Part 22

_Washington Allston._--The first poet of distinction who evidently represents the tradition of Wordsworth was the artist Washington Allston (1779-1843), a friend of Coleridge, and declared by him to have a genius for literature and painting “unsurpassed by any man of his age.” Southey too was an enthusiastic admirer; and Wordsworth, who was chary of praise for the age in which he lived, commended the American painter ungrudgingly. In Allston’s “Sylphs of the Seasons” (1813) there is evidence of the exact eye of an artist, and there is much delicacy of sentiment and gentle play of fancy; but great constructive and imaginative vigour are not present, and a certain tameness in the rhymes and obviousness in the succession of thoughts serve to explain why the poem has not secured a more lasting recognition. His “America and Great Britain” was included by Coleridge in “Sibylline Leaves” (1817), “for its moral no less than its patriotic spirit.” As an attempt to incorporate in language the conception of abstract, so to speak, intellectual, beauty, “The Angel and the Nightingale” reminds one of Shelley.

Before Allston, there had been ballad-writers who dealt with themes that are now familiar to readers of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In particular, the motive of the young and innocent girl who has been betrayed, and through her betrayal crazed, was a notable favourite. Lucius M. Sargent’s “Hubert and Ellen” (1812) is described as a poor imitation of Wordsworth, taking its cue, like Joseph Hutton’s ballad on Crazy Jane (“Leisure Hours,” 1812) and Henry C. Knight’s “Poor Margaret Dwy,” from one study or another of mental derangement in “Lyrical Ballads” or the “Poems” (by Wordsworth) of 1807. Doubtless a large number of parallels could be found in American literature to Wordsworth’s “Ruth,” and to his sympathetic treatment of other lowly types of humanity. In like manner, just as the same English poet fraternises with the robin and the butterfly, and Coleridge hails a young ass as his “brother,” and as Shelley in 1815 claims kindred with “bright bird, insect, or gentle beast,” so Knight addresses “The Caterpillar” (1821) as “cousin reptile.” The Puritans had averred, Most sins, and all sinners, are equal; Rousseau and the French Revolutionists went further, declaring, All men are equal; and now, responsive to the doctrine of Coleridge and his Pantisocrats, American poets were implying, All creatures are equal. Thus thrives the principle of democracy and fraternity. Themistocles is at length no better than the boorish islander, and the Apostles have lost their superiority to sparrows. “Cousin reptile,” of course, is an extreme case.

On its saner side, the new impulse set in motion several writers of not a little promise. Such was John Neal (1793-1876), whose poem “The Battle of Niagara” (1818) reflects Wordsworthianism at second hand through Shelley and Keats, with a touch of Byronic grandiloquence and tameness, but with a touch, too, of aboriginal nature, however crude. The native powers of Neal were later dissipated in journalism, novel-writing, and the like.

_Joseph Rodman Drake._--Of great promise likewise, but cut short by a premature demise, was the career of Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820). Drake was a precocious spirit, working swiftly, and valuing his easily produced and quickly moving verses perhaps a little below their true worth. A friend of Halleck, and like Halleck under the sway of the novelist Fenimore Cooper, he reveals also how familiar he was with the half-luminous, half-misty style of Coleridge. In Drake’s happiest attempt, “The Culprit Fay” (1816), he aimed to find an utterance for the poetry of the great American rivers, hitherto neglected, as he and his friends decided, in the native literature. The outcome of a discussion between Drake, Freneau, and Cooper, this fanciful story is nevertheless replete with the cadences of Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), however difficult it may be to explain the resemblance. Needless to say, “The Culprit Fay” could not make a general appeal like that of “The American Flag,” by the same author--a rhetorical and manneristic piece that, up to a few years ago, was on the lips of every American school-boy:

When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there.

Set them where? In spite of the fact that it is grandiose and unprecise, “The American Flag” may yet be yielded an advantage in point of style over Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with which one naturally compares it.

_Fitz-Greene Halleck._--The final quatrain of “The American Flag” was written by Drake’s associate in the “Croaker Papers,” Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867). Halleck was a witty poet, who aimed at no lasting fame, but humorously chastised the passing follies of New York society, much as Lord Byron scourged society in London. He wrote clearly and gracefully, and was greatly overpraised in his time. His satiric poem “Fanny” (1819) was highly popular. “Marco Bozzaris,” a lyric recital of the Byronic type, portrayed with a good deal of life, but with a suspicion of rant too, a dramatic incident in the struggle of modern Greece against the Turk. His tribute to Burns (1827) was warmly approved by the Scottish bard’s sister: “nothing finer,” she said in 1855, “has been written about Robert.” “Red Jacket” and the monody on “Drake” also belong to Halleck’s early period. In fact, his main activity as a poet was confined to the ten or eleven years commencing with the death of Drake (1820). As Allston was the first of our poets to arouse much admiration abroad, so Halleck was the first to receive notable posthumous honours at home. In general, he owed a large measure of his inspiration to Washington Irving.

