Part 21

What will be the type of the American novel of the future? Probably it is rash to make any prediction; but one may venture to believe that the prevailing attitude of our future novelists will be that of a sane and optimistic realism. The morbid books like “The Jungle” do not wear well; and, while such books may have their use in promoting needed reforms, they do not constitute additions to literature and can, therefore, secure no permanent place. The pleasant paths of romance will always tempt bold and imaginative writers; but they will be more than ever restrained by the demand of enlightened readers that they shall not wander far from the probable, and shall present, clear and undistorted, the best there is in the actual present. That there are immense possibilities in the varied and complex life of to-day, few will doubt; that the great artists are to appear who will make the most of these opportunities we may assume with confidence.

III. THE POETS

=English Influence on American Poetry.=--If we accept the popular belief, and identify poets with makers of verse, it must be allowed that American poetry at its best--in the nineteenth century--is in a peculiar sense unoriginal and derivative. To be derivative, to have a traceable pedigree, may, indeed, be no disadvantage, either for a national or an individual genius. In their way, all modern literatures are derivative and unoriginal; not merely influenced by each other, but ultimately dependent for the sources of their inspiration upon the basal civilisations of Palestine and Greece. “We are all Greeks,” said Shelley. Milton might have said, “We are all Hebrews.” And our best American poets might have added, “_We_ are all Englishmen.” Particular scenes on this continent, and the vast and ever growing extent of our territory, have both left their impress on our poets during the last five generations; they have touched the poetry of ten or twelve decades here and there with the undeniable stamp of reality, and given it now and then a largeness of range and freedom of atmosphere very proper to a nation whose sense of geography has been so elastic. Yet one can hardly say that our natural scenery has ever been really incarnate in our literature as a whole, or that a pervasive national spirit, a spirit at once large and precise, has entered fundamentally into our verse. What has been most effectual in our literature has been closely imitative, has followed at a little distance, yet step for step, the development of the English literature from which it sprang. This continuous imitation, now more superficial, now more indirect and elusive, has been the mainspring of our poetry even more than our prose, during the century just gone by.

American poetry, it is true, has probably been more plastic and mobile in its outer form than American prose, has been less steadily patterned after those literary standards in England which were bequeathed by the eighteenth century. The prose style of Irving betrays its descent from the essays of Addison; the style of Franklin was developed through conscious and painstaking emulation of the same models. Even fairly late in the eighteen hundreds, when perhaps only a trained ear can detect the lingering echoes of Pope and his school in our verse, the “Autocrat” of Wendell Holmes still retains an accent and a flavour from eighteenth-century, Ciceronian eloquence. No doubt the age of Pope and Johnson survived by many vestiges much longer in English prose than in English verse, for its habits of thought were more or less suited to argument and exposition in every time. Yet in the history of American letters it is easier to find parallels to Wordsworth and Shelley than to duplicate the prose rhapsodies--characteristic in nineteenth-century Europe--of De Quincey and Ruskin. To the transition in English literature that was marked by the appearance of “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 our poetry was, in the main, more quickly responsive than our prose. None the less our prose, more conservative though it has been, less changeful in its manner of expression, has struck its roots far more deeply into our national being; and our verse, like the other fine arts, is still an exotic.

For our lack of a national art, a national poetry, a superficial reason is often assigned: in the conditions of a new country, in the struggle for existence, in the development of agriculture and commerce, in the assimilation of foreign races, there has been very little time for the nourishment of letters, very little of that leisure which the Greeks called _scholé_, and which is indispensable for a productive scholarship and for the flourishing of imagination. Yet we have had, or have taken, sufficient leisure to write and publish an immense amount of verse, judged merely by its bulk. Scarcely an American author can be mentioned in the nineteenth century that did not try his hand at metrical composition. The truth is, rather, that we have seldom approached the art of poetry with enough seriousness; that, having rebelled against the Puritan’s unkindly conception of life, we have nevertheless to some extent acquiesced in his belittling estimate of imaginative art; that we have failed to recognise in the poet a necessary servant of the commonwealth, a leader worthy of a high and severe training. Our versifiers have rushed into print before they were ripe, and they have praised each other’s work too easily; while the standards set by the public taste have been readily met when the rhymers succeeded in being “patriotic.” Real patriotism demands such an admission.

