potency of the spirit of the beloved and departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the workmanship consummate. So with the theme of revenge in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the theme of mysterious intrigue in “The Assignation.” In Poe’s detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to call them, he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has cunningly put together. “The Gold Bug” is the best known of these, “The Purloined Letter” the most perfect, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator loves to pose as a man without imagination and with “habits of rigid thought.” And there are tales of conscience, of which “The Black Cat” is the most fearful and “William Wilson” the most subtle; and there are landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor stuff.
It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe’s limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish that the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land, with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded with such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his imagination dealt less often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of our race. Yet when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism into primal savagery and shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was caged in by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised themselves against his prison.
Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they brought back the glory and the cash.
I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that man before, in “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows.” All of them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe–what would he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: “I belong at this table.” And he does.
Walt Whitman, whom his friend O’Connor dubbed the “good gray poet,” offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no interest in American history or in American ideas; he was a timeless, placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman had a passion for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent much of his mature life in brooding over the question, “What, after all, is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?” It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen of “these states.” His personality is unique. In many respects he still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of his countrymen without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic interest in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast majority of American men and women “good old Walt” is still an outsider.
Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory of all created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle to the Sun.” It cries, “Benedicite, Omnia opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!” That is the real motto for Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Like St. Francis, and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants “I know I am deathless.” Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott’s poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his “inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years.” Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the “single man” of Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address. “I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out.” Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.
So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman’s life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman’s own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman’s father was a carpenter, who “leaned to the Quakers.” There were many children. When little “Walt”–as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, Walter–was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried typesetting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible.
The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the “Democratic Review,” a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, “mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall,” and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on “The Brooklyn Eagle” and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter’s trade with his father, and brooded over a book–“a book of new things.”
This was the famous “Leaves of Grass.” He set the type himself, in a Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The book had a portrait of the author–a meditative, gray-bearded poet in workman’s clothes–and a confused preface on America as a field for the true poet. Then followed the new gospel, “I celebrate myself,” chanted in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to Whitman from Concord: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”
Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote “Drum Taps” and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on Lincoln’s death, “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Swinburne called this “the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world.” After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. O’Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the best known poets and critics of England and the Continent now began to recognize his genius. But his health had been permanently shattered by his heroic service as a nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which forced him to resign his position in Washington and remove to his brother’s home in Camden, New Jersey.
He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of patient and serene invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in this final period, and his cluttered chamber in Camden became the shrine of many a literary pilgrim, among them some of the foremost men of letters of this country and of Europe. He was cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he appeared in public, a magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at seventy-three, the “Dark mother always gliding near” enfolded him.
There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution of Walt Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his theory of poetry and in his actual poetical performance are still far from solution. But a few points concerning him are by this time fairly clear. They must be swiftly summarized.
The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the formlessness or alleged formlessness of “Leaves of Grass.” This is a highly technical question, involving a more accurate notation than has thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of free verse and of emotional prose. Whitman’s “new and national declamatory expression,” as he termed it, cannot receive a final technical valuation until we have made more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. As regards the contents of his verse, it is plain that he included much material unfused and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the nature of poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his catalogue or inventory poems often remain inert objects only. Like many mystics, he was hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails to communicate to his reader the trancelike emotion which he himself experienced. This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more significant defect in Whitman’s poetry than the relatively few passages of unashamed sexuality which shocked the American public in 1855.
The gospel or burden of “Leaves of Grass” is no more difficult of comprehension than the general drift of Emerson’s essays, which helped to inspire it. The starting point of the book is a mystical illumination regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the light of this experience, all created things are recognized as divine. The starting-point and center of the Whitman world is the individual man, the “strong person,” imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open road, to his conception of “these States.” One of his typical visions of the breadth and depth and height of America will be found in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.” In this and in many similar rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his national creed. The first is the newness of America, and its expression is in his well-known chant of “Pioneers, O Pioneers.” Yet this new America is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman’s later poems, such as “Passage to India,” the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of America. Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic is “one and indivisible.” This unity, in Whitman’s view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the “Captain,” dies indeed on the deck of the “victor ship,” but the ship comes into the harbor “with object won.” Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity has but one heart and that it should have but one will. No American poet has ever prophesied so directly and powerfully concerning the final issue involved in that World War which he did not live to see.
Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art. His life and work raise many problems which will long continue to fascinate and to baffle the critics. But after all of them have had their say, it will remain true that he was a seer and a prophet, far in advance of his own time, like Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the soul of this republic.
CHAPTER IX. UNION AND LIBERTY
“There is what I call the American idea,” declared Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. “This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy–that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness’ sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.”
