Chapter XII: Part 12

_Bayard Taylor._--A Quaker poet of a different stamp was the meteoric Bayard Taylor (1825-78). His boyhood was distinguished by a passion for roving and for collecting objects of natural history. His devotion to books and his distaste for labour on a Pennsylvania farm did not always please his father, who laughed boisterously, however, when a phrenologist said of the son: “You will never make a farmer of him to any great extent: you will never keep him home; that boy will ramble around the world, and furthermore, he has all the marks of a poet.” At the age of nineteen, having just published “Ximena: or The Battle of Sierra Morena, and Other Poems,” and armed with some introductions from N. P. Willis, Taylor engaged in a Byronic pilgrimage on the Continent. A half-year at Heidelberg rendered him fluent in German. By a circuitous route through northern Germany and Austria he proceeded on foot to Italy, and from Italy through France back to England, supporting himself by correspondence which he sent to _The New York Tribune_, _The Saturday Evening Post_, and _The United States Gazette_, and which on his return to America he collected in “Views Afoot” (1846). Our account of his life thus far gives a faint impression of his physical and mental activity. No adequate narrative may here be essayed of his wandering and eventful career throughout. “Views Afoot” made his reputation. By 1848 he had become head of the literary department of _The New York Tribune_. In 1849, as correspondent for _The Tribune_, he spent five months with the gold-diggers in California. In 1850 he married Miss Mary Agnew, who was dying of consumption, and who survived her wedding but two months. In 1851-53 he travelled in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Ethiopia, Spain, India, and China. In 1856 he broke down from overwork in America--lecturing and writing--and he went to Europe again. In Germany (1857) he married the daughter of an eminent astronomer, P. A. Hansen. In 1857-58 he visited Greece. Two years later, at an expense of $17,000, he had built a home, near his birthplace, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, calling his estate “Cedarcroft.” To settle down in affluence had been his cherished ambition; but this dream, and his haste to realise it, embarrassed him financially, cost him much peace of mind, and eventually cost him his life. He never succeeded in resting. In 1862-63 he was Secretary of the Legation at St. Petersburg. During other intervals, he lectured in America. Among his lectures may be mentioned those delivered at Cornell University in 1870, 1871, 1875, and 1877. A large part of his correspondence is at present housed in the Cornell University Library. His translation of Goethe’s “Faust,” Part First, appeared in 1870; nearly all of the first edition was sold in one day. The Second Part came out in 1871. Excessive labour, an irregular and not abstemious way of life, and, more especially, financial worry told upon his constitution. He was destined never to finish his projected “Life of Goethe.” He had barely entered upon his duties as Minister to Germany when the collapse came. His last words were, “I must be away.”

“Taylor,” says Albert H. Smyth, “wrote with such rapidity that he could complete a duodecimo volume in a fortnight.... In a night and a day, he read Victor Hugo’s voluminous ‘La Légende des Siècles,’ and wrote for _The Tribune_ a review of it which fills eighteen pages of his ‘Essays and Literary Notes,’ and contains five considerable poems that are translations in the metre of the original.” His powers of memory are said to have been prodigious. He could repeat not only from his favourite authors but from the futile compositions of poetasters whose manuscripts he had read as an editor and rejected. He was in the habit of carrying his own poetry in his head until the process of correction was ended. Accordingly, the perfection of his “copy,” which was written in the neatest hand imaginable, has led various critics into the error of thinking that he did not revise. His poetry was much more carefully worked out than his prose, upon which he had no thought of building a reputation. He would spend hours on the chiselling of a single couplet. His style resounds with echoes of word and phrase from Byron and Shelley, indeed from the whole circle of his reading in both English and German. Nor is it deficient in individuality. Taylor has a pronounced cadence of his own. Nevertheless his poetry wants some quality or other that would make it lasting. Although in 1896 there was a cult of younger men that studied and imitated him, his immense vogue as a prose writer had already waned; and his eclipse as a poet is now almost complete. In the history of American literature there is nothing stranger than this eclipse. Taylor’s learning was wide and substantial. He shrank from no drudgery of preparation. At the age of fifty he was willing to begin the study of Greek. And it was not merely that he was in touch with his time on all sides, and able by brilliant arts to snare the popular fancy. When he wrote, he knew what he was talking about. His “Poems of the Orient” (1854), containing the Shelley-like “Bedouin Song,” show deep sympathy with the customs and passions of the East. “Ross Browne’s Syrian dragoman, when he listened to the reading of ‘Hassan to his Mare,’ ‘sprang up with tears in his eyes, and protested that the Arabs talked just that way to their horses.’” Taylor had the suffrages of educated critics too. “The Picture of St. John” (1866) Longfellow reckoned “a great poem”; while Lowell said that, except “The Golden Legend,” no American poem could match it in finish and sustained power. “The Masque of the Gods” (1872), an endeavour to combine the ideals of Christianity and Hellenism, also pleased Longfellow. “Lars, a Pastoral Poem” (1873), is a curious tale, with some historical basis; the unwonted background of Norwegian fiords makes part of the setting for a tragic romance among the Quakers. Of Taylor’s dramatic poems we shall hazard no discussion; besides “The Masque of the Gods,” he published “The Prophet” (1874), whose scene is laid among the Mormons, and “Prince Deukalion” (1877), a piece of symbolism in which the author tried to objectify his total conception of human life both here and hereafter. He felt as sure of the other world as of this. In such assurance he possessed the most vitalising belief that can inspire a poetic soul. Why, then, is his poetry now disregarded? Why is it that the production for which the present age is most ready to thank him is his version of Goethe’s “Faust”? A tentative explanation is this. Taylor’s life was full of disquiet. He never enjoyed the solitude necessary to the maturing of poetic sentiment. He was betrayed by temporal ambition into posting over land and ocean without rest. He was too determined to achieve fame. There are times for action, and there are times for a wise passiveness. They also serve who only stand and wait.