Not that our poets have been wholly without a philosophy of criticism; though it is significant that the most subtle and sympathetic understanding of the poetic temperament, of its function as well as its perils, is to be found, not in the writings of any maker of verses but in those of a novelist, Hawthorne--for example, in “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Great Stone Face.” Yet Bryant read, meditated, and wrote upon the art of poetry; Poe thought somewhat, if not deeply, upon it; Lanier made a worthy contribution to the science of meter; Longfellow was conversant with the literature of criticism; and Emerson’s stimulating essay on “The Poet,” while it may not have been the sort of medicine that our men of letters most needed, has doubtless exerted a wholesome influence. In Poe’s day, several magazines were discussing the principles of imaginative composition. However, an “Art of Poetry” like Timrod’s (published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for September, 1905) could lie for forty years in manuscript, without exciting any strong suspicion of its value; and in the long run there has been an amazing disproportion between the slender thread of fundamental tradition and sound critical theory on the one hand, and the swollen and rapid stream of naïve, uncultivated verse, gathering from every quarter, on the other. Whatever English poets furnished the models, the imitation was largely on the surface. First Pope and his successors in England, then Wordsworth and Coleridge, then Shelley and Keats, and Scott and Bryon, and subsequently Tennyson,--all had in turn their American devotees. But there seems to have been relatively little understanding like that of Bryant and Timrod for the conscious theory underlying the “experiments” in “Lyrical Ballads,” or for the ideal demands which Shelley laid upon poetry and poets; nor did cisatlantic readers of Lord Byron much concern themselves about that Longinus whom he studied “o’er a bottle,” or for the structural frame upon which was reared Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.”

=Characteristics of the Period.=--Of course in the following pages we shall deal as briefly as possible with those American poets in the last century who are touched to any great extent by strictures like these; for a history of literature is bound to treat as far as may be of writers that have made a wise use of tradition, and whose native insight has enabled them to train their genius in accordance with universal canons of art, and with a due appreciation of masterly technique. Meanwhile we may attempt to summarise the characteristics of the poetical era under consideration, and, in particular, of the earlier rather than the latter half of that era. The nearer we advance toward our own day, the wiser it is to refrain from general characterisation.

1. The relation between English literature and American in the initial twenty or thirty years of the last century has already been suggested. Aside from that, or very often through that, the influence of Rousseau was paramount. The doctrine that upheld the innocence of “man in a state of nature,” and maintained the equality of all individuals, and the feeling, half pantheistic, for an external nature opposed to civilisation, since they entered into the vital tissue of our national thought,--and though they are at bottom contrary to science and all demonstrable experience--are among the very conditions, so to speak, of much of our poetry. From these sources, for example, it came about that while in actual practice we despised and maltreated that “natural man” the cruel Indian, we idealised him in poetical effusions; just as Fenimore Cooper, treading in the footsteps of Chateaubriand, idealised him in prose.

2. Our earlier poets, that is, immediately after the Revolution, but again, and especially, after the War of 1812 had confirmed our sense of national solidarity, are much given to the utterance of their patriotism; albeit only a few out of many more or less pretentious or tasteful efforts have survived. Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), conceived at the close of the second war, antedates “The American Flag” (1819) of Drake by but five years; these two, with Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798), and “America” (1832), the well-known hymn by S. F. Smith, whatever their relative or absolute merits as literature, remain our most cherished national poems.

3. However frequent or insistent the note of patriotism, the general temper of American poets has not been strongly optimistic. As one glances over a long list of the subjects chosen for treatment, a leaning toward the more sombre and melancholy elements and aspects of life becomes more and more apparent. Nor is this leaning confined to the multitude. Exceptions like Walt Whitman to the contrary notwithstanding, it is characteristic, in the main, of the leaders, whenever they escape from common or inherited themes, and give rein to their own personalities. That joy which is the well-spring of Wordsworth’s vitality is greatly diminished in even his nearest American counterpart, Bryant; assuredly it is not akin to the subdued sadness of Longfellow, though this be not strictly “akin to pain.”

4. On the other hand, the noblest American poetry has not been tragic. Tragedy and serious epic have been attempted, but, as in the case of Dwight, Barlow, and so many others, largely as academic exercitations, savouring of the desk and the library. With our national life they have had no essential connection. A central motive in our history like the death of Lincoln still awaits the imagination of a master-dramatist.

5. Though few have devoted their entire lives to it, most of our poets have begun the profession betimes, conceiving very often in haste, and publishing in their immaturity. The painful advice of Horace has not been to our liking. With the examples of Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson continually before us, we have yet failed to profit by their insistence upon generous preparation, meticulous technique, and laborious delay in publication. We have realised the brevity of life more fully than the length of art.

