CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 88.C171 
 
 A short history of American iiterature : 
 3 1924 022 000 248 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022000248 
 
A Short History 
 
 of 
 
 American Literature 
 
 Based upon 
 
 The Cambridge History of 
 American Literature 
 
 Edited by 
 
 William Peterfield Trent, John Erskine, 
 Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren 
 
 New York 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 Hbe 'Knicbetbocbet pcess 
 1922 
 

 P\^l^Vc\ 
 
 a\ 
 
 Copyright, 1922 
 
 by 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
 ^"ft^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. — Colonial Writers 
 
 Edwards 
 Franklin 
 
 By Paul Elmer More 
 By Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 I 
 l6 
 
 II. — Knickerbocker Writers 
 
 Irving By George Haven Putnam 
 
 Bryant By William Ellery Leonard 
 
 Cooper Bm Carl Van Daren , 
 
 37 
 52 
 
 III.— POE 
 
 By Killis Campbell 
 
 8? 
 
 IV. — Transcendentalists 
 
 Emerson 
 
 Hawthorne 
 
 Thoreau 
 
 By Paul Elmer More 
 
 By John Erskine . 
 
 By Archibald MacMechan 
 
 roc 
 04 
 130, 
 
 V. — Poets, Essayists, Romancers 
 
 Longfellow 
 
 Whittier 
 
 Holmes 
 
 Lowell 
 
 Melville 
 
 Mrs. Stowe 
 
 By William Peterfield Trent 
 By William Morton Payne 
 By Brander Matthews 
 By Ashley H. Thorndike 
 By Carl Van Doren 
 By Carl Van Doren 
 
 145 
 155 
 168 
 
 185 
 198 
 202 
 
IV 
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 VI. — ^Lincoln By Nathaniel Wright Stephenson 
 
 PACE 
 
 207 
 
 VII. — ^Whitman By Emory Holloway 225 
 
 VIII. — The New Nation 
 
 Mark Twain 
 
 By Stuart P. Sherman . 
 
 . 242 
 
 HOWELLS 
 
 By Carl Van Doren 
 
 . 262 
 
 Henry James 
 
 By Joseph Warren Beach 
 
 . 272 
 
 Lanier 
 
 By Dudley Howe Miles . 
 
 . 285 
 
 Harris 
 
 By C. Alphonso Smith . 
 
 . 301 
 
 IX. — The Short Story 
 
 Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Mrs. Cooke, O'Brien, Hale, Henry 
 James, Harte, Miss Woolson, Miss Jewett, Cable, Aldrich, 
 Stockton, Bunner, Bierce, Miss Murfree, Harris, Johnston, 
 Garland, Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Chopin, Smith, London, Davis, 
 O. Henry By Fred Lewis Pattee ..... 
 
 3" 
 
 X. — Historians and Scholars 
 
 Prescott 
 
 By Ruth Putnam . 
 
 ■ 340 
 
 Motley 
 
 By Ruth Putnam . 
 
 • 344 
 
 Parkman 
 
 By John Spencer Bassett 
 
 • 349 
 
 Henry Adams 
 
 By John Spencer Bassett 
 
 • 352 
 
 TiCKNOR 
 
 By Samuel Lee Wolff . 
 
 • 355 
 
 Whitney 
 
 By Samuel Lee Wolff . 
 
 . . 361 
 
 XI. — Preachers and Philosophers 
 
 Beecher By Samuel Lee Wolff 
 
 Brooks By Ambrose White Vernon 
 
 RoYCE By Morris R. Cohen 
 
 William James By Morris R. Cohen 
 
 365 
 371 
 379 
 383 
 
Contents v 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XII. — The English Language in America 
 
 By Harry Morgan Ayres .... 390 
 
 Bibliographical Notes . 409 
 
 Index 415 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 Colonial Writers 
 I. Jonathan Edwards 
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS was born atlWindsor, Connecticut, 
 in 1703. He belonged, unlike his great contemporary 
 Franklin in this, to the "Brahmin families" of America, 
 his father being a distinguished graduate of Harvard and a 
 minister of high standing, his mother being the daughter of 
 Solomon Stoddard, a revered pastor of Northampton, Massa- 
 chusetts, and a religious author of repute. Jonathan, one of 
 eleven children, showed extraordinary precocity. There is 
 preserved a letter of his, written apparently in his twelfth year, 
 in which he retorts upon certain materialistic opinions of his 
 correspondent with an easiness of banter not common to a 
 boy; and another document, from about the same period, 
 an elaborate account of the habits of spiders, displays a keen- 
 ness of observation and a vividness of style uncommon at any 
 age. 
 
 He studied at Yale, receiving his bachelor'^s degreein, 172a, 
 before his seventeenth birthday. While at college he continued 
 his interest in scientific observations, but his main concern was 
 naturally with the^gy and moral philosophy. As a sopho- 
 more he read Locke On the Human Understanding, with the 
 delight of a "greedy miser" in "some newly discovered treas- 
 ure." Some time after reading Locke and before graduation 
 he wrote down a series of reflections, preparatory to a great 
 metaphysical treatise of his own, which can be compared only 
 with the Commonplace Book kept by Berkeley a few years 
 earlier for the same purpose. In the section of "Notes on the 
 Mind" thisentry is found: " Our perceptions or ideas, that we 
 passively receive by our bodies, are commtmicated > to us 
 
2 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 immediately by God." JN'ow Berkeley's Principles and his 
 Hylas and Philonous appeared in 171 o and 1713 respectively, 
 and the question has been raised, and not answered, whether 
 this Berkeleian sentiment was borrowed from one of these books 
 or was original with Edwards. Possibly the youthful philo- 
 sopher was following a line of thought suggested by the English 
 disciples of Malebranche, possibly he reached his point of view 
 directly from Locke; in any case his life-work was to carry on 
 the Lockian philosophy from the point where the Berkeleian 
 idealism left off. 
 
 After graduation Edwards remained for two years at Yale, 
 preparing for the ministry. In 1722 he was called to a Presby- 
 terian church in New York. Here he preached acceptably for 
 eight months, returning then to his father's house, and later 
 to New Haven, where he held the position of tutor in the college. 
 In 1727 he went to Northampton as colleague, and became in 
 due time successor, to his grandfather. Almost immediately 
 after ordination he married Sarah Pierrepont, like himself 
 of the Brahmin caste, whom he had known as a young 
 girl, and whose beauty of body and soul he had described in a 
 passage of ecstatic wonder. 
 
 " They say," he began, being himself then twenty and the object 
 of his adoration thirteen, "there is a young lady in New Haven who 
 is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and 
 that there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way 
 or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding 
 sweet delight." 
 
 The marriage, notwithstanding this romantic rapture, proved 
 eminently wise. 
 
 Like a good many other men of his age Edwards lived his 
 inner life, so to speak, on paper. There is therefore nothing 
 peculiar or priggish in the fact that at the beginning of his 
 religious career he should have written out a set of formal 
 resolutions, which he vowed to read over, and did read over, 
 at stated intervals in order to keep watch on his spiritual 
 progress. A number of these resolutions have been printed, 
 as has also a part of the diary kept at about the same time. 
 Neither of these dociunents, the time of their writing con- 
 sidered, contains anything remarkable. But it is qtiite other- 
 
Edwards 3 
 
 wise with the private reflections which he wrote out some 
 twenty years later (about 1743) at Northampton, apparently 
 on some occasion of reading over his youthful diary. In these 
 we have an autobiographical fragment that, for intensity of 
 absorption in the idea of God and for convincing power of 
 utterance, can be likened to the Confessions of St. Augustine, 
 while it unites to this religious fervour a romantic feeling for 
 nature foreign to the Bishop of Hippo's mind and prophetic 
 of a movement that was to sweep over the world many years 
 after Edwards's death. A few extracts from this document 
 (not so well known as it would have been if it had not been 
 printed with the works of a thorny metaphysician) must 
 be given for their biographical and literary interest: 
 
 From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections 
 against the doctrine of God's sovereignty, in choosing whom he 
 would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased; leaving them 
 eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It 
 used to appear like a horrible doctrine to ms. But I remember 
 the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and fully 
 satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God. ... I have often, since that 
 first conviction, had quite another kind of sense of God's sovereignty 
 than I had then. I have often since had not only a conviction, but 
 a delightful conviction. The doctrine has very often appeared 
 exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is 
 what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not 
 so. 
 
 The first instance that I remember of that sort of inward, sweet 
 delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, 
 was on reading those words. Now unto the King eternal, immortal, 
 invisible, the only wise God, he honour and glory for ever and ever, 
 Amen. As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was 
 as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine 
 Being. . . . 
 
 Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave 
 an account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. 
 I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and 
 when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary 
 place in my father's pasture, for contemplation. And as I was 
 walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came 
 into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace 
 oftGod, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them 
 
4 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; 
 it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic 
 meekness ; an awful sweetness ; a high, and great, and holy gentleness. 
 
 This is not the Edwards that is commonly known, and 
 indeed he put little of this personal rapture of holiness into his 
 published works, which were almost exclusively polemical in 
 design. Only once, perhaps, did he adequately display this 
 aspect of his thought to the public; and that was in the Dis-_. 
 sertation on the Nature of Virttie, wherein, starting from the 
 definition of virtue as "the beauty of the qualities and exer- 
 cises of the heart, " he proceeds to combine ethics and aesthetics 
 in an argument as subtle in reasoning as it is, in places, victori- 
 ous in expression. One cannot avoid the feeling, when his 
 writings are surveyed as a whole, that in his service to a particu- 
 lar dogma of religion Edwards deliberately threw away the 
 opportunity of making for himself, despite the laxness of his 
 style, one of the very great names in literature. 
 
 It should seem also that he not only suppressed his personal 
 ecstasy in his works for the press, but waived it largely in his 
 more direct intercourse with men. He who himself, like an 
 earlier and perhaps greater Emerson, was enjoying the sweet- 
 ness of walking with God in the garden of earth, was much 
 addicted to holding up before his people the "pleasant, bright, 
 and sweet" doctrine of damnation. Nor can it be denied that 
 he had startling ways of impressing this sweetness on others. 
 It is a misfortune, but one for which he is himself responsible, 
 that his memory in the popular mind today is almost exclu- 
 sively associated with certain brimstone sermons and their 
 terrific effect. Best known of these is the discourse on Sinners 
 in the Hands of an Angry God, delivered at Enfield, Connecticut, 
 in the year 1741. His text was taken from Deuteronomy: 
 "Their foot shall slide in due time"; and from these words 
 he proceeded to prove, and "improve," the truth that "there 
 is nothing that keeps wicked men at any moment out of hell, 
 but the mere pleasure of God." He is said to have had none 
 of the common qualities of the orator. His regular manner of 
 preaching, at least in his earlier years, was to hold his "manu- 
 script volume in his left hand, the elbow resting on the cushion 
 or the Bible, his right hand rarely raised but to turn the leaves, 
 
Edwards 5 
 
 and his person almost motionless"; but there needed no gesti- 
 culation and no modulation of voice to convey the force of his 
 terrible conviction, when, to an audience already disposed to 
 accept the dogma, he presented that dogma in a series of 
 pictures like the following: 
 
 The Crod that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a 
 spider, or some loathesome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is 
 dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks 
 upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; 
 he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight. 
 
 The congregation of Enfield, we are told, was moved almost 
 to despair ; " there was such a breathing of distress and weeping " 
 that the speaker was interrupted and had to plead for silence. 
 Sincerity of vision may amount to cruelty, and something is 
 due to the weakness of human nature. 
 
 The result was inevitable. The people of Northampton 
 listened to Edwards for a time; were rapt out of themselves; 
 stiff ered the relapse of natural indolence; grew resentful under 
 the efforts to keep them in a state of exaltation; and freed 
 themselves of the burden when it became intolerable. At 
 first all went weU. Stoddard, in whose declining years the 
 discipline of the chvirch had been somewhat relaxed, died in 
 1729, and the fervour of his successor soon began to teU on the 
 people. In 1733, as Edwards notes in his Narrative of Surprising 
 Conversions, there was a stirring in the conscience of the young, 
 who had hitherto been prone to the awful sin of "frolicking." 
 The next year the sudden conversion of a young woman, 
 "who had been one of the greatest company keepers in the 
 whole town," came upon the community "like a flash of 
 lightning"; the Great Awakening was started, which was to 
 run over New England like a burning fire, with consequences 
 not yet obliterated. The usual accompaniments of moral 
 exaltation and physical convulsions showed themselves. 
 Edwards relates with entire approbation the morbid conversion 
 of a child of four. The poor little thing was overheard by her 
 mother in her closet wrestling with God in prayer, from which 
 she came out crying aloud and "wreathing her body to and 
 fro like one in anguish of spirit." -She was afraid she was 
 going to hell! 
 
6 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 It was inevitable that such a wave of superheated emo- 
 tion should subside in a short time. In fact the enthusiasm 
 had scarcely reached its height when it began to show signs 
 of perversion and decay. Immediately after the story of 
 the young convert Edwards notes that "the Spirit of God 
 was gradually withdrawing" and "Satan seemed to be 
 let loose and raged in a dreadful manner." An epidemic 
 of melancholy and suicidal mania swept over the community, 
 and multitudes seemed to hear a voice saying to them: " Cut 
 your own throat, now is a good opportunity." Strange delu- 
 sions arose and spread, until common sense once more got the 
 upper hand. 
 
 It was an old tale, told in New England with peculiar fury. 
 The saddest thing in the whole affair is the part played by 
 Edwards. Other leaders saw the danger from the first, or 
 were soon awakened to it; but Edwards never, either at this 
 time or later, wavered in his belief that the Awakening, though 
 marred by the devil, was in itself the work of the Divine Spirit. 
 His Thoughts on the Revival of Religion and his Marks of a 
 Work of the True Spirit are both a thoroughgoing apology for 
 the movement, as they are also an important document in 
 his own psychology. The jangling and confusion he admits; 
 he recognizes the elements of hysteria that were almost inextri- 
 cably mixed up with the moral exaltation of conversion; but his 
 defence is based frankly on the avowal that these things are 
 the universal accompaniments of inspiration — they attended 
 the founding of the church in the Apostolic age, they were to 
 be expected at the instauration of religion. Often the reader 
 of these treatises is struck by a curious, and by no means 
 accidental, resemblance between the position of Edwards and 
 the position of the apologists of the romantic movement in 
 literature. There is the same directness of appeal to the 
 emotions; the same laudation of sheer expansiveness, at the 
 cost, if need be, of judgment or measture or any other restraint. 
 Prudence and regularity may be desirable in the service of 
 God, yet it is still true that "the cry of irregularity and 
 imprudence" has been mainly in the mouths of those who 
 are enemies to the main work of redemption. Perturbation, 
 in truth, is not properly so called when it is the means of rousing 
 the cold and indifferent from their lethargy; we are bound to 
 
Edwards 7 
 
 suppose that not even the man "of the strongest reason" and 
 greatest learning" can remain master of himself if "strongly 
 impressed with a sense of divine and eternal things." It 
 comes in the end to this, that, notwithstanding his verbal 
 reservations, Edwards had no critical canon to distinguish 
 between the order and harmony governed by a power higher 
 than either the imagination or the emotions, and the order and 
 harmony that are merely stagnation. 
 
 One factor in his confidence was a belief that the discovery 
 of America, coinciding as it did with the beginning of the 
 Reformation, came by Providence for "the glorious renovation 
 of the ^vorld"; nay more, that the humble town in which he 
 was preaching might be the cradle of the new dispensation, 
 from whence it should spread over the whole earth. His 
 language may even seem to betray a touch of spiritual pride 
 over the part he himself should be called upon to play as the 
 instrument of Grace in this marvellous regeneration. That 
 vice of the saints was indeed a subject much in his meditations, 
 and one of the finest pieces of religious psychology in his 
 works is the passage of the Revival in which he tracks it through 
 the labyrinthine deceits of the human heart. It was a sin 
 against which he had probably to keep particular ward in 
 these years, but we should not say that he ever, in any proper 
 sense of the word, lapsed from the virtue of Christian httmility. 
 If he seemed to set himself above other men as an exigent 
 judge, this was rather due to a faulty sympathy, an inability 
 to measure others except by the standard of his own great 
 faculties. Thus, for aU his emotionalism, he lived under the 
 control of an iron will, and he could not comprehend how 
 the over-stimulation of terror and joy in a weaker disposition 
 would work moral havoc. Nor from his own constant height 
 could he understand how brief and fitful any mood of exalta- 
 tion must be among ordinary men in their ordinary condition. 
 Hence he not only failed to see the gravity of the actual evils 
 at the time of the Awakening, but failed also, with more 
 grievous results for himself, to recognize the impossibility of 
 flogging the dead emotion into new life. 
 
 The issue came on a point of church discipline. Edwards 
 believed that religion was essentially a matter of the emotions 
 or affections. A man might have perfect knowledge of divine 
 
8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 things, as indeed the devil had, but unless the love of God was 
 implanted in his heart by the free act of Grace he had no lot 
 with the faithful. To develop this theme he wrote his great 
 Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, a work which may 
 without exaggeration be said to go as far as the htunan intellect 
 can go in the perilous path of discriminating between the purely 
 spiritual life and the life of worldly morality. Now even the 
 simple statement of the difference between the condition of 
 Grace and the condition of nature is hard for the natiiral man 
 to follow; but when Edwards, with the acumen of a genius and 
 the doggedness of a scholar, imposed his distinction on all the 
 intricate feelings of life, the natural man was dazed ; and when he 
 j attempted to make it the criterion of admission to the Lord's 
 I Table, the natural man who thought himself a Christian re- 
 |belled. Stoddard had held it right to admit to communion 
 all those who desired honestly to unite themselves with the 
 church. Edwards protested that only those who had undergone 
 a radical conversion and knew the affections of supernatural 
 love should enjoy this high privilege. His congregation sided 
 with their old guide against him. 
 
 The quarrel was further embittered by another issue. It 
 came to light that certain young folk of the chtirch were reading 
 profane books which led to lewd conversation. Edwards 
 called for public discipline of the sinners; the congregation 
 supported him until investigation showed that the evil was 
 widespread and woiild bring discredit on most of the better 
 families of the town, and then they blocked further proceedings. 
 If tradition is correct in naming Pamela as one of the guilty 
 books, we may admire the literary taste of youthful Northamp- 
 ton, yet think that their pastor was justified in condemning 
 such reading as incendiary. However that may be, when, on 
 22 June, 1250, a public vote was taken whether Edwards 
 should be dismissed from his pastorate, a large majority was 
 counted against him. Northampton has the distinction of 
 having rejected the greatest theologian and philosopher 
 yet. produced in this country. The behaviotir of Edwards 
 when the crisis actually came was simple, dignified, and even 
 noble. His Farewell Sermon, with its dispassionate and 
 submissive appeal from the tribunal of men to that final 
 judgment which shall be given in knowledge and righteous- 
 
Edwards 9 
 
 ness, cannot be read today without a deep stirring of the 
 heart. 
 
 At the age of forty-six Edwards was thrust upon the world, 
 discredited, in broken health, with a large family to support, but 
 undaunted. Then befell a strange thing. This philosopher, 
 whose thoughts and emotions ranged beyond the ken of most 
 educated men, was sent to the frontier town of Stockbridge as a 
 QiissianaryLjta_±he.Jndians. There for six years he laboured 
 faithfully and, at least in the practical management of affairs, 
 successfully. It must have been one of the memorable sights 
 of the world to see him returning on horseback from a 
 solitary ride into the forest, while there fluttered about him, 
 pinned to his coat, the strips of paper on which he had scribbled 
 the results of his meditations. His days were little troubled, 
 and not overburdened with work, peaceful it is thought; 
 and now it was he wrote the treatise on the Fre^vmofJheJVill 
 ligon^hich.his.-farae-.chieflyjde$)eixds. 
 