_Walt Whitman._--His belief in immortality, in the absolute and eternal value of each individual person and thing, constitutes the main element of permanence in the writings of Walt (= Walter) Whitman. He too had in his veins a strain of blood from the Quakers; though he was born (May 31, 1819) in a family that took little cognisance of religion. His mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was of mingled Dutch and Welsh descent, illiterate, but in the eyes of her second child, the poet, always “perfect.” When this child was four years old, his father and name-sake, a good carpenter and of honest Connecticut ancestry, but a slipshod householder, removed from West Hills, Huntington Township, Long Island, to the “village,” as it then was, of Brooklyn; not before the impresses of rural life had entered unawares into the heart of the child; and not too late for the life of the future metropolis to become an imperishable part of his experience. The poet’s formative years were passed in the midst of the growing population centred at New York. He attended the public schools of Brooklyn until he was thirteen, then, with a scanty knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, entered a lawyer’s office as errand-boy, his employers giving him access during free hours “to a big circulating library.” “Up to that time,” he says, “this was the signal event of my life.” “For a time I now revel’d in romance-reading of all kinds; first the ‘Arabian Nights,’ all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, with sorties in very many other directions, took in Walter Scott’s novels, one after another, and his poetry.” From errand-boy he became typesetter, varying his desultory labours for _The Patriot_, and _The Star_, by excursions on Long Island, by contributing “sentimental bits” to local newspapers, and by active participation in several debating societies. At eighteen he turned country schoolmaster; and shifting from that, he set up as editor of _The Long Islander_, hiring some help, but himself doing most of the work, including the distribution of his weekly sheet to its patrons. In 1841 he returned to New York, became editor of _The Daily Aurora_, wrote for _The Tattler_, and published stories in _The Democratic Review_. In later years it was his “serious wish to have all these crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion.” Meanwhile he attended the theatre, continued his observation of the crowds at the Brooklyn ferries and in the streets of New York, and his study of nature on the shores of Long Island, read newspapers, “went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorbed ... Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translations [available] of Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them.” A brief connection with _The Brooklyn Eagle_ was terminated by Whitman’s falling out with the radical faction of the Democrats; whereupon he seized “a good chance to go down to New Orleans on the staff of _The Crescent_, a daily to be started there.” Accompanied by his younger brother, “Jeff,” he crossed the Alleghanies, and took steamer down the Ohio and the Mississippi--“a leisurely journey and working expedition”; then “after a time plodded back northward, up the Mississippi, and around to and by way of the Great Lakes, ... to Niagara Falls and Lower Canada, finally returning through central New York and down the Hudson; travelling altogether probably 8000 miles this trip, to and fro.” In the experiences of his life up to this point lay the materials for his “Leaves of Grass,” which he published at his own expense in 1855, having done part of the typesetting himself. A copy sent to Emerson elicited from him a letter in which the book was characterised as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” The next year Whitman brought out a second and amplified edition, printing Emerson’s laudatory letter and his own answer in the Preface, and on the back the quotation, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” with Emerson’s name beneath. This act of questionable taste failed to augment the sale of the volume; nor was the edition of 1860 more successful. In 1862, Whitman’s younger brother having been wounded during service in the Union Army, the poet was brought into contact with the army hospitals. He continued his ministrations to the sick and suffering almost uninterruptedly until the hospitals in Washington were closed. “From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer, for another he wrote a letter home, ... to another, some special friend, very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along.” By sheer personal magnetism he saved many lives. The record of his connection with the war is to be found in his “Specimen Days,” in the posthumous collection of letters entitled “The Wound-Dresser” (1898), in “Drum Taps,” published in 1865, and in the “Sequel to Drum Taps,” which contained his poems on Lincoln (among them the threnody, “O Captain! My Captain!”), published later in the same year. Shortly after the war was over, Whitman, who had found a place as clerk in the Department of the Interior, was discharged by Secretary Harlan, Harlan having discovered the authorship of “Leaves of Grass,” in his opinion “an indecent book.” The poet quickly received another position, in the office of the Attorney-General; and his enthusiastic friend and champion, W. D. O’Connor, brought out a defence of Whitman, written in terms of exaggerated praise, under the famous title of “The Good Grey Poet.” A fourth edition of “Leaves of Grass,” revised, and supplemented by “Drum Taps,” was published in 1867; a fifth, including the “Passage to India,” in 1871. The sixth and seventh editions appeared in 1876 and 1881-1882; the eighth (1888-1889) contained in addition “November Boughs,” and the ninth (1891-1892) “Good-bye my Fancy.” In 1873, Whitman, disabled by a stroke of paralysis, gave up his position in Washington and removed to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived with George Whitman until 1879. By this time he had so far recovered that he could make a journey to the West, followed by another, the next year, to Canada. In 1881, the sale of his works allowed him to settle, at Camden, in a home of his own. Here he lived in comparative comfort, the object of a good deal of curiosity, receiving visitors, some of them very distinguished, and, as his strength allowed, adding to his stock of verse. In 1888, he had a second stroke of paralysis, but he lived on, preserving his courage and mental alertness, until 1892. He died on March 26th of that year. If we can credit his statement made in 1890, he was probably survived by four out of six children that were not born in wedlock.