6. Our respect for the “practical” and for “common sense” is allied to a fondness shown in our poetry for common, everyday subjects. Here, of course, we have succeeded better in the comic than in the serious vein. To treat of homely topics so as to invest their essential dignity with the light of imagination--in painting the world about us, to “add the gleam”--was the task set for himself by an English mystic. It is a dangerous trade for men whose talk is of oxen. Homely minds on homely matters are prone to slip into the trivial or the pathetic. Even Longfellow cannot be freed from the charge of too much attention to the obvious commonplace, and, as a versifier at least, of too much love for the merely sentimental. For adequate imaginative handling of themes that are serious, complete, and of sufficient magnitude to produce the loftier effects of great literary art, we are in general forced to go to our best prose fiction.

7. So long as Puritan ideals, however modified and softened, continued to dominate any considerable part of American education, that is, up to a point somewhere within the past twenty-five years, our poetry has tended to be obviously didactic. Not only clerical but secular poets have seemed to regard themselves as direct teachers of morality. In satirical writers,--Freneau, Halleck,--or in literature that by virtue of its kind is pietistic, such a tendency is altogether normal and effective. But in supposedly imaginative poems such as “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” though the basic moral order of the universe doubtless ought to be inherent, it just as certainly ought to contrive its own effect, without the adventitious aid of sermonising. To the present writer, much of the best--not of course the very best--in American poetry loses in ethical as well as æsthetic value through the intrusion of argument and exhortation on the subject of conduct or belief. The finest work of Holmes, for instance, “The Chambered Nautilus,” may be thought to lose in this way. The spirit of the United States is a prosaic spirit, hence our verse, when it is at all substantial, rarely lacks some element or other from the style of the forensic orator.

8. On the other hand, since we can make no pretence to the possession of a tragic drama, and none to a truly national epic, it may safely be affirmed that our poetry has risen to its greatest heights in meditative and religious lyric; in meditative verse on nature, that is, such “nature-poetry” as assumes the Divine immanence throughout the world of objective reality--in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in the religious lyric, that is, in a few of our hymns.

_The Earlier Poets._--We commence this survey of American poetry at the date to which the sections adapted from Tyler have conducted the literature as a whole, namely, the year 1784. The chief poets of the Revolutionary period, Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Freneau, all lived well on into the next century, Barlow, in fact, being the only one of these who did not survive the War of 1812.

In Barlow’s day, heroics were the fashion. His _magnum opus_, a rhymed epic on the discovery of America, had already taken shape in manuscript as early as 1781; in 1787 it appeared as “The Vision of Columbus”; by 1807 it had grown into the ponderous “Columbiad.” It is an uninspired, pseudo-classical narrative, schematically and metrically correct, but organically lifeless, full of the “printer’s devil personification” so characteristic of its time. With gratuitous industry, as it supplies all the lineage of personified abstractions like “Discord,” so it begins the history of America at Creation, fetches the story down through colonial times to the Revolution, and includes in its sweep a glance at events yet to come. Similarly in his mock-heroic, “The Hasty Pudding” (1793), which is touched with fancy and is in every way more attractive than his “Columbiad,” Barlow commences with the growth and harvesting of the maize which is to furnish the flour.

Dwight, who was at first a tutor, but from 1795 until his death, in 1817, president, of Yale College, in 1785 brought forth a Biblical epic entitled “The Conquest of Canaan,” in which the narrative of Exodus is diversified by allusions to heroes in the American War of Independence, and by a tale of romantic love superadded. Dwight was a diligent reader of Pope and Goldsmith, but he did not confine his interest to the eighteenth century; he knew the enchantment of the poets’ poet, Spenser; and like Thomson he could at times, as in “Greenfield Hill,” look with his own eyes at things about him. He was a friend of Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow; on occasion he penned a bitter invective. But as a writer he will be remembered for his noble hymn, whose second stanza commences,

I love Thy Church, O God,

which is the key-note of his life.

Trumbull, though he lived to a great age (1750-1831), had completed his remarkable mock-heroic, “M’Fingal,” prior to 1784; hence at this point he interests us chiefly on account of his friendship with Dwight and Barlow, and his effect on later satirists.

