Initial Studies in American Letters Part 7

The _Biglow Papers_ remain Lowell's most original contribution to American literature. They are, all in all, the best political satires in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character, with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of literary expression almost as effective as Burns's Ayrs.h.i.+re Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d"--which, in the tough New England stock, stands instead of the pa.s.sion in the blood of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugitive Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as

"They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three,"

and the pa.s.sage beginning

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,"

became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing,

"And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then if ever come perfect days,"

is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel.

One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz Adam's Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New England Two Centuries Ago_.

The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl, _The Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with England for her unfriendly att.i.tude toward the North, were not inferior to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell has written in his professedly serious verse. In such pa.s.sages the dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following:

"Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth On war's red techstone rang true metal, Who ventered life an' love an' youth For the gret prize o' death in battle?

To him who, deadly hurt, agen Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, Tippin' with fire the bolt of men That rived the rebel line asunder?"

Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense of humor, wished that the author of the _Biglow Papers_ "could have used good English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote _A Fable for Critics_, something after the style of Sir John Suckling's _Session of the Poets_; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the American Parna.s.sus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, and sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to 1868, before publis.h.i.+ng another volume of verse. In the latter year appeared _Under the Willows_, which contains some of his ripest and most perfect work, notably _A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire_, with its n.o.ble and touching close--suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling, the dedication of Goethe's _Faust_,

"Ihr naht euch wieder, schw.a.n.kende Gestalten;"

the subtle _Footpath_ and _In the Twilight_, the lovely little poems _Auf Wiedersehen_ and _After the Funeral_, and a number of spirited political pieces, such as _Villa Franca_ and the _Washers of the Shroud_. This volume contained also his _Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration_ in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the finest occasional poems in the language, and the most important contribution which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation of his _alma mater_ in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a more personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front of battle. Particularly note-worthy in this memorial ode are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, "Many loved Truth;" the exordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" and the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the youthful heroes who

"Come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore and with the rays Of morn on their white s.h.i.+elds of Expectation."

From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863 to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Th.o.r.eau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like _Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc.

Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the t.i.tle _Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers.

His scholars.h.i.+p is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It is rich, exuberant, and, sometimes overfanciful, running away into excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste.

Lowell's resources in the way of ill.u.s.tration and comparison are endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye," or of his speaking of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope and subst.i.tuted the Gascon _v_ for the _b_ in binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fas.h.i.+on of telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The critics also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied," and with his writing such lines as the famous one--from _The Cathedral_, 1870--

"Spume-sliding down the baffled dec.u.man."

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way as to recall many other things.

Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of one writer who touched its circ.u.mference briefly. This was Sylvester Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine. Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all rememberable was _Margaret_, 1845, a novel of which, Lowell said, in _A Fable for Critics_, that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England towns.h.i.+p just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as well as in the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order.

As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all departments of thought have multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Political history, in and of itself, scarcely falls within the limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether dismissed, for the historian's art, at its highest, demands imagination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians have begun authors.h.i.+p in the domain of imaginative literature: Bancroft with an early volume of poems; Motley with his historical romances, _Merry Mount_ and _Morton's Hope_; and Parkman with a novel, _Va.s.sall Morton_.

The oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an honorable position in the historical literature of the world was William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose for his theme the history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps slightly overgorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand.

His completed histories, in their order, are the _Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella_, 1837; the _Conquest of Mexico_, 1843--a topic which Irving had relinquished to him; and the _Conquest of Peru_, 1847.

Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune, but he had difficulties of another kind to overcome. He was nearly blind, and had to teach himself Spanish and look up authorities through the help of others, and to write with a noctograph or by amanuenses.

George Bancroft (1800-91) issued the first volume of his great _History of the United States_ in 1834, and exactly half a century later the final volume of the work, bringing the subject down to 1789. Bancroft had studied at Gottingen, and imbibed from the German historian Heeren the scientific method of historical study. He had access to original sources, in the nature of collections and state papers in the governmental archives of Europe, of which no American had hitherto been able to avail himself. His history, in thoroughness of treatment, leaves nothing to be desired, and has become the standard authority on the subject. As a literary performance merely, it is somewhat wanting in flavor, Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's services to his country have been publicly recognized by his successive appointments as secretary of the navy, minister to England, and minister to Germany.

The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was John Lothrop Motley (1814-77), who, like Bancroft, was a student at Gottingen and United States minister to England. His _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, 1856, and _History of the United Netherlands_, published in installments from 1861 to 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific thoroughness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the picturesque brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in its masterly a.n.a.lysis of great historic characters, reminding the reader, in this particular, of Macaulay's figure-painting. The episodes of the siege of Antwerp and the sack of the cathedral, and of the defeat and wreck of the Spanish Armada, are as graphic as Prescott's famous description of Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico; while the elder historian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal sketches of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of Navarre, and William the Silent. The _Life of John of Barneveld_, 1874, completed this series of studies upon the history of the Netherlands, a theme to which Motley was attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for liberty offered, in some respects, a parallel to the growth of political independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and especially in his own America.