 In 1757 his son-in-law, the Rev. Aaron Btur, died, and 
 Edwards was chosen by the Trustees of the College of New 
 J^sey to succeed him as.president. Edwards hesitated, stating 
 frankly to the Trustees his disabilities of health and learning, 
 but he finally accepted the offer. He left his family to follow 
 him later, and arrived in Princeton in January, 1758. Small- 
 pox was in the town, and the new president was soon infected. 
 His death took place on 22 March, in the fifty-fifth year, of 
 his age. His last recorded words were: "Trust in God and 
 ye need not fear." 
 
 The child was indeed father of the man, and it was peculiarly 
 fitting that he who from youth upward had been absorbed in 
 the idea of God should have died with the sacred word on his 
 lips. But what shall be said of the fearlessness — and there is 
 no reason to question the perfect sincerity of his spiritual joy 
 — ^in the breast of one who had made tfilBEffi^^iexhief'in&trunient 
 of appeal to, men and had spent his life in fighting for a dogma 
 which the genial author of The One-Hoss Shay thought no 
 decent man could hold without going crazy? To understand 
 that charge properly we must throw ourselves back into the 
 age in which Edwards lived. 
 
 Now the !EJdwardian theology was a part of the great deistic 
 debate which took its root in the everlasting question of the 
 
10 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 origin of evil in the worid. It was a three-cornered contest. The 
 Calvinists and the infidels both believed in a kind of determin- 
 ism, but differed over the nature of the determining cause. The 
 Calvinists found this cause in a personal Creator, omnipotent 
 and omniscient, to whom they did not scruple to carry up all 
 the evil as well as all the good of the universe — "c'est que 
 Dieu, " as Calvin himself states categorically, "non seulement a 
 preveu la cheute du premier homme, et en icelle la ruine de toute 
 sa posterite, mais qu'il I'a ainsi voulu." The deists, who at 
 this time formed the fighting line of the infidels, while verbally 
 acknowledging the existence of God and theorizing on the 
 nature of evil, virtually regarded the universe as a perfectly 
 working machine in which there was no room for a personal 
 governor or for real sin. To the Arminians, including the 
 bulk of the orthodox churchmen, the alliance between Cal- 
 vinism and deism seemed altogether to outweigh the differences. 
 As Daniel Whitby declares in the preface to his discoiu-ses 
 On the Five Points of Calvinism (1710; reprinted in America), 
 to hold God responsible for evil is to play directly into the 
 hands of the atheists. And so the age-old dispute between 
 Augustinian and Pelagian, and between Calvinist and Arminian, 
 took on a new life from the deistic controversy, and there 
 sprang up a literature which undertook to preserve the idea of 
 an omnipotent personal Creator and at the same time to 
 save his face, if the expression may be tolerated, by attribut- 
 ing to men complete free will and accountability for their 
 actions. 
 
 It was in answer to Whitby's book and one or two others 
 of the kind that Edwards composed his Freedom of the Will. 
 His argtiment has a psychological basis. In the Treatise 
 Cm£ermngJR£ligigu^^Affec^ he hM divided the soul into 
 two faculties: one called the undacstanding, by which it dis- 
 cerns, views, and judges things; the other called the heart 
 Pr-JZill?:„t>eing nothing else but the incHnation of the soul 
 towards or the disinclination from what is discerned and 
 judged by the tmderstanding. In the Freedom of the Will 
 he starts with Locke's statement that "the Will is perfectly 
 distinguished from Desire, which in the very same action may 
 have a quite contrary tendency from that which our Wills 
 set us upon." This theory Edwards analyses and rejects, and 
 
Edwards " 
 
 then proceeds to show that a man's desire and will are virtually 
 the same facility of the soul. It follows from this that the 
 win at any moment is determined by the strongest motive 
 acting upon the soul; we are free in so far as no obstacle is 
 presented to our willing in accordance with our inclination, 
 but our inclination is determined by what at any moment 
 seems to us good. In his attack on the common arguments for 
 the freedom of the will Edwards is magnificently victorious. 
 If the psychology by which the Arminians sought to relieve 
 God of the burden of evil in htunan life is pushed into a corner, 
 it shows itself as nothing more than this: Man's will is a 
 faculty absolutely, indeterminate in itself and entirely independ- 
 ent of his inclinations. When, therefore, a man errs, it is 
 because, the choice between evil with its attendant suffering 
 and good with its attendant happiness being presented to 
 him, the man, having full knowledge of the consequences and 
 being impelled by no momentary preponderance of the one 
 or the other from his innate disposition, deliberately and freely 
 chooses what is evil and painful. Such an account of human 
 action is monstrous, inconceivable; it offered an easy mark 
 for so sharp a logician as Edwards. 
 
 But whence arise the conditions by which a man's inclina- 
 tion is swayed in one direction or the other? Edwards carries 
 these unflinchingly up to the first cause, — that is, as a Christian, 
 to God. Berkeley had made the world to consist of ideas 
 evoked in the mind of man by the mind of God; Edwards 
 accepts the logical conclusion, and holds God responsible for 
 the inclination of the human will which depends on these 
 ideas. Calvin did not hesitate to attribute, in the bluntest 
 language, the source of evil to God's will, but at the same time 
 he warned men against intruding with their finite reason into 
 this "sanctuary of the divine wisdom." The mind of Ed- 
 wards could not rest while any problem seemed to him unsolved. 
 Confronted with the mystery of the divine permission of evU, 
 he undertakes to solve it. by applying his psychology of man 
 to the nature of God. (He himself would put it the other 
 way about: "Herein does very much consist that image of 
 God wherein he made man.") The passage in which he 
 develops this thesis, though generally overlooked by his 
 critics, is of the first importance: 
 
12 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 We must conceive of Him as influenced in the highest degree, by 
 that which, above all others, is properly a moral inducement, viz., 
 the moral good which He sees in such and such things: and therefore 
 He is, in the most proper sense, a moral Agent, the source of all 
 moral ability and Agency, the fountain and rule of all virtue and 
 moral good; though by reason of his being supreme over all, it is 
 not possible He should be under the influence of law or command, 
 promises or threatenings, .rewards or punishments, counsels or 
 warnings. The essential qualities of a moral Agent are in God, 
 in the greatest possible perfection; such as understanding, to per- 
 ceive the difference between moral good and evil; a capacity of 
 discerning that moral worthiness and demerit, by which some 
 things are praiseworthy, others deserving of blame and punishment; 
 and also a capacity of choice, and choice guided by understanding, 
 and a power of acting according to his choice or pleasure, and 
 being capable of doing those things which are in the highest sense 
 praiseworthy. 
 
 In other words, the will of God is precisely like the will of 
 man; it is merely the inclination, or moral inducement, to act 
 as he is influenced by external power. The fatal mystery of 
 good and evil, the true cause, lies above and beyond him; he 
 is, like ourselves, a channel, not the source. The only differ- 
 ence is that God has complete knowledge of the possibilities of 
 being, and therefore is not moved by threats and blind com- 
 mands but, immediately, by what Edwards elsewhere calls the 
 "moral necessity" of governing in accordance with the best of 
 the "different objects of choice that are proposed to the Divine 
 Understanding." By such a scheme God is really placed in 
 about such a, position as in the Leibnitzian continuation of 
 Laurentius Valla's Dialogue on Free Will and Providence, 
 where he is naively portrayed as looking upon an infinite variety 
 of worlds piled up, like cannon balls, in pyramidal form before 
 him, and selecting for creation that one which combines the 
 greatest possible amoimt of good with the least possible ad- 
 mixture of evil. 
 
 From this pretty sport of the imagination Edwards would 
 no doubt have drawn back in contempt, and indeed in his 
 ordinary language God is merely the supreme Cause, with- 
 out further speculation. One of the Leibnitzian inferences, 
 moreover, is utterly excluded from his philosopliy. He was no 
 
Edwards i3 
 
 optimist, was in fact the last man to infer that, because this 
 world is the best possible conceivable, evil is therefore a 
 small and virtually negligible part of existence. On the 
 contrary the whole animus of his teaching springs from a deep 
 and immediate hatred of evil in itself and apart from any 
 consideration of its cause. 
 
 "The thing," he says, "which makes sin hateful, is that by which 
 it deserves punishment; which is but the expression of hatred. . . . 
 Thus, for instance, ingratitude is hateful and worthy of dispraise, 
 according to common sense; not because something as bad, or worse 
 than ingratitude, was the cause that produced it; but because it is 
 hateful in itself, by its own inherent deformity." 
 
 To the charge of the Arminians that the doctrine of pre- 
 destination leaves no place for the punishment of sin, this is an 
 adequate and practical reply. But the consequences of this 
 principle of common sense are, in another way, peculiar and 
 even disastrous to the Edwardian theology. If we are right, 
 as we indubitably are right, in detesting evil in itself and where- 
 ever seen, and if we hold with Edwards that the.will of God, like 
 the will of man,- is merely the inclination towards.'the best 
 object presented to its choice, and there is no power either in 
 God or in man above the will, in what essential way, then, 
 does the act of God in creating a world mixed with evil differ 
 from the act of Judas in betraying God, and how are we relieved 
 from hating God for the evil of his work with the same sort of 
 hatred as that which we feel for Judas? Edwards had terrified 
 the people of Enfield with a picture of God treading down 
 sinners till their blood sprinkled his raiment, and exulting 
 in his wrath. The retort is obvious, and unspeakable. Nor 
 can he, or any other Predestinarian, escape the odium of 
 such a retort by hiding behind the necessity of things which all 
 men must, in one way or another, admit. There is a war 
 between the nations, he will say, and suddenly a bomb, drop- 
 ping upon a group of soldiers, themselves innocent of any 
 crime, horribly rends and mangles them. Here is a hideous 
 thing, and by no twisting of the reason can we avoid carrying 
 the responsibility for this evil back to the first great cause of all. 
 Shall we be held impious for saying metaphorically that the 
 blood of these soldiers is sprinkled on the raiment of that 
 
14 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Cause? — ^Aye, but the difference to us morally if we leave that 
 cause in its own vast obscurity, unapproached by our reason, 
 untouched by our pride; or if we make it into an image of 
 ourselves, composed only of understanding and inclination 
 like our own, and subject to oior reprobation as surely as to 
 our love! 
 
 Edwards had riddled and forever destroyed the arguments 
 for free will commonly employed by the Arminians ; is there no 
 alternative for the human reason save submission to his theo- 
 logical determinism or to fatalistic atheism ? 
 
 One way of escape from that dilemma is obvious and well 
 known. It is that which Dr. Johnson, with his superb faculty 
 of common sense, seized upon when the Edwardian doctrine 
 came up in conversation before him. "The only relief I had 
 was to forget it," said BosweU, who had read the book; and 
 Johnson closed the discussion with his epigram: "All theory 
 is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it. " That 
 is sufficient, no doubt, for the conduct of life; yet there is per- 
 haps another way of escape, which, if it does not entirely silence 
 the metaphysical difficulties, at least gives them a new ethical 
 turn. Twice in the course of his argument Edwards refers to 
 an unnamed Arminian^ who placed the liberty of the soul not 
 in the will itself, but in some power of suspending volition until 
 due time has elapsed for judging properly the various motives 
 to action. His reply is that this suspension of activity, being 
 itself an act of volition, merely throws back without annulling 
 the difficulty; and as the argument came to him, this refutation 
 is fairly complete. But a fuller consideration of the point at 
 issue might possibly indicate a way out of the dilemma of free 
 will and determinism into a morally satisfying form of dualism 
 within the soul of man himself. At least it can be said that the 
 looseness of the Arminian reasoning leaves an easier loophole 
 of escape into a human philosophy than does the rigid logic of 
 the Predestinarians. 
 
 Yet for all that, though we may foUow Edwards's logical 
 system to the breaking point, as we can follow every meta- 
 
 ' Edwards, it should seem, had immediately in mind the Essay on the Freedom 
 of Will in God and the Creature of Isaac Watts; but the notion had been discussed 
 at length by Locke {Essay II, xxi), and at an earlier date had been touched on 
 with great acumen by Joha Norris in his correspondence with Henry More. 
 
Edwards ^5 
 
 physical system, and though we may feel that, in his revulsion 
 from the optimism of the deists, he distorted the actual evil 
 of existence into a nightmare of the imagination, — yet for all 
 that, he remains one of the giants of the intellect and one of the 
 enduring masters of religious emotion. He had not the legal 
 and executive brain of Calvin, upon whose Institutes his scheme 
 of theology is manifestly based, but in subtle resourcefulness 
 of reasoning and still more in the scope of his spiritual psy- 
 chology he stands" above his predecessor. Few men have 
 studied Edwards without recognizing the force and honesty of 
 hig genius. 
 
2. Franklin 
 
 IN a respectful and indeed laudatory notice of Franklin for 
 The Edinburgh Review of July, 1806, Lord Jeffrey employed 
 the case of the ' ' uneducated tradesman of America " to sup- 
 port his contention that "regular education is unfavourable to 
 vigour or originality of understanding." Franklin attained his 
 eminence, so rtms the argument, without academical instruc- 
 tion, with only casual reading, without the benefit of associa- 
 tion with men of letters, and "in a society where there was no 
 relish and no encouragement for literature." This statement 
 of Franklin's educational opportunities is manifestly inadequate ; 
 but it so pleasantly flatters our long-standing pride in our self- 
 made men that we are loath to challenge it. The hero pre- 
 sented to the schoolboy and preserved in popular tradition 
 is still an "uneducated tradesman of America": a runaway 
 Boston printer walking up Market Street in Philadelphia 
 with his three puffy rolls; directing his fellow shopkeepers the 
 way to wealth; sharply inquiring of extravagant neighbours 
 whether they have not paid too much for their whistle; flying 
 his kite in a thunderstorm ; by a happy combination of curiosity 
 and luck making important contributions to science; and, to 
 add the last lustre to his name, by a happy combination of 
 industry and frugality making his fortune. This picturesque 
 and racy figure is obviously a product of provincial America, 
 the first great Yankee with all the strong lineaments of the 
 type: hardness, shrewdness, ingenuity, practical sense, frugality, 
 industry, self-reliance. The conception of the man here 
 suggested is perhaps sound enough so far as it goes, being de- 
 rived mainly from facts supplied by Franklin himself in the 
 one book through which he has secured an eternal life in Utera- 
 
 x6 
 
Franklin i7 
 
 ture. But the popular notion of his personality thus derived 
 is incomplete, because the Autobiography, ending at the year 
 1757, contains no record of the thirty-three years which 
 developed a competent provincial into an able, cultivated, and 
 imposing man of the world. 
 
 The FranHin now discoverable in the ten volumes of his 
 complete works is one of the most widely and thoroughly 
 cultivated men of his age. He had not, to be sure, a university 
 training, but he had what serves quite as well : sharp appetite 
 and large capacity for learning, abundance of books, extensive 
 travel, important participation in great events, and association 
 through a long term of years with the most eminent men of three 
 nations. In^tou£h_aS-4aimteiLasd_^ublisher with the classic 
 and current literature produced at home and imported from 
 abroad, he becomes in Philadelphia almost as good a "Queen 
 Anne's man" as Swift or Defoe. His scientific investigations 
 bring him into correspondence with feUow- workers in England, 
 France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Spain. Entering upon 
 public life, he_is_forced into co-operation or conflict wTEhrtiie 
 leading politicians, diplomats, and statesmen of Europe. In 
 his native land he has known men lilce Cotton Mather, White- 
 field, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin West, Ezra Stiles, Noah 
 Webster, Jay, Adams, Jefferson, and Washington. In Eng- 
 land, where his affections strike such deep root that he considers 
 establishing there hisjje rmanent ^ode, he is in relationship, 
 more or less intimate, with Mandeville, Paine, Priestley, Price, 
 Adam Smith, Robertson, Hume, Joseph Banks, Bishop Wat- 
 son, Bishop Shipley, Lord Kames, Lord Shelbume, Lord 
 Howe, Burke, and Chatham. Among Frenchmen he numbers 
 on his list of admiring friends Vergennes, Lafayette, Mirabeau, 
 Turgot, Quesnay, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Condorcet, 
 Lavoisier, Buffon, D'Alembert, Robespierre, and Voltaire. It 
 is absurd to speak of one who has been subjected to the moulding 
 of such forces as a product of the provinces. All Europe has 
 wrought upon and metamorphosed the Yankee printer. The 
 man whom Voltaire kisses is a statesman, a philosopher, a 
 friend of mankind, and a favourite son of the eighteenth century. 
 With no softening of his patriotic fibre or loss of his Yankee 
 tang, he has acquired all the common culture and most of the 
 master characteristics of the Age of Enlightenment — up to 
 
1 8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 the point where the French Revolution injected into it a drop 
 of madness: its emancipation from authority, its regard for 
 reason and nature, its social consciousness, its progressiveness, 
 its tolerance, its cosmopolitanism, and its bland philanthropy. 
 Now this man deserves his large place in our literary history 
 not so much by virtue of his writings, which had little immedi- 
 ate influence upon belles-lettres, as by virtue of his acts and 
 ideas, which helped liberate and liberalize America. To de- 
 scribe his most important work is to recite the story of his life. 
 In reviewing his own career Franklin does not dwell on 
 the fact that he who was to stand before kings had emerged 
 from a tallow chandler's shop. To his retrospective eye there 
 was nothing miraculous nor inexpHcable in his origin. On 
 the contrary he saw and indicated very clearly the sources of 
 his talents and the external impulses that gave them direction. 
 Born in Boston on 6 January, ,,1706, he inherited from his 
 long-lived parents, Josiah and Abiah Folger Franklin, a rugged 
 physical and mental constitution which hardly faltered through 
 the hard usage of eighty-four years. He recognized and 
 profited by his father's skill in drawing and music, his "mechan- 
 ical genius," his "understanding and solid judgment in 
 prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs," his 
 admirable custom of having at his table, "as often as he could, 
 some sensible friend or neighbour to converse with," always tak- 
 ing care "to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, 
 which might tend to improve the minds of his children." 
 Benjamin's formal schooling was begun when he was eight 
 years old and abandoned, together with the design of making 
 him a clergyman, when he was ten. He significantly remarks, 
 however, that he does not remember a time when he could 
 not read; and the subsequent owner of one of the best private' 
 libraries in America was as a mere child an eager collector 
 of books. For the two years following his removal from 
 school he was employed in his father's business. When he 
 expressed a firm disinclination to become a tallow chandler, 
 his father attempted to discover his natural bent by taking 
 him about to see various artisans at their work. Everything 
 that Franklin touched taught him something; and everything 
 that he learned, he used. Though his tour of the trades 
 failed to win him to any mechanical occupation, 
 
Franklin i9 
 
 it has ever since been a pleasure to me [he says] to see good work- 
 men handle their tools; and it has been useful to me, having learnt 
 so much by it as to be able to do little odd jobs myself in my 
 house . . . and to construct little machines for my experiments, 
 while the intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm 
 in my mind. 
 
 Throughout his boyhood and youth he apparently devoured 
 every book that he could lay hands upon. He went through 
 his father's shelves of "polemic divinity"; read abtmdantly in 
 Plutarch's Lives; acquired Bunyan's works "in separate little 
 volumes," which he later sold to buy Burton's Historical 
 Collections; received an impetus towards practical improve- 
 ments from Defoe's Essay upon Projects and an impetus 
 towards virtue from Mather's Essays to do Good. Before he 
 left Boston he had his mind opened to free speculation and 
 equipped for logical reasoning by Locke's Essay Concerning 
 Human Understanding, the Port Royal Art of Thinking, 
 Xenophon's Memorabilia, and the works of Shaftesbury and 
 Collins. 
 
 Franklin found the right avenue for a person of his "bqc^sh 
 JncUnation" when his brother James, returning from England 
 in 1717 with a press and letters, set up in Boston as a printer, 
 and proceeded to the publication of The Boston Gazette, 17 19, 
 and The New England Courant, 1721. j, Benjamin, a ged twelve , 
 became his_afgiren±ice. It can hardly be too much emphasized 
 that this was reaUy an inspiring "job." It made him stand 
 at a very early age full in the wind of local political and theo- 
 logical controversy. It forced him to use all his childish stock 
 of learning and daily stimulated him to new acquisitions. It 
 put him in touch with other persons, young and old, of 
 bookish inclination. They lent him books which kindled his 
 poetic fancy to the pitch of composing occasional ballads 
 in the Grub Street style, which his brother printed, and had 
 him hawk about town. His father discountenanced these 
 effusions, declaring that "verse-makers were generally beg- 
 gars"; but coming upon his son's private experiments in 
 prose, he applied the right incentive by pointing out where the 
 work "fell short in elegance of expression, in method, and in 
 perspicuity." "About this time," says Franklin in a familiar 
 paragraph, "I met with an odd volume of the Spectator." 
 