_James Kirke Paulding._--So did James Kirke Paulding (1779-1860), though his “Lay of the Scotch Fiddle” (1813) was a parody of Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and though his title to enduring fame, as he supposed, was an epic, “The Backwoodsman” (1818), representing life on the American frontier. Neither the clever ballad, nor the prosy epic, nor his second instalment of _Salmagundi_ has outwitted the envy of time. In its own day Paulding’s effort to repeat the first success of Irving was eclipsed by “The Croakers” of Halleck and Drake. His “Peter Piper” still lingers.

_John Howard Payne._--A case similar to “Peter Piper” is that of a song in “Clari” (1823), one of the dramas by John Howard Payne (1791-1852). Payne, who tried his hand at various pursuits, was a friend of Irving, and acquainted with Coleridge and Lamb. At one time he was United States consul at Tunis. As an actor and a journalist he knew the temper of his American public; hence he was able to enjoy a considerable reputation as playwright. His “Brutus” (1818) was well received; yet he would be totally forgotten save for a single lyric in “Clari,” “Home, Sweet Home,” which successive generations of his countrymen have handed down as an heirloom of the people.

_Woodworth_, _Morris_, _Hoffman_, _Willis, etc._--Two other writers of the same period, now known chiefly through brief and homely songs or rhetorical selections, were Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842), still remembered for “The Old Oaken Bucket” (1826), and George P. Morris (1802-64), whose “Woodman, Spare That Tree” and “The Main Truck” (otherwise called “A Leap for Life”) have re-echoed from the platform of many a village schoolhouse, and given many a young rustic his principal conceptions of impassioned eloquence. The songs of Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-84), while by no means so familiar as these, are not at all inferior. Hoffman was a student at Columbia College, bred up in the literary traditions of New York City. So also were James W. Eastburn (1797-1819) and Robert C. Sands (1799-1832). Under a rather indefensible nomenclature, all three would be included with Paulding and Halleck as members of the “Knickerbocker School,” the bright luminary in which is Irving (“Diedrich Knickerbocker”). To these we may add McDonald Clarke (1798-1842), “the mad poet,” irritatingly personal in his allusions to the belles of the metropolis; Park Benjamin (1809-64); and N. P. Willis (1806-67), whose reign of cleverness succeeded that of Halleck. Flippant, careless how or whom he hit, Willis made an extraordinary name at home, and was able to create a stir abroad. In America he published where and what he pleased, for the editors were glad to pay him well, so eager were people to read him. But he had the reward of a lightly won popularity: when the generation for whom he wrote had passed away he was deservedly neglected. His championship of American literature against the strictures of Lockhart and Marryat, and the redeeming candour of his opinions, make poor amends for his abuse of talents that might have improved, rather than satisfied, the taste of the garish day.

_William Cullen Bryant._--However different in aim and permanence from the last mentioned adherent of the “Knickerbocker School,” to the same general category may be assigned William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), who from 1826 until his death was an active force in the literary life of New York. The author of “Thanatopsis” and one of the best verse translations of Homer was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, attended a local school, was taught Latin and Greek by private tutors, two clergymen of ability, and studied for part of a year at Williams College, where the standard of scholarship was then low. Leaving that institution in 1811, he made ready to enter the profession of law. During his preparation he had an interval of experience as adjutant in the State militia. After that, he practised as a lawyer in his native State, at Plainfield and Great Barrington, until 1825, when he yielded to the strong propensity of nature, and took up literature for the business of life.

As a mere child, Bryant showed an exceptional leaning toward poetry. He was unweariedly studious, and an omnivorous reader. He wrote verses before he was nine; in his youth, so he says, he varied his private devotions from the ordinary Calvinistic models, by supplicating that he “might receive the gift of poetic genius and write verses that might endure.” The gift came to him through the instrumentality of Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” (the American edition of 1802), whose mastery over him he afterwards acknowledged, and bore witness to in his practice. At first, however, he was imbued with the tendencies of his own predecessors in America. A Federalist in his political sympathies, he opposed the aims of Jefferson’s administration--although later he grew to be a staunch supporter of “Jeffersonian Democracy.” Encouraged by his father, a well-known physician, who himself indulged in verse, young Cullen, before he was fifteen, saw in print his political satire “The Embargo” (1808), a work in the manner of Freneau and Trumbull, in which Jefferson was invited to resign the presidency. In Wordsworth, fortunately, Byrant had a model choicer than the satirists. He became acquainted with “Lyrical Ballads” in 1810. Sometime in the autumn of 1811, his inward eye having been taught to see the operation of a benign and healing spirit in the world of nature, this thoughtful youth, now about to begin the study of law, and, as it were, to commence the effort of life, was moved to record his sentiments on the all-pervading fact of death: the universal debt is not an evil; to pay it is as natural as to be born; and to obey the voice of nature, to confide in her will, is the source of human satisfaction. That is the burden of “Thanatopsis.”

