Part 192

AMERICAN LITERATURE

The development of American literature may be treated under three distinctly marked periods: (1) a colonial or ante-revolutionary period (1620-1775), during which the literature of the colonies was closely assimilated in form and character to that of England; (2) a first American period (1775-1865), which witnessed the transition from a style for the most part imitative to one in some degree national; and (3) a second American period from 1865 to the present time, in which the literature of the country has assumed a more decided character of originality.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1620-1775

The literary traditions of the United States were in large part inherited from England. Although from the time of the Stuart restoration in England, in 1660, there are indications of a divergence in social and political temper, which in the long run must find expression in a distinct American literature, yet the literary emancipation of America was much more gradual than the political.

The first literature in America was the product of men educated in other lands, who happened to be drawn to the New World, and who wrote about the new country.

The first work of broad interest concerning the colonies that subsequently became the United States was the famous Captain John Smith’s _True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia_. This is an interesting and romantic work; but Smith was in America for three years only of his adventurous life, and consequently his narrative is highly colored. _The History of the Plymouth Plantation_, by Governor Bradford, and the _History of New England_, by John Winthrop, are productions of a colder clime than Virginia and of a less glowing imagination than Captain John Smith’s.

Aside from such records, more interesting always from the standpoint of history than from that of literature, the sum of colonial production, north or south, is very small. In New England, where most books were written, if not always there published, we find chiefly theological polemics, often presented with attractive titles but rarely with any other power to carry them to posterity.

The _Poems_ of Anne Bradstreet were very highly praised in their day, but almost the only book of lasting value and interest written in the century was Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia Christi Americana_ (1702). Mather was one of a great clerical and literary family. He wrote many other books, but none retains the interest of posterity. The _Magnalia_, however, is still a noble monument of a wonderful generation.

Franklin’s _Poor Richard’s Almanac_, begun in 1732 and carried on by him for twenty-five years, was a book of almost literary rank. “Poor Richard” was a fictitious character in whose mouth Franklin put a simple philosophy which became as widely popular in its sphere as the more scholarly utterances of the Spectator.

The two great literary figures of the eighteenth century may be properly considered together. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) may represent to us the passing domination of theology; Benjamin Franklin, the domination just beginning of politics and secular common sense. They are the first Americans to make a lasting reputation by letters, and, curiously enough, with each literature was but a means to an end.

The remarkable effect of the preaching and writing of Jonathan Edwards came largely from the direct simplicity and clearness which makes his style almost no style at all. As for Franklin, he learned to write systematically, as he did everything else, and regarded his power to express himself chiefly as one of the means whereby he accomplished his purposes for the good of society. Edward’s great works on the _Freedom of the Will_ and other theological topics are probably read now by few, and the same may be said of much of Franklin’s writings. But Franklin’s _Autobiography_ is still one of the most interesting things of its kind. Both men belonged to the time and place: America was expressing herself, whether in literary form or not.

In the years preceding the Revolution another real opportunity opened, and oratory became one of the genuine modes of national expression. Patrick Henry, James Otis, John Adams, Joseph Warren, Richard Henry Lee, Samuel Adams, spoke under the best conditions for literature, because they had something that had to be said. Yet their eloquence now is more a matter of fame than of fact. Of some, hardly more than a few slight reports remain to give us a notion of the powers that fired an earlier generation. This summary of colonial literature gives an idea of a very meagre literary production that was but natural. There was little written in America, and that little was compelled by the practical issues of the politics or theology of the time.

We shall readily understand that though such a review indicates slight literary appreciation as we understand the term, it does not imply a lack of intelligence. If the colonists had been less intelligent they might have produced more literature. Folk poetry and legend, with which true literature is apt to begin, is not the result of education.

The Americans were, comparatively speaking, a well-educated people. They very early provided for that literary scholarship training which comes from scholastic training. The colleges of the colonies, Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (chartered as the College of New Jersey, 1746), Columbia (originally King’s, 1754), Brown (College of Rhode Island, 1764), Rutgers (originally Queens, 1766), Dartmouth (1769), and the University of Pennsylvania (founded as an academy by Franklin, 1754; chartered 1779), show a great appreciation of learning on the part of the colonists.

A somewhat wider if less scholastic culture is evidenced by the foundation of libraries, the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), the Redwood Library of Newport (1747), the Charleston Library (1748), and the New York Society Library (1754), being the earliest.

FIRST NATIONAL PERIOD, 1775-1865

The two decades that brought the eighteenth century to a close were full of exciting political events, but barren of literature. The fathers could make a nation by adopting a constitution and abiding by it, but the creation of a national literature was not so easy a matter. National poetry did not come with national life. The efforts of Trumbull (1750-1831), and Barlow (1754-1812), are as good as the ordinary poetical work of the time in England, but they are not the expression of the soul of the new nation.