The last of these Ma.s.sachusetts historical writers whom we shall mention is Francis Parkman (1823- ), whose subject has the advantage of being thoroughly American. His _Oregon Trail_, 1847, a series of sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life, originally contributed to the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, displays his early interest in the American Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the _Conspiracy of Pontiac_. This has been followed by the series ent.i.tled _France and England in North America_, the six successive parts of which are as follows: the _Pioneers of France in the New World_, the _Jesuits in North America_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_; the _Old Regime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France_; and _Montcalm and Wolfe_. These narratives have a wonderful vividness, and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made himself personally familiar with the scenes which he described, and some of the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to be found in his histories. If any fault is to be found with his books, indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and "fine writing" are a little in excess.

The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 hinged upon the antislavery struggle. In this "irrepressible conflict" Ma.s.sachusetts led the van. Garrison had written in his _Liberator_, in 1830, "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolitionists remained for a long time, even in the North, a small and despised faction. It was a great point gained when men of education and social standing, like Wendell Phillips (1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74), joined themselves to the cause. Both of these were graduates of Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the representative orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform and Sumner in the Senate. The former first came before the public in his fiery speech, delivered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at Alton, Ill., while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf of the slave. His eloquence was impa.s.sioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, simple, and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes outside of politics, and his lecture on the _Lost Arts_ was a favorite with audiences of all sorts.

Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his conscience. He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection. He was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society.

But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress until slavery was abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully Brooks" of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His most impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of his parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the Kansas-Nebraska Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against Kansas_, May 19 and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on the _True Grandeur of Nations_.

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. _Voices of the Night_. _The Skeleton in Armor_. _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. _The Village Blacksmith_.

_The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems_ (1846). _By the Seaside_.

_Hiawatha_. _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. _Elsie Venner_. _Old Ironsides_. _The Last Leaf_. _My Aunt_. _The Music Grinders_. _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_. _Nux Postcoenatica_. _A Modest Request_. _The Living Temple_. _Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College_. _Homesick in Heaven_. _Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Series_. _The Boys_. _Dorothy Q_. _The Iron Gate_.

3. James Russell Lowell. _The Biglow Papers_ (two series). _Under the Willows, and Other Poems_ (1868). _Rhoecus_. _The Shepherd of King Admetus_. _The Vision of Sir Launfal_. _The Present Crisis_. _The Dandelion_. _The Birch Tree_. _Beaver Brook_. _Essays on Chaucer_.

_Shakespeare Once More_. _Dryden_. _Emerson, the Lecturer_.

_Th.o.r.eau_. _My Garden Acquaintance_. _A Good Word for Winter_. _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.

4. William Hickling Prescott. _The Conquest of Mexico_.

5. John Lothrop Motley. _The United Netherlands_.

6. Francis Parkman. _The Oregon Trail_. _The Jesuits in North America_.

7. _Representative American Orations_, volume v. Edited by Alexander Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884.

[Transcriber's note: In the poem fragment "soap for soap" the o's in each "soap" must be rendered with Unicode to appear correctly--in the first "soap", o-breve (Ux014F); in the second, o-macron (Ux014D).]

CHAPTER VI.

LITERATURE IN THE CITIES.

1837-1861.

Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until very recently. Even now the number of those who support themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as _Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a G.o.dsend to poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne.

About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines--_G.o.dey's Lady's Book_ and _Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the first ocean steamers there started up a cla.s.s of large-paged weeklies in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the _New World_, and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the freshest writings of d.i.c.kens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in _Harper's_ in installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals.

The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work.

Still others, like Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, by living in the country and making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's case by lecturing here and there--suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. But, in default of some such _pou sto_, our men of letters have usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North American_. Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the break-up of the Brook Farm Community.

In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the earliest American poet of importance, whose impulses drew him to the solitudes of nature, was compelled to gain a livelihood, by conducting a daily newspaper; or, as he himself puts it, was

"Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen."

Bryant was born at c.u.mmington, in Berks.h.i.+re, the western-most county of Ma.s.sachusetts. After two years in Williams College he studied law, and practiced for nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great Barrington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the social and theological affiliations of Berks.h.i.+re have always been closer with Connecticut and New York than with Boston and eastern Ma.s.sachusetts.

Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded to the attractions of a literary career, he betook himself to New York city, where, after a brief experiment in conducting a monthly magazine, the _New York Review and Athenaeum_, he a.s.sumed the editors.h.i.+p of the _Evening Post_, a Democratic and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when he entered the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his _Thanatopsis_ had been published in the _North American Review_, and had attracted immediate and general admiration. It had been finished, indeed, two years before, when the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a wonderful instance of precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon the universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. Bryant's blank verse when at its best, as in _Thanatopsis_ and the _Forest Hymn_, is extremely n.o.ble. In gravity and dignity it is surpa.s.sed by no English blank verse of this century, though in rich and various modulation it falls below Tennyson's _Ulysses_ and _Morte d'Arthur_. It was characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early into possession of his faculty. His range was always a narrow one, and about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain coldness, rigidity, and solemnity. His fixed position among American poets is described in his own _Hymn to the North Star_:

"And thou dost see them rise, Star of the pole! and thou dost see them set.