In many ways, Whitman corresponds to the ideal presented in the “natural man” of Rousseau; if space allowed, a profitable comparison might be made between “the good grey poet” and the French forerunner of American democracy. At the outset, the excessive sentimentalism of Rousseau would constitute a patent difference. But Whitman’s assumption of equality among individuals, in so far as they are not spoiled by what he deems a false and artificial education, is nothing new to the reader of Rousseau; and his preference of the “powerful, uneducated,” raw material of humanity has its counterpart in the sympathetic attitude of Rousseau toward the burgher and peasant classes which formed the part of society that he really understood. Moreover, both of these authors demand an individual standard--which is no standard--of judgment. Both desire to be appreciated, yet refuse to be appraised according to standards which the cumulative wisdom of mankind in the past, of the greatest democracy, has attained to and approved. Both try to regard organisation and the subordination of one person or thing to another as unnatural. In the case of Whitman at least, it is for want of philosophical standards, and for want of a consistent effort to determine what is meant by _nature_ and _natural_, that the so-called literature of democracy has been so hard to measure.

In the first place, then, if we are to measure Whitman at all, we must make certain postulates. For example, we must postulate that restraint in literature, as in life, is a law of nature. This, Whitman is not disposed to admit. In private life, it is true, he was more temperate and continent than certain passages in “Leaves of Grass” led casual readers to surmise. But he saw fit to beget children, out of wedlock, without assuming the responsibility of their nurture and education. Are the duties which modern society lays upon parents less natural than the alleged practice of Rousseau, or are they more? Again, Whitman decides to address the public in the guise of a poet. Now in practice, be it observed, he is much truer to the demands of a poetic ear than are many of our conventional versifiers; and though he has a predilection for colloquial diction and syntax, he is in his own way not unscrupulous in the matter of technique. The changes that he made in successive editions of his main work, “Leaves of Grass,” are of deep interest to the student of poetic art. At the same time, he repudiates literary convention, and recognizes no law as binding upon one who contracts to write for his fellow men, save the law of his individual being. There is, however, no law, or science, or art, of the individual as such. Poetry, according to the deepest thinkers on this subject, is the rhythmical utterance of the individual in harmony with universal law; and criticism has for its province the recognition of that universal law in the particular poet. In so far, then, as Whitman’s irregularly trained personality succeeds in expressing what is true for all men, or for many, or for representative and typical men, uttering that truth in terms that are both choice and generally intelligible,--in so far as he actually conforms to the best conventions--he is a great poet, perhaps our greatest native poet. He succeeds often. It is to be noted that he is most successful when, as in his lament for Lincoln, he adopts a regular metrical form.

On Whitman’s achievement as spokesman of modern democracy perhaps too much stress has already been laid. Following his own lead, his interpreters have been inclined to associate his idiosyncrasies, his departures from the normal, his lapses from good taste in referring to the physiology of sex, too closely with the nature of this achievement. In dealing with the “poetry of democracy,” it seems to have escaped observation that an age of popular freedom and republican ideals may produce a literature of high refinement and perfect balance between literary tradition and the impulses of the individual author. It is well to remember that the masterpieces of art which ennobled Athens under Pericles were the expression of--for Greece--an age of democracy; and that the epics of Milton, however conventional in one sense, were the outpourings of a nobler champion of liberty than Whitman. Referring to the practice of studying his illustrious predecessors, Whitman has said: “Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me!” Something like this is sure to take place. In order to appreciate him rightly, we must confront him, full of the spirit of those authors, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and their peers, by the standard of whom one is bound to estimate poetry. If thus confronted, Whitman’s lustre, so bright in the eyes of his cult, begins to wane; still, the tributes paid him by W. M. Rossetti, Freiligrath, Dowden, Björnson, Symonds, may not lightly be set aside. Taken at its best, his poetry, as Emerson said, “has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.” His prose works ought not to be dismissed so summarily as must here be the case; being less subject to suspicious innovation than his verse, conforming naturally to expected canons, his prose, in particular his prose criticism, is well worth study. It is direct. Genius, said Whitman, is almost one hundred per cent directness.

_Bret Harte_, _Joaquin Miller_, _Edward Rowland Sill_.--We turn to the poetry of the Far West. Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902), born at Albany, New York, after a varied youth in California won a sudden renown through his “Heathen Chinee” and “Condensed Novels.” His later success as a prolific writer of short stories tended to obscure his talent as a humourist in verse; and even in the present decade, when his death has called fresh attention to the value of his literary work as a whole, his poetry is hardly known as it should be. Probably in the course of years his “East and West Poems” (1871) and “Echoes of the Foothills” (1874) will entertain more readers than they now do in comparison with “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” There is likely to come a time when pioneer life among the gold-mines will appeal less than it does to the present generation; whereas the permanent aspects of external nature, as Harte has caught them in “Crotalus,” can never cease to interest. The details of his life are recounted in another part of this volume.

Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (born 1841), another celebrity of the West, was reared in a log-cabin in Indiana. After a few years of life on a farm in Oregon, he went to the gold-fields of California. When he had met almost every kind of experience imaginable, he studied law, and practised in Oregon. In 1870 he brought out a small volume of poems, one of them entitled “Joaquin,” the name of a Mexican brigand, Joaquin Murietta, in whose defence he had already written, and henceforth his pen-name. His volume, “Songs of the Sierras,” for which he at first vainly tried to find a publisher, produced, when finally accepted and issued, a sensation that recalled the days of Byron. His vogue has since declined, though he is still read, a collective edition of his poems having been published in 1897.

Much less famous than either Harte or Miller, not having the virility of the former, yet possessing a finer sensibility than the latter, was Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887), a third poet of the Far West. Sprung from a family in Connecticut, a teacher in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, finally professor of English literature in the University of California, Sill, in “Hermione, and Other Poems,” “The Hermitage, and Later Poems” (1867), “The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems,” published (1888) after his death, sent forth a rill of poetry, slender but pure. In the opinion of his friends and many besides, Sill’s death cut short a poetic career of unusual promise. His poems were collected in 1902, in a single volume, and again in 1906; in the latter edition they are arranged chronologically.

=Miscellaneous and Later Poets.=--Under this heading must be gathered a handful of writers whom the classification thus far adopted has not accounted for, some of whom would not easily admit of classification. However, it is not the purpose of this Manual to consider in detail the current writers of verse throughout America, among whom distinctions of value can rarely be established.

_Hans Breitmann._--Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) might be associated with Bayard Taylor. He is said to have neglected mathematics at Princeton for Carlyle and Spinoza; he studied abroad, returned to Philadelphia to engage in the practice of law, but gave this up for work as an editor. During the Civil War his pen was active in defence of the Union. Afterward he became popular through his “Hans Breitmann Ballads,” in picturesque dialect displaying the humour of the shrewd jovial German immigrant before the war. Leland made himself an authority on gypsy lore, and was busy in several fields as a translator. During his long residence abroad, he enjoyed an acquaintance with many distinguished men of letters in Europe. Besides his ballads in dialect and translations from J. V. Scheffel, he wrote verse of serious intent; for example, “The Music Lesson of Confucius, and Other Poems,” in which, like Taylor, he desired to unite the ideals of Christianity with those of Hellenism. The deaths of Leland, Stoddard, Aldrich, and Stedman within the last five years took almost the last survivors of an elder generation in American letters.

_Richard Henry Stoddard._--In the year of his death, 1903, R. H. Stoddard was called by his friend, E. C. Stedman, “the most distinguished of living American poets.” He was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, July 2, 1825. Educated in the schools of New York City, he supplemented by private reading his brief opportunities for regular study, and from worker in a foundry became connected with Bayard Taylor as a journalist. In 1853, Hawthorne aided him in securing a position in the New York Custom-House. From 1860 to 1870 he was literary editor of the New York _World_; in 1880 he took a similar post on _The Mail and Express_. His first volume of poetry, “Footprints” (1849), was afterwards suppressed; his second, “Poems” (1852), secured him an audience. “Songs of Summer” (1857) was a collection of poems that had been printed in various magazines. The latter part of his life was marked by great activity as an editor and biographer, somewhat after the fashion of Stedman. Most of his poetry subsequent to the collective edition of 1880 is included in “The Lion’s Cub, with Other Verse” (1890). He preserved his lyrical quality to a great age. Like several of our leading poets, Stoddard reached his highest level in dealing with the theme of Abraham Lincoln.

_Thomas Bailey Aldrich._--With his “Ballad of Babie Bell” (1855) in the New York _Journal of Commerce_, Aldrich (1836-1907) began a career whose high-water mark was the editorship of _The Atlantic Monthly_ from 1881 to 1890. His initial volume of poetry, published in 1854, was “The Bells,” which was succeeded in 1858 by “The Ballad of Babie Bell, and Other Poems.” Of his numerous later poetical works, “Pampinea, and Other Poems” (1861), “Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems” (1874), “Flower and Thorn” (1876), etc., perhaps the tragedy of “Mercedes” (“Mercedes, and Later Lyrics,” 1884) deserves particular notice, having been successfully staged, a test which few dramas by American poets have been able to endure. Aldrich was a master of his craft. Deep in his reverence for Tennyson, whom he ranks third in English poetry--after Shakespeare and Milton,--he sometimes exercises an almost Tennysonian harmony in the selection of detail; witness the Oriental luxury and splendour in “When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan.”