These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar phrase of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet students of literature, no less than students of politics, recognize the difficulty of summarizing in words a national “idea.” Precisely what was the Greek “idea”? What is today the French “idea”? No single formula is adequate to express such a complex of fact, theories, moods–not even the famous “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.” The existence of a truly national life and literature presupposes a certain degree of unity, an integration of race, language, political institutions, and social ideals. It is obvious that this problem of national integration meets peculiar obstacles in the United States. Divergencies of race, tradition, and social theory, and clashing interests of different sections have been felt from the beginning of the nation’s life. There was well-nigh complete solidarity in the single province of New England during a portion of the seventeenth century, and under the leadership of the great Virginians there was sufficient national fusion to make the Revolution successful. But early in the nineteenth century, the opening of the new West, and the increasing economic importance of Slavery as a peculiar institution of the South, provoked again the ominous question of the possibility of an enduring Union. >From 1820 until the end of the Civil War, it was the chief political issue of the United States. The aim of the present chapter is to show how the theme of Union and Liberty affected our literature.
To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves again of what many persons have called the civic note in our national writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from the pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at action rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring things to pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, as they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to compromise and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in the epochmaking novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons blazing with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the human heart. We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war itself, and finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains, in the noblest tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our continuance as a nation.
Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides Dickens have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of our existence oratory was necessary as a stimulus to communal thought and feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as essential to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and the armed conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so swiftly and dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, the orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and bench.
The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, “Harry of the West,” the glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for a while a part of the political system of the United States. Union and Liberty were the master-passions of Clay’s life, but the greater of these was Union. The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the Kentucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable act of his life was his successful management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise of 1850. All his life long he fought for national issues; for the War of 1812, for a protective tariff and an “American system,” for the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and he had plead generously for the young South American republics and for struggling Greece. He had become the perpetual candidate of his party for the Presidency, and had gone down again and again in unforeseen and heart-rending defeat. Yet he could say honorably: “If any one desires to know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the preservation of this union will furnish him the key.” One could wish that the speeches of this fascinating American were more readable today. They seem thin, facile, full of phrases–such adroit phrases as would catch the ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, hard thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay’s day. Calhoun had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity for it, although he was too indolent to employ his great gifts steadily. Yet it was Webster who analyzed kindly and a little sadly, for he was talking during Clay’s last illness and just before his own, his old rival’s defect in literary quality: “He was never a man of books . . . . I could never imagine him sitting comfortably in his library and reading quietly out of the great books of the past. He has been too fond of excitement–he has lived upon it; he has been too fond of company, not enough alone; and has had few resources within himself.” Were the limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more unerringly than in these words?
When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in 1830, “Union AND Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable,” the words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than any similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster’s was the richer, fuller nature, nurtured by “the great books of the past,” brooding, as Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem of preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful seventh of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of his personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the ruin of his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing, and the South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the worst that can fairly be said against that speech today is that it lacked moral imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to visualize, the human results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent necessity of maintaining the old Union it was consistent with Webster’s whole development of political thought.
What were the secrets of that power that held Webster’s hearers literally spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that alienation of 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we touch here the mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But enough survives from the Webster legend, from his correspondence and political and legal oratory, to bring us into the presence of a superman. The dark Titan face, painted by such masters as Carlyle, Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical voice, remembered now but by a few old men; the bodily presence, with its leonine suggestion of sleepy power only half put forth–these aided Webster to awe men or allure them into personal idolatry. Yet outside of New England he was admired rather than loved. There is still universal recognition of the mental capacity of this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman of his time. He was unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, limpid statement; but he could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction, a splendid sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public appearances were in the Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court, the Plymouth, Bunker Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to Hayne, and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he exhibited in his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of the pioneer, his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His lifelong antagonist Calhoun declared that “The United States are not a nation.” Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of states, devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that the United States “IS,” not “are.” Thus he came to be known as the typical expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the turning point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal and political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise to mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human speech. And in truth he never exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly than in the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the status quo, for the avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and South, for obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort to reconcile an irreconcilable situation.
It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered his private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential year. “I have given my life to law and politics,” he wrote to Professor Silliman. “Law is uncertain and politics are utterly vain.” The dispassionate judgment of the present hour frees him from the charge of conscious treachery to principle. He was rather a martyr to his own conception of the obligations imposed by nationality. When these obligations run counter to human realities, the theories of statesmen must give way. Emerson could not refute that logic of Webster’s argument for the Fugitive Slave Law, but he could at least record in his private Journal: “I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BY GOD!” So said hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the North, but Webster did not or could not hear them.
