Part 2

It may not be insisting too strongly on a parallel to see in the history of Southern literature a state of affairs much like that we have just sketched. It will be remembered that in 1818 Bryant sounded his protest against a "sickly and affected imitation of the peculiar manner of the late popular poets of England." As late as 1848 Lowell did not hesitate roughly to assert:

They stole Englishmen's books and thought Englishmen's thought, With English salt on the tail our wild Eagle was caught.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that Sydney Smith should have asked with suggestion of truth even if with evidence of venom, "Who reads an American book?" American literature in the Northern and Middle sections escaped from bondage many years before the South came into its own literary inheritance. Just as unreasoning worship of a pseudo-classicism had its death-grip on Eighteenth Century writers so a like uncritical devotion to the usually read classic writers and to earlier English authors had checked the growth of the budding Southern literature of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Conservative as the South has always been in matters of thought it was not surprising that this should be so. Paul H. Hayne tells what contemptuous references were made by the literary coterie of Charleston to the early efforts of Simms because he dared aspire to cultivate the Muses, when he must needs get his Homer through the medium of Chapman or of Pope. This respect unto classical authority was of long continuance among cultured men and showed itself, also, in the dry and tedious essays of Legare who was reputed a great scholar.

It was, indeed, not until 1870 that the South may be said to have achieved literary independence. As the sway of Greece and Rome passed away, the South came to be a literary dependency of England. Kennedy and Sims are dominated by Scott, just as Wirt and his friends of the "Old Bachelor" group got their inspiration from the Spectator. Of course there were poets as Hayne and Timrod and story-writers as Johnston and Thompson who sang and wrote clearly and with a note of individuality. But Lowell might have described the greater part of Southern literary work in the words:

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion To what will be thought of it over the ocean.

With the same thought in mind Poe wrote that "one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel, their having crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction."

This natural conservatism was upheld by the fact that many Southerners of means sent their sons to England to be educated. The South being settled for the most part by emigrants of English blood, it is not surprising that the controlling influence should be from mother-country.

Before the war, Sydney Smith's cutting question might have been answered with greater suggestion of truth in the form, "who reads a Southern book?" A not untruthful answer would have been, "Southerners do not." We have never adequately supported our own writers. We have added to the tragedy of nations by allowing Poe to die the death of an outcast; Timrod to break his heart, without a crust to eat or a penny to buy food; Lanier not to have time to record the strains that were demanding utterance, in order to spend his wasting strength seeking support for wife and children; Russell broken in courage and in fortune to find not even a resting-place in the soil of his native State. Before the war the Southern library shelves were weighed down with Fielding, Smollett, Addison, Johnson, Scott and Dickens. Charleston had a public meeting to congratulate Macaulay on the issuance of one of the later volumes of his History. Simms and Timrod lived in the City by the Sea in obscurity and neglect. We have not yet reached the place where we turn first to our own writers.

To say we had no writers, no books is not true. We had a plentiful supply of books whose writers with a kind of literary metonymy transferred the conventionalities and commonplaces of English life to the atmosphere of the South. The result was not English and it was not Southern but it had the worst features of both. Wax flowers were long a popular form of domestic art and the literary amateur caught the unreality of the maker of flowers.

There was, indeed, abundant material in the South and much of it was made use of. A distinct weakness in our workmanship arose from the fact that too much material was used for a given purpose. The stage was overcrowded with characters, the plot was weakened by using too much incident. This surplus-age of incident seems to have distracted the writer's attention from the details of his craft. The value of the work of art was lost in carelessness of workmanship. The new order of things was to see a renaissance of simplicity. It was to be expected that in order to bring about a re-crystallization of Southern literary canons a shock was essential. That shock came in the form of the war between the States. New ideas, newly expressed was the inheritance.

The new school of Southern writers found their material near at hand and yet from a past growingly remote. They delighted to tell of the days of slavery--to idealize that period, perhaps--and with some acquaintance with slavery as it actually existed. While it has not been a half century since the master and his slave lived together in Southern lands, yet the number of those who have had experiential knowledge of slave-life in the South is increasingly small. To be accurate the picture of master and man had need to be painted quickly.

Perhaps the very first of our writers to give a true picture of negro life in negro dialect was Irwin Russell of Mississippi. He was certainly the first to make use of verse to put before us the negro as he saw him. Russell's negro is for the most part not the slave but the negro who is reconstructed in his legal relations, but altogether unreconstructed in habits of thought and of action. That negro, a picture of whom was to be had only during the decade immediately after the war, is the hero of much of Russell's verse. That he has pictured the character faithfully is evidenced by the fact of the life of his work. Despite encouragements to die, the slender volume of posthumous verse still lives and seems destined to have permanent place in American literature.