With Freneau the case is different. Some of his choicest verse did not appear until 1786, when he published a collection containing “The House of Night”; and in 1795 he brought together in another collection what he apparently considered best in his output for twenty-five years or more preceding. This was very uneven, including much that might better have been left unprinted, and other work which stamps Freneau as the one American of true poetical genius before 1800. He was not unaware of his powers, and aimed to develop them by frequent perusal of good models in ancient and modern literature; but he was not sufficiently self-critical. He prolonged a career of travel and rapid composition, in both poetry and prose, beyond the normal span of life, making still another collection of his works in 1815. His latter years were darkened by the thought that he was being unwarrantably neglected for men of lesser talent. A man of great bodily vigour, he was meditating yet another, a final, edition of his writings, when he came to his unfortunate end. In 1832 he lost his way as he was returning home through a snow-storm, and died from exposure. His once maligned personality has of late been duly vindicated, and his work has received generous praise. It is claimed that Scott and Campbell were content to borrow lines from him. Furthermore, he has been deemed a co-worker with Coleridge and Wordsworth in bringing about in literature the so-called “return to nature.” The parallel might easily be carried too far. Until literary scholarship has broadened and deepened its knowledge of the entire period in which Freneau was active, neither the worth of his poetry nor the possible extent of his influence can be judicially determined. There can be no question that such poems as “The Wild Honeysuckle,” “The Hurricane,” “The Dying Indian,” and “Eutaw Springs” have more than a transitory value. However, it is by his satirical verse that Freneau might seem more likely to persist; for the nature of satire tolerates in some measure a free and easy style such as he developed.

_Early Minor Poets._--Of the minor poetry prior to 1815 there is little to be said by way of praise. We see in it how the influence of Akenside and other English didactic writers of a previous age gives ground before the newer spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge; although the satires of the Revolution had a lineage, in Paine and others, that did not quickly die away; and although several other literary fashions had their intervals of existence, as, for example, the imitation of “Ossian” and the cult of the Della Cruscans. The intellect of Akenside made itself felt in such work as “The Power of Solitude” (1804), by Joseph Story (1779-1845), and the anonymous “Pains of Memory,” published four years later. “Of much higher merit,” thinks Professor Bronson, “are the didactic poems of Robert Treat Paine (1773-1811), a man of versatile and brilliant parts, but dissipated character. His lyrics, orations, and dramatic criticisms all show ability. But his best work is ‘The Ruling Passion,’ a poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1797.” This is “frankly on the model of Pope, but so witty, vigorous, and pointed that it does honour to its original.” William Cliffton’s “Poems” (1800), and Thomas G. Fessenden’s “Original Poems” (1804), can only be mentioned.

A word may be added on the poetesses of the time, several of whom, for example Mrs. Mercy Warren (1728-1814), having made themselves heard during the American struggle for liberty, continued to find an audience in the early years of the Republic. Mrs. Warren’s poems were collected in 1790, Mrs. Susanna H. Rowson’s in 1804. The sentimental Mrs. Sarah W. Morton may also be noted; she flourished somewhat later than the others (1759-1846). She is no longer interesting as the “American Sappho,” nor is it generally recalled that she considered Paine to be the American “Menander.” She was an exponent of the inane “Della Cruscan” style, which had its vogue in England until it was attacked by William Gifford, and in the United States until Gifford’s “Baviad” and “Mæviad” were republished at Philadelphia (1799), seconded by a poetical epistle to their author from the pen of the young Quaker Cliffton.

Not less pernicious than the Della Cruscans were the imitators of MacPherson’s “Ossian,” including Joseph B. Ladd (1764-1786), Jonathan M. Sewall (1746-1808), and John Blair Linn (1777-1804). Both schools gave place when the Wordsworthian reaction set in against “poetic diction” and the habit of writing verse about natural objects without having looked at them.

When party spirit runs high, satire is likely to be thriving. Political tension during the latter part of Washington’s presidency and during the administrations of Adams and Jefferson gave birth to a brood of satiric poems, many of them unacknowledged by their authors. Anonymous or otherwise, in most of them the writer’s pen was wielded as a bludgeon rather than a knife. Freneau himself was none too delicate in his censure of the government, although he ill deserved the reputation of a man lacking in love for his country; but Freneau was merely the most gifted among a number, more partisan than he, who, according as they were Federalists or Democrats, bitterly assailed the measures of the opposing faction. The “Democratiad” and the “Guillotina” were anonymous attacks in 1795 and 1796 upon the Democrats. William Cobbett, the Englishman, and Alexander Hamilton, whose private life offered an easy target, were pilloried as representatives of the Federalist party, in Carey’s “Porcupiniad” (1799) and a collection entitled “Olio” (1801).

Nor was factional spleen unrelated to a variety of patriotic sentiment which displayed itself in verse for holidays and state occasions; but, like all the satires, most of the post-Revolutionary effusions of patriotism have long since ceased to excite emotion. As has been noted, Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798) is one of the exceptions. Colonel David Humphreys (1753-1818), a large part of whose verse amounted to eulogies on Washington, to the general public is hardly so much as a memory; and his intention “to make use of poetry for strengthening patriotism, promoting virtue, and extending happiness” has gone the way of many similar purposes of great excellence unaided by genius.