While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many eloquent men. John C. Calhoun’s acute, ingenious, masterly political theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of their effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt roughly with Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of oratorical gifts and graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked with Webster, but the dust is settling upon his learned and ornate pages. Rufus Choate, another conservative Whig in politics, and a leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and an intensity of emotion unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery orators, on the other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in which they led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the most consummate in his air of informality, and his example did much to puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert in virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask of conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still distrusted and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, still adored by the children and grandchildren of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward Everett, seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues and portraits and massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded orations. He may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow’s “Journal and Correspondence” and the “Life and Letters” of George Ticknor. There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and friend. But in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic, domineering. “Sumner is my idea of a bishop,” said Lincoln tentatively. There are bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of England, what an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best service to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in England, where he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher’s oratory, in and out of the pulpit, was temperamental, sentimental in the better sense, and admirably human in all its instincts. He had an immense following, not only in political and humanitarian fields, but as a lovable type of the everyday American who can say undisputed things not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference with an infectious smile. The people who loved Mr. Beecher are the people who understand Mr. Bryan.
Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the successful journalist as described by Zola–the man who keeps on pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of the public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory editorial in “The Liberator” on January 1, 1831: “I am in earnest–I will not retreat a single inch–AND I WILL BE HEARD.” He kept this vow, and he also kept the accompanying and highly characteristic promise: “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or write, or speak, with moderation.” But there would be little political literature in the world if its production were entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of “The Liberator,” though certainly harsh and full of all uncharitableness towards slave-owners, make excellent reading for the twentieth century American who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation, in which Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our race-problem remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the “New York Tribune” was a farmer’s boy who learned early to speak and write the vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new ideas, even in Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy and journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked advice to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature by his replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in his best days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural and city-bred readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best examples of that obsolescent personal journalism which is destined to disappear under modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers really used to care for “what Greeley said” and “Dana said” and “Sam Bowles said,” and all of these men, with scores of others, have left their stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our political writing.
In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that the most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” No American novel has had so curious a history and so great or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In spite of all that has been written about it, its author’s purpose is still widely misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the controversy over this one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books.
Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832 to 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of slave territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system. While her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were anti-slavery, she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of that word. At twenty five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin Stowe, to whom she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of New England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such was the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when the Stowes migrated to Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been appointed to a chair at Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by household cares which she had to face single-handed–for the Professor was a “feckless body”–Mrs. Stowe nevertheless could not be indifferent to the national crisis over the Fugitive Slave Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law wrote to her: “If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is,” Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: “God helping me, I will write something; I will if I live.”
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman’s answer to Webster’s seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated to be “to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends under it.” The book was permeated with what we now call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of the French Revolution. “There is a dies irae coming on, sooner or later,” admits St. Clare in the story. “The same thing is working, in Europe, in England, and in this country.” There was no sectional hostility in Mrs. Stowe’s heart. “The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South, in that they have NOT the apology of education or custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery in our national body.” “Your book is going to be the great pacificator,” wrote a friend of Mrs. Stowe; “it will unite North and South.” But the distinctly Christian and fraternal intention of the book was swiftly forgotten in the storm of controversy that followed its appearance. It had been written hastily, fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at Brunswick, had been printed as a serial in “The National Era” without attracting much attention, and was issued in book form in March, 1852. Its sudden and amazing success was not confined to this country. The story ran in three Paris newspapers at once, was promptly dramatized, and has held the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon the “Index” in Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions of copies were sold in Europe, and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” more than any other cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in the English cotton crisis of our Civil War.
It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to recognize its excellencies. “If our art has not scope enough to include a book of this kind,” said Madame George Sand, “we had better stretch the terms of our art a little.” For the book proved to be, as its author had hoped, a “living dramatic reality.” Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of Balzac’s indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good to be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little Eva–nor, for that matter, over the death of Dickens’s little Nell. There is some melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd recognition scenes at the close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the vast and ominous system of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of volition.
Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them “Dred,” “The Minister’s Wooing,” “Oldtown Folks,” “Oldtown Fireside Stories.” In the local short story she deserves the honors due to one of the pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor, and her humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite independent of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of that astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a single book. She would not mind this fate.
The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle which was necessary before that idea could be realized in national policy is on the whole not commensurate with the significance of the issue itself. Any collection of American political verse produced during this period exhibits spirited and sincere writing, but the combination of mature literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There are single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test of effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry, both sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending with 1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental spaciousness and energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in Whitman is not characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and Shelley and Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican poetry than ours. The passion for freedom has been very real upon this side of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang “Dixie” as well as in their antagonists who chanted “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic;” but this passion has not yet lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the sentiment of union was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and orations, even in a short story–Edward Everett Hale’s “Man Without a Country”–than by most
of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme.
Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music of “The Star-Spangled Banner” fully express what we feel while we are trying to sing it, as the “Marseillaise,” for example, does express the very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, and not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell, Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn,” scribbled hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster’s “Reply to Hayne” thirty years before, the idea of union made “simple, sensuous, passionate.” No American poem has had a more dramatic and intense life in the quick breathing imagination of men.