Russell's place in our literary history does not depend solely on the estimation put on his own work but is assured by the fact of his influence on those he preceded in this new field. Joel Chandler Harris was one of the first to recognize the genius of Russell and he doubtless looks upon the power of the young poet as one of the formative influences of his life. Likewise Thomas Nelson Page delights to ascribe to the Bard of the Quarters the inspiration of his own literary life.

It will be remembered that in sketching the English Romantic Movement the fact was recorded that the boys Warton and Chatterton occupied a place of prescience with regard to these new ideas. It will be worth while calling to mind that Irwin Russell's relation to the Southern Romantic Movement was much the same. Already at sixteen years of age, he had begun to write and ten years later he had completed his work and returned his talents to him who gave them.

The parallel to be drawn between the life of Chatterton and of Russell is interesting if not suggestive of actual brotherhood of thought.

As mere boys they both began to write verse. They both made use of a medium other than mother tongue. Chatterton manufactured for himself a speech we cannot do better than describe as the Rowley dialect; Russell put into form the rude speech of the negro with whom he had grown up; yet he had no help in the difficult work of transcriber.

Chatterton found the tasks set for him in a lawyer's office unbearable while there was poetry in his mind to be written down; Russell was actually admitted to the bar but the Muse of Letters had marked him for her own and the courtroom knew him no more. Breaking away from the bondage of legal drudgery, Chatterton went with high hopes from Bristol to London where for a few short months "the unhappy boy" strove against starvation only at last to be overcome in the struggle for living.

Russell left Port Gibson and went to New York to enter upon a literary life but after buffetings not a few, he at last entered into the eternal rest not vouchsafed on earth to that weary, outworn body.

Chatterton may be granted place as forerunner of that noble body of poets who have had part in making the poetry of the Nineteenth Century as distinct contribution to English literature. Before Irwin Russell there were, indeed, fore-gleams of the day that was to dawn, but it may not unfairly be urged that he was the first to turn his camera on one section of our Southern life and give us a picture that has cause to be enumerated among the monuments which must be consulted as primary authorities by the historian who will picture the life and thought of the Southern people.

WILLIAM WARD, A MISSISSIPPI POET ENTITLED TO DISTINCTION.

BY DABNEY LIPSCOMB

A gentleman of advanced age, ripe culture, and extensive knowledge of the literature of the State, was asked, "Who is the best poet Mississippi has produced?" Promptly he replied, "William Ward of Macon." Respect for the opinion of the one who so unhesitatingly adjudged this pre-eminence among the poets of the State led to a study of William Ward's life and poetry, the result of which is now presented.

At the outset, however, let it be understood that the purpose of this essay is not to establish Mr. Ward's supremacy as a poet. Classifications of this kind in literature and elsewhere are generally unsatisfactory and often invidious, for excellencies that vary greatly in kind are not to be measured in degree. Some would doubtless accord pre-eminence to Irwin Russell for his humorous, sympathetic pictures of the quaintly sage and irrepressibly happy old-time plantation negro. Others would as likely claim this honor for James D. Lynch of West Point, who, against over two hundred poets of America, won for himself and his State, by unanimous vote of the committee of awards, the proud distinction of welcoming the nations of the world to the great Columbian Exposition, and afterward of having his salutation ode adopted as the Press Poem of America. Of him and his works more will be said on another occasion. Other classes in attempts at gradation would prefer this one or that one for reasons as different as the peculiar merits of the poet or the tastes of the admirers.

Panegyric cannot perpetuate a reputation. If so, Tupper, whose fame was predicted, would live as long as the language, would now be more than a name. Joanna Baillie, too, whom even Sir Walter Scott describes as sweeping her harp

Till Avon's swans-- Awakening at the inspired strain, Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again,

--where is she? Mindful of the futility of claiming for an author more than is warranted, no eulogy will be offered, extravaganza will be avoided. On the contrary, that criticism will be eschewed which "damns with faint praise" what is cordially admired, fearful lest others may not assent. William Ward and his poems shall speak largely for themselves; knowledge of the man and his work being sufficient, it is believed, to justify the claim that he is a poet entitled to distinction.