_Edmund Clarence Stedman._--Stedman’s services to literature as a critic and anthologist are doubtless of much greater importance than his own poetry; but neither the one nor the other may be disparaged. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833, his mother (by her second marriage Mrs. J. C. Kinney, the friend of the Brownings) being a woman of educated taste and herself a poet. Entering Yale at the age of fifteen, Stedman showed ability in Greek and in English composition, and shortly gained a prize by his poem on “Westminster Abbey.” On account of a boyish prank he was compelled to leave college before the end of the course. Prior to the Civil War he was connected with _The Norwich Tribune_ and _Winsted Herald_, and for a time with _The New York Tribune_; in this he printed his “Tribune Lyrics” (among them “Osawatomie Brown”). From 1861 to 1863 he was war correspondent of the New York _World_; later he was assistant to Edward Bates, Attorney-General under Lincoln. His interest in the first Pacific railroad brought him into relations with Wall Street, where, in 1869, he became an active member of the New York Stock Exchange. Here he remained until 1900, an influential man of affairs, respected by financiers as well as literary men, amassing and enjoying the means which he desired for the pursuits of literature. He was a thorough patriot, an earnest advocate of international copyright, above all a steady labourer for the education of public taste. His lectures on “The Nature and Elements of Poetry,” delivered first at Johns Hopkins University, subsequently at the University of Pennsylvania, and again at Columbia, unfolded the dignity of a subject that is often regarded as a matter of indifference. By his “Victorian Anthology” (1895) he gave further evidence of the powers of selection displayed in “A Library of American Literature” (1888-1889), on which he collaborated with Ellen M. Hutchinson. His “American Anthology” (1901, etc.), several times reissued, contains selections from about six hundred American poets, with brief biographies, and is, to say the least, an indispensable volume to the general student of our literature. The present section of this Manual is much indebted to Stedman’s “Anthology.” One would hardly make too liberal an assertion in saying of Stedman that he was the most thoroughly read man of his time in the poetry of his own nation. It is possible that he was over generous in his recognition of the work of inferior authors; but let us not impute this to him as too serious a fault. Of the fifteen poems of his own to which he allowed admission in the “American Anthology” (sixteen, counting the “Prelude” to the volume), the best known are “The Discoverer,” “Pan in Wall Street,” and “The Hand of Lincoln.” He died on January 18, 1908.

_James Whitcomb Riley._--This artist in the “Hoosier” dialect of Indiana (born 1853), though still in middle life, seems to belong with the older rather than the younger generation of American poets. Unwilling to follow his father’s profession of attorney, he early betook himself to a wandering life, gaining experience of the world as a vendor of patent medicines, sign-painter, actor, and the like. Settling at Indianapolis, he became known by his contributions to various newspapers, and when his reputation was established, won additional success by public readings from his poetry. His verse is bright and crisp, and he has pathos, humour, and good powers of description and narrative. He has an unusually keen understanding for the experiences of country life, particularly of youth and boyhood in rural villages and on the farm. “The Old Swimmin’-Hole, and ‘Leven More Poems” (1883) was his first notable venture. “Afterwhiles” appeared in 1888. Within ten years or so he then published “Old-Fashioned Roses” (1888), “Pipes o’ Pan at Zekesbury” (1889), “Rhymes of Childhood” (1890), “Neighbourly Poems” (1891), and, among other volumes, “A Child-World” (1896), and the “Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers” (1899). As a writer of dialect in verse, he falls not very far short of Lowell. His allusions to nature, to insect life for example, are simple and true. If but a bird or butterfly sit down beside him, he is as happy as if the same were a maiden-queen.

* * * * *

Space forbids any delay upon George Henry Boker (1823-1890), diplomat and dramatist, and his metrical drama, “Francesca da Rimini” (1856); or Francis Miles Finch (1827-1907), professor in Cornell University, and his celebrated poem “The Blue and the Gray” (in _The Atlantic Monthly_, 1867), a gift of healing from the North to the South; or John Hay (1838-1905), whose manifold services to his country were roofed and crowned with an abiding interest in literature (“Pike County Ballads,” published in _The New York Tribune_); or Richard Watson Gilder (born 1844), editor of _The Century Magazine_, social reformer, and author of several volumes of finished verse; or Stephen Collins Foster (1836-1864), composer, whose songs, “The Old Folks at Home,” “The Suwanee River,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” familiar the country over, are significant of the influence which the negroes have exerted on the language and art of the whites; or Will H. Thompson (born 1848), and “The High Tide at Gettysburg”; or John Townsend Trowbridge (born 1827), one of the original contributors to _The Atlantic Monthly_, author of “The Vagabonds” (1863), and steeped in the spirit of New England; or John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-1890), the Fenian, who escaped from imprisonment in Australia, and became a journalist in Boston (“Songs, Legends, and Ballads,” “Songs of the Southern Seas,” etc.); or Eugene Field (1850-1895), witty, eccentric, friend and student of children; or Richard Hovey (1864-1900), cut off in the flower of his promise (“Taliesin: a Masque,” 1899); or Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the negro poet, dead before his time, who wrote good and stirring English as well as pathetic dialect; or William Vaughn Moody, professor in the University of Chicago (“The Masque of Judgment,” 1900); or Bliss Carman (born 1861) and Clinton Scollard (born 1860). All these and many more must pass with insufficient notice or none; otherwise the page would contain only a meaningless enumeration of names and dates. As was implied at the beginning, very few American writers who have won distinction in other ways have refrained from publishing a volume of lyrics “and other poems.” Also, in spite of the slender encouragement from publishers to new authors of original verse, the occasional volume from the hitherto and hereafter unknown poetaster, who foots the bill for printing, continues to emerge and sink again at the present day.