More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to the words of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in language, as his life was the truest embodiment in action, of our national ideal. It is a curious reversal of contemporary judgments that thus discovers in the homely phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect literary expression of the deeper spirit of his time. “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” asked the critical East. The answer is that he had learned in a better school than the East afforded. The story of Lincoln’s life is happily too familiar to need retelling here, but some of the elements in his growth in the mastery of speech may at least be summarized.
Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense concentration. It was characteristic of him that he rarely took notes when trying a law case, saying that the notes distracted his attention. When his partner Herndon was asked when Lincoln had found time to study out the constitutional history of the United States, Herndon expressed the opinion that it was when Lincoln was lying on his back on the office sofa, apparently watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination of bodily repose with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar to those who have studied the biography of some of the great mystics. Walter Pater pointed it out in the case of Wordsworth.
In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln’s boyhood and his infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him. These were not many, it is true, but they included “The Bible,” “Aesop’s Fables,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and, a little later, Burns and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of a boy has never been found. Then he came to the history of his own country since the Declaration of Independence and mastered it. “I am tolerably well acquainted with the history of the country,” he remarked in his Chicago speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he exhibited a familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution which amazed the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the address. “He has wit, facts, dates,” said Douglas, in extenuation of his own disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the young Henry Watterson that “he is the greatest debater I have ever met, either here or anywhere else.” Douglas had won the senatorship and could afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent’s facts and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln’s mental grip, indeed, was the grip of a born wrestler. “I’ve got him,” he had exclaimed toward the end of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was called, had turned and twisted in vain, caught by “that long-armed creature from Illinois.” He would indeed win the election of 1858, but he had been forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision which cost him the Presidency in 1860.
Lincoln’s keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands of this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the “Freeport dilemma” for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a fox-hunter lays his trap. “Gentlemen,” he had said of an earlier effort, “Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was probably carefully prepared. I ADMIT THAT IT WAS.”
The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist’s pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or made up his own mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic setting “over in Sangamon County.” For although upon his intellectual side the man was a subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing “a man” who symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even his invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln’s destiny was to be that of an explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or courtroom, then to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished to hear national issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation in the agony of civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the essence of democracy.
As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as if the man’s soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the world. But it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand reply to a serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting deputation of clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and clarify a complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness and fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He never wasted a word. “Go to work is the only cure for your case,” he wrote to John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none of over four letters. The “Gettysburg Address” contains but two hundred and seventy words, in ten sentences. “It is a flat failure,” said Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered “the” oration of that day, wrote to the President: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.” Today the “Address” reads as if Lincoln knew that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze.
Yet the real test of Lincoln’s supremacy in our distinctly civic literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of language, consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of his nature which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal of American citizenship and its significance to the world. There was melancholy in that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there was mysticism and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his responsibilities increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity for the sorrowful, patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an expectation for the future of humanity which may best be described in the old phrase “waiting for the Kingdom of God.” His recurrent dream of the ship coming into port under full sail, which preluded many important events in his own life–he had it the night before he was assassinated–is significant not only of that triumph of a free nation which he helped to make possible, but also of the victory of what he loved to call “the whole family of man.” “That is the real issue,” he had declared in closing the debates with Douglas; “that is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles–right and wrong–throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings.”
For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old English saint, while he was “still learning,” had none of the typical hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he was one of those “prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things to come,” with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough to see that ship coming into the harbor under full sail.
CHAPTER X. A NEW NATION
The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward expression of American life since Lincoln’s day are enough to startle the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of one of the many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty, Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of the last century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some future historian of the period may piece together, from no other sources than Mr. Howells’s writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making during more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt is to sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which seem to characterize the age.
One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson’s “Journal.” The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every man’s house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration of Professor Shaler’s law of tension and release. The one overshadowing issue which had absorbed so much thought and imagination and energy had suddenly disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of course. Reconstruction of the South was one of them, and the vast economic and industrial changes that followed the opening of the New West were to bring fresh problems almost as intricate as the question of slavery had been. But for the moment no one thought of these things. The South accepted defeat as superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once more. The jubilant North went back to work–to build transcontinental railroads, to organize great industries, and to create new states.