20 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Anticipating Dr. Johnson's advice by half a century, he gave 
 his days and nights to painstaking study and imitation of 
 Addison till he had mastered that style — "familiar but not 
 coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious" — ^which several 
 generations of English essayists have sought to attain. AH the 
 world has heard how FranTcHn's career as a writer began 
 with an anonymous contribution stealthily slipped under the 
 door of his brother's printing-house at night, ^.nd in the morning 
 approved for publication by his brother's circle of "writing 
 friends." Professor Smyth ^ inclined to identify this contri- 
 bution with the first of fourteen humorous papers with Latin 
 mottoes signed "Silence Dogood, " which appeared fortnightly 
 in The New England Courant from March to October, 1722. 
 In this year Benjamin was in charge of the Courant during his 
 brother's imprisonment for printing matter offensive to the 
 Assembly; and when, on repetition of the offence, the master 
 was forbidden to publish his journal, it was continued in the 
 name of the apprentice. In this situation James became 
 jealous and overbearing, and Benjamin became insubordinate. 
 When it grew evident that there was not room enough in Boston 
 for them both, the younger brother left his indentures behind, 
 and in 1723 made his memorable flight to Philadelphia. 
 
 Shortly after his arrival in the Quaker city, he found employ- 
 ment with the second printer in Philadelphia, Samuel Keimer, 
 a curious person who kept the Mosaic law. In 1 724, encouraged 
 by the facUe promises of Governor Keith, F9ai5diil went to 
 England in the expectation that letters of credit and recom- 
 mendation from his patron would enable him to procure a 
 printing outfit. Left in the lurch by the governor, he served 
 for something ovgr a year in two great London printing-houses, 
 kept free-thinking and rather loose company, and, in refutation 
 of Wollaston's Religion of Nature, upon which he happened to 
 be engaged in the composing-room, published in 1725 his 
 suppressed tract On Liberty and Necessity. .Returning to 
 Philadelphia in 1726, he re-entered the employ of Keimer; in 
 
 ' The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Collected and edited by Albert Henry 
 Smyth. New York, 1907. Vol. 11, p. I. The Dogood Papers were claimed by 
 Franklin in the first draft of his Autobiography, and they have been long ac- 
 credited to him; but they were first included in his collected works by Professor 
 Smyth, 
 
Franklin 21 
 
 1728 formed a brief partnership with Hugh Meredith; and in 
 1730 rnarned and set up for himself. In 1728 he founded the 
 famous Junto Club for reading, debating, and reforming the 
 world — an institution which developed into a powerful organ 
 of political influence. Shortage of money in the province 
 prompted him to the composition of his Modest Inquiry into 
 the Nature and Necessity of Paper Currency (1729), a service 
 for which his friends in the Assembly rewarded him by employ- 
 ing him to print the money — "a very profitable job and a great 
 help to me." Forestalled by Keimer in a project for launching 
 a newspaper, Franklin contributed in 1728-9 to the rival 
 journal, published by Bradford, a series of sprightly "Busy- 
 Body" papers in the vein of the periodical essayists. Keimer 
 was forced to sell out; and Franklin acquired from him the 
 paper known from 2 October, 1729, as TTie Pennsylvania Gazette. 
 To this he contributed, besides much miscellaneous matter, 
 such pieces as the Dialogue between Philocles and Horatio con- 
 cerning Virtue and Pleasure, the letters of "Anthony Afterwit" 
 and "Alice Addertongue," A Meditation on a Quart Mug, and 
 A Witch Trial at Mount Holly. In 1732 he began to issue the 
 almanacs containing the wit and wisdom of "Poor Richaxd," 
 a homely popular philosopher, who is only the incarnation 
 of common sense, and who is consequently not, as has been 
 carelessly assumed, to be identified with his creator. 
 
 By the time he was thirty Franklin gave promise of becom- 
 ing, by a gradual expansion of his useful activities, the leading 
 Pennsylvanian. Ini 236_he_was chosen clerk of the General 
 Assembly, and in the following year was appointed postmaster . 
 of Philadelphia. He made both these offices useful to his 
 printing business and to his newspaper. In compensation, 
 he used his newspaper and his business influence to support 
 his measures for municipal improvements, among the objects 
 of which may be mentioned street-sweeping, paving, a regular 
 police force, a fire company, a hospital, and a public library. 
 As his business prospered, he expanded it by forming partner- 
 ships with his promising workmen and sending them with 
 printing-presses into other colonies. In 1741 he experimented 
 with a monthly publication. The General Magazine and Histori- 
 cal Chronicle for all the British Colonies in America; tlus monthly^ 
 notable as the second issued in America, expired with the 
 
22 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 sixth number. In 1742 he, invented the stove of which he 
 published a description in 1744 as An Account of the New 
 Invented Pennsylvanian Fire Places. In 1743 Jie^ drew., up, 
 proposals for an academy which eventually became the Uni- 
 versity of Pennsylvania, and in 1744 he founded the American 
 Philosophical Society. In 1 746 he witnessed Spence's electrical 
 experiments in Boston, bought the apparatus, and repeated 
 the experiments in Philadelphia, where interest in the new 
 science was further stimulated that year by a present of a 
 Leyden jar given to the Library Company by the English 
 experimenter Peter CoUinson. To this English friend Franklin 
 made extended reports of his earlier electrical investigations 
 in the form of letters which CoUinson published in London in 
 1 75 1 with the title Experiments' and Observations in Electricity, 
 made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin. 
 In 1752 he showed the identity of lightning and electricity 
 byhis kite experiment, and invented the lightning rod. In 
 1748, being assured of a competency, he had tuiiied over his 
 business to his foreman David Hall, and purposed devoting 
 the rest of his life to philosophical inquiries. But he had 
 inextricably involved himself in the affairs of his community, 
 which, as soon as it found him at leisure, "laid hold" of, him, 
 as he says, for its own purposes — "every part of the civil 
 government, and almost at the same time, imposing some 
 duty upon me." He was made a justice of the peace, member 
 of the common council, and alderman, and was chosen burgess to 
 represent the city of Philadelphia in the General Assembly. 
 In 1753 he was appointed jointly with William Hunter to 
 exercise the office of postmaster-general , of .America. In 
 1754 as a member of the Pennsylvania commission he laid 
 before the colonial congress at Albany the "Plan of Union" 
 adopted by the commissioners. In 1755 he displayed remark- 
 able energy, ability, and public spirit in providing transporta- 
 tion for General Braddock's Ul-fated expedition against the 
 French; and in the following year he himself took command 
 of a volunteer military organization for the protection of the 
 north-west frontier. In 1757 he was sent to England to present 
 the long-standing grievances of. the Pennsylvania Assembly 
 against the proprietors for obstructing legislation- designed 
 to throw upon them a fair share of the expense of government. 
 
Franklin . 23 
 
 Though Franklin's political mission was not wholly success- 
 ful, his r esidenc e in England from 1757 to 1762. was highly 
 profitable to him. It developed his talent as a' negotiator of 
 public business with strangers; it enabled him to consider 
 British colonial policies from English points of view; and it 
 afforded him many opportunities for general self-improvement. 
 After a fruitless effort to obtain satisfaction from the repre- 
 sentatives of the Penn family, dismissing as impractical the 
 hope of procuring for Pennsylvania a royal charter, he appealed 
 to the Crown to exempt the Assembly from the influence of 
 proprietary instructions and to make the proprietary estates 
 bear a more equitable proportion of the taxes. To get the 
 Assembly's case before the public, he collaborated with an 
 unknown hand on An Historical Review of the Constitution and 
 Government of Pennsylvania, published in 1759. The result 
 was a compromise which in the circumstances he regarded as 
 a victory. His interest in the wider questions of imperial 
 policy he exhibited in 1760 by aspersing the advocates of a 
 hasty and inconclusive peace with France in his stinging little 
 skit, Of the Meanes of disposing the Enemies to Peace,^ which he 
 presented as an extract from the work of a Jesuit historian. 
 In 1760, also, he was joint author with Richard Jackson of a 
 notably influential argtunent for the retention of Canada, 
 The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her 
 Colonies; to which was appended his Observations Concerning 
 the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. In the 
 intervals of business, he sat for his portrait, attended the 
 theatre, played upon the armonica, experimented with electri- 
 city and heat, made a tour of the Low Countries, visited the 
 principal cities of England and Scotland, received honorary 
 degrees from the universities, and enjoyed the society of CoUin- 
 son, Priestley, Price, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and 
 Kames. He returned to America in the latter part of 1762, 
 In 1763 he made a 1600-mile tour of the northern provinces 
 to inspect the postoffices. In the following year he was 
 again in the thick of Pennsylvania politics, working with the 
 party in the Assembly which sought to have the proprietary 
 government of the province replaced by a royal charter. In 
 support of this movement he published in 1764 his Cool Thoughts 
 ' See Writings, ed. Smyth, Vol. iv, pp. 89-95. 
 
H Chapters of American Literature 
 
 on the Present Situation of our Public Affairs and his Preface 
 to the Speech of Joseph Galloway, a brilliant and blasting indict- 
 ment of the proprietors, Thomas and Richard Penn. 
 
 In the fall of 1764 Franklin was sent again to England by 
 the Assembly to petition for a royal charter and to express the 
 Assembly's views with regard to Grenville's Stamp Act, then 
 impending. On 11 July, 1765, after the obnoxious measure 
 had been passed by an overwhelming majority, Franklin wrote 
 to Charles Thomson : 
 
 Depend upon it, my good nefghbour, I took every step in my 
 power to prevent the passing of the Stamp Act. . . . But the Tide 
 was too strong against us. The nation was provoked by American 
 Claims of Independence, and all Parties joined in resolving by this 
 act to settle the point. We might as well have hindered the sun's 
 setting. 
 
 This letter and one or two others of about the same date 
 express a patient submission to the inevitable. As soon, 
 however, as Franklin was ftdly apprised of the fierce flame of 
 opposition which the passage of the act had kindled in the 
 colonies, he caught the spirit of his constituents and threw 
 himself sternly into the struggle for its repeal. In 1766 he 
 underwent his famous examination before the House of Com- 
 mons on the attitude of the colonies towards the collection 
 of the new taxes. The report of this examination, which 
 was promptly published, is one of the most interesting and 
 impressive pieces of dramatic dialogue produced in the eight- 
 eenth century. After the repeal, Franklin received recognition 
 at home in the shape of new duties: in 1768 he was ap- 
 pointed agent for Georgia; in 1769, for New Jersey; in 1770, for 
 Massachusetts. In the summer of 1766 he visited Germany; 
 the following summer he visited Paris; and he was in France 
 again for a month in 1769. His pen in these years was em- 
 ployed mainly in correspondence and in communications to the 
 newspapers, in which he pointedly set forth the causes which 
 threatened a permanent breach' between the mother country 
 and the colonies. In 1773 he published in The Gentleman's 
 Magazine two little masterpieces of irony which Swift might 
 have been pleased to sign: An Edict by the King of Prussia 
 and Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small 
 
Franklin 25 
 
 One. In 1774, in consequence of his activity in exposing 
 Governor Hutchinson's proposals for the military intimidation 
 of Massachusetts, Franklin was subjected before the Privy 
 Council to virulent and scurrilous abuse from Attorney- 
 General Wedderbum. This onslaught it was, accentuated 
 by his dismissal from the office of postmaster-general, which 
 began to curdle in Franklin his sincere long-cherished hope of 
 an ultimate reconciliation. It is a curiously ominous coinci- 
 dence that ia this year of his great humiliation he sent with a 
 letter of recommendation to his son-in-law in Philadelphia one 
 Thomas Paine, an obscure Englishman of whiggish temper, 
 two years later to become the fieriest advocate of American 
 independence. In disgrace with the Court, Franklin lingered 
 in England to exhaust the last possibilities of amicable adjust- 
 ment : petitioning the king, conferring with Burke and Chatham, 
 and curiously arranging for secret negotiations with the go- 
 betweens of the Ministry over the chessboard of Lord Howe's 
 sister. He sailed from England in March, 1775, half -convinced 
 that the Ministry were bent upon provoking an open rebellion. 
 When he arrived in Philadelphia, he heard what had happened 
 at Lexington and Concord. On 5 July, 1775, he wrote a letter 
 to an English friend of thirty years' standing, William Strahan, 
 then a member of Parliament; it was shortened like a Roman 
 sword and sharpened to this point: 
 
 You and I were long Friends: — You are now my Enemy, — 
 and I am 
 
 Yoiurs, 
 
 B. Franklin. 
 
 ' As Franklin was sixty-nine years old in 1775, he might 
 fairly have retreated to his library, and have left the burden 
 of the future state to younger hands. He had hardly set foot 
 on shore, however, before the Pennsylvania Assembly elected 
 him 4^gate to the first .CgntineataL Congress, where his 
 tried sagacity was enlisted in organizing the country's political, 
 economic, and military resources for the great conflict. On 
 7 July, 1775, the old man wrote to Priestley: 
 
 My time was never more fully employed. In the morning 
 at six, I am at the Committee of Safety, appointed by the Assembly 
 
26 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 to put the province in a state of defence; which committee holds 
 till near nine, when I am at the Congress, and that sits till, after 
 four in the afternoon. 
 
 In the period slightly exceeding a year previous to his 
 departure for France, he served on innumerable committees of 
 the Congress, was made Postmaster-General of the colonies, 
 presided over the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania, 
 was sent on a mission to Canada, assisted in drafting the 
 Declaration of Independence, and signed it. 
 
 In October, 1776, he sailed for France on a commission of the 
 Congress to negotiate a -treaty of alliance, which was concluded 
 in February, 1778, after the surrender of Burgoyne had inspired 
 confidence in the prospects of the American arms. In Septem- 
 ber, 1778, he was appointed plenipotentiary to the Court of 
 France. Clothed with large powers, he transacted in the 
 next few years an almost incredible amount of difficult busi- 
 ness for his country. He obtained from the French government 
 the ro^gated loans which made possible the carrying on of a 
 long war; he made contracts for clothing and ammunition; 
 he dissuaded or recommended to Congress foreign applicants 
 for commissions in the colonial army; he arranged exchanges 
 of prisoners-of-war; he equipped and to some extent directed 
 the operations of privateers; he supplied information to many 
 Europeans emigrating to America ; he negotiated treaties of amity 
 and commerce with Sweden and Prussia. With all this engross- 
 ing business'bn his hands, he found time to achieve an immense 
 personal popularity. He was not merely respected as a 
 masterly diplomat; he was lionized and idolized as the great 
 natural philosopher, the august champion of liberty, and the 
 friend of humanity. In the press of public affairs, never 
 losing interest in scientific matters, he served on a royal French 
 commission to investigate Mesmerism; sent to his foreign 
 correspondents ingenious geological and meteorological conjec- 
 tures; and transmitted to the Royal Society reports on French 
 experiments in aeronautics. He entertained with a certain 
 lavishness at his house in Passy; and he was a frequent diner- 
 out, adored for his wit and good humour in the intimate coteries 
 of Mme. Helvetius and Mme. Brillon. He set up for the 
 amusement of himself and his friends a private press in Passy, 
 
Franklin 27 
 
 on which he printed a number of bagatdles of an accomplished 
 and charming levity: The Ephemera (i^jS), The Morals of Chess 
 (i 779) , The Whistle (i 779) , The Dialogue between Franklin and the 
 Gout (1780.) In 1784 he resumed work on his unfinished auto- 
 biography, and published Advice to such as would remove to 
 America and Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America. 
 In his residence in France he began seriously to feel the siege 
 of gout, the stone, and old age. In 1781, in reply to repeated 
 supplications for leave to go home and die. Congress had 
 appointed him a member of the commission to negotiate .ajreaty 
 of peace between England and the United States. This last 
 great task was completed in 1785. In midsummer of that 
 year he said a regretful farewelf to his affectionate French 
 friends, received the king's portrait set in four hundred dia- 
 monds, and in one of the royal litters was carried down to his 
 point of embarkation at Havre de Grace. 
 
 Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in September, 1785, re- 
 solved to set his house in order. He was soon made aware 
 that, like the hero in The Conquest of Granada, he had not 
 "leisure yet to die." He was overwhelmed with congratula- 
 tions; or, as he put it with characteristic modesty of phrase in 
 a letter to his English friend Mrs. Hewson: "I had the 
 happiness of finding my family well, and of being very kindly 
 received by my Country folk." In the month after his arrival 
 he was elected Pr^ident_^ofjth§ Statg_of„E^irisylvania; and the 
 honour was thrust upon him again in 1786 and in 1787. In a 
 letter of 14 November, 1785, he says: 
 
 I had not firmness enough to resist the unanimous desire of 
 my country folks; and I find myself harnessed again in their ser- 
 vice for another year. They engrossed the prime of my life. They 
 have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to pick my bones. 
 
 In 1787 he was chosen a delegate to. the convention to frame 
 tjje Constituiion pi.liie.jQnited States — an instrument which he 
 deemed not perfect, yet as near perfection as the joint wisdom 
 of any numerous body of men could bring it, handicapped by 
 "their prejudices, their passions, their local interests, and their 
 selfish views." In 1789, as President of the Abolition Society, 
 Franklin signed a memorial against slavery which was laid 
 before the House of Representatives; and on 23 March, 1790, 
 
28 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 less than a month before his death, he wrote for The Federal 
 Gazette an ironical justification of the enslaving of Christians by 
 African Mohammedans — quite in the vein of the celebrated 
 Edict of the King of Prussia. As the shadows thickened about 
 him, he settled his estate, paid his compliments to his friends, 
 and departed, on the seventeenth day of April, 1790, in his 
 eighty-fifth year. 
 
 In the matter of religion Franklin was distinctly a pro- 
 duct of the eighteenth-century enlightenment. He took his 
 direction in boyhood and early manhood from deistical writers 
 like Pope, Collins, and Shaftesbury. At various periods 
 of his life he drew up articles of belief, which generally included 
 recognition of one God, the providential government of the 
 world, the immortality of the soul, and divine justice. To 
 profess faith in as much religion as this he found emotionally 
 gratifying, socially expedient, and conformable to the common 
 sense of mankind. He would have subscribed without hesita- 
 tion to both the positive and negative dogmas of the religion 
 civile formulated by Rousseau in the Contrat Social. In his 
 later years he was in sympathetic relations with Paine, Price, 
 and Priestley. He was, however, of a fortunately earlier 
 generation than these English "heretics," and certain other 
 circumstances enabled him to keep the temper of his heterodoxy 
 sweet while theirs grew acidulous, and to walk serenely in 
 ways which for them were embittered by the odium theologicum. 
 His earlier advent upon the eighteenth-century scene made 
 possible the unfolding and comfortable settlement of his 
 religious ideas before deism had clearly allied itself with 
 political radicalism and edged its sword for assault upon in- 
 spired Bible and established church as powers federate with 
 political orthodoxy in upholding the ancient regime. Among 
 the diverse denominational bodies in Pennsylvania his perfectly 
 genuine tolerance and his unfailing tact helped him to maintain 
 a friendly neutrality between parties which were far from 
 friendly. Like Lord Chesterfield, he sincerely believed in the 
 decency and propriety of going to church; and he went himself 
 when he could endure the preachers. He advised his daughter 
 to go constantly, "whoever preaches." He made pecimiary 
 contributions to all the leading denominations in Philadelphia; 
 respectfully acknowledged the good features of each; and 
 
Franklin 29 
 
 undertook to unite in his own creed the common and, as 
 he thought, the essential features of all. Man of the world 
 as he was, he enjoyed the warm friendship of good Quakers, 
 good Presbyterians, Whitefield, the Bishop of St. Asaph, and 
 his French abbes. His abstention froiR theological xwntroves^- 
 was doubtless due in part to a shrewd regard for his own interest 
 and influence as a business man and a public servant; but it 
 was due in perhaps equal measure to his profound indifference 
 to metaphysical questions unrelated to practical conduct. 
 "Emancipated" in childhood and unmolested in the independ- 
 ence of his mind, he reached maturity without that acrimony 
 of free thought incident to those who attain independence 
 late and have revenges to take. He was consistently opposed 
 to the imposition of religious tests by constitutional authority. 
 But in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 he offered a 
 motion in favour of holding daily prayers before the delibera- 
 tions of the assembly, for, as he declared, "the longer I live, 
 the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs 
 in the Affairs of Men." With his progress in eminence and, 
 years, he seems to have been somewhat strengthened in Cicero's | 
 conviction that so puissant a personality as his own could not 1 
 utterly perish, and he derived a kind of classical satisfaction I 
 from the reflection that this feeling was in concurrence with the 1 
 common opinions of mankind. A few weeks before his death ] 
 he admitted, in a remarkable letter to Ezra Stiles, a doubt as 
 to the' divinity of Jesus; but he remarked with his characteristic 
 tranquillity that he thought it "needless to busy myself with 
 it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the 
 Truth with less Trouble." Not elate, like Emerson, yet 
 quite unawed, this imitator of Jesus and Socrates walked in 
 this world and prepared for his ease in Zion. 
 
