine not as a
controversialist but as a man of letters, with such poems as Tritemius,
and Skipper Ireson's Ride. Characteristic productions of this period are
My Psalm, Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Andrew Rykman's Prayer, The Eternal
Goodness--poems grave, sweet, and tender. But it was not until the
publication of Snow-Bound in 1866 that Whittier's work touched its
widest popularity. He had never married, and the deaths of his mother
and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the desolate Amesbury house,
over memories of his birthplace, six miles away in East Haverhill. The
homestead had gone out of the hands of the Whittiers, and the poet,
nearing sixty, set himself to compose an idyll descriptive of the
vanished past. No artist could have a theme more perfectly adapted to
his mood and to his powers. There are no novel ideas in Snow-Bound, nor
is there any need of them, but the thousands of annual pilgrims to the
old farmhouse can bear witness to the touching intimacy, the homely
charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with which Whittier's genius
recreated his own lost youth and painted for all time a true New England
hearthside.

Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred more poems, for he lived
to be eighty-five, and he composed until the last. But his creative
period was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly recognition of his work
that came to him from every section of a reunited country. His personal
friends were loyal in their devotion. He followed the intricacies of
American politics with the keen zest of a veteran in that game, for in
his time he had made and unmade governors and senators. "The greatest
politician I have ever met," said James G. Blaine, who had certainly met
many. He had an income from his poems far in excess of his needs, but
retained the absolute simplicity of his earlier habits. When his
publishers first proposed the notable public dinner in honor of his
seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining to a member of his family
that he did not want the bother of "buying a new pair of pants"--a petty
anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, shrewd, gentle old man
waited for the end. He had known what it means to toil, to fight, to
renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see some of his dreams come
true. We have had, and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in verse,
but we have never bred a more genuine man than Whittier, nor one who had
more kinship with the saints.

A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote an affectionate poem in
celebration of the eighty-third birthday of his old friend of the
Saturday Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 1892. The little
Doctor, rather lonely in his latest years, composed some tender obituary
verses at Whittier's passing. He had already performed the same office
for Lowell. He lingered himself until the autumn of 1894, in his
eighty-sixth year--The Last Leaf, in truth, of New England's richest
springtime.

"No, my friends," he had said in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, "I
go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family
traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five
generations." The Doctor came naturally by his preference for a "man of
family," being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the
poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he had made the most picturesque of the
Quincys, was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips was his cousin. His
father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Yale graduate, was the minister of the
First Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel-roofed" parsonage
that Oliver Wendell was born in 1809.

     Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.--
     Born there? Don't say so! I was, too.
     •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •
     Nicest place that was ever seen--
     Colleges red and Common green.

So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, concerning the
village of his boyhood and the city of Boston. His best-known prose
sentence is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System." It is
easy to smile, as indeed he did himself, at such fond provinciality, but
the fact remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs this
richness of local atmosphere. A nation of restless immigrants, here
today and "moved on" tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination
uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of "local color" purchase
brilliancy at the cost of thinness of tone, poverty of association.
Philadelphia and Boston, almost alone among the larger American cities,
yield the sense of intimacy, or what the Autocrat would call "the
cumulative humanities."

Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of his class of 1829 at
Harvard. It was only in 1838 that their reunions began, but thereafter
they held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended fifty and wrote
poems for forty-three. Many of "the Boys" whom he celebrated became
famous in their own right, but they remain "the Boys" to all lovers of
Holmes's verses. His own career as a poet had begun during his single
year in the Law School. His later years brought him some additional
skill in polishing his lines and a riper human wisdom, but his native
verse-making talent is as completely revealed in Old Ironsides,
published when he was twenty-one, and in The Last Leaf, composed a year
or two later, as in anything he was to write during the next
half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the
cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been,
like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with
the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive
social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of
congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his
clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman"
resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. Like
Voltaire, he was tolerant--except toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In
some of the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier Sterne. His
knack for vers de société was caught from Horace, but he would not have
been a child of his own age without the additional gift of rhetoric and
eloquence which is to be seen in his patriotic poems and his hymns. For
Holmes possessed, in spite of all his limitations in poetic range, true
devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos.

His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose
was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which
his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical
School. He had studied in Par

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