The significant American literature of the first decade after the close of the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved in the War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor and romance. Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable “History of American Literature since 1870,” uses scarcely too strong a phrase when he entitles this period “The Second Discovery of America”; and he quotes effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers: “The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”
Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he describes in “Roughing It.” Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer’s trade, had wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom times of Nevada and California. His fame began with the publication in New York in 1867 of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” A newspaper now sent him to Europe to record “what he sees with his own eyes.” He did so in “Innocents Abroad,” and his countrymen shouted with laughter. This, then, was “Europe” after all–another “fake” until this shrewd river pilot who signed himself “Mark Twain” took its soundings! Then came a series of far greater books–“Roughing It,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “The Gilded Age (in collaboration ), and “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”–books that make our American “Odyssey”, rich in the spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every reader of American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things seemed to go with the part of professional humorist, to be like the caressing drawl of Mark’s voice. The force of advertisement could no further go. But at bottom he was far other than a mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with frontier preferences in humor. He was a passionate, chivalric lover of things fair and good, although too honest to pretend to see beauty and goodness where he could not personally detect them–and
an equally passionate hater of evil. Read “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” and “The Mysterious Stranger.” In his last years, torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical pessimist as we have bred. He died at his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is a twenty-five volume edition of his “Works.”
All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The inexhaustible American appetite for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. John Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye– these are already obsolescent names. If Clemens lacked something of Artemus Ward’s whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings’s tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in a certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak without censorship. His country-men liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast in “Innocents Abroad.” As a professional humorist, he has paid the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when one turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd’nhead Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain’s power in sheer description and episode, his magic in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his blazing scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for quacks.
Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than Mark Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the evolution of the American short story, and he did for the mining-camps of California what Clemens wrought for the Mississippi River: he became their profane poet. Yet he was never really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a prospector’s eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole rich mine of it–a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really qualified to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct that did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher’s son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte emigrated to California in 1854 at the age of sixteen. He became in turn a drug-clerk, teacher, type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the California Mint–his nearest approach, apparently, to the actual work of the mines. In 1868, while editor of “The Overland Monthly,” he wrote the short story which was destined to make him famous in the East and to release him from California forever. It was “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” He had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years; he had steeped himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the eighteen-sixties; and now he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his own shining eyes. It was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret Harte worked to the end of his career this material furnished by the camps, this method of the short story. He never returned to California after his joyous exit in 1871. For a few years he tried living in New York, but from 1878 until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe, still turning out California stories for an English and American public which insisted upon that particular pattern.
That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte’s artistry. In mastery of the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to strike. “Tennessee’s Partner,” “The Outcast of Poker Flat,” and all the rest are triumphs of selective skill–as bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at the end of a hard day’s labor. That they do not adequately represent the actual California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently romantic action.
The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. What is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”) has typified to millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and on the screen.
Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in Alaska–and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the “Call of the Wild,” “living life naked and tensely.” In his talk Jack London was simple and boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles. His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at bottom, a sentimentalist, Jack London’s formula was that at bottom every man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a very long voyage over human life.
“Joaquin” (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in 1918, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled “in a covered wagon pointing West,” mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of “Songs of the Sierras” at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin’s life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain times.
John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in his “Journal,” but forever absorbing and worshiping sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his books and “Journal” will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with wild, clean, uplifted things–blossoms in giant tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the shoulders of Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as far above Jack London’s and Frank Norris’s as the snow-line is higher than the jungle.
The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political and social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of its life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the new nation.
The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable’s fascinating “Old Creole Days,” was recognized, not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss Murfree (“C. E. Craddock”) charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the talent of Southern writers.
But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies Edward Eggleston wrote “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “The Circuit Rider,” faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which were destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented “The Old Swimmin’ Hole” and rejoiced “When the Frost is on the Punkin.” It was the era of Denman Thompson’s plays, “Joshua Whitcomb” and “The Old Homestead.” Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in “Ramona,” and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized American readers with his “Chinese Ghosts” and “Chita.” A fascinating period it seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted until about the end of the century, when the suddenly discovered commercial value of the historical novel and the ensuing competition in best sellers misled many a fine artistic talent and coarsened the public taste. The New South then played the literary market as recklessly as the New West.
Let us glance back to “the abandoned farm of literature,” as a witty New Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one field of literature only has New England maintained its rank since the Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here women have distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce–Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated, in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard under long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism; at worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with an austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied. Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will.
Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period were not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, “can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American,” came to “the Holy Land at Boston” as a “passionate pilgrim from the West.” “A Boy’s Town,” “My Literary Passions,” and “Years of my Youth” make clear the image of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in Venice and became assistant editor of “The Atlantic Monthly” in 1866. In 1871 he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those realistic novels of contemporary New England which established his fame as a writer. “A Modern Instance” and “The Rise of Silas Lapham” are perhaps the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr. Howells’s chief “visiting-card to posterity.” We cannot here follow him to New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate upon realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books of Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a knowledge of Mr. Howells’s work is essential to the student of the American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of our more generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. “My Literary Friends and Acquaintance” gives the most charming picture ever drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature when young Howells came out of the West, and “My Mark Twain” is his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that will rule the future.
Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London, anything more than a “visiting mind.” His grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that “American Scene” which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but ever since “A Passionate Pilgrim” and “Roderick Hudson” appeared in, 1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, in his own fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who will take the pains to read the author’s prefaces to the New York edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which James loved, has an artist put his intentions and his self-criticism more definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told plainly enough here: a specially equipped intelligence, a freedom from normal responsibilities, a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, as life unfolded its complexities and nuances before his vision, an increasing passion to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, a beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated only. The much discussed early and middle and later manners of James are only various campaigns of this one questing spirit, changing his procedure as the elusive object of his search hid itself by this or that device of protective coloration or swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare butterflies had one method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for the Orinoco, and still another for Japan–though Henry James found his Japan–and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town!
No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the art of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain, with mystical intensity and a mystic’s involution and reversal of all the values of vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. His own power as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his intellectual endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank contempt for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write English. He preferred, as did Browning, who would have liked to reach the masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increasingly after he was fifty. It was a dialect capable of infinite gradations of tone, endless refinements of expression. In his threescore books there are delicious poignant moments where the spirit of life itself flutters like a wild creature, half-caught, half-escaping. It is for the beauty and thrill of these moments that the pages of Henry James will continue to be cherished by a few thousand readers scattered throughout the Republic to which he was ever an alien.
No poet of the new era has won the national recognition enjoyed by the veterans. It will be recalled that Bryant survived until 1878, Longfellow and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, Whittier and Whitman until 1892, and Holmes until 1894. Compared with these men the younger writers of verse seemed overmatched. The “National Ode” for the Centennial celebration in 1876 was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty person, author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, and a skilful translation of “Faust.” But an adequate “National Ode” was not in him. Sidney Lanier, who was writing in that year his “Psalm of the West” and was soon to compose “The Marshes of Glynn,” had far more of the divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with the Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in dire poverty, gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had rich capacities for both arts, but suffered in both from the lack of discipline and from an impetuous, restless imagination which drove him on to over-ambitious designs. Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, it has grown constantly in popular favor, and he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. The late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose “American Anthology” and critical articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the reputation of other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics and spirited narrative verse. His later days were given increasingly to criticism, and his “Life and Letters” is a storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New York as a literary market-place during half a century. Richard Watson Gilder was another admirably fine figure, poet, editor, and leader of public opinion in many a noble cause. His “Letters,” likewise, give an intimate picture of literary New York from the seventies to the present. Through his editorship of “Scribner’s Monthly” and “The Century Magazine” his sound influence made itself felt upon writers in every section. His own lyric vein had an opaline intensity of fire, but in spite of its glow his verse sometimes refused to sing.
The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period–and, many think, our one faultless worker in verse–was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His first volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, the year of Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy” and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” By 1865 his poems were printed in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, by Ticknor and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded Howells in the editorship of the “Atlantic.” Aldrich had a versatile talent that turned easily to adroit prose tales, but his heart was in the filing of his verses. Nothing so daintily perfect as his lighter pieces has been produced on this side of the Atlantic, and the deeper notes and occasional darker questionings of his later verse are embodied in lines of impeccable workmanship. Aloof from the social and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself to the fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believing that the beautiful line is the surest road to Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized, had shown the way.
To some readers of these pages it may seem like profanation to pass over poets like Sill, George Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, William Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein–to mention but half a dozen distinguished names out of a larger company–and to suggest that James Whitcomb Riley, more completely than any American poet since Longfellow, succeeded in expressing the actual poetic feelings of the men and women who composed his immense audience. Riley, like Aldrich, went to school to Herrick, Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow, but when he began writing newspaper verse in his native Indiana he was guided by two impulses which gave individuality to his work. “I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were spoken for the first time.” The first impulse kept him close to the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert Frost’s theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a revival of the bardic practice of reciting one’s own poems. For Riley had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and comprehended that poetry might be made again a spoken art, directed to the ear rather than to the eye. His vogue, which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that of any living American poet, is inexplicable to those persons only who forget the sentimental traditions of our American literature and its frank appeal to the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. Riley’s best “holt” as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, and in this sense, surely, there was genius in the warm and gentle heart of this fortunate provincial who held that “old Indianapolis” was “high Heaven’s sole and only understudy.” No one has ever had the audacity to say that of New York.