Like many others who have reflected honor on the State, he was a son of Mississippi by adoption, a New Englander by birth. Son of William and Charlotte Ward, he was born in August, 1823, at Litchfield, Connecticut, an historic village, the early home of the Beechers; once noted also for its famous law school, attended by many from the South, John C. Calhoun among the number. Scarcely less was it famous for the beauty of the surrounding scenery and for the aristocracy of its leading families, who boasted their descent from old English houses as much as did the Virginians of their Cavalier and the Carolinians of their Huguenot ancestry. Social aristocracy in New England was a more prominent feature of life there than is commonly supposed. Among the leading families of Litchfield was that of the Wards. William, father of the subject of this sketch, was a jeweler by occupation, a man of integrity and unusual intelligence; wealthy until middle life, when it appears that reverses overtook him. For this reason his children, excepting one, perhaps, did not receive a college education as was intended. John became an Episcopal clergyman; Elias a jeweler, like his father; Henry, sorely disappointed in not being able to attend Yale College, scholarly, poetic, took reluctantly to printing an editorial work; Mary Charlotte, literary in her tastes, married a wealthy gentleman, traveled in Europe, and wrote sketches of travel and a number of poems. Of Henry Ward, a word more in passing to indicate more fully the literary leaning of the family. At the age of thirteen, his poem, "Novel Reading; or The Feast of Fiction," published in the local paper, gave him notoriety and raised great expectations. Thwarted in his college aspirations looking toward the ministry, he grew melancholy and excessively reserved. After forty years of life as a practical printer and editor, he left at his decease manuscripts in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, versification of the Books of Job and Lamentations, and a volume of hymns. His claim to the well-known hymn, "I Would Not Live Always," generally accredited to William Augustus Muhlenberg, and also to the poem, "Tell Me Ye Winged Winds," usually ascribed to Charles Mackay, is set forth in Harpel's Poets and Poetry of Printerdom. In it, too, may be found other poems by him and several by his sister Mary, then Mrs. Webster.

But to William Ward, the youngest son, attention must now be turned exclusively, with a glance first at the brief but important period of his life spent in his boyhood home. Of those early days which evidently left deep impression on his after life, less can be said than could be wished. The beauty of the country about Litchfield must have impressed him as it did Henry and Harriet Beecher, born amid the same surroundings, ten or twelve years before him. Like them, no doubt, he gazed with delight on the glorious sunsets which Mrs. Stowe so enthusiastically describes, and roamed in perhaps the same mood the woods in which they speculated whether Apollo had not there once built his altars. He, too, wandered along the banks of crystal Bantam River and dreamily watched the clouds as they hooded and un-hooded Mount Tom in the hazy distance. Nature there surely must have been "meet nurse for a poetic child."

His scholastic education was completed under the tuition of a learned Episcopal clergyman whose private academy for boys was well patronized. He was an insatiable reader and a fairly good student, though his mind ran in literary lines rather than to the study of the exact sciences. The classics he must have especially preferred, and in them been carefully instructed, judging from the familiarity he manifests in his poems with the mythology and literature in general of Greece and Rome. Astronomy seems to have laid strong hold upon him; for it held high place in his esteem in later life. He early gave evidence of a poetic tendency, and some of his boyish effusions are said to have possessed considerable merit. Intuition, environment, and reading apparently combined to make of this New England lad a poet. What the experiences of active life contributed in this direction, a look ahead will show.

When only sixteen years of age, a great and unexpected change in his plans and prospects occurred. He was urged by his brother Elias who had gone South and set up in business at Columbus, Mississippi, to come and learn under him the watch repairing and jewelry business. Though his tastes and aptitudes led in opposite direction, the opening seemed too favorable to be set aside. The invitation was accepted and bidding adieu forever to the home of his love, with mingled enthusiasm and trepidation the young man set out on his long journey to the South. Embarking at New York on a sailing vessel, he reached Mobile, Alabama, after a safe but lengthy voyage. Of the experiences of that voyage which afterward gave coloring to some of his most poetic lines and of the amusing incident attendant upon his arrival at Mobile notice cannot now be taken.

Ten or twelve years of quiet busy life at Columbus, Mississippi constitute the second distinct period in William Ward's comparatively uneventful life. His letters home indicate that many of the sights and incidents connected with life in that almost frontier land were new and startling to the scholarly youth from staid Connecticut. By degrees he became accustomed to his surroundings, and identified himself with the society and business of the place. Modest and reserved in public, with his friends he was ever a genial and interesting companion. More student than mechanic, he would doubtless have preferred a literary career. As it was, his literary tendency continued to assert itself, and before attaining his majority verses from his pen began to appear in print. At twenty or earlier he became a contributor to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, to which for ten years or more thereafter he continued to furnish poems or themes chiefly classical and patriotic. First in order of time of those that have been preserved is "The Grave of Hale," which appeared in the issue of June 3, 1843. In smooth and vigorous Spenserian stanzas, he protests against the neglect of the martyr-patriot's grave.