The first real literature was in prose, arising from natural imitation of past models under conditions of culture which led to appreciation of such imitation.

Washington Irving, then twenty-four years old, living the pleasant life of a clever young fellow in a small provincial city, joined with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding in one of the periodicals modeled after the Spectator common in the eighteenth century. Their venture was called _Salmagundi_, and although not remarkable in itself, its success gave confidence, so that two years afterward, feeling his own power, Irving wrote _Knickerbocker’s History of New York_, one of the first pieces of American _belles-lettres_ to become known in Europe as well as America. These productions came naturally from the conditions of Irving’s life; so did the _Sketch Book_, with which he became a professed man of letters, the representative, we may say, of the first period of our national literature.

Irving had pre-eminently the gift for literary expression; in his hands everything became literature--history, biography, descriptive as well as satire, story, essay. He showed the possibility of giving literary form to American material.

The same thing was done in a special department of literature by James Fenimore Cooper. Charles Brockden Brown had written novels, but they have not survived. Cooper, on the other hand, so far saw the essential quality of certain elements of American life, that the figures of Leatherstocking, the American pioneer, Harvey Birch, the patriot, and Long Tom Coffin, the sailor, are still living figures.

In fiction also two masters of equal power were shortly to develop a form of literature in which America has produced much of the first order. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe made of the short story a means of artistic presentation, which has been more highly appreciated in our day than it was in their own.

The first true poet was William Cullen Bryant. In the same year with Cooper’s first American novel (1821) appeared a volume of Bryant’s poems, of which one at least, _Thanatopsis_, had already excited admiring attention. Bryant’s long and honorable life was devoted to many interests beside poetry, but he maintained throughout the pure and idealistic touch, and the intimate appreciation of nature that characterized his first work.

The first quarter of the nineteenth century, then, saw a beginning, slight indeed, but such as to endure, of a true literature in the departments of poetry, fiction, _belles-lettres_. The fifty years following saw more substantial production in each direction.

The American poets of the middle of the century are not of the very first rank, but each is genuinely representative of some true poetic quality or way of looking at things.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow presents the beauty and charm of American life and history in melodious and figured verse; John Greenleaf Whittier expresses the soul of our life and history in lyrics of most sincere human quality; Edgar Allan Poe gives a few most intense emotions in singularly perfect and individual form, while Walt Whitman expresses a certain American ideality in a strange mode of utterance, which despite its faults is characteristically strong.

As a poet Lowell is at his best in satire, Holmes in wit, Emerson in sententious wisdom.

In the field of fiction there was not so much that was good. It was not till he had written short stories for twenty years that Hawthorne found time for the novel for which he had so long felt himself capable. He wrote four, of which three at least are masterpieces. As a novelist he had no rivals; but there were not a few who carried on the tradition of the short story, of whom the most noteworthy were Fitz James O’Brien (1828-1862), Harriet Prescott, 1835 (afterward Mrs. Spofford), and Edward Everett Hale. _The Diamond Lens_, _The Amber Gods_, and _The Man Without a Country_ of the latter are very typical works.

In history also there was first-rate expression. George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman, were all original workers and all men of literary power. The first two were rather too much influenced by the literary ideals of the past, but Motley and Parkman attain a perfection of literary history which seems impossible in our day of development and division of labor.

More specifically American, though perhaps more temporary, is the oratory of the period. Political conditions were still such as to encourage eloquence. Three names stand together as representative of American public life: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. Their oratory has dignity, representative character and force. Three other orators should be mentioned: Edward Everett, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher, one eminent on great public occasions, one in public discussion and agitation, and the third in the pulpit. And we must add the name of a speaker whose simple sincerity gave him at times a greater power of speech than that of any other man of his day, Abraham Lincoln.

Several other elements of the literature of this time are important. The New England movement of idealistic thought, somewhat expressed by Transcendentalism, is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a figure more thoroughly characteristic of American thinking than any other writer. Singularly individual and different from any other man of his time, he is yet typical of a combination of ideality and common sense thoroughly American.

James Russell Lowell is another important figure of the period: noteworthy as a poet, a critic, a scholar, an essayist, he is especially interesting as the successor of Irving as the representative man of his literary generation. He made literature an active factor in life and yet never allowed it to lose its literary quality.