The immediate outlook for poetry in the United States is not bright. It does not appear that with the material growth of the country we have developed a unified national spirit capable of expression at the hands of a great poet, were he to arise. It does not appear that we have among the younger men a first-class poet capable of expressing the national soul, were this more unified and precise. Furthermore, the type of humanistic education which fostered our elder poets of New England is generally discredited, and seems to be passing away without leaving any hope of a popular training in the near future worthy to succeed it. Simplicity, rigour, precision, and accuracy, all of them friendly to the poetic spirit, and among its necessary conditions, have fewer and fewer champions in the schools. Many subjects are studied, and almost nothing is mastered and retained. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is not in esteem. “Literature” is taught--though not learned; yet the children know no poetry. Worst of all, and a primary cause of much of the evil, the reading of standard works within the family is becoming less and less common. In particular, though there is much talk about the Bible, the Bible, like the classics, is becoming unfamiliar, to the great detriment of popular thought and style.

On the other hand, to offset the deficiency of our secondary schools and the decay of culture in the home, the last thirty years have witnessed an immense expansion in advanced scholarship, most notable, perhaps, in the investigation of the vernacular and related literatures. Graduate study of English, and of the literatures from which English literature has sprung, offers a refuge to such persons as have a serious and abiding interest in belles-lettres; it is undoubtedly developing the personalities of investigators to the highest point of efficiency possible under present conditions, and making ready for another generation, more fortunate, whose poetry shall find root in the fields that are to-day so thoroughly cultivated; working downward, it is already tending to bring about salutary changes here and there in the procedure of the schools, and hence eventually to have an influence in the home. A generation of scholars to clear the way, as in the beginning of the Renaissance--to produce the literary atmosphere which now is wanting--may be regarded as a hopeful sign of a generation of poets to come. Finally, if American poetry now seems moribund, we must yet remember the eternal power that the true poet is always in alliance with; the power that at any time can make the poet say of any literature: The maid is not dead, but sleepeth.[21]

IV. THE ESSAYISTS AND THE HUMOURISTS.

=English Influences on American Letters.=--Springing from a common stock, the two branches of eighteenth-century English literature showed many similarities. The charge of imitation and even of plagiarism has been brought against the American writers of that period; but it seems in no way unsafe to point to the single origin as the probable cause of the same characteristics appearing in the literature produced here, and that produced in the mother-country. No one can deny, of course, that not a few of our authors went to school to Englishmen, but the assertion that America until recently has produced nothing but pinchbeck literature is as false as it is absurd. That like produces like may be a trite saying, but its frequent repetition does not impair its truth. The English mind, whether expressing itself at home or in the colonies, naturally put forth the same kind of shoots: that their development was not in all respects equally rapid, that in time they became so much unlike as to appear unrelated, can be traced, no doubt, to the unsheltered fortune of the American scion in early days, and to the complete removal of the slip from the parent stem in after-years.

With this thought in mind, the most thorough-going American may admit, without apologetic reserve, that the essayists of eighteenth-century England have counterparts in Irving and certain of his contemporaries, and that those of a slightly later date have much in common with Emerson and Thoreau. Should one feel, however, that excusable pride is to be taken only in those authors who exhibit qualities indigenous to America, one may triumphantly mention Warner, and Lowell, and Margaret Fuller; for, although these essayists show the racial instinct of English writers, they are none the less emphatically American in thought, tone, and expression. In passing, it is perhaps well to notice that a large number of American writers have tried their hands at more than one form of literature. For this reason Irving is discussed as an essayist, although he might be placed with the humourists, or perhaps better still, with fiction-writers, since he has the right to dispute with Poe the claim to be regarded as the progenitor of the American short story. Again, Emerson, like George Eliot, felt that his fame would eventually rest upon his poetry, but his readers almost always think and speak of him as an essayist. Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier, on the other hand, are properly reviewed at large as poets, despite the fact that their prose work is not inconsiderable nor unimportant and must therefore receive some attention in even a rapid survey of the American essay.

_Washington Irving._--Washington Irving (1783-1859), the first essayist of importance in the National Period of American Literature, was born in New York City. Unable on account of ill-health to continue his education, Irving went abroad in 1804. Returning two years later, he was admitted to the bar, but he never engaged in the actual practice of law. In 1815 Irving again went to Europe, this time upon matters connected with the cutlery business in which, as silent partner, he was engaged with his brothers. It was seventeen years before he again set foot upon his native soil, but when he did come back, he was widely known, both for his writings and for his diplomatic service as member of the American legations, first at Madrid (1826-1829) and later at London (1829-1831). During the next decade, Irving was in this country, living quietly at Sunnyside, as he called his home at Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. In 1842, accepting an appointment as Minister to Spain, he went to Europe for a third time and remained abroad four years. Upon his return home, he gave himself up entirely to writing, finishing his monumental work upon Washington but a short time before his death. He is buried in the Tarrytown Sleepy-Hollow Cemetery--within sight of the road down which one of his characters, Ichabod Crane, made his precipitous flight in mad endeavour to escape the headless horseman.