 Franklin set himself in youth to the study of "moral perfec- 
 tion, " and the work which only great public business prevented 
 his leavingas his literary monument was to have been a treatise 
 on the "art of virtue." His merits, however, in both the 
 theory and practice of the moral life have been seriously called 
 in question. It is alleged that his standards were low and that 
 he did not live up to them. It must be conceded on the one 
 hand that he had a natural son who became governor of New 
 Jersey, and on the other hand that industry and frugality, 
 
30 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 which most of us place among the minor, he placed among the 
 major virtues. When one has referred the "errata" of his 
 adolescence to animal spirits, "free thinking," and bad com- 
 pany; and when one has explained certain laxities of his 
 maturity by alluding to the indulgent temper of the French 
 society in which he then lived; one may as weU candidly admit 
 that St. Francis made chastity a more conspicuous jewel in his 
 crown of virtues than did Dr. Franklin. And when one has 
 pointed out that the prudential philosophy of Poor Richard's 
 Almanac was rather a collection of popular wisdom than an 
 original contribution; and when one has called attention to the 
 special reasons for magnifying economic virtues in a community 
 of impecunious colonists and pioneers; one may as well frankly 
 acknowledge that there is nothing in the precepts of the great 
 printer to shake a man's egotism like the shattering paradoxes 
 of the Beatitudes nor like the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas 
 Browne to make his heart elate. Franklin had nothing of what 
 pietists call a "realizing sense" of sin or of the need for mystical 
 regeneration and justification — faculties so richly present in 
 his contemporary Jonathan Edwards. His cool calculating 
 reason, having surveyed the fiery battleground of the Puritan 
 conscience, reported that things are properly forbidden because 
 hurtful, not hurtful because forbidden. Guided by this 
 utilitarian principle, he simplified his reHgion and elaborated 
 his morality. His system included much more than maxims 
 of thrift and prudent self-regard, and to insinuate that he set 
 up wealth as the summum bonum is a sheer libel. He com- 
 mended diligence in business as the means to a competency; 
 he commended a competency as a safeguard to virtue; and he 
 commended virtue as the prerequisite to happiness. The 
 temple that he reared to Moral Perfection was built of thirteen 
 stones: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, indus- 
 try, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, 
 chastity, and humility — the last added on the advice of a 
 Quaker. He wrought upon the structure with the method 
 of a monk and he recorded his progress with the regularity of a 
 bookkeeper. The presiding spirit in the edifice, which made it 
 something more than a private oratory, was a rational and 
 active benevolence towards his fellow-mortals in every quarter 
 of the earth. The wide-reaching friendliness in Franklin may 
 
Franklin 31 
 
 be distinguished in two ways from the roseate humanitarian 
 enthusiasm in the Savoyard Vicar. It was not begotten by a 
 theory of "natural goodness" nor fostered by millennial 
 expectations, but was bom of sober experience with the utility 
 of good will in establishing satisfactory and fruitful relations 
 among men. It found expression not in rhetorical periods 
 but in numberless practical means and measures for ameliorat- 
 ing the human lot. By no mystical intuition but by the com- 
 mon light of reason the "prudential philosopher" discovered 
 and acted upon the truth that the greatest happiness that can 
 come to a man in this world is to devote the full strength 
 of body and mind to the service of his feUow-men. Judged 
 either by his principles or by his performance, Franklin's moral 
 breadth and moral elevation have been absiardly under- 
 estimated. 
 
 It is perhaps in the field of politics that Franklin exhibits 
 the most marked development of his power and his vision. 
 A realistic inductive thinker, weUrversed in the rudiments of his 
 subject long before the revolutionary theorists handled it, 
 he was not rendered by any preconception of abstract rights 
 indocile to the lessons of his immense political experience. He 
 formulated his conceptions in the thick of existing conditions, 
 and always with reference to what was expedient and possible 
 as well as to what was desirable. He served his apprenticeship 
 in the Philadelphia Junto Club, which at its inception was 
 little more than a village improvement society, but which threw 
 out branches till it became a power in the province, and a 
 considerable factor in the affairs of the colonies. In this 
 association he learned the importance of co-operation, mastered 
 the tactics of organization, practised the art of getting pro- 
 paganda afoot, and discovered the great secret of converting 
 private desires into public demands. In proposing in 1754 
 his plan for a union of the colonies he was applying to larger 
 ujiits the principle of co-operative action by which he had 
 built up what we might call to-day his "machine" in Pennsyl- 
 vania. Writers like Milton and Algernon Sidney had re- 
 enforced his natural inclination towards liberal forms of govern- 
 ment. But he had in too large measure the instincts and the 
 ideas of a leader, and he had too much experience with the 
 conflicting prejudices and the resultant compromises of popular 
 
32 chapters of American Literature 
 
 assemblies, to feel any profound reverence for the "collective 
 wisdom ' ' of the people. ' ' If all officers appointed by governors 
 were always men of merit," he wrote in his Dialogue Concern- 
 ing the Present State of Affairs in Pennsylvania, "it would be 
 wrong ever to hazard a popular election." That his belief 
 in popular representation was due as much to his sense of its 
 political expediency as to his sense of its political justice is 
 suggested by a passage in his letter on the imposition of direct 
 taxes addressed to Governor Shirley, i8 December, 1754: "In 
 matters of general concern to the people, and especially where 
 burthens are to be laid upon them, it is of use to consider, as well 
 what they wUl be apt to think and say, as what they ought to 
 think." His sojourn in England widened his horizons, but not 
 beyond the bounds of his nationality. As agent, he felt himself 
 essentially a colonial Englishman pleading for the extension 
 of English laws to British subjects across, the sea, and playing 
 up to the Imperial policy of crushing out the colonizing and 
 commercial rivalry of France. The ultimate failure of his 
 mission of reconciliation effected no sudden transformation 
 of his political ideas; it rather overwhelmed him with disgust 
 at the folly, the obstinacy, and the corruption rampant among 
 English politicians of the period. He returned to the arms 
 of the people because he had been hurled from the arms of the 
 king; and he embraced their new principles because he was 
 sure that they could not be worse applied than his old ones. 
 His respect for the popular wUl was inevitably heightened by 
 his share in executing it in the thrilling days when he was 
 helping his fellow-countrymen to declare their independence, 
 and was earning the superb epigraph of Turgot: Eripuit 
 fulmen coelo, sceptrumgue tyrannis. His official residence in 
 France completely dissolved his former antagonism to that 
 country. In the early stages of the conflict his wrath was bitter 
 enough towards England, but long before it was over he had 
 taken the ground of radical pacificism, reiterating his conviction 
 that "there is no good war and no bad peace." He who had 
 financed the Revolution had seen too much non-productive 
 expenditure of moral and physical capital to believe in the 
 appeal to arms. If nations required enlargement of their 
 territories, it was a mere matter of arithmetic, he contended, 
 to show that the cheapest way was purchase. "Justice," he 
 
Franklin 33 
 
 declared, "is as strictly due between neighbour Nations as 
 between neighbour Citizens, . . . and a Nation that makes 
 an unjust War, is only a great Gang." So far as he was able, he 
 mitigated the afflictions of noncombatants. He proposed by 
 international law to exempt from peril fishermen and farmers 
 and the productive workers of the world. He ordered the 
 privateersmen under his control to safeguard the lives and 
 property of explorers and men of science belonging to the enemy 
 country; and he advocated for the future the abolition of the 
 custom of commissioning privateers. In the treaty which he 
 negotiated with Prussia he actually obtained the incorporation 
 of an article so restricting the "zone of war" as to make a war 
 between Prussia and the United States under its. terms virtually 
 impossible. His diplomatic intercourse in Europe and his 
 association with the Physiocrats had opened his eyes to the 
 common interests of all pacific peoples and to the inestimable 
 advantages of a general amity among the nations. His ulti- 
 mate political ideal included nothing short of the welfare and the 
 commercial federation of the world. To that extent he was a 
 believer in "majority interests." It may be further said that 
 his political development was marked by a growing mastery 
 of the art of dealing with men and by a steady approximation 
 of his political to his personal morality. 
 
 For the broad humanity of Franklin's political conceptions 
 undoubtedly his interest in the extension of science was partly 
 responsible. As a scientific investigator he had long been a 
 citizen of the world ; and for him not the least bitter consequence 
 of the war was that it made a break in the intellectual brother- 
 hood of man. If he had not been obliged to supply the army 
 of Washington with guns and ammunition, he might have been 
 engaged in the far more congenial task of supplying the British 
 Academy with food for philosophical discussion. He could 
 not but resent the brutal antagonisms which had rendered 
 intellectual co-operation with his English friends impossible, 
 and which had frustrated his cherished hope of devoting his 
 ripest years to philosophical researches. A natural endow- 
 ment he certainly possessed which would have qualified him 
 in happier circumstances for even more distinguished service 
 than he actually performed in extending the frontiers of 
 knowledge. He had the powerfully developed curiosity of the 
 
34 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 explorer and the Inventor, ever busily prying into the causes 
 of things, ever speculating upon the consequences of novel 
 combinations. His native inquisitiveness had been stimulated 
 by a young civilization's manifold necessities, mothering mani- 
 fold inventions, and had been supplemented by a certain moral 
 and idealizing passion for improvement. The practical nature 
 of many of his devices, his interest in agriculture and naviga- 
 tion, his preoccupation with stoves and chimneys, the image 
 of him firing the gas of ditch water or pouring oil on troubled 
 waves, and the celebrity of the kite incident, rather tend to 
 fix an impression that he was but a tactful empiricist and a 
 lucky dilettante of discovery. It is interesting in this connection 
 to note that he confesses his lack of patience for verification. 
 His prime scientific faculty, as he himself felt, was the imagi- 
 nation which bodies forth the shapes and relations of things 
 unknown — ^which constructs the theory and the hypothesis. 
 His mind was a teeming warren of hints and suggestions. He 
 loved rather to start than to pursue the hare. Happily what 
 he deemed his excessive penchant for forming hypotheses was 
 safeguarded by his perfect readiness to hear all that could 
 be urged against them. He wished not his view but truth 
 to prevail — ^which explains the winsome cordiality of his 
 demeanour towards other savants. His unflagging correspond- 
 ence with investigators, his subscription to learned publica- 
 tions, his active membership in philosophical societies, and his 
 enterprise in founding schools and academies all betoken his 
 prescience of the wide domain which science had to conquer 
 and of the necessity for co-operation in the task of subduing 
 it. Franklin was so far a Baconian that he sought to avoid 
 unfruitful speculation and to unite contemplation and action 
 in a stricter embrace for the generation of knowledge useful to 
 man. But in refutation of any charge that he was a narrow- 
 minded utilitarian and lacked the liberal views and long faith 
 of the modern scientific spirit may be adduced his stunning 
 retort to a query as to the usefulness of the balloons then on 
 trial in Prance: "What is the use of a new-bom baby?" 
 
 Of Franklin^, style the highest praise is to declare that it 
 reveals the mental and moral qualities of the man himself. 
 It is the flexible style of a writeT^whoiias-teamed Ihe craft of 
 expression by studying and imitating the virtues of many 
 
Franklin 35 
 
 masters: the playful charm of Addison, the trenchancy of 
 Swift, the concreteness of Defoe, the urbanity of Shaftesbury, 
 the homely directness of Bunyan's dialogue, the unadorned 
 vigour of TiUotson, and the epigrammatic force of Pope. His 
 mature manner, however, is imitative of nothing but the 
 thoroughly disciplined movement of a versatile mind which 
 has never known a moment of languor or a moment of un- 
 controllable excitement. Next to his omnipresent vitality, 
 his most notable characteristic is the clearness which results 
 from a complete preliminary vision of what is to be said, and 
 which in a young hand demands deliberate preconsideration. 
 To Franklin, the ordering of his matter must have become 
 eventually a light task as, with incessant passing to and fro 
 in his experience and with the daily habit of epistolary com- 
 munication, he grew as familiar with his intellectual terrain as 
 an old field marshal with the map of Europe. For the writing 
 of his later years is marked not merely by clearness and force 
 but also by the sovereign ease of a man who has long under- 
 stood the interrelations of his ideas and has ceased to make 
 revolutionary discoveries in any portion of his own nature. His 
 occasional wrath does not fluster him but rather intensifies 
 his lucidity, clarifies his logic, and brightens the ironical smile 
 which accompanies the thrust of his wit. The "decent plain- 
 ness and manly freedom" of his ordinary tone — notes which 
 he admired in the writings of his maternal grandfather Peter 
 Folger — rise in parts of his official correspondence to a severity 
 of decorum; for there is a trace of the senatorial in the man, 
 the dignity of antique Rome. He is seldom too hurried, even 
 in a private letter, to gratify the ear by the turning and cadence 
 of sentence and phrase; and one feels that the harmony of his 
 periods is the right and predestined vesture of his essential 
 blandness and suavity of temper. His stylistic drapery, how- 
 ever, is never so smoothed and adjusted as to obscure the 
 sinewy vigour of his thought. His manner is steadily in 
 the service of his matter. He is adequate, not copious; for 
 his moral "frugality and industry" prompt him to eschew, 
 surplusage and to make his texture firm. His regard for 
 purity of diction is classical; he avoids vulgarity; he despises 
 the jargon of scientific pedants; but like Montaigne he loves 
 frank and masculine speech, and he likes to enrich the language 
 
36 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 of the well bred by discreet drafts upon the burry, homely, 
 sententious, proverbial language of the people. Like Lord 
 Bacon and like many other grave men among his fellow-coun- 
 trymen, he found it difficult to avoid an opportunity for a jest 
 even when the occasion was unpropitious ; and he never sat 
 below the Attic salt. When his fortune was made, he put 
 by the pewter spoon and bowl of his apprenticeship; his 
 biographers remind us that he kept a well stocked cellar at 
 Passy and enjoyed the distinction of sufEering from the gout. 
 With affluence and years he acquired a "palate," and gave 
 a little play to the long repressed tastes of an Epicurean whom 
 early destiny had cast upon a rock-bound coast. The literary 
 expression of his autumnal festivity is to be fotmd in the 
 bagatelles. The Ephemera proves that this great eighteenth- 
 century rationalist had a fancy. It is no relative, indeed, of 
 that romantic spirit which pipes to the whistling winds on the 
 enchanted greens of Shakespeare. It is rather the classic 
 Muse of eighteenth-century art which summons the rosy Loves 
 and Desires to sport among the courtiers and philosophers and 
 the wasp-waisted ladies in a fete champitre or an Embarkment 
 for Cythera of Watteau. The tallow chandler's son who 
 enters on the cycle of his development by cultivating thrift 
 with Defoe, continues it by cultivating tolerance and philan- 
 thropy with Voltaire, and completes it with Lord Chesterfield 
 by cultivating "the graces." " ~^ 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Knickerbocker Writers 
 
 I. Irving 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING was bom in WiUiam Street, 
 New York City, 3 April, 1783. As this was the year 
 in which the colonies finally achieved the independ- 
 ence for which they had been fighting for seven years, Irving 
 may be regarded as the firstauthor producedin the new rqaublic. 
 
 The writer recalls that he visited Sunnyside with his father 
 a year or two before the death of Irving and heard him narrate, 
 doubtless not for the first time, how, when he was a youngster 
 a year old, his nurse had held him up in her arms while Washing- 
 ton was passing by on horseback, in order that the General 
 might place his hand on the head of the child who bore his 
 name. "My nurse told me afterwards, " said Irving, "that the 
 General lifted me in his arms up to the pommel of his saddle 
 and bestowed upon me a formal blessing." The listening boy 
 looked, with reverential awe, at the head that had been touched 
 by the first president, but when later he told his father about 
 Irving's words, the father said: "You did not see the spot 
 that Washington touched." "And why not?" was the 
 natural question. "You goose, " came the retort, "do you not 
 know that Mr. Irving wears a wig?" 
 
 Washington Irving was prevented by poor health from 
 following his two elder brothers to Columbia College. His 
 formal training was limited to a course of a few years in the 
 public schools of the day. He had always, however, encouraged 
 in himself a taste for reading and an interest in human affairs 
 so that his education went on steadily from year to year. His 
 father, a Scotchman by birth, had built up an importing busi- 
 ness and ranked well among the leading merchants of the city. 
 The family comprised in all five sons and two daughters. The 
 
38 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 relations to each other of these brothers and sisters were 
 always closely sympathetic, and throughout the record of 
 Irving's career the reader is impressed with the loyal service 
 rendered, first, by the elder brothers to the younger, and later, 
 when the family property had disappeared and the earnings of 
 the youngster had become the mainstay of the family, by 
 Washington himself to his seniors, and to his nieces. 
 
 In 1804, Irving, who had just attained his majority, made 
 his first journey to Europe. His father had died some years 
 earlier, and the direction of the family affairs was in the hands 
 of the eldest brother William. The trip seems to have re- 
 established Washington's health, which had been a cause of 
 anxiety to his brothers. After a voyage of forty-two days he 
 landed in Bordeaux, whence he journeyed to Paris. He then 
 travelled by way of Marseilles to Genoa, from which point 
 he went by stage-coach through some of the pictviresque regions 
 in Italy. It was on these trips that he secured his first im- 
 pressions of the Italian hill cotmtry and of the life of the cotmtry 
 folk, impressions that were utilized later in the Tales of a 
 Traveller. From Naples, crossing to Palermo, he went by stage 
 to Messina, and he was there in 1805 when the vessels of Nelson 
 passed through the straits in their search for the combined 
 French and Spanish fieet under Villeneuve, a search which 
 culminated in the great victory at Trafalgar. 
 
 Journeying in Europe during those years of war and of 
 national upheaval was a dangerous matter. Irving was stopped 
 more than once, and on one occasion was arrested at some place 
 in France on the charge of being an EngHsh spy. He seems to 
 have borne the troublesome interruptions with a full measure of 
 equanimity, and he used each delay to good ptirpose as an 
 opportunity for a more leisurely study of the environment and 
 of the persons with whom he came into touch. He returned 
 to New York early in 1806, shortly after Europe had been 
 shaken by the battle of Austerlitz. ^ 
 
 Irving was admitted to the bar in November, 1806, having 
 previously served as attorney's clerk, first with Brockholst 
 Livingston and later with Josiah Ogden Hoffman. The law 
 
 ' During these journeys he took notes, wrote them out in a full journal, por- 
 tions of which have recently been published, and utilized his material in elaborate 
 letters to his relations. 
 