We have had American drama for one hundred and fifty years,* but much of it, like our popular fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more interesting to the student of social life and national character than to literary criticism in the narrow sense of that term. Few of our best known literary men have written for the stage. The public has preferred melodrama to poetic tragedy, although perhaps the greatest successes have been scored by plays which are comedies of manners rather than melodrama, and character studies of various American types, built up around the known capabilities of a particular actor. The twentieth century has witnessed a marked activity in play-writing, in the technical study of the drama, and in experiment with dramatic production, particularly with motion pictures and the out-of-doors pageant. At no time since “The Prince of Parthia” was first acted in Philadelphia in 1767 has such a large percentage of Americans been artistically and commercially interested in the drama, but as to the literary results of the new movement it is too soon to speak.
* “Representative American Plays,” edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, N. Y., 1917.
Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a still more striking movement of contemporary taste, the revival of interest in poetry and the experimentation with new poetical forms. Such revival and experiment have often, in the past, been the preludes of great epochs of poetical production. Living Americans have certainly never seen such a widespread demand for contemporary verse, such technical curiosity as to the possible forms of poetry, or such variety of bold innovation. Imagism itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain; and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the end of the matter.
The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like “North of Boston” and “A Spoon River Anthology,” judgments of life that run very deep.
American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story has made little technical advance since the first successes of “O. Henry,” though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns has resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized types instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual characters. Short stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with amazing mechanical expertness, but with little artistic advance in design. The same temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France and England, however, where different causes have been at work. No one can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary garden wither at the same moment that others are outgrowing their borders.
There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state will be denied by nobody–namely, that kind of nature-writing identified with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr King, John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and many others. Their books represent, Professor Canby* believes, the adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence one of the most genuinely American traits of our literature.
* “Back to Nature,” by H. S. Canby, “Yale Review,” July, 1917.
Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to write vigorously and poetically about it, but we write less vitally as soon as we enter the library door. A Frenchman does not, for he is better trained to perceive the continuity and integrity of race-consciousness, in the whole field of its manifestation. He does not feel, as many Americans do, that they are turning their back on life when they turn to books.
Perhaps the truth is that although we are a reading people we are not yet a book-loving people. The American newspaper and magazine have been successful in making their readers fancy that newspaper and magazine are an equivalent for books. Popular orators and popular preachers confirm this impression, and colleges and universities have often emphasized a vocational choice of books–in other words, books that are not books at all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that American journalism, whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself to supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and economic factors enter into such a problem. But few observers will question the assertion that the influence of the American magazine, ever since its great period of national literary service in the eighties and nineties, has been more marked in the field of conduct and of artistic taste than in the stimulation of a critical literary judgment: An American schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through the illustrated magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. But–whether the judgment of school-teachers and schoolchildren upon a piece of literature is any better than it was in the red schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a disputable question.
But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The fundamental problem of our literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, has been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling in sections as widely separated as the peoples of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and truth, the motions stimulated by our national life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that American literature is something different from English literature written in America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities of their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the full energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a range and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, no one would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which American character has been more adequately expressed than in words. Nevertheless the books are here, in spite of every defect in national discipline, every flaw in national character; and they deserve the closest attention from all those who are trying to understand the American mind.
If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly complex national experience has been the problem of our literary past, the literary problem of the future is the expression of the adjustment of American ideals to the standards of civilization. “Patriotism,” said the martyred Edith Cavell just before her death, “is not enough.” Nationality and the instincts of national separatism now seem essential to the preservation of the political units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy individualism must be the basis of all enduring social fellowship. Yet it is clear that civilization is a larger, more ultimate term than nationality. Chauvinism is nowhere more repellent than in the things of the mind. It is difficult for some Americans to think internationally even in political affairs–to construe our national policy and duty in terms of obligation to civilization. Nevertheless the task must be faced, and we are slowly realizing it.
In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. Only American books, and not books written in English in America, can adequately represent our national contribution to the world’s thinking and feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of these two poets came to realize in his old age that the New World and the Old World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World will inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its discipline.
It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends: “The houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly translated.” But even if Longfellow and his friends had been nothing more than translators and diffusers of European culture, their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern windows came in, and still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the American spirit. To decry the literatures of the Orient and of Greece and Rome as something now outgrown by America, is simply to close the eastern windows, to narrow our conception of civilization to merely national and contemporaneous terms. It is as provincial to attempt this restriction in literature as it would be in world-politics. We must have all the windows open in our American writing, free access to ideas, knowledge of universal standards, perception of universal law.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler’s “History of American Literature during the Colonial Time,” 2 volumes (1878) and “Literary History of the American Revolution,” 2 volumes (1897). For a general survey see Barrett Wendell, “A Literary History of America” (1900), W. P. Trent, “American Literature” (1903), G. E. Woodberry, “America in Literature” (1903), W. C. Bronson, “A Short History of American Literature” (1903), with an excellent bibliography, W. B. Cairns, “History of American Literature” (1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, “Great American Writers” (1912), and W. Riley, “American Thought” (1915). The most recent and authoritative account is to be found in “The Cambridge History of American Literature,” 3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren.