"Alas! and hath no gentle honoring hand, But that of Nature decked his tomb with flowers, We mourn the heroes of some storied land, And leave a cold and barren grave to ours."

Among other published poems of his early period indicative of his devotion to the classic Muse, and of his ardent patriotism, may be named "The Egean," "Greece," "The Bellman of '76," and "Our Own New England."

These lines from the first two poems, written respectively in 1844 and 1845, but for the dates might seem to have been inspired by the result of the late sad struggle between the Greeks and Turks:

"Bright sea! no more the naiad haunts Thy pearl founts with a syren spell, No sea-nymph on thy foam-bed pants, Within her rainbow spawning cell, The halo of departed years-- Sleeps like a dream upon thy sky, While the dark curse of blood and tears Is echoed back with freedom's sigh."

* * * * *

"Oh Greece! could ye but boast of Greeks the shame That gathers o'er thee now would make thy altars flame."

For the tenderness and warmth of sentiment expressed therein, the poem, "Our Own New England," merits more than simple reference to it. The last stanza shows how thoroughly Southern in ten years he had become. Friendships strong and lasting had been formed, and he was now prominent among the citizens of a town that even then prided itself on its culture. One of the intimate friends of Alexander K. McClung, he has left an appreciative tribute to that powerful, but somber and erratic genius.

In 1850 Mr. Ward removed to Macon; Mississippi, and there lived till his death in 1887. Early in the fifties he married Miss Emilie A. Whiffen, an estimable and highly cultured young lady of English parentage, then teaching in a female institute at Crawford, Miss. The Philadelphia _Courier_ contained a pleasant notice of the marriage, from which this extract is taken: "We sincerely congratulate our esteemed correspondent, William Ward, Jr., Esq., whose delightful verses have enriched but too seldom our Poet's Corner, upon the agreeable fact reported in our hymeneal department last week." These were his halcyon days, during which he was prosperous and serenely joyful in his home. In 1856, he built in the woods skirting the eastern edge of the town the modest but tasteful little cottage in which he spent the remainder of his days. To verse he seems to have given but little time during those busy years; though occasionally he still contributed a poem to the _Courier_ and to the Macon and Columbus papers. Three daughters and a son came to increase his pleasures and his cares. Meanwhile the war cloud lowered and the tempest broke in fury on the land he had learned to love and call his own. But this was little heeded in comparison with the calamity which befell him in the midst of those dreadful days in the loss of his devoted and helpful wife. His life "cleft in twain," as he expressed it, from that time forward is thus described by one who knew and loved him: "To his half-orphaned children he became father and mother. We have seen him in his cottage home spending his evenings in the bosom of his little family, assisting his daughters with their lessons, amusing the children, looking after their comfort, and doing all in his power to make them happy. Proud and sensitive, he bravely struggled through poverty that came to so many Southern families; and though at times obliged to add the office of housekeeper to that of bread-winner for his young family, he never sank the dignity of a gentleman to the servility of a drudge."

Under these circumstances, all the more honor is due to him that after the war he spurned the offers of place and wealth extended by carpet-bag leaders of the Republican party who knew of his Northern birth. Instead of such a course, he became in 1870 editor of the Macon _Beacon_, and was as pronounced a Democrat as he had been Whig in former years. During intervals of work in his little shop he hurriedly wrote his editorials; and might often be seen walking up and down behind the counter evolving a poem or a prose reverie, oblivious to his surroundings. But to poetry he gave no more time than, as he said, he _must_. Outside the joys of companionship with books and with his children, he could truly have exclaimed with Burns:

"Lease me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure, My chief, amaist my only pleasure."

With his little ones, on Sundays, he walked in the woods hard by his house; and on clear nights he often pointed out to them the stars and constellations, and told them of the myths that cluster about Orion, the Pleiads and other denizens of the nightly firmament. He had his own telescope and frequently searched the heavens with it for hours. "It is well," he says, "to look upon the Christmas skies when the most glorious constellations of the year are gathered as at the world's great festival. It will give us higher conceptions of life and tone down excesses we too often indulge in through the anniversary week that closes up the year."

But let us look more closely at the man himself and then give his work such examination as time left us will admit. Tall, slender, erect in carriage, clean shaven, with dark brown hair and eyes, rapid in his movements, the scholar and the gentleman written unmistakably on every lineament, and William Ward, the man, is as nearly portrayed as can now be done; for except a little daguerreotype taken for his wife, which has been lost, he sat for no other picture. Singularly reserved and almost shy in public, with his children and with his intimate friends he was delightfully communicative, a vein of quiet humor often outcropping in his words and deeds.