Oliver Wendell Holmes is best known as a humorist, and perhaps the most American in that field in which America has a very special place. Humor is more than most branches of literature a matter of taste. It must be enough, therefore, to note, without attempting to discriminate or describe, the achievements of Artemus Ward (1834-1867), of Mark Twain and of Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). In this second period of our literature occurred the Civil war. Such an event could not have been without its effect upon men of letters both South and North. In the North especially do we perceive the strongest influence: the anti-slavery element cannot be dissociated from the work of Lowell or Whittier. Yet in literature the war produced little of permanence. It is the backbone of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s title to remembrance; but powerfully effective as was _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, it is probable that there was more real genius in those presentations of that old New England life of which she was herself a product.

SECOND NATIONAL PERIOD, 1865- ----

In considering the period from the Civil war to the present, the most remarkable thing is the great increase of production and the slight accession to the rolls of genius. Such is especially the case with fiction; there have been very many good novels and short stories written, but there is no such commanding personality as Hawthorne.

The two chief figures of the seventies and eighties, at least, were Henry James and William Dean Howells. With great differences, they are yet both masters of the realistic school which was dominant in the second half of the century, in Europe as well as in America. Their superiority might remain unquestioned, were it not for the decline of interest in the kind of novel in which they excelled. In the early eighties a change in tone was perceptible.

The first noteworthy American representative of romantic or idealistic fiction which then began to appear was Marion Crawford, who has retained power and popularity for twenty-five years. He and a few other innovators were followed by a number of writers who found and presented the charm and romance of American history. These have now in their turn passed away except Winston Churchill who would seem really to have more enduring power than his companions. But the realistic movement was not without its results, for it directed American novelists, and especially story writers, into an appreciation of the specific qualities of different parts of their country.

The first writer to have this especial flavor was, it is true, the romanticist Bret Harte. His followers were more realistic: George Washington Cable gave a charming presentation of Creole life in New Orleans, and since the _Grandissimes_ (1880) there have been a great number who have drawn pictures of the especial life of particular localities. Most noteworthy of these are Miss Mary N. Murfree (“Charles Egbert Craddock”), Miss Mary E. Wilkins (now Mrs. Freeman), James Lane Allen, Thomas Nelson Page, and Hamlin Garland.

If we are to mention any other novelist of the present day whose work seems likely to endure, it must be Mrs. Edith Wharton, who rather continues the traditions of Henry James.

In poetry no one has for forty years appeared who has been considered the equal of the earlier generation. Sidney Lanier and Edmund Clarence Stedman will probably be considered the chief figures of the seventies, while Richard Hovey (1864-1900) and James Whitcomb Riley are superior to their later contemporaries.

There has been much history in recent years, and if there are no historians of the rank of Motley and Parkman, the reason may lie in the difference that has come into the methods of historical study. John Fiske was a philosopher before he became a historian. Justin Winsor was a master of authorities, and his labors as an editor rendered possible one of the characteristic productions of the time, the _Narrative and Critical History of America_, written by a number of special scholars. Of other contemporary writers most noteworthy are probably Henry C. Lea, whose works deal with different phrases of the history of civilization, and Captain A. T. Mahan, whose studies of the influence of sea power on history have attracted the attention of the world.

Coincidently, a new school of humor has risen in the writing of F. P. Dunne, creator of the sagacious _Mr. Dooley_, and George Ade, author of _Fables in Slang_. Earlier humorists, aside from “Mark Twain” and Charles F. Browne (“Artemus Ward”), are Henry W. Shaw (“Josh Billings”) (1818-1885), Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), the author of _Uncle Remus’ Stories_, amusing dialect fantasies. In the summary of American literature one can hardly omit the names of Sarah Margaret Fuller (“Ossoli”), R. H. Dana, author of _Two Years Before the Mast_, and Donald G. Mitchell, author of _Reveries of a Bachelor_ and _Dream Life_.

Recent and contemporary historians and essayists deserving of mention are T. W. Higginson, C. E. Norton, and William James.

Another form of writing should be mentioned, though its results are perhaps too ephemeral to be called literature. The newspaper is, however, a very important part of everybody’s reading. It has been learning, however, to appeal more and more to an enormously wide audience, with the result that whatever literary character it may have had is now hard to find. In the middle of the century certain great editors had very definite literary standing, as Bryant of the New York _Evening Post_, Henry J. Raymond (1820-1869) of the _Times_, Horace Greeley (1811-1872) of the _Tribune_. Later figures must include Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), who gave a very distinctive character to the _Sun_; James Gordon Bennett (1841) of the _Herald_, and E. L. Godkin (1831-1902) of the New York _Evening Post_, and Henry Watterson of the Louisville _Courier-Journal_.

=SUMMARY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE=

NOTE.--Poetic and dramatic writings are indicated by _italics_.