Irving 39 
 
 failed, however, to exercise for him any fascination, and his 
 practice did not become important. He had the opportunity 
 of being associated as a junior with the cotmsel who had charge 
 of the defence of Aaron Burr in the famous trial held in Rich- 
 mond in June, 1807. The writer remembers the twinkle in the 
 old gentleman's eye when he said in reply to some question 
 about his legal experiences, "I was one of the counsel for 
 Burr, and Burr was acquitted. " In letters written. from Rich- 
 mond at the time, he was frank enough, however, to admit that 
 he had not been called upon for any important service. Dviring 
 Irving's brief professional association with Hoffman, he was 
 accepted as an intimate in the Hoffman family circle, and it was 
 Hoffman's daughter Matilda who was the heroine in the only 
 romance of the author's life. He became engaged to Matilda 
 when he was barely of age, but the betrothal lasted only a few 
 months, as she died suddenly at the age of seventeen. At the 
 time of Irving's death it was fotmd that he was still wearing on 
 his breast a locket containing her miniature and a lock of hair 
 that had been given to him half a century before. He never 
 married. 
 
 The first Hterary undertaking to which Irving's pen was 
 devoted, apart from a few ephemeral sketches for one of the 
 daily papers, was a s^al publication issued at irregular inter- 
 vals dtiring 1807-08, under the title of Salmagundi. In this 
 work, Irving had the collaboration of his brother William and 
 his friend James K. Paulding. The Salmagundi papers, re- 
 issued later in book form, possess, in addition to their interest 
 as hurnorous literature, historical value as pictures of social 
 Hfe in Ne^y York during the first decade of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 The famous History of New-York was published in 1809. 
 The mystery stirrounding the disappearance of old Diedrich 
 Knickerbocker, to whom was assigned the authorship, was pre- 
 served for a number of months. The first announcement of 
 the book stated that the manuscript had been found by the 
 landlord of the Columbian Hotel in New York among the effects 
 of a departed lodger, and had been sold to the printer in order 
 to offset the lodger's indebtedness. Before the manuscript was 
 disposed of, Seth Handaside, the landlord, inserted in New 
 York and Philadelphia papers an advertisement describing 
 
40 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Mr. Knickerbocker and asking for information about him. 
 When acknowledgment of the authorship of the book was 
 finally made by Irving, it was difificult for his fellow New 
 Yorkers to believe that this unsuccessful young lawyer and 
 attractive "man about town" could have produced a work 
 giving evidence of such mattirity and literary power. He had 
 secured an excellent position in New York society, a society 
 which in the earlier years of the century was stUl largely made 
 up of the old Dutch families. In the "veracious chronicle" 
 of Mr. Knickerbocker free use was made of the names of these 
 historic families, and it is related that not a few of the young 
 author's Dutch friends found it difficult to accord forgiveness for 
 the liberty that had been taken with their honourable ancestors 
 in making them the heroes of such rollicking episodes. 
 
 After a brief editorial experience in charge of a Philadelphia 
 magazine called the Analectic, to which he contributed some 
 essays later included in The Sketch Book, Irving enjoyed for 
 a few months the excitement ol .military service. He was 
 appointed a colonel on the staff of Governor Tompkins, and 
 during the campaign of 1814 was charged with responsibilities 
 in connection with the defence of the northern line of New York. 
 
 In 1 8 10, Irving had been taken into partnership with his 
 two brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, who were carrying on busi- 
 ness as general merchants and importers; and on the declara- 
 tion of peace in 18 14 he was sent by his firm to serve as its 
 representative in Liveipool. If the business plans of that year 
 had proved successful, it is possible that Irving might for the ' 
 rest of his life have remained absorbed in commercial under- 
 takings, but in 1818 the finn w;as overtaken by disaster and the 
 young lawyer-merchant (never much of a lawyer and by no 
 means important as a merchant) found himself adrift in Eng- 
 land with small funds and with no assured occupation or 
 prospects. He had already come into friendly relations with a 
 number of the leading authors of the day, a group which 
 included Scott, Moore, Southey, and Jeffrey. Scott had ia 
 fact sought him out very promptly, having years earlier been 
 fascinated by the originality and the humour shown in The 
 History of New-York. 
 
 After a couple of years of desultory travelling and writing, 
 Irving completed a series of papers which were published in 
 
Irving 41 
 
 New York in 1819^20 and in London in 1820, under the title of 
 The Sketch JBqok. It is by this volume that he is today best 
 known among readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The book 
 has been translated into almost every European tongue, and 
 for many years it served, and still serves, in France, in Ger- 
 many, and in Italy as a model of English style and as a text- 
 book from which students are taught their English. In this 
 latter r61e, it took, to a considerable extent, the place of The 
 Spectator. 
 
 The pubHcation by Murray of The Sketch Book, and two 
 years later of Bmcebridge Hall, brought Irving at once into 
 repute in literary circles not only in Great Britain, but on the 
 Continent. In 1826, after a year or two chiefly spent in 
 travelling in France, Germany, and Italy, he was appointed by 
 Alexander Everett, at that time Minister to Spain, attach^ to 
 the Legation at Madrid, and this first sojourn in Spain had an 
 important influence in shaping the direction of Irving's future 
 Hteraiy work. In July, 1827, he brought to completion his 
 biography of Columbus, . later followed by the account of the 
 Companions of Columbus (1831). The Columbus was published 
 in London and in Philadelphia in 1828 and secured at once 
 cordial and general appreciation. Southey wrote from London ; 
 "This work places Irving in the front rank of rnodem bio- 
 graphers" ; and Edward Everett said that "through the Colum- 
 bus, Irving is securing the position of founder of the American 
 school of polite learning." Irving continued absorbed and 
 fascinated with the examination of the Spanish chronicles. He 
 made long sojourns in Granada, living for a great part of the 
 time within the precincts of the Alhambra, and later he spent a 
 year or more in Seville. He occupied himself collecting material 
 for the completion of The Conquest of Granada, published in 
 1829, and for the Legends of the Alhambra, published in ^832. 
 
 In 1828, Irving declined an offer of one hundred guineas to 
 write an article for The Quarterly Review, of which his friend 
 Murray was the publisher, on the ground, as he wrote, "that 
 the Review [then under the editorship of Gifford] has been so 
 persistently hostile to our country that I cannot draw a pen in 
 its service." This episode may count as a fair rejoinder to 
 certain of the home critics who were then accusing Irving (as 
 half a century later Lowell was, in like manner, accused) of 
 
42 chapters of American Literature 
 
 having become so much absorbed in his English sympathies as 
 to have lost his patriotism. 
 
 In 18,29, Irving was made a member of the Royal Academy 
 of History in Madrid, and having in the same year been ap- 
 pointed Secretary of Legation by Louis McLane, he again took 
 up his residence in London. Here, in iS^Oj-the Royal Society of 
 Literature voted to him as a recognition of his "service to 
 history and to literature" one of its gold_medals. The other 
 medal of that year was given to Hallam for his History of the 
 Middle Ages. A Httle later Oxford honoured Irving with the 
 degree of Doctor of Laws. The ceremony of the installation 
 was a serious experience for a man of his shy and retiring 
 habits. As he sat in the Senate HaU, the students saluted him 
 with cries of "Here comes old Knickerbocker," "How about 
 Ichabod Crane?" "Has Rip Van Winkle waked up yet?" 
 and "Who discovered Columbus?" 
 
 In 1832, Irving returned. to New York, having been absent 
 from his_ country for seventeen years. His fellow citizens 
 welcomed him, not a little to his own discomfiture, with a 
 banquet given in the City HaU, where the orator of the evening 
 addressed him as the "Dutch Herodotus. " Later in the year, 
 he made a journey through the territory of the Southwest, an 
 account of which he published under the title of A Tour on the 
 Prairies (1835). His description of St. Louis as a frontier post 
 and of the great wilderness extending to the west of the 
 Mississippi still makes interesting reading. Returning from 
 his journey by way of New Orleans, he visited Columbia, South 
 Carolina, where he was the guest of Governor Hamilton. The 
 Governor, who had just transmitted to the legislature the edict 
 of nullification, insisted that the author must repeat his visit 
 to the state. "Certainly," responded the guest, "I will come 
 with the first troops. " 
 
 In 1834, Irving declined a Democratic nomination for 
 Congress, and in 1838 he put to one side the Tammany nomina- 
 tion for mayor of New York and also an offer from President 
 ;Van Buren to make him Secretary of the Navy. In 1842, he 
 accepted from President Tyler the appointment of Minister to 
 §paim The suggestion had come to the President from Daniel 
 Webster, at that time Secretary of State. The succeeding 
 five years were in large part devoted to the collection of material 
 
Irving 43 
 
 relating to the history and the legends of Spain during the 
 Moorish occupation. 
 
 On his return to New York in 1846, he met with a serious 
 disappointment. His books were out- o£ print, at least in the 
 United States, and his Philadelphia publishers assured him 
 that, as there was no longer any public demand for his writ- 
 ings, it would be an unprofitable venture to put new editions 
 upon the market. They explained that the public taste had 
 changed, and that a new style of authorship was now in vogue. 
 The books had in fact been out of print since 1845, but at that 
 time Irving, still absent in Spain, had concluded that the plan 
 for revised editions might await his return. To be told now by 
 publishers of experience that The Sketch Book, Knickerbocker, 
 Columbus, and the other books, notwithstanding their original 
 prestige, had had their day and were not wanted by the new 
 generation, was a serious shock to Irving not only on the 
 ground of the blow to his confidence in himself as an author, 
 but because his savings were inconsiderable, and he needed the 
 continued income that he had hoped to secure from his pen. 
 
 His personal wants were few, but he had always used his 
 resources generously among his large circle of relatives, and 
 having neither wife nor child he had made a home at Sunnyside 
 for an aged brother Ebenezer, and at one time for no less than 
 five nieces. Some western land investments, which in later 
 years became profitable, were at this time liabilities instead of 
 resources, and his immediate financial prospects were discourag- 
 ing. He had taken a desk in the office of his brother John Treat 
 Irving, and to John he now spoke, possibly half jestingly, of 
 the necessity of resuming the practice of the law. He was at 
 this time sixty-five years of age, and as it was forty years since 
 he had touched a law book, it is hardly Hkely that he could 
 have made himself of much value as a counsellor. 
 
 One morning early in 1848, he came into the office in a 
 joyful frame of mind. He tossed a letter over to his brother 
 saying : "John, here is a fool of a pubHsher willing to give me 
 $2000 a year to go on scribbling. " The "fool of a publisher" 
 was the late George P. Putnam, who had recently returned 
 from London where he had for eight years been engaged in 
 the attempt to induce the English public to buy American 
 books. Mr. Putnam now proposed to issue a uniform revised 
 
44 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 edition of all of Irving's writings, with which should be asso- 
 ciated the books that he might later bring to completion, and 
 to pay to the author a royalty on each copy sold, guaranteeing 
 against such royalty for a term of three years a sum increasing 
 with each year. It may be mentioned as evidence of the accu- 
 racy of the publisher's judgment that the payments during the 
 years in which this guaranty continued were always substan- 
 tially in excess of the amounts contracted for. 
 
 In 1849, the London publisher Bohn began to print un- 
 authorized editions of the various books of Irving. A series of 
 litigations ensued, as a result of which the authorized publishers, 
 Murray and Bentley, discouraged with a long fight and with 
 the great expense incurred in securing protection under the 
 existing copyright regulations, accepted the offer of the pirate 
 for the use, at a purely nominal price, of their publishing rights, 
 and Irving's works came thus to be included in Bohn's Library 
 Series. Copyright in Great Britain, as in the United States, 
 was in 1850 in a very unsatisfactory condition, and it was not 
 easy to ascertain from the provisions of the British statute just 
 what rights could be maintained by alien authors. So far as 
 American authors were concerned, this uncertainty continued 
 until, through the enactment of the statute of 1891, an inter- 
 national copyright relation was secured. 
 
 As one result of the transfer to Bohn of the control of the 
 English editions of Irving's earlier volumes, the author found 
 that he could not depend upon any material English receipts 
 for his later works. For the right to publish the English edition 
 of the Life of Washington (a work comprised in five volumes) 
 Bentley paid the sum of £50, which was a sad reduction from 
 the £3000 that Murray had given him for the Columbus. 
 
 In December, 1852, Irving wrote to his American publisher 
 a letter of thanks, which is notable as an expression both of the 
 sense of fairness and of the modest nature of the man. That 
 this expression of friendship was not a mere empty courtesy, 
 he had opportunity of making clear a few years later. In 1857, 
 partly because of the mismanagement of his financial partner 
 and partly because of the general financial disasters of the 
 year, Mr. Putnam was compelled to make an assignment 
 of his business. Irving received propositions from a number of 
 other publishers for the transfer of his books, the commercial 
 
Irving 45 
 
 value of which was now fully appreciated. From some of these 
 propositions he could have secured more satisfactory returns 
 than were coming to him under the existing arrangement. He 
 declined them aU, however, writing to his publisher to the effect 
 that as long as a Putnam remained in the publishing business, 
 he proposed to retain for his books' the Putnam imprint. He 
 purchased from the assignee the plates and the publishing 
 agreements; he held these plates for a year or more until Mr. 
 Putnam was in a position to resume the control of the pubHca- 
 tion, and he then restored them to his publisher. He waived 
 the larger proceeds to which, as the owner of the plates, he 
 would have been entitled, and insisted that the old pubHshing 
 arrangement should be resumed. Such an episode is interesting 
 in the long and somewhat troubled history of the relations of 
 authors with publishers, and it may be considered equally 
 creditable to both parties. 
 
 The final, and in some respects the greatest of Irving's 
 productions, the Life^of WasMngion, was completed on his 
 seventy-sixth birthday, 1859, and a month or two later he had 
 the pleasure of holding in his hands the printed volume. His 
 death came on 29 November, of the same year, and he was laid 
 to rest in the beautiful little graveyard of the Sleepy Hollow 
 Church. The writer has in his memory a picture of the great 
 weather-beaten walls of the quaint little church with the back- 
 ground of forest trees and the surroundings of the moss-covered 
 graves. Beyond on the roadside could be seen the grey walls of 
 the miU, in front of which Ichabod Crane had clattered past, 
 pursued by the headless horseman. The roadside and the 
 neighbouring fields were crowded with vehicles, large and small, 
 which had gathered from all parts of the countryside. It was 
 evident from the words and from the faces of those that had 
 come together that the man whose life was closed had not only 
 made for himself a place in the literature of the world, but had 
 been accepted as a personal friend by the neighbours of his 
 home. 
 
 Washington Irving occupied an exceptional position among 
 the literary workers of his country. It was his good fortune to 
 begin his writing at a time when the patriotic sentiment of the 
 nation was taking shape, and when the citizens were giving 
 their thoughts to the constructive work that was being done by 
 
46 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 their selected leaders in framing the foundations of the new 
 state. It was given to Irving to make clear to his countrymen 
 that Americans were competent not merely to organize a state, 
 but to produce literature. He was himself a clear-headed and 
 devoted patriot, but he was able to free himself from the local 
 feeling of antagonism toward the ancient enemy Great Britain, 
 and from the prejudice against other nations, always based 
 upon ignorance, that is so often confused with patriotism. 
 Irving's early memories and his early reading had to do with 
 the events and with the productions of colonial days. Addison 
 
 iand Goldsmith are the two English writers with whose works 
 his productions, or at least those relating to English sub- 
 jects, have been most frequently compared. His biography of 
 Goldsmith shows the keenest personal sympathy with the 
 sweetness of nature and the literary . ideals of his subject. 
 'Irving's works came, therefore, to be a connecting link between 
 jthe literature of England (or the English-inspired literature of 
 I the colonies) and the literary creations that were entitled to the 
 jname American, and they expressed the character, the method 
 [of thought, the ideals, and the aspiration of English folk on this 
 iside of the Atlantic. 
 
 The greatest intellectual accomplishment to be credited to 
 New York during the first years of the republic was the pro- 
 duction of The Federalist. It is fair to claim, however, that 
 with Irving and with those writers immediately associated with 
 his work during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 
 began the real literature of the country. Partly by tempera- 
 ment and by character, and partly, of course, as a result of the 
 opportunities that came to him after a close personal knowledge 
 of England, with a large understanding of things Continental, 
 Irving, while in his convictions a sturdy American, became in 
 his sympathies a cosmopolitan. His first noteworthy produc- 
 tion. The History of New-York, is so distinctive in its imagina- 
 tion and humour that it is difficult to class. It is purely local 
 in the sense that the characters and the allusions all have 
 to do with the Dutch occupation of Manhattan Island and the 
 Hudson River region, but, as was evidenced by the cordial 
 appreciation given to the book on the other side of the Atlantic, 
 the humour of Mr. Knickerbscker was accepted as a contribu- 
 tion to the literature of the world. 
 
Irving 47 
 
 In the production of The Sketch Book, Irving was able not 
 only to enhance his fame by a charming contribution to litera- 
 ture, but to render a special service to two countries, England 
 and America. The book came into print at a time when the 
 bitterness of the war which closed in 1 814 was still fresh in 
 the minds of both contestants. It was a time when it was the 
 fashion in America to use Great Britain as a bugaboo, as a 
 synonjmi for all that was to be abominated in political theories 
 and in political action. The word "British" was associated 
 in the minds of most Americans with an attempt at domination, 
 while in England, on the other hand, references to the little 
 Yankee nation were no more friendly, and things American 
 were persistently decried and sneered at to the intense irritation 
 of Americans. 
 
 It was of enormous value that at such a period, first in the 
 list of patriotic Americans who through sympathetic knowledge 
 of England have come to serve as connecting links between the 
 two countries, Irving should have been a resident in England 
 and should have absorbed so thoroughly the spirit of the best 
 that there was in English life. It was in part because men 
 honoured in Great Britain, writers like Scott, Southey, Rogers, 
 Roscoe, Moore, men of aifairs like Richard Bentley, John 
 Murray, and many others, came not only to respect, but to have 
 affectionate regard for, the American author, and it was in part 
 because the books written by this man showed such sympathetic 
 appreciation of things and of men English, that England was 
 brought to a better understanding of the possibilities of America. 
 If there could come from the States a man recognized as one of 
 nature's gentlemen, and to be accepted as a companion of the 
 best in the land, a man whose writings on things English won 
 the highest approval of the most authoritative critics, it 
 was evident that there were possibilities in this new English- 
 speaking state. If one American could secure friendships in 
 Great Britain, if one American could make a noteworthy con- 
 tribution to the literature of the EngHsh tongue, the way was 
 thrown open to other Americans to strengthen and widen the 
 ties and the relations between the two countries. An American 
 critic who might have been tempted to criticize some of the 
 papers in The Sketch Book as unduly English in their sympathies 
 and as indicating a surrender by the author of his American 
 
48 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 principles, was estopped from any such folly by the fact that 
 the same volume contained those immortal legends of the 
 Hudson, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 
 In these stories, poems in prose, the author utilized, as the 
 pathway and inspiration for his imagination, the great river of 
 which he was so fond. If Irving's descriptions of rural England 
 were to give fresh interest to American readers in the old home 
 of their forefathers, the skill with which he had utiKzed the 
 traditional legends of the CatskiU Mountains and had woven 
 fanciful stories along the roadway of Sleepy Hollow made 
 clear to readers on the other side of the Atlantic that imagina- 
 tion and literary style were not restricted to Europe. 
 
 The work begun in The Sketch Book was continued in Brace- 
 bridge Hall. Here also we have that combination (possibly 
 paralleled in no other work of literature) of things Enghsh and 
 things American. Squire Bracebridge~is, of course, a lineal- 
 descendant of Sir Roger de Coverley. It is not necessary, 
 however, because Irving was keenly sympathetic with Addi- 
 son's mode of thought, to speak of Irving's hero as an imitation. 
 England has produced more than one squire, and Bracebridge 
 and the family of the Hall were the creations of the American 
 observer. The English home of the early nineteenth century is 
 presented in a picture that is none the less artistic because it 
 can be accepted as trustworthy and exact. In this volume we 
 have also a characteristic American study, Dolph Heyliger, a 
 fresh romance of Irving's beloved Hudson River. 
 
 The Tales of a Traveller, the scenes of which were laid partly 
 in Italy, show the versatility of the author in bringing his im- 
 agination into harmony with varied surroundings. Whether 
 the subject be in England, in France, or in Italy, whether he 
 is writing of the AJhambra or of the Hudson, Irving always 
 succeeds in coming into the closest sympathy with his environ- 
 ment. He hasthe artist's touch in the ability to reproduce the 
 atmosphere in which the scenes of his stories are placed. 
 