Irving’s first book, “A History of New York,” published as from the pen of “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” appeared in 1809. It attracted immediate attention and established its author’s reputation as a humourist; but unfortunately its fun at the expense of the ancestors of certain American families roused not a little rancour. Irving’s next work, “The Sketch Book,” was published, first in parts in 1819, and then in two volumes in the following year. This book and “Bracebridge Hall, or The Humourists” (1822), “Tales of a Traveller” (1824), “The Alhambra” (1832), and “Wolfert’s Roost” (1855), are all miscellaneous collections of sketches, short stories, and character studies, of which one volume is not inferior to another. The first of them received cordial recognition from Scott, who arranged for its publication in London; and the last had a wide circulation both in America and in England.

During Irving’s first visit to Spain, he became interested in certain biographical and historical material there easily accessible, and put it to use when he was writing “The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus” (1828), “The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada” (1829), “The Voyages of the Companions of Columbus” (1831), “The Alhambra,” already mentioned, and “The Life of Mahomet” (1849). Upon Irving’s return to America his interest in the same kind of material continued, and led him to publish “The Life of Goldsmith” (1849), and “The Life of Washington” in six volumes (1855-1859). Irving’s other works are “A Tour on the Prairies” (1835), “Astoria” (1836), and “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville” (1837).

Irving was the first American writer to gain literary reputation abroad; nor was the interest which he awakened there merely that of curiosity wondering what would come out of a wilderness. It may be that the great bulk of his work is not widely read at present, but such stories as “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” such sketches as “The Stout Gentleman” and “Moonlight on the Alhambra” are perennial. Irving was hardly skilful in his use of pathos, degenerating not infrequently into the sentimental and even into the maudlin; yet the buoyancy of his fascinating and delicate humour has seldom been matched by any other American writer. His graceful, almost faultless style is akin to that of the writers of _The Spectator_, although it savours now and then of Goldsmith, and has, according to Scott, a dash of Swift. Perhaps Lowell best summed up the matter of Irving and his style in “A Fable for Critics”:

“To a true poet-heart add the fun of Dick Steele,
Throw in all of Addison, _minus_ the chill,

* * * * *

Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain,
That only the finest and clearest remain,

* * * * *

And you’ll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving
A name either English or Yankee,--just Irving.”

_Bryant and Others._--William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) is generally thought of as a poet, but his prose was not inconsiderable either in amount or in value. During his long connection with the New York _Evening Post_, from 1826 until the end of his life, he wrote daily editorials of high literary quality, contributed to many other journals, and delivered frequent orations upon various subjects. A collection of Bryant’s prose works in two volumes was published in 1894: one who reads them is convinced that their author was possessed of a clear, smooth style, an accurate, careful judgment, and good common sense. Whittier (1807-1892) and Longfellow (1807-1882) may not improperly be mentioned here, although, like Bryant, they also are best known as poets. Whittier was closely associated with William Lloyd Garrison in the Abolition movement and contributed much to its literature. Controversial writing, however, seldom lives, and Whittier’s has not proved an exception to the rule. In addition to one or two attempts at novel-writing, Whittier published “Supernaturalism in New England” (1847), “Old Portraits and Modern Sketches” (1850), and “Literary Recreations” (1854); but these works are not important in style or in matter. The demands of metre and rhyme upon Whittier seem to have prevented the appearance, in his poetry, of certain crudities which sadly mar his prose. Longfellow’s prose, on the other hand, is more important. It is marked by a delicacy and refinement which would go far towards keeping it well known, if the author’s greater fame as a poet did not eclipse his renown as a prose writer. In addition to two romances, he published “Outre Mer” (1825), a volume in aim and content somewhat like Irving’s “Sketch Book”; and under the title of “Drift Wood” he included in the first edition of his “Complete Prose Works” (1857) a collection of stray essays and book reviews originally contributed to various periodicals.

_Edgar Allan Poe._--Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1869), like the three authors just mentioned, was a poet, yet to his own time he was perhaps even better known as a short story writer and essayist. Opinions about the value of his literary work have been as various as those respecting his character; but it is safe to claim for him no mean place among writers of criticism. In this department of literature he undertook to bring about a reform among American authors who had passed from timid deference to English opinion into the stage of noisy and indiscriminate praise of every piece of writing produced in this country. From a study of Coleridge, Poe had come to the conclusion that poetry was a matter of “intellectual happiness”; its soul was the imagination. A person of metaphysical acumen, therefore, by noting how poetic moods are excited, could produce a finer poem than one who, lacking the analytical faculty, could only feel the emotions he desired to arouse in his readers. Poe laid great stress, too, on perfection of form as of the utmost importance in producing an effect; truth was a secondary matter, except in detail, and as a means of securing assent to a conclusion which might be essentially untruthful. The object of poetry, he thought, is to arouse a subtle, indefinite pleasure; this was imparted by music; hence the necessity of melody, of the refrain.

As a critic, Poe was often savage in the extreme; but it must be remembered, as we look back upon him, that the urbanity of the modern book reviewer was then a thing unknown. Poe’s literary judgments have in the main been justified, although some of his unsparing attacks in “The Literati of New York” arouse resentment even at this late day, while his equally unrestrained laudation of certain of his now wholly forgotten contemporaries leads one near to contemptuous amusement. Poe’s most important contribution to the theory of writing are two essays usually reprinted with his poems; of these “The Philosophy of Composition” first appeared in _Graham’s Magazine_ for April, 1846, and “The Poetic Principle,” originally a lecture, was printed in _Sartain’s Magazine_ for October, 1850. Perhaps an essay “On Critics and Criticism” ought also to be mentioned; it was first published in _Graham’s Magazine_ for January, 1850.