When “Thanatopsis” was submitted by the poet’s father to _The North American Review_ (in 1817), people would hardly believe that such an exalted strain had been conceived outside of England. “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” (written in 1815) are indeed in many ways Wordsworthian; the similarity is immediately noticeable. Yet the similarity is not complete. In the first place, they are founded, and very definitely founded, upon the natural scenery of Bryant’s own New England environment; and they sprang out of a unified individual experience to which his personal observation contributed as much as his reading. But, as has been remarked before, the note of Bryant is a less joyous note than that of his great English exemplar, not only because of a difference in the selection of subjects, but through a difference in the treatment of detail as well. It is not to be expected that in perfection of technique a boy of seventeen could equal a poet who at the age of thirty-two (when Wordsworth first became at all generally known in America) was virtually master of his craft. Moreover, “Thanatopsis” as we now have it is actually an immense improvement upon the version that came out in _The North American_; yet in finality of expression it cannot vie with the “Lines” associated with Tintern Abbey, not to speak of certain portions of “The Prelude” or “The Excursion” written in the zenith of Wordsworth’s power. Still, “Thanatopsis” was the first great American poem; in its ultimate form it bids fair to please most readers in all ages. The majesty of Thucydides is borrowed in the conception that the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; there is Homeric splendour of epithet in such expressions as the “all-beholding sun.” The “healing sympathy” of nature, of course, is Wordsworthianism pure and simple; but the poem as a whole is tinged with a pantheism much more stoical than the pantheism of Wordsworth, and curiously out of keeping with the touch of New England moralising toward the end. This touch is even more pronounced in the verses “To a Waterfowl.”

“To a Waterfowl” was published with several other poems, including “Thanatopsis,” in 1821. According to that wayward genius Hartley Coleridge, it is the best short poem in the English language; a perilously sweeping judgment, like Shelley’s on “France,” the magnificent ode by Hartley’s father. At all events, “To a Waterfowl” is hardly surpassed by any of Bryant’s later work, and probably unsurpassed by anything of comparable subject and scope ever written in America.

In 1821, Bryant, then practising law at Great Barrington, was married to Miss Frances Fairchild. In 1825, he gave up the law and a secure livelihood, and, removing to New York, assumed the editorship of _The New York Review_. After a brief connection with _The United States Review_, he became assistant editor of _The Evening Post_; in 1829 he was made editor-in-chief. His lifelong guidance of this most influential paper is briefly touched upon elsewhere. It may be readily thought that Bryant’s prolonged editorial labours interfered with his subsequent development as a poet. Yet his partial ownership of _The Post_ finally gave him abundant means for travel and a widening of his experience in his own and foreign lands; and his habits of industry, supported by a temperate bodily régime, enabled him to achieve during his extended career a noble literary monument outside of journalism.

By 1832 he was ready to publish another edition of his “Poems,” adding more than eighty pieces that were new--notably, the “Forest Hymn,” the “Song of Marion’s Men,” and “The Death of the Flowers.” At intervals of a few years (1834, 1836, 1842, 1844, etc.) other editions or volumes followed; giving evidence that his imagination was not dormant, for they contained in each case material in part or wholly fresh. Thus the “Poems” of 1854 included “O Mother of a Mighty Race” and “Robert of Lincoln,” the latter a favourite with many, though inferior to Bryant’s general standard. Of the “Thirty Poems” issued ten years later (1864), twenty-seven were new; the presence of selections, in English, from Book V of the Odyssey is worthy of particular remark. They had already appeared, a few months before, in _The Atlantic Monthly_.

The achievement of Bryant’s declining years was his translation of Homer. He had at various times amused himself with renderings of one or another passage that pleased him in foreign tongues. He was an ardent admirer of the Greek epics. He was dissatisfied with the versions of Cowper and Pope. It is possible that he was acquainted with the counsels of Matthew Arnold, called forth by the Homer of Francis Newman. The favour met by his attempts with the Odyssey encouraged him to try his hand at the Iliad. On the death of his wife, in 1866, he felt the need of some employment to distract his attention, and resolved to translate the Iliad entire. By 1869 he had finished the first twelve books, at the rate of from forty to seventy-five lines a day. These twelve books were published in February, 1870, the remainder of the Iliad in June. By the first of July he was engaged upon the Odyssey; on December 7, 1871, he sent his printers “the twenty-fourth and concluding book of [his] translation of Homer’s Odyssey, together with the table of contents for the second volume.” To misunderstand the repression of feeling in these simple words, with which the venerable Bryant takes leave of his final work, is to miss the hidden fire animating his whole existence. In a great poet there is little waste of energy in the outward expression. The moment feeling shows itself, it is transmuted into artistic form. The form is adequate, but it is something different from the sentiment that gives it life.