 "The Life of Columbus may be considered as presenting 
 Irving's first attempt at history, but it was an attempt that 
 secured for him at once a place in the first rankamong historians. 
 In this biography, Irving gave ample evidence of his power of 
 reconstituting the figures of the past. He impresses upon the 
 reader the personality of the great discoverer, the idealist, the 
 
Irving 49 
 
 man who was so absorbed in his own belief that he was able to 
 impress this upon the skeptics about him. We have before us a 
 vivid picture of the Spanish Court from which, after patient 
 effort, Columbus secured the grudging support for his expedi- 
 tion, and we come to know each member of the little crew 
 through whose service the great task was brought to accom- 
 plishment. Irving makes clear that the opposition of the 
 clerics and the apathy of King Ferdinand were at last overcome 
 only through the sympathetic support given to the project by 
 Queen Isabella. 
 
 In the Conquest of Granada, the narrative is given in a 
 humorous form, but it represents the result of very thorough 
 historic research. By the device of presenting the record 
 through the personality of the mythical priestly chronicler, 
 Fray Agapida, blindly devoted to the cause of the Church, 
 Irving is able to emphasize less invidiously than if the state- 
 ments were made direct, the bitterness, the barbarism, and the 
 preju dices of the so-called Christianity of the Spaniards. 
 Through the utterances of Agapida, we come to realize the 
 narrowness of Ferdinand and the priestly arrogance of Ferdi- 
 nand's advisers. The admiration of the reader goes out to the 
 fierce patriotism of the great Moorish leader. El Zagal, and his 
 sympathies are enlisted for the pathetic career of Boabdil, the 
 last monarch of Granada. Granada was Irving's favourite 
 produc tion, and he found himself frankly disappointed that 
 (possibly on the ground of the humorous form given to the 
 narrative) the book failed to secure full acceptance as history 
 and was not considered by the author's admirers to take rank 
 with his more popular work. 
 
 The Alhambra, which has been called the "Spanish Sketch 
 Book," is a beautiful expression of the thoughts and dreams of 
 the author as he muses amid the ruins of the Palace of the 
 Moors. The reader feels that in recording the great struggle 
 which terminated in 1492 with the triumph of Spain, Irving's 
 sympathies are not with the conquering Christians but with 
 the defeated Moslems. ^^ __ 
 
 The Life of Mahomet and the supplementary volume on the 
 successors of Mahomet followed in 1849-50. The biographies 
 constitute good narrative and give further examples of the 
 author's exceptional power of characterization. If they fail to 
 
50 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 reach the high standard of the Columbus, it is doubtless because 
 Irving possessed no such close familiarity with the environ- 
 ment of his subjects. In Spain he had made long sojourns and 
 had become imbued with the atmosphere of the Spanish legends 
 and ideals. He knew his Italy, in like manner, from personal 
 observation and from sympathetic relations with the peasants 
 no less than the scholars, but Arabia was to him a distant land. 
 The writing of Columbus prepared the way for Irving's chief 
 historical achievement. The Life of Washington is not only a 
 biography presenting with wonderful precision and complete- 
 ness the nature and career of a great American, but a_study, and 
 the first study of importance, of the evolution of the republic, 
 Irving had given thought and planning to the biography for 
 years before he was able to put a pen to the work. As early as 
 1832 he had confided to some of his nearer friends his ambition 
 to associate his name with that of Washington and to devote 
 such literary and historical ability as he possessed to the crea- 
 tion of a Kterary monument to the Father of the Republic. The 
 work had, of necessity, been postponed during his long sojourn 
 in England and the later residence in Spain, but he never per- 
 mitted himself to put the plan to one side. As soon as the sales 
 of the new Putnam edition of the earlier works and of the later 
 volumes that he had been able to add to these freed him from 
 financial care, he began the collection of material for the great 
 history. He had already travelled over much of the country 
 with which the career of his hero was connected. He knew by 
 the observations of an intelligent traveller the regions of New 
 England, New Jersey, Western Pennsylvania, and Virginia, 
 while with the territory of New York he had from his youth 
 been familiar. The Hudson River, which had heretofore served 
 as the pathway for Irving's dreams of romance, was now to be 
 studied historically as the scene of some of the most critical of 
 the campaigns of the Revolution. Since the date of Irving's 
 work, later historians have had the advantage of fuller mate- 
 rial, particularly that secured from the correspondence in the 
 homes of Revolutionary leaders. North and South, but no later 
 historian has found occasion for any corrections of importance, 
 either in the details of Irving's narrative, or in his analysis of 
 the characters of the men through whom the great contest was 
 carried on. Irving possessed one qualification which is lacking 
 
Irving 51 
 
 in the make-up of not a few conscientious and able historians. 
 His strain of romance and his power of imagination enabled 
 him to picture to himself and to make vivid the scenes de- 
 scribed, and the nature, the purpose, and the manner of thought 
 of each character introduced. The reader is brought into 
 personal association with the force and dignity of the great 
 leader; with the assumption, the vanity, the exaggerated opi- 
 nion of his powers and ability of Charles Lee; with the sturdy 
 patriotism, the simple-hearted nature, persistence, and pluck 
 of the pioneer fighter Israel Putnam; with the skill, leadership, 
 and unselfishness of Philip Schuyler; with the pettiness and 
 btunptiousness of Gates; with the grace, fascination, and loyalty 
 of Lafayette; and with the varied attainments and brilliant 
 qualities of that wonderful youth Alexander Hamilton. We 
 are not simply reading descriptions, we are looking at living pic- 
 tures, and the historic narrative has the quality of a vitascope. 
 
 The production of this great history constituted a fitting 
 culmination to the literary labours of its author. When Irving 
 penned the last word of the fifth volume of the Washington, he 
 was within a few months of his death. The work on this volume 
 had in fact been a strain upon his vitality, and there were times 
 when he needed to exert his will power to the utmost in order 
 to complete the task allotted to himself for the day. He said 
 pathetically from time to time to his nephew and loyal aid 
 Pierre and to his friend Putnam, "I do not know whether I 
 may be spared to complete this history, but I shall do my best." 
 In this his final work, the shaping of the fifth volume, he did 
 his best. 
 
 It may fairly be contended for this American author, whose 
 work dates ahnost from the beginning of the Republic, that his 
 writings possess vitality and continued importance for the 
 readers of this later century. His historical works have, as 
 indicated, a distinctive character. They are trustworthy and 
 dignified history, while they possess the literary charm and 
 grace of the work of a true man of letters. For the world at 
 large, Irving will, however, doubtless best be known by his 
 works of imagination, and the students in the gallery in Oxford 
 who chaffed "Diedrich Knickerbocker" as he was receiving his 
 degree were probably right in selecting as th e^ cha racteristic 
 and abiding production of the author his,Bip-V(m^Wmkle. 
 
2. Bryant 
 
 To the old-fashioned prayers which his mother and grand- 
 mother taught him, the little boy bom in Cummington, 
 Massachusetts, 3 November, 1794, a year before John 
 Keats across the sea, was wont to add (so we learn from the 
 Autobiographical Fragment),' his private supplication that he 
 might "receive the gift of poetic genius, and write verses that 
 might endure. " 
 
 This inner urge and bent, witnessed so early and so long, 
 could not be severed, early or late, from the unfathomable 
 world. Bryant's was a boyhood and youth among the virginal 
 woods, hills, and streams, among a farmer folk and country 
 labours and pastimes, in a Puritan household, with a father 
 prominent in the state as physician and legislator, whose 
 independence and breadth are attested by a leaning toward 
 that liberalism which was to develop into the American Uni- 
 tarian movement and by his enlightened devotion, as critic and 
 friend, to the boy's ambitions in rhyme. Private tutoring by 
 unpretending clergymen, a year at poverty-stricken WiUiams 
 College, law studies in an upland office, distasteful practice as 
 a poor country lawyer, a happy marriage with her whose 
 "birth was in the forest shades, " * death, season by season, of 
 those nearest and dearest, travel down among the slave-holding 
 states and out to the prairies of Illinois, where his brothers and 
 mother were for a second time pioneers, with voyages on various 
 
 ' Godwin, Life, vol. I, p. 26. 
 
 ' Poems, p. 82. Roslyn edition (1913), from which all poetical quotations 
 are cited in thi.' chapter. 
 
 52 
 
Bryant 53 
 
 occasions to the West Indies, to Europe, and to the Levant, and 
 fifty years as a New York editor, who with the wisdom of a 
 statesman and the courage of a reformer made The Evening 
 Post America's greatest newspaper, — all this gives us a life of 
 many visions of forest, field, and foam, of many books in diverse 
 tongues, of many men and cities, of many problems in his own 
 career and in the career of that nation which he made so much 
 his own, a life not without its own adventures, struggles, 
 joys, and griefs. So it stands recorded, a consistent and elo- 
 quent and (fortunately) a familiar chapter in American biog- 
 raphy, even as it passed before the visionary octogenarian 
 back in the old home, sitting ' 'in the early twilight, " whilst 
 
 Through the gathering shade 
 He looked on the fields around him 
 Where yet a child he played.' 
 
 One might regard the events of this lifetime either as in 
 subtle and inevitable ways harmoniously contributory to the 
 poet-nature that was Bryant's (if not indeed often its persistent 
 and victorious creation), or as in the main a deflection, a check. 
 If no other American poet has written, year measured by year, 
 so Uttle poetry, the poetry of no other so clearly defines at once 
 its author's character, environment, and country; if no other 
 American poet was apparently so much occupied with other 
 interests than poetry, not excepting the critic, diplomat, orator, 
 and humorist Lowell, none felt his high calling, it seems, with 
 as priestly a consecration, — no, truly, not excepting Whitman, 
 who protested thereon sometimes a little too much. 
 
 Bryant's public career as poet fulfilled the psalmist's three- 
 score years and ten, if we date from The Embargo, an anti- 
 Jefferson satire in juvenile heroics (1808). It began with the 
 year of Scott's Marmion; it was barely completed with Sigurd 
 the Volsung of William Morris; it included the lives of Byron and 
 Shelley and most that was best in those of Tennyson, Arnold, 
 Browning. It began the year following Joel Barlow's American 
 epic The Columbiad, and the publication of The Echo by the 
 Hartford Wits. Longfellow and Whittier were in the cradle, 
 Holmes and Poe unborn. Except Freneau, there were no poets 
 ■ A Lifetime. 
 
54 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 in the country but those imitative versifiers of an already anti- 
 quated English fashion whom Bryant was himself to charac- 
 terize^ with quiet justice in the first critical appraisal of our 
 "literature," the first declaration of intellectual iodependence, 
 antedating Emerson's American Scholar by nineteen years. 
 He compassed the generations of all that was once or is still 
 most reputed in American. poetry: the generations of Paulding, 
 Percival, Halleck, Drake, Willis, Poe, Longfellow, Whittier, 
 Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, Bret Harte. 
 
 Yet he was from very early, in imagination and expression, 
 curiously detached from what was going on in poetry around 
 him. TheEmbargo is a boy's echo, significant only for_pre- 
 cocious facility and for the twofold interest in verse and politics 
 that was to be lifelong. Byron's voice is audible in the Spen- 
 serian stanzas and subject matter of the Phi Beta Kappa poem 
 of 1 82 1, The Ages"; the New York verses, so painfully facetious 
 on Rhode Island coal and a mosquito, are less after Byron than 
 after the town wit HaUeck and his coterie. Wordsworth, at the 
 reading of whose Lyrical Ballads in 181 1, "a thousand springs, " 
 Bryant said to Dana, "seemed to gush up at once in his heart, 
 and the face of Nature of a sudden to change into a strange 
 freshness and Hfe, " was the companion into the woods and 
 among the flowers who more than all others helped him to find 
 himself; but Thanatopsis, so characteristic of Bryant, was 
 written almost certainly some weeks before he had seen the 
 Lyrical Ballads,^ and, even if Bryant's eminence as poet of 
 nature owed much to this early reinforcement, his poetry is 
 not Wordsworthian either in philosophy or in mood or in 
 artistry. Wordsworth never left the impress on Bryant's 
 work that the realms of gold made upon the surprised and 
 spellbound boy Keats. No later prophets and craftsmen, 
 
 ' North American Review, July, 1818. 
 
 ' Thomson's Liberty may have contributed something to the choice of theme. 
 
 3 The time relations seem to have been as follows. Bryant's father purchased 
 the Lyrical Ballads in Boston during 18 10, when the son was at college (till May, 
 1811); Bryant "had picked it up at home'' (Godwin, Life, vol. I, p. 104) to take 
 with him to Worthington (Dec, 1811), where it was that, as a young law student, 
 he first read it with such surprised delight. Thanatopsis had been written between 
 May and December, apparently in the autumn (Godwin, Ljye, vol. I, pp. 97-99), 
 and if (as likely) before 3 November, then written when Bryant was still a lad of 
 sixteen. See Van Doren, C, The Growth of "Thanatopsis," Nation, 7 October, 
 1915- 
 
Bryant 55 
 
 American, English, or continental, seem to have touched him 
 at all. » 
 
 More obvious to the registrar of parallels are Bryant's 
 literary relations to the poets he read, and read evidently with 
 deeper susceptibility than has been realized, before l8il.* 
 The reference is not alone to the well-known relation Thanatop- 
 sis bears to Blair's Grave, Porteus's Death, ^ Kirke White's Time, 
 Rosemary, etc., and the whole Undertaker's Anthology so 
 infinitely beneath the Lucretian grandeur of America's first 
 great poem with its vision of 
 
 Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago. 
 
 The reference is equally to certain themes and moods and un- 
 classified details in poems written long after Thanatopsis, all 
 of which, though so characteristically Bryant's, make us feel 
 him as much closer to the eighteenth century tradition than 
 any of his contemporaries, even than Holmes with his deference 
 to "the steel-bright epigrams of Pope"; so that we may ap- 
 praise him much better by going forward from the moraliz- 
 ing, "nature" blank verse of Thomson, Cowper, Young, and 
 Akenside, than baclcward from Wordsworth and Tennyson. 
 In the eighteenth century tradition is the very preference for 
 blank verse as the instrument for large and serious thought, and 
 the lifelong preference itself for large and serious thought on 
 Death, History, Destiny. The Biblical note too is of the former 
 age. But the diction is, if anything, freer than the mature 
 Wordsworth himself from eighteenth century poetic slang, and 
 the peculiarities of this blank verse (to be mentioned later) 
 have fewer cadences suggestive of Cowper than, perhaps, of the 
 early poems of Southey, whose impression on those impression- 
 able first years of Bryant's has apparently been overlooked.'' 
 With this early romanticism we may connect the sentimental 
 element in the appeal of innocent and happy savages, whether 
 
 ' Tennysoniaa blank-verse in Sella has been suggested — unconvincingly. 
 
 " See Autobiographical Fragment for a partial list. 
 
 3 Winner of the Seaton Prize at Cambridge for 1759. Death may be found in 
 Musae Seatonianae, Cambridge, 1808 — a copy of which was apparently in Doctor 
 Bryant's library. 
 
 * Compare Southey's Inscriptions (themselves imitated from Akenside), especi- 
 ally In a Forest, with Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood. 
 
56 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 on Pitcalm's Island or in the pristine Indian summers; likewise 
 the two or three tales of horror and the supernatural, in which 
 he succeeded so poorly. But he arrived soon enough to con- 
 tribute his own influence to the nineteenth-century poetry of 
 nature. 
 
 He came to himself early, for one who had so many years in 
 which to change, if he would change or could. The first volume, 
 the forty-four pages-olx82X, contains most, the second, 1832, cer- 
 tainly contains all, of the essential Bryant, the essential as to 
 what he cared for in nature and human life, as to how he en- 
 visaged it in imagination and dwelt with it in intellect and 
 character, and as to how he gave it expression. In the later years 
 there is more of Bryant's playful fancy, perhaps more of ethical 
 thinking and mood, a slight shift of emphasis, new constructions, 
 not new materials. His world and his speech were already his : 
 there is no new revelation and no new instrument in any one of 
 the several succeeding issues of his verse (though there are many 
 new, many high poems), as there are new revelations and new 
 instruments in Byron, Tennyson, and Browning; indeed, Keats 
 in the three years between the volumes of 181 7 and 1820 lived a 
 much longer, a more diversified Hfe of steadily increasing vision 
 and voice. It need hardly be remarked, then, that he experi- 
 enced no intellectual and moral crisis, — ^neither from without, 
 as did Wordsworth when his country took up arms against 
 Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality and when shortly Liberty, 
 Fraternity, and Equality danced, like the Weird Sisters, i 
 around the cauldron of horroir; nor from within, like the ex- 
 patriated husband and father Byron, and the political idealist 
 Dante, and even the fl&neur who wrote The Ballad oj Reading 
 Gaol. 
 
 He came, likewise, early to his fame. He was first and alone. 
 The little world of the lovers of good things on the North 
 Atlantic seaboard in those days, trained as it was in the English 
 and ancient classics, quickly set the young man apart; Bryant 
 became established, fortunately, somewhat before American 
 literary criticism had become self-consciously patriotic, indis- 
 criminate, vulgar. England, too, long so important an influence 
 on American judgments of American products, early accorded 
 him a measure of honour and thanks. It is well knowTi that 
 Washington Irving secured the English reprinting of the volume 
 
Bryant 57 
 
 of 1832 in the same year, with a brief criticism by way of dedi- 
 cation to Samuel Rogers, whose reading of the contents was the 
 delight of that old Maecenas and Petronius Arbiter. It has, 
 however, apparently not been observed that the entire contents 
 of the volume of 182 1 were reprinted, indeed in the same order, 
 in Specimens of the American Poets (London, 1822) with a note- 
 worthy comment' on the lines Thanatopsis that "there are 
 few pieces, in the works of even the very first of our living poets, 
 which exceed them in sublimity and compass of poetical 
 thought." And Bryant was spared from the beginning furor 
 and contempt : he was never laurelled like Byron, never fools- 
 capped Hke Keats by critics or public; his repute was always, 
 like himself, dignified, quiet, secure. And so the critical prob- 
 lem is initially simplified, in two ways: there is no story of 
 struggle for recognition, and the effects of that struggle on the 
 workman ; there is no story of evolution of inner forces. Thus 
 the poetry of Bryant admits of treatment as one performance, 
 one perception and one account of the world, in a more re- 
 stricted sense than is generally applicable to poetic performance, 
 where the unity is the unity of psychological succession in a 
 changing temporal order: Don Juan is, perhaps, implied in the 
 English Bards and Childe Harold, Paradise Lost in the Nativity, 
 Hamlet in Romeo and Juliet; but, in a humbler sphere. Among 
 the Trees and The Flood of Years are less implied than actually 
 present in A Forest Hymn and Thanatopsis. If Bryant's poems 
 need sometimes the reference of date, it is for external occasion 
 and impulse, not for artistic registration. Three periods have 
 been discovered for Chaucer, and four for Shakespeare; our 
 modest American was without "periods. " 
 
 The critical problem is simple, though not necessarily 
 trivial or easy, in another way: this one performance was itself 
 of a relatively simple character. Bryant's poems stress per- 
 petually a certain few ideas, grow perpetually out of a certain 
 few emotional responses, and report in a few noble imaginative 
 modes a certain few aspects of man and nature, with ever 
 recurring habits of observation, architectonics, and style. This 
 absence of complexity is, again, emphasized by the elemental 
 clarity and simplicity of those same few ideas, emotions, modes, 
 methods. Within his range he is complete, harmonious, and, 
 
 ' P. 190. 
 
58 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 in a deeper sense than above, impressively one. It is for this, 
 perhaps, that of all American poets he makes the strongest 
 impression of an organic style, as contrasted with an individual, 
 a literary style, consciously elaborated, as in Poe and Whitman. 
 It is partly for this, perhaps, that the most Puritan of our poets 
 is also the most Greek. Bryant's limitations, then, are inti- 
 mately engaged in the peculiar distinction of his work; and it is 
 ungracious, as well as superficial, to quarrel with them. 
 