_Ralph Waldo Emerson._--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), serious, high-minded, and well balanced, affords a striking contrast in almost every way to Poe. Born in Boston, he was graduated from Harvard College at the age of nineteen. After teaching school for a time, he became minister of the Old North Church in his native city, but in 1835 withdrew from his charge because of his aversion to the rite of the Lord’s Supper. Taking up his residence at Concord, Massachusetts, he spent the rest of his years in writing and lecturing. While engaged in the latter work he went as far west as California and made two visits abroad. During the first, Emerson met Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, and De Quincey, who received him graciously, George Eliot, who referred to him as “the first man she had ever seen,” and Carlyle, who found in the visitor a hero well worthy of sincere admiration. Dignified and simple in manner, deep and kindly in thought, he found contentment in an uneventful career; sympathising strongly with those who would live the life of the spirit, he supported in theory the Brook Farm experiment; advocating anti-slavery ideas, he opened his church to Abolition agitators; but objecting on principle to war, he proposed to buy the slaves and educate them morally. He went down to his grave loved by his neighbours and honoured by many who knew him only through his works.

Emerson made his earliest appearance as a writer in a book entitled “Nature” (1836), but he first attracted real attention by his Phi Beta Kappa oration before Harvard College in 1837. This address, now published in his collected works as “The American Scholar,” made so strong an appeal to his listeners to break away from the influence of England in matters of authorship that Holmes with his usual felicity termed it “our literary Declaration of Independence.” For three or four years, beginning in 1840, Emerson was editor of _The Dial_. In 1841 he published his first collection of “Essays”; and three years later his second. From then on at irregular intervals other volumes of like content appeared; of these the most important, in all probability, are “Representative Men” (1850), “The Conduct of Life” (1860), and “Society and Solitude” (1870). There is no need of an enumeration of Emerson’s books, since they are all similar in form, content, and purpose. While Emerson is in no true sense a philosopher, he did project a theory of life. Sincerity he regarded as fundamental, and his belief in the formative influence of great men was almost identical with that held by Carlyle. By the possession of “transcendental reason,” man, according to Emerson, becomes intuitively aware of the truth. This truth or doctrine has been reduced by some critic to three propositions: (1) God is in all things and all things are in God. (2) Each created existence is essential to every other created existence. (3) Nothing which has once existed ever ceases to exist. To the average reader these ideas are bewildering and have been collectively designated as “a new philosophy maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and everything is nothing in particular.” It is related as a fact, that after an address by Emerson before a college society, the minister in charge of the meeting devoutly prayed that the hearers might be preserved from ever again being compelled to listen to such transcendental nonsense. At the close of the meeting Emerson imperturbably remarked that the gentleman seemed a very conscientious, plain-spoken man.

The distance between Emerson’s thought and that of most men laid him open to the charge of obscurity, an accusation which is still widely repeated by those who do not trouble themselves to read or to think. It cannot be denied that Emerson is often mystical, and that he must find spiritual insight and almost poetic imagination in those who would penetrate to the heart of his teachings; but it is unfair to give the impression that, save to the initiated, he is nearly always incomprehensible. Page after page of his writings offers no difficulty whatever to the most cursory reader, and his work as a whole is within the ken of any serious and unprejudiced reader. In style Emerson is sometimes forbidding through a strong tendency to condensation of expression; but the beauty of his thought frequently draws to itself a diction and order which transform his prose into veritable poetry. His strong, earnest spirituality is never fanatical, his perfect trust in what he called the Over-Soul is never sentimental, his full confidence that the world is making for ultimate good is never unpractical. Looking upon the universe as “one vast symbol of God,” he escaped pantheism on one hand and materialism on the other. As a teacher uttering his uplifting thought through literature, Emerson, it may be confidently said, stands without a rival among American writers.

_Henry David Thoreau._--Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is by many readers coupled with Emerson. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he spent the greater part of his life in his native town and its vicinity. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, although he refused his diploma on the ground that it was not worth five dollars. He gave occasional lectures and wrote many books: of these he himself published but two, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers” (1849) and “Walden, or Life in the Woods” (1854). To these have been added from time to time since Thoreau’s death several volumes entitled “Excursions in Field and Forest” (1863), “The Maine Woods” (1864), “Cape Cod” (1865), and “A Yankee in Canada” (1866). The greater part of his voluminous journal was published in 1906 and 1907, though extensive selections had been previously printed in four volumes bearing respectively the names of the four seasons of the year. More than any other well-known American author, Thoreau strove to get at Nature’s inmost heart. Withdrawing to Walden Pond, he spent the larger part of his time for two years in reading and meditation; feeling then that his object had been accomplished, he returned to town life. For a brief period, Thoreau lived as an inmate of Emerson’s household and became an unconscious disciple of the man who entertained him. A transcendentalist imbued with a strong spirit of otherworldliness, he may perhaps be best summed up in Emerson’s words. “He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the state; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist he used neither rod nor gun.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson has pointed out that Thoreau’s fame has survived two of the greatest dangers that can beset reputation--a brilliant satirist for critic (Lowell), and an injudicious friend for biographer (Channing).