The excellence of Bryant’s blank-verse translation of Homer is not a theme for long discussion here. He aimed at simplicity and faithfulness. He rejected several of the customary ornaments of modern verse, choosing for his medium that rhythm which is most nearly related to the cadence of everyday speech. Tested by its effect on the layman of the present day, his attempt is more successful than other well-known metrical versions, less than the cadenced prose of translators, like Myers and Lang, who have profited by the advice of Arnold with respect to diction, but in avoiding the trammels of metre have followed the example set by the scholars of King James in the Authorised Version of the Scriptures. However, Bryant’s rendering is too noble a piece of imaginative scholarship to be passed over.

Bryant spent something like six years upon his Homer. He survived its completion by six years more, full of honours, rejoicing in a hale old age, still visited occasionally by poetical inspiration, still influential in the political thought of his nation, able at four score and four to make a public address in honour of the Italian patriot Mazzini. During this address, “his uncovered head was for a time exposed to the full glare of the sun. Shortly after, while entering a house, he fell backwards, striking his head upon the stone steps; concussion of the brain and paralysis followed.” He died in New York, June 12, 1878, and was buried at Roslyn, on Long Island Sound, near the beautiful country home where for thirty-five years his literary toils had been “sweetened to his taste.”

Owing to his artistic reserve, Bryant had the reputation of a temperamental coldness, a reputation that is belied both by the tenderness of his domestic ties and by his well chosen and enduring friendships. His patriotism also was unswerving. If he “let no empty gust of passion find an utterance in his lay,” nevertheless he knew and valued

... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the boundless deep.

He was a devoted lover of humanity and life; he was a devoted lover of his art. For him, art and life were one. It is easy for the uninitiated to credit him with a lack of warmth. The fully emancipated are aware what union of fire and self-restraint, of vigour and delicacy, goes to the rearing of a fabric like the orderly and effective career of Bryant.

Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a fluent nor a very prolific writer.... His manuscripts, as well as his proofs, were commonly so disfigured by corrections as to be read with difficulty even by those familiar with his script.” His capacity for intense application was a partial measure of his success both as poet and as critic. For oratory, his legal training stood him in good stead, and his later prominence in New York and in the country as a whole gave him many an occasion. If Bryant, as Matthew Arnold believed, was “_facile princeps_” among American poets, this eminence arose from no merely capricious outburst of genius; it was the natural efflux of a noble, well rounded, and representative human life.

_Saxe_, _Melville_, _Alice and Phoebe Cary.--_After Bryant it is convenient to speak of a few poets, very different from him, and for the most part from each other, whose contemporaneous presence in New York is almost the only thing that connects them. John G. Saxe (1816-87), a native of Vermont, in his time was counted a leader among satirists. He staggers now under the accusation of extreme superficiality; none the less is he lively and readable. He consciously imitated Hood; he could scarcely avoid imitating Wendell Holmes. Of himself he had a remarkable turn for epigram and for punning in rhyme. His burlesque adaptations of Ovid are smart and amusing. On the whole it may be said that Saxe was at his best in “The Proud Miss MacBride,” where he girds at an upstart aristocracy:

Of all the notable things on earth, The queerest one is pride of birth, Among our “fierce Democracie.”

Herman Melville (1819-91), who wrote a fascinating account (“Typee,” 1846) of his stay among the aborigines of the Marquesas, also published “Battle-Pieces” (1866) and other poems. His verse is less objective and sincere than his prose. Alice Cary (1820-71) and her sister, Phoebe (1824-71), were born in Ohio, where they were locally appreciated. Removing first to Philadelphia, then to New York, they supported themselves by their pens. The talents of Alice Cary were manifestly superior; yet for a time, yielding to her admiration of Poe, she allowed the element of harmonious sound in her poetry to overbalance that of meaning. Her hymns, one of which is almost a classic, are noble in their purity of sentiment.

_Dana_, _Sprague_, _Hillhouse, etc._--Although his life and activity were centred elsewhere, Bryant, as we have seen, was a product of western Massachusetts. From him and the city of his adoption we naturally turn to a number of writers whose careers are to be more closely identified with New England. Many of these, like Richard Henry Dana senior (1787-1879), of Boston, were poets only secondarily. Dana was a journalist and politician--an admirer of Wordsworth and a lecturer on Shakespeare. An edition of his prose and verse in 1833 contained a poem, “The Buccaneer,” inspired by Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” His shorter poems are moral--

Oh, listen, man! A voice within us speaks the startling word, “Man, thou shalt never die”--