 Bryant's ideas, stated in bald prose, are elementary, — 
 common property of simple minds. His metaphysics was 
 predominantly that of the Old Testament : God is the Creator 
 and His works and His purposes are good. Bryant communi- 
 cated, however, little sense of the loving fatherhood and divine 
 guidance in human affairs: perhaps once only, in To c Water- 
 fowl, which originated in an intensely religious moment of young 
 manhood. ' His ethics stress the austerer loyalties of justice 
 and truth rather than those of faith, hope, and charity. His 
 politics in his poems, however analjrtic and specific he might 
 be as publicist, reiterate only the idealsjjf .poHtical freedom and 
 progress, with ever confident reference to the high destinies of 
 America, that "Mother of a Mighty Race. " His assurance of 
 individual immortality for all men, which scarcely touches the 
 problem of sin, rests not on revelation, not on a philosophy of 
 the transcendental significance of intellect, struggle, and pain, 
 but mainly on primitive man's desire to meet the loved and 
 lost, the father, the sister, the wife. There is nothing subtle, 
 complex, or tricky here ; there are no philosophers, apparently, 
 on his reading desk; no Spinoza, Plotinus, Berkeley, Hartley, 
 who were behind Coleridge's discursive verse; no Thomas 
 Aquinas who was the propaedeutic for The Divine Comedy. And 
 of any intricate psychology, or pseudo-psychology, such as 
 delighted Browning, there is of course not a bit. There is in 
 these ideas, as ideas, nothing that a noble pagan, say of republi- 
 can Rome, might not have held to, even before the advent of 
 Stoic and Academician. But there is a further paganism in the 
 emphasis on the phenomena of life as life, on death as death. 
 Man's life, as individual and type, is what it is — birth and toil 
 in time; and death is what it is, save when he mentions a 
 private grief — for men and empires it is a passing away in a 
 » Godwin, Life, vol. I, pp. 143-145. 
 
Bryant 59 
 
 ''universe of time and change. The original version of Thanatop- 
 sis is more characteristic than its inconsistent introductory 
 and concluding lines, now the oftenest quoted of aU his writings. 
 If Bryant was the Puritan in his austerity and morale, he wa^' 
 quite as much the Pagan in the universality of his ideas, and iq 
 his temperamental adjustment to brute fact. 
 
 On nature and man's relation to nature, one who reads 
 without prepossession will find the American Wordsworth 
 equally elemental. He raises his hymn in the groves, which 
 were God's first temples, — venerable columns, these ranks of 
 trees, reared by Him of old. And "the great miracle still goes 
 on " ; and even the "delicate forest flower" seems 
 
 An emanation of the indwelling Life, 
 A visible token of the upholding Love, 
 That are the soul of this great universe.* 
 
 But more frequently nature is herself enough, in the simple 
 thought that personifies and capitalizes: it is She herself that 
 speaks to man, in his different hours, a various language. But 
 it is only casually, as in Among the Trees, that he wonders if 
 the vegetable world may not have some 
 
 dim and faint 
 . . . sense of pleasure and of pain, 
 As in our dreams; 
 
 only casualty, for conscious mysticism was foreign to Bryant's 
 intellect, and the conception had yet to be scientifically in- 
 vestigated in the laboratories of the Hindoo botanist Bose. 
 Here nature, as herself the Life, is simply an hypostasis of the 
 racial imagination in which Bryant so largely shared, just like 
 his intimate personifications of her phenomena, her flowers, her 
 winds, and waters; it is not a philosophic idea, but a primitive 
 instinct. "Nature's teachings" for men are simply the ideas 
 that suggest themselves to Bryant himself (not inevitably to 
 everyone) when he observes what goes on, or what is before 
 him: 
 
 The faintest streak that on a petal lies. 
 May speak instruction to initiate eyes.* 
 
 • A Forest Hymn. » The Mystery of Flowers. 
 
6o Chapters of American Literature 
 
 But this apparently Wordsworthian couplet can be related to 
 no system of thought or Wordsworthian instruction. These 
 ideas are sometimes merely analogies, where in eflfect the flower 
 (be it the gentian), or the bird (be it the waterfowl), is the first 
 term in a simile on man's moral Hfe; in this phase Bryant's 
 thought of nature differs from that of Homer, the Psalmist, 
 Jesus, or any sage or seer, Pagan or Christian, only in the 
 appositeness, more or less, of the illustrative symbol. It implies 
 no more a philosophy of nature than similes drawn from the 
 action of a locomotive or a motor-boat would imply a philo- 
 sophy of machinery. As a fact, Biyaa.t!s_ one .abiding idea 
 about nature is that she is a profound influence on the human 
 spirit, chastening, soothing, encouraging, ennobling-y-how, he 
 does not say; but the fact he knows from experience, and 
 mankind knows it with him, and has known it from long before 
 the morning when the sorrowful, chafed soul of Achilles walked 
 apart by the shore of the many-sounding sea. 
 
 Every poet, like every individual, has of course his favourite, 
 his recurrent ideas: Wordsworth, again and again, adverts to 
 the uses of old memories as a store and treasure for one's future 
 days, again and again he sees his life as divided into three ages; 
 Browning again and again preaches the doctrine that it is 
 better to aim high and fail than to aim low and succeed; 
 Emerson that the soul must live from within. But with Bryant 
 the recurrence is peculiarly insistent and restricted in variety. 
 
 But these ideas were involved in a temperament. The chief 
 differences among men are not in their ideas, as ideas, but in 
 the power of the ideas over their emotions, or in the ideas 
 considered as the overflow of their emotions. In Bryant 
 presumably the ideasbecame formulas of thought, clarified 
 and explicit, through his feelings. A man of great reserve and 
 poise, both in life and art, his "coldness," well established in 
 our Hterary tradition by some humorous lines of Lowell and a 
 letter of Hawthorne, is a pathetic misreading. There is no sex 
 passion; if there was in Bryant any potentiality of the young 
 Goethe or Byron, it was early transmuted into the quiet affec- 
 tions for wife and home. There is no passion for friends; 
 without being a recluse, he never craved comradeship, like 
 Whitman, for humanity's sake, nor, like Shelley, for affinity's 
 sake, and was, in the lifelong fellowship with such men as the 
 
Bryant 61 
 
 elder Dana, the literary mentor who is responsible for more of 
 Bryant's revisions in verse than any one knows,' spared the 
 shocks that usually stimulate the expression of the passion of 
 friendship. But his feelings, for woman and friend, were deep 
 if quiet — perhaps deeper because quiet. And the other primary 
 feeHngs were equally deep : awe in the presence of the cosmic 
 process .and the„ movements of mankind, reverence for holiness, 
 ^ pity for suffering,! brooding resentment against injustice, 
 'S^rejcttdng-in- moral victory, patriotism, susceptibility to beauty 
 ol^outHne and colour and sound, with 'peculiar susceptibility 
 ta both-^arm and sublimity in natural phenomena. These 
 emotions, in Bryant, ring out through his poetry, clear, without 
 blur or fringe, like the Italian vowels. He had no emotional 
 crotchets, no erratic sensibilities; among other things, he was 
 too robust and too busy. He had the "feelings of calm power 
 and mighty sweep" of which he himself speaks, as befitting 
 the poet.* 
 
 The few aspects of man and nature he reported have, in a 
 way, been necessarily already suggested. With senses more 
 alert to observe details in the physiognomy and voice of nature 
 than of man, his imagination continually sees the same general 
 vision : the Indian, shadowy ts^pe of a departed world, accoutred 
 with feathers and tomahawk, realized, however, in almost none 
 of his actual customs and in none of his actual feelings save that 
 of sorrow for tribal ruin; the warriors of freedom, especially of 
 the American Revolution; the infinite and mysterious racial 
 past on this earth with aU its crimes, triumphs, mutations, 
 rather than with its more ethical future which he believes in 
 more than he visualizes, an act of his thinking rather than of his 
 imagination; the earth itself as the sepulchre of man; and, like 
 one great primeval landscape, the mountain, the sea, the wind, 
 the river, the seasons, the plain, the forest that undergo small 
 change from their reality, take on few subjective peculiarities, 
 by virtue of an imagination that seems, as it were, to absorb 
 rather than to create its objects, — ^in this more like the world of 
 phenomena in Lucretius than, say, in Tennyson, or in the par- 
 tially Lucretian Meredith, certainly than in Hugo, to whom 
 
 ' See some correspondence between Bryant and Dana apropos the 1846 
 edition of the Poems, Godwin, Life, vol. 11, p. 14 S. 
 ' The Poet. 
 
62 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 nature becomes so often monstrous and grotesque. And yet 
 Bryant's imagination has its characteristic modes of relating 
 its objects. Three or four huge and impressive metaphors 
 underlie a great part of his poetry: the past as a place, an 
 tmderworld, ^ dim and tremendous, most poignantly illustrated 
 in the poem The Past with its personal allusions, and most 
 sublimely in The Death of Slavery, a great political hymn, with 
 Lowell's Commemoration Ode, and Whitman's When Lilacs last 
 in the Dooryard Bloomed, the highest poetry of solemn grandeur 
 produced by the Civil War; death as a mysterious passage- 
 way, whether through gate'' or cloud, ^ with the hosts ever 
 entering and disappearing in the Beyond; mankind conceived 
 as one vast company, a troop, a clan ; and, as suggested above, 
 nature as a multitudinous Life. 
 
 Bryant wonderfully visualized and unified the vast scope of 
 the racial movement and the range of natural phenomena. His 
 "broad surveys," as they have been called, are more than sur- 
 veys : they are large acts of the combining imagination, presenting 
 the significance, not merely the catalogue. These acts take us 
 home to the most inveterate habit of his poet-mind. As method 
 or device they seem to suggest a simple prescription for writing 
 poetry; superficially, after one has met them again and yet 
 again in Bryant, one might call them easy to do, because easy 
 to understand. The task is, however, not to make a list, but to 
 make the right list; a list not by capricious association of ideas, 
 but by the laws of inner harmony of meaning. Again, in 
 Bryant the list is itself often a fine, far look beyond the immedi- 
 ate fact — the immediate fact with which all but the poet would 
 rest content. The Song of the Sower needed no suggestion from 
 Schiller's Song of the Bell, which, however, Bryant doubtless 
 knew;-! it highly illustrates his own natural procedure: 
 
 .» The figure is in Kirke WHte's Time: 
 
 "Where are conceal'd the days which have elapsed? 
 Hid in the mighty cavern of the past. 
 They rise upon us only to appal. 
 By indistinct and half -glimpsed images. " 
 
 This is doubtless one of the many indications of how thoroughly Bryant's 
 early reading penetrated his subconsciousness and, with boyhood's woods and 
 mountains, contributed to his essential make-up in maturity. 
 
 ' Poems, p. 260. 3 Ibid., p. 250. * See The Death of Schiller. 
 
Bryant 63 
 
 Fling wide the golden shower; we trust 
 The strength of armies to the dust. 
 
 The grain shall ripen for the warrior. Then he goes on: 'O 
 fling it wide, for all the race: for peaceful workers on sea and 
 land, for the wedding feast, for the various unfortunate, for the 
 communion, for Orient and Southland' — and we live, as we 
 read, wise in the basic fact of agriculture and wise in the activi- 
 ties of humankind. The precise idea is handled more lightly- 
 in The Planting of the Apple Tree. Often the "survey" — 
 the word is convenient — starts from some on-moving pheno- 
 menon in nature — again an immediate fact — and proceeds by 
 compassing that phenomenon's whence or whither, what it has 
 experienced or what it will do: let one re-read his tale of The 
 River, by what haunts it flows (Uke, but how unlike, Tennyson's 
 brook); The Unknown Way, the spots it passes (becoming a 
 path syTnbolic of the mystery of Hfe); The Sea, what it does 
 under God (like and tmHke Byron's apostrophe) ; The Winds, 
 what they do on sea and land; A Rain-Dream, imaging the 
 waters of the globe. Sometimes the phenomenon is static and 
 calls his imagination to penetrate its secret history, or what 
 changes it has seen about it, as when he looks at the fountain' 
 or is among the trees.' Sometimes the vision rides upon or 
 stands beside no force in Nature, but is his own direct report, 
 as in Fifty Years, on the changes in individual lives, in history, 
 in inventions, especially in these States, since his class graduated 
 at Williams. "Broad surveys" of human affairs and of the 
 face of earth, so dull, routine, bombastic as far as attempted in 
 Thomson's Liberty, in Blair's Grave, in White's Time, become 
 in Bryant's less pretentious poems the essential triumph of a 
 unique imagination. The mode remained a favourite to the 
 end: large as in The Flood of Years, intimate and tender in 
 A Lifetime. No American poet, except Whitman, had anj 
 imagination at all like Bryant's,' or, indeed, except Whitman andj 
 Emerson, as great as Bryant's. 
 
 No reminder should be aieeded that Bryant, like Thoreau ^ 
 and Burroughs, was a naturalist with wide and accurate know- 
 ledge. He knew the way of the mist on river and mountain- 
 crest, all tints of sunset, the rising and the setting of the 
 
 » Poems, p. 185. ' Ibid., p. 321. 
 
64 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 constellations, every twig and berry and gnarled root on the 
 forest floor, all shapes of snow on pine and shrub, the coninioner 
 insects and wild creatures, and especially the birds and the 
 flowers; and he knew the hums and the murmurs and the 
 boomings that rise, like a perpetual exhalation, from the breast 
 of earth. A traveller from some other planet could take back 
 with him no more useful account of our green home than Bry- 
 ant's honest poems of nature. There is a group of his poems 
 that details the look, habits, and habitat of single objects: 
 The Yellow Violet (with an intrusive moral — ^but his "morals" 
 are, contrary to traditional opinion, seldom intrusive, being 
 part of the imaginative and emotional texture), and Robert of 
 Lincoln (which is besides most fetching in its playfulness and 
 Bryant's one success in dramatic portrayal). He was a good 
 observer; he would never have placed, like Coleridge, a star 
 within the nether tip of the crescent moon. There is an alUed 
 group which impart the quality of a moment in nature, as 
 Summer Wind: 
 
 It is a sultry day; the sun has drunk 
 The dew that lay upon the morning grass; 
 There is no rustling in the lofty elm . . . 
 . . . All is silent, save the faint 
 And interrupted murmur of the bee, 
 Settling on the sick flowers .... 
 . . . Why so slow ? 
 Gentle and voluble spirit of the air? 
 
 These, if not the most representative, are the most exqxaisite of 
 all his poems. 
 
 And no reminder should be needed that he knew best the 
 American scene, and was the first to reveal it in art. Irving, 
 in the London edition of 1832, naturally emphasized this claim 
 to distinction; and Emerson, many years later, at an after- 
 dinner speech on the poet's seventieth birthday, dwelt on it 
 with a winsome and eloquent gratitude* that has made all sub- 
 sequent comment an impertinence. 
 
 Apart from the characteristics outlined above, Bryant had, 
 as if a relief and release from the verities and solemnities, alove- 
 of fairyland: he had found it already, for instance, in the snow 
 
 ' Godwin, Life, vol. ll, p. 216 ff. 
 
Bryant 65 
 
 world of the Winter Piece; he went to it more often and eagerly 
 from the editorial desk and the noise and heat of the Civil War : 
 in The Little People of the Snow, in Sella (the underwater 
 maiden), and in the fragments, A Tale of Cloudland and Castles 
 in the Air. Their flowing blank verse (each some hundreds of 
 lines), unlike his early experiments in prose narrative (which in 
 their wooden arrangement, duU plot, and stilted characteriza- 
 tions are of a piece with the American short story before Poe 
 and Hawthorne), tdls, in simple chronological order, of one 
 simple type of adventure, a mortal penetrating beyond the 
 confines of nature — again the repetition of theme and archi- 
 tectonics, and one more manifestation of the primitive in 
 Bryant (for the fairy-tale is, as the anthropologists tell us, 
 among the most primitive activities of man) as dreamer and 
 poet. 
 
 Like Cowper and Longfellow, and so many others, Bryant 
 turned, in later life, to a long task of translation, in his case 
 HjameiV-as relief from sorrow. The literary interest was to see 
 if he might not, by closeness to the original and simplicity of 
 straightforward modem English, supersede the looseness and 
 artificial Miltonic pomp of Cowper. His translation, by de- 
 tailed comparison line for line with the Greek and with the 
 English poet, will be found to be exactly what Bryant intended 
 it. By block comparison of book for book, or version for ver- 
 sion, it will be found to be the better translation, from the point 
 of view of limpid and consequent story-telling — ^perhaps the 
 best in English verse. Of Arnold's four Homeric characteristics, 
 rapidity of movement, plainness of style, simplicity of ideas, 
 nobility of manner, Bryant's translation is inadequate mainly 
 in the first and the last, but the Homer is, in any case, a proof 
 of intellectual alertness, scholarship, and technical skill. All 
 his translations, many of them made before Longfellow's now 
 widely-recognized activities as spokesman in America for 
 European letters, are a witness to Bryant's knowledge of foreign 
 tongues and literatures, to his part in the culttuization of 
 America, to the breadth of his taste and a certain dramatic 
 adaptability (for the originals that attracted him had often 
 not much of the specific qualities of his own verse), and to his 
 all but impeccable artistry. 
 
 Of his artistry this study has scarcely spoken; yet it has 
 
66 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 been throughout implied. His qualities of thought, feeling, 
 imagination, were communicated, were indeed only communi- 
 cable, because so wrought into his diction, his rhymes, cadences, 
 and stanzas. Indeed, there is no separating a poet's feeling, 
 say, for a beautiful flower from his manner of expressing it — 
 for all we know about his feeling for the flower is what he 
 succeeds in communicating by speech. It is tautology to say 
 that a poet treats a sublime idea sublimely^or it is the sub- 
 limity in the treatment that makes us realize the sublimity of 
 the idea. We can at most conceive a poet's ' ' style " as a whole ; 
 as, along with his individual world of meditation and vision, 
 another phase of his creative power — as his creation of music. 
 Possibly it is the deepest and most wonderful of the poet's 
 creations, transcending its manifestation in connection with 
 any single poem. Perhaps, for instance, Milton's greatest 
 creative act was not Lycidas, or the Sonnets, or Paradise Lost, 
 but that music we call Miltonic. Certainly this is the more 
 true the more organic the style is; and, as said before, Bryant's 
 style was highly organic. 
 
 An astute and sympathetic mind who might never have seen 
 a verse of Bryant's could deduce that style from what has been 
 said in this chapter — if what has been said has been correctly 
 said. Such a mind would not need to be told that -Bryantls 
 diction was severe, simple, chaste, narrower in range than that 
 of his political prose; that his rhymes were dignified, sonorous, 
 exact and emphatic rather than subtle or allusive, and narrow 
 in range — not from artistic poverty but because the rhyme 
 vocabulary of the simple and serious moods is in English itself 
 narrow, and much novelty and variety of rhyme is in our 
 speech possible only when, like Browning, one portrays the 
 grotesque and the eccentric, or like Shelley the fantastic, or 
 like Butler the comic, or like Chaucer the familiar. Such a 
 mind would deduce Bryant's most fundamental rhythm, the 
 iambic; his most fundamental metre, the pentameter; together 
 with his preference for stanzaic, or periodic, treatment, whether 
 in blank verse or in rhyme, rather than for couplets; yes, 
 together with the most characteristic cadences, — ^like the curves 
 of a distant mountain range, few and clear but not monotonous ; 
 like the waves of a broad river, slow and long but not hesitant 
 or ponderous, never delighting by subtle surprises, nor jarring 
 
Bryant 67 
 
 by abrupt stops and shifts. Indeed, and would our critic not 
 likewise guess, especially if recently schooled at Leipzig under 
 Sievers, the very pitch of his voice in verse — strongest in the 
 lower octaves — as well as the intrinsic alliteration, ' — an allitera- 
 tion as natviral as breathing, in its context unobtrusive as such 
 to the conscious ear because so involved in a diction which 
 is itself the outgrowth of very mood and meaning? In quite 
 different ways, Bryant is, with Poe, America's finest artist in 
 verse. Perhaps this is, with Bryant's genuineness of manhood, 
 a reason why Bryant was the one native contemporary that 
 Poe thoroughly respected. 
 