The best collection of American prose and verse is E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson’s “Library of American Literature,” 11 volumes (1888-1890). For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, “An American Anthology” (1900), and W. C. Bronson, “American Poems,” 1625-1892 (1912). For criticism of leading authors, note W. C. Brownell, “American Prose Masters” (1909), and Stedman, “Poets of America” (1885). Chapters 1-3. Note W. Bradford, “Journal” (1898), J. Winthrop, “Journal” (1825, 1826), also “Life and Letters” by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863), G. L. Walker, “Thomas Hooker” (1891), O. S. Straus, “Roger Williams” (1894), Cotton Mather, “Diary,” 2 volumes (1911, 1912), also his “Life” by Barrett Wendell (1891), Samuel Sewall, “Diary,” 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan Edwards, see “Works,” 4 volumes (1852), his “Life” by A. V. G. Allen (1889), “Selected Sermons” edited by H. N. Gardiner (1904). The most recent edition of Franklin’s “Works” is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 volumes (1907).
Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, “Works,” 4 volumes (1904), John Adams, “Works,” 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, “Life” by M. D. Conway, 2 volumes (1892), “Works” edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), Philip Freneau, “Poems,” 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1900, Thomas Jefferson, “Works” edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898), J. Woolman, “Journal” (edited by Whittier, 1871, and also in “Everyman’s Library”), “The Federalist” (edited by H. C. Lodge, 1888).
Chapter 5. Washington Irving, “Works,” 40 volumes (1891-1897), also his “Life and Letters” by P. M. Irving, 4 volumes (1862-1864). Fenimore Cooper, “Works,” 32 volumes (1896), “Life” by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). Brockden Brown, “Works,” 6 volumes, (1887). W. C. Bryant, “Poems,” 2 volumes (1883), “Prose,” 2 volumes (1884), and his “Life” by John Bigelow (1890).
Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, “Studies in New England Transcendentalism” (1908). R. W. Emerson, “Works,” 12 volumes (Centenary edition, 1903), “Journal,” 10 volumes (1909-1914), his “Life” by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes (1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E. Woodberry (1905); see also “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” a critical study by O. W. Firkins (1915). H. D. Thoreau, “Works,” 20 volumes (Walden edition including “Journals,” 1906), “Life” by F. B. Sanborn (1917), also “Thoreau, A Critical Study” by Mark van Doren (1916). Note also Lindsay Swift, “Brook Farm” (1900), and “The Dial,” reprint by the Rowfant Club (1902).
Chapter 7. Hawthorne, “Works,” 12 volumes (1882), “Life” by G. E. Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, “Works,” 11 volumes (1886), “Life” by Samuel Longfellow, 3 volumes (1891). Whittier, “Works,” 7 volumes (1892), “Life” by S. T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894). Holmes, “Works” 13 volumes (1892), “Life” by J. T. Morse, Jr. (1896). Lowell, “Works,” 11 volumes (1890), “Life” by Ferris Greenslet (1905), “Letters” edited by C. E. Norton, 2 volumes (1893). For the historians, note H. B. Adams, “Life and Writings of Jared Sparks,” 2 volumes (1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, “Life and Letters of George Bancroft,” 2 volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, “Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor,” 2 volumes (1876), George Ticknor, “Life of Prescott” (1863), also Rollo Ogden, “Life of Prescott”(1904), G. W. Curtis, “Correspondence of J. L. Motley,” 2 volumes (1889), Francis Parkman, “Works,” 12 volumes (1865-1898), “Life” by C. H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson, “History of Historical Writing in America” (1891).
Chapter 8. Poe, “Works,” 10 volumes (Stedman-Woodberry edition, 1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia edition, J. A. Harrison, 1900, “Life” by G. E. Woodberry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, “Leaves of Grass” and “Complete Prose Works” (Small, Maynard and Co.) (1897, 1898), also John Burroughs, “A Study of Whitman” (1896).
Chapter 9. C. Schurz, “Life of Henry Clay,” 2 volumes (1887). Daniel Webster, “Works,” 6 volumes (1851), “Life” by H. C. Lodge (1883). Rufus Choate, “Works,” volumes (1862). Wendell Phillips, “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters,” 2 volumes (1892). W. L. Garrison, “The Story of his Life Told by his Children,” 4 volumes (1885-1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Works,” 17 volumes (1897), “Life” by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincoln, “Works,” 2 volumes (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894).
Chapter 10. For an excellent bibliography of the New National Period, see F. L. Pattee, “A History of American Literature since 1870” (1916).
For further bibliographical information the reader is referred to the articles on American authors in “The Encyclopaedia Britannica” and in “The Warner Library” (volume 30, “The Student’s Course,” N. Y., 1917).