 What to puzzled readers seems "characteristically Bryant's 
 blank verse" is really the total impression of both materials 
 and manner, manner itself including diction as well as metrics. 
 But the metrics alone do have their peculiarities, which can, 
 however, hardly be examined here: line endings like "and the 
 green moss, " caesuras at the end of the first and of the fourth 
 foot, the tendency to repeat the same caestira and cadence 
 through a succession of lines, a stanza group of five or more lines 
 with ftdl stop followed by a single line or so, inverted accent at 
 the begirming of a line, and a differentiated, strong cadence at 
 the conclusion of the whole poem which gives the effect of a 
 completion, not of a mere stopping, — ^these are all contributing 
 factors. 
 
 Yet Bryant is not one of the world's master-poets. It is not 
 so much that he contributed little or nothing to philosophic 
 thought or spiritual revolution, not altogether that his range 
 was narrow, not that he never created a poem of vast and multi- 
 tudinous proportions, drama, epic, or tale, not that he knew 
 natiure better than human Ufe and human life better than 
 human nature, not that he now and then lapsed from imagina- 
 tive vision into a bit of sentiment or irrelevant fancy, — ^not 
 either that there is not a single dark saying, or obscure word, 
 construction, allusion, in all his verse, for the judicious to 
 elucidate at a club or in a monograph. He is not one of the r 
 world's master-poets, because he was not pre-eminently en- V 
 dowed with intellectual intensity and imaginative concentration. 
 The character of his whole mind was discursive, enumerative, 
 
 ' Largely on b and frequently in idiomatic pairs, as "bees and birds," "bled 
 or broke." 
 
68 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 tending, when measured by the masters, to the diffuse. Thus, 
 among other results, his report of things has given man's 
 current speech but few quotations, of either epigrammatic 
 criticism or haunting beauty. A book could be written on this 
 thesis, but a paragraph must suffice. It is just as well: it is 
 better to realize what Bryant was than to exploit what he was 
 not. 
 
 And if he was and is a true poet, he belongs to our best 
 traditions also as critic. He was never, to be sure, the pro- 
 fessional guide of literary taste, like Arnold and Lowell. 
 Apart from sensible but obvious memorial addresses on Irving, 
 Halleck, and Cooper, his best known essay is introductory to his 
 Library of Poetry and Song; it enunciates fewer keen judgments 
 on individuals, fewer profound principles, than does Emerson's 
 introduction to his Parnassus, but it does enunciate the pri- 
 macy of "a luminous style" and of themes central to common 
 man, in noble paragraphs that should not be forgotten, certainly 
 not by any one who believes that criticism gains in authority 
 when it is the concentrated deduction of experience. Of his 
 services as editor of a leading metropolitan paper, through 
 nearly two generations of crisis after crisis in the nation's life, 
 only an historian should speak. Not even Godwin, his editorial 
 colleague, has spoken, it seems, quite the definitive word. Why 
 shotild it not be spoken? The fact is, no such man ever sat, 
 before or since, in the editorial chair; in no one other has there 
 been such culture, scholarship, wisdom, dignity, moral idealism. 
 Was it all in Greeley? in Dana? What those fifty years may 
 have meant as an influence on the American press, especially as 
 counteracting the flamboyant and vulgar, the layman may only 
 conjecture. 
 
 There is no space to speak of his letters beyond noting that, 
 with all their elegance, courtesy, criticism, information, they 
 do not belong, with Cicero's, Gray's, Cowper's, Byron's, Emer- 
 son's, Meredith's, to the literature of correspondence, because 
 they are without zest for little details of human Ufe (whether 
 in others or in himself), or without informal spontaneity and 
 flashes of insight — or without whatever it be that makes a pri- 
 vate letter ultimately a public joy. 
 J As a whole, Bryant's prose style has quality as well as 
 xj qualities, but here a word only on its relation to the style of his 
 
Bryant 69 
 
 poetry. Bryant more than once expKcitly differentiated the 
 functions of the two harmonies'; but Prescott* was not the only 
 one who detected in both the same quaKties of mind: obviously 
 a man is not two different beings according to whether he is 
 playing a violin or a cello, singing or talking. Bryant, as 
 Dowden said of Burke, saw "the life of society in a rich, concrete, 
 imaginative way"; and not unlike Burke he had, as politician, 
 the poet's generalizing power. But the point here of special 
 interest is the recurrence in his prose so often, when his prose 
 rises to things in their significance (as apart from their mere 
 relations), of the same imaginative procedure: there is the 
 "broad survey," as in the account of the waters of the Mis- 
 sissippi^ (themselves introduced as a simile to illustrate the 
 fame of Homer); there are his fundamental metaphors, the 
 grammar of his dialect, as that of the past as a place, occurring 
 in the editorial'' on the amendment abolishing slavery, which is 
 besides in many details of imagery almost another version of 
 the poem on the same theme, written, says Godwin, a little 
 later. In a public address on the electric telegraph ' he said : 
 
 My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea, 
 to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, 
 among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs 
 strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned 
 men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of 
 gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth 
 never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, among the 
 fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never 
 visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human 
 eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in 
 darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne 
 by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. 
 
 Is not this in imagination, mood, manner, even in the recur- 
 rent blank verse cadences, veritably as if an unpubHshed frag- 
 ment of A Hymn of the Sea ? 
 
 So we return to the Poet. Yet when all is said, it is the whole 
 man that is ours and that should be ours. He is the Citizen of 
 
 ' Godwin, Prose, vol. ii, p. 22. • Godwin, Lije, vol.'ii, p. 36. 
 
 3 Godwin, Prose, vol. 11, p. 269. * Godwin, Lije, vol. 11, p. 235. 
 
 « Godwin, Prose, vol. 11, p. 259. | 
 
70 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 our tradition; not to us today so much for his hand in the 
 founding of two political parties, nor for his counsels by per- 
 sonal letter and speech that Lincoln, the Statesman of our 
 tradition, heard with such grave respect, nor for his civic 
 activities in art, charity, and reform; but for that Mosaic 
 massive head, those deep, peering, brooding eyes, those white 
 shaggy brows, and the great beard over the old man's cloak 
 that, in the engraving after Sarony's photograph, has been now 
 for a generation familiar in so many homes of our land. 
 
3- Cooper 
 
 A CERTAIN John Bristed, writing in 1818, maintained 
 that the United States, without aristocracy, antiq- 
 uity, and a romantic border, could not have a Scott. 
 Seldom has time contradicted a prophet so fully and so soon as 
 when Cooper, within three years, began to show that democracy 
 has its contrasts, that two hundred years can be called a kind 
 of antiquity, and that the border warfare between pioneer and 
 Indian is one of the great chapters in the world's romance. 
 
 The task weighed less upon Cooper than it might had he 
 been from boyhood at all bookish or, when he began his career, 
 either scholar or conscious man of letters. But instead of this 
 he had been trained in the world. Bom at Burlington, New 
 Jersey, 15 September, 1789, the son of Judge William Cooper 
 and Susan Fenimore, James Cooper' was taken in November, 
 1790, to Cooperstown, the raw central village of a pioneer 
 settlement recently established by his father on Otsego Lake, 
 New York. Here the boy saw at first hand the varied life of 
 the border, observed its shifts and contrivances, listened to 
 tales of its adventures, and learned to fed the mystery of the 
 dark forest which lay beyond the cleared circle of his own life. 
 Judge Cooper, however, was less a typical backwoodsman than 
 a kind of warden of the New York marches, like Judge Temple- 
 ton in The Pioneers, and he did not keep his son in the woods 
 but sent him, first to the rector of St. Peter's in Albany, who 
 grounded him in Latin and hatred of Puritans, and then to 
 Yale, where he wore his college duties so lightly as to be dis- 
 
 ' The family name was changed to Fenimore-Cooper by act of legislattire in 
 April, 1826. Cooper soon dropped the hyphen. 
 
 71 
 
T2 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 missed in his third year. 'Ehinking the navy might furnish 
 better discipline than Yale, Judge Cooper shipped his son before 
 the mast on a merchant vessel to learn the art of seamanship 
 which there was then no naval academy to teach. His first 
 ship, the Sterling, sailed from New York in October, 1806, for 
 Falmouth and London, thence to Cartagena, back to London, 
 and once more to America in September of the following year. 
 They were chased by pirates and stopped by searching parties, 
 incidents Cooper never forgot. In January, 1808, he was 
 commissioned midshipman. He served for a time on the 
 Vesuvius, and later in the same year was sent with a party to 
 Lake Ontario to build the brig Oneida for service against the 
 British on inland waters. He visited Niagara, commanded for 
 a time on Lake Champlain, and in November, 1809, was ordered 
 to the Wasp. In the natural course of events he would have 
 fought in the War of 1812, but, having been married in Janu- 
 ary, 181 1, to Miss Susan Augusta DeLancey, he resigned his 
 commission the following May and gave up all hope of a naval 
 career. 
 
 Thus at twenty-two he exchanged a stirring youth for the 
 quiet, if happy, life of a country proprietor. He spent the next 
 eleven years, except for a stay at Cooperstown (1814-17), in 
 his wife's native county of Westchester, New York. There, 
 in a manner quite casual, he began his real work. His wife 
 challenged him to make good his boast that he could write a 
 better story than an English novel he was reading to her. He 
 attempted it and wrote Precaution (1820), which, as might 
 have been expected from a man who, in spite of a juvenile 
 romance and a few doggerel verses, was little trained in author- 
 ship, is ahighly conventional novel. Its scene is laid in England, 
 and no quality is more notable than stifE elegance and painful 
 piety. Cooper was dissatisfied with his book. "Ashamed to 
 have fallen into the track of imitation, I endeavoured to repay 
 the wrong done to my own views, by producing a work that 
 shovild be purely American, and of which love of country should 
 be the theme. " ' He chose for his hero a spy who had served 
 John Jay during the Revolution, according to Jay's own 
 account, with singular purity of motive. The work was 
 carelessly done and published at the author's risk, and yet 
 
 ,' A Letter to his Countrymen, 1834, p. 98. 
 
Cooper 73 
 
 with the appearance of TTie Spy (22 December, 182 1), American 
 fiction may be said to have come of age. 
 
 This stirring tale has been, for many readers, an important 
 factor in the tradition which national piety and the old swelling 
 rhetoric have built up around the Revolution. The share of 
 historical fact in it, indeed, is not large, but the action takes 
 place so near to great events that the characters are all invested 
 with something of the dusky light of heroes, while the figure of 
 Washington moves among them like an unsuspected god. 
 Such a quality in the novel might have gone with impossible 
 partiality for the Americans had not Cooper's wife belonged to 
 a family which had been loyal during the struggle for inde- 
 pendence. As it was, he made his loyalists not necessarily 
 knaves and fools, and so secured a fairness of tone which, aside 
 from all questions of justice, has a large effect upon the art of 
 the narrative. It is clear the British are enemies worth fighting. 
 Perhaps by chance. Cooper here hit upon a type of plot at 
 which he excelled, a struggle between contending forces, not 
 badly matched, arranged as a pursuit in which the pursued are, 
 as a rule, favoured by author and reader. In the management 
 of such a device Cooper's invention, which was great, worked 
 easily, and the flights of Birch from friend and foe alike exhibit 
 a power to carry on plots with sustained sweep which belongs 
 only to the masters pi narration. To rapid movement Cooper 
 added the virtues of a very real setting. He knew Westchester 
 and its sparse legends as Scott knew the Border; his topography 
 was drawn with a firm hand. In his characters he was not 
 uniformly successfvd. Accepting for women the romantic 
 ideals of the day and writing of events in which, of necessity, 
 ladies cotdd play but a small part. Cooper tended to cast his 
 heroines, as even that day remarked, into a conventional mould 
 of helplessness and decorum. With the less sheltered classes of 
 women he was much more truthful. Of his men, too, the gentle- 
 men are likely to be mere heroes, though Lawton is an interest- 
 ing dragoon, while those of a lower order have more marked 
 characteristics. Essentially memorable and arresting is Harvey 
 Birch, peddler and patriot, outwardly no hero at aU and yet 
 surpassingly heroic of soul. The skill with which Birch is 
 presented, gaunt, weather-beaten, canny, mysterious — a skill 
 which Brown lacked — should not make one overlook the half- 
 
74 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 supernatural spirit of patriotism which, like the daemonic 
 impulses in Brown's characters, drives Birch to his destiny at 
 once wrecking and honouring him. This romantic fate also 
 condemns him to be sad and lonely, a dedicated soul who 
 captures attention by his secrecy and holds it throughout his 
 career by his adventures. No character in American historical 
 fiction has been able to obscure this first great character, whose 
 fame has outlasted every fashion for almost a century. 
 
 With The Spy Cooper proved his power to invent situations, 
 conduct a plot, vivify history and landscape, and create a 
 certain type of heroic character. His public success was in- 
 stant. The novel reached a third edition the following March ; 
 it was approved on the stage; European readers accepted it with 
 enthusiasm. Pleased, though perhaps surprised, at this recep- 
 tion of his work. Cooper threw himself into the new career 
 thus offered him with characteristic energy. He removed to 
 New York and hurried forward the composition of The Pioneers, 
 which appeared in February, 1823, with Cooper's first bump- 
 tious preface. Technically this book made no advance upon 
 The Spy. Cooper had but one method, improvisation, and 
 the absence of any very definite purstiit deprives The Pioneers, 
 though it has exciting moments, of general suspense. But it is 
 important as his first trial at the realistic presentation of 
 marmers in America. Dealing as he did with the Otsego 
 settlement where his boyhood had been spent, and with a time 
 (1793) within his memory, he could write largely from the fact. 
 Whatever romance there is in the story lies less in its plot, 
 which is relatively simple, or in its characters, which are, for the 
 most part, studied under a dry light with a good deal of caustic 
 judgment, than in the essential wonder of a pioneer life. The 
 novel is not as heroic as The Spy had been. Indian John, the 
 last of his proud race, is old and broken, corrupted by the 
 settlements; only his death dignifies him. Natty Bumppo, a 
 composite from many Cooperstown memories, is nobler because 
 he has not yielded but carries his virtues, which even in Cooper's 
 boyhood were becoming archaic along the frontier, into the 
 deeper forest. Natty stands as a protest, on behalf of sim- 
 plicity and perfect freedom, against encroaching law and order. 
 In The Pioneers, however, he is not yet of the proportions which 
 he later assumed, and only at the end, when he withdraws 
 
Cooper 75 
 
 from the field of his defeat by civilization, does he make his full 
 appeal. Cooper may have felt that there were still possibilities 
 in the character, but for the present he did not try to realize 
 them. Instead, he undertook to surpass Scott's Pirate in 
 seamanship and produced The Pilot, issued in January, 1824.' 
 With this third success he practically ended his experimental 
 stage. Like The Spy, his new tale made use of a Revolutionary 
 setting; like The Pioneers, it was fuU of realistic detail based on 
 Cooper's own experience. The result was that he not only 
 outdid Scott in sheer narrative, but he created a new literary 
 type, the tale of adventure on the sea, in which, though he was 
 to have many followers in almost every modern language, he 
 remains unsurpassed for vigour and variety. Smollett had 
 already discovered the racy humours of seamen, but it remained 
 for Cooper to capture for fiction the mystery and beauty, the 
 shock and thriU of the sea. Experts say that his technical 
 knowledge was soimd; what is more important, he wrote, in 
 The Pilot, a story about sailing vessels which convinces lands- 
 men even in days of steam. The conventional element in the 
 novel is its hero, John Paul Jones, secret, Byronic, always 
 brooding upon a dark past and a darker fate. Thoroughly 
 original is that worthy successor of Birch and Natty Bumppo, 
 Long Tom Coffin, who lives and dies by the sea which has made 
 him, as love of coimtry made the spy and the forest made the 
 old hunter. 
 
 Cooper had now become a national figure, although critical 
 judgment in New England condescended to him. He founded 
 the Bread and Cheese Club in New York, a literary society of 
 which he was the moving spirit ; he took a prominent part in the 
 reception of Lafayette in 1824; in the same year Columbia 
 College gave him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. He 
 planned a series of Legends of the Thirteen Republics, aimed to 
 celebrate each of the original states, which he gave up after the 
 first, Lionel Lincoln (1825), for all his careful research failed to 
 please as his earlier novels had done. During the next two 
 years Cooper reached probably the highest point of his career 
 in The Last of the Mohicans (February, 1826) and The Prairie 
 (May, 1 827) . His own interest and the persuasion of his friends 
 led him to continue the adventures of Natty Bumppo, and 
 
 •But dated 1823. :'" 
 
76 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 very naturally he undertook to show both the days of Natty's 
 prime and his final fortunes. In each case Cooper projects 
 the old hunter out of the world of remembered Otsego, into the 
 dark forest which was giving up its secrets in 1793, or into the 
 mighty prairies^which Cooper had not seen but which stretched, 
 in his mind's eye, for endless rmles beyond the forest, another 
 mystery and another refuge. Natty, called Hawkeye in 
 The Last of the Mohicans, no longer has the hardness which 
 marred his age in The Pioneers. With all his virtues of hand 
 and head he combines a nobility of spirit which the woods have 
 fostered in a mind never spoiled by men. He grows nobler as 
 he grows more remote, more the ^oet and hero as the world in 
 which he moves becomes more wholly his own. Chingachgook 
 has undergone even a greater change, has got back all the 
 cunning and pride which had been deadened in Indian John. 
 But Hawkeye and Chingachgook are both limited by their 
 former appearance; one must still be the canny reasoner, the 
 other a little saddened with passing years. The purest romance 
 of the tale lies in Uncas, the forest's youngest son, gallant, swift, 
 courteous, a lover for whom there is no hope, the last of the 
 Mohicans. That Uncas was idealized Cooper was ready to 
 admit; Homer, he suggested, had his heroes. And it is clear 
 that upon Uncas were bestowed some of the virtues which the 
 philosophers of the age had taught the world to find in a state 
 of nature. Still, after a century many smile upon the state of 
 nature who are yet able to find in Uncas the perennial appeal of 
 youth cut oflE in the flower. The action and setting of the novel 
 are on the same high plane as the characters. The forest, in 
 which all the events take place, siurotmds them with a change- 
 less majesty that sharpens, by contrast, the restless sense of 
 danger. Pursuit makes almost the whole plot. The pursued 
 party moving from Fort Edward to Port WiUiam Henry has 
 two girls to handicap its flight and to increase the tragedy of 
 capture. Later the girls have been captured, and sympathy 
 passes, a thing unusual in Cooper, to the pursuing rescuers. In 
 these tasks Hawkeye and the Mohicans are opposed by the 
 fierce capacity of Magua, who plays villain to Uncas's hero, in 
 moral qualities Uncas's opposite. There is never any relaxa- 
 tion of suspense, and the scene in which Uncas reveals himself 
 to the Delawares is one of the most thrilling moments in fiction. 
 
Cooper 77 
 
 The Prairie has less swiftness than The Last of the Mohicans 
 but more poetry. In it Natty appears again, twenty years 
 older than in The Pioneers, far away on the plains beyond the 
 Mississippi. He owns his defeat and he still grieves over the 
 mirrdered forest, but he has given up anger for the peace of old 
 age. To him it seems that all his virtues are gone. Once 
 valiant he must now be crafty ; his arms are feeble ; his eyes have 
 so far failed him that, no longer the perfect marksman, he has 
 suiik to the calling of a trapper. There is a pathos in his resig-, 
 nation which would be too painful were it not merely a phase 
 of his grave and noble wisdom. He is more than ever what 
 Cooper called him, "a philosopher of the wilderness." The 
 only change is that he has left the perils and delights of the for- 
 est and has been subdued to the eloquent monotony of the 
 plains. Nowhere else has Cooper shown such sheer imaginative 
 power as in his handling of this mighty landscape. He had 
 never seen a prairie; indeed, it is clear that he thought of a 
 prairie as an ocean of land and described it partly by analogy. 
 But he managed to endow the huge empty distances he had not 
 seen with a presence as haunting as that of the poptdous forest 
 he had known in his impressionable youth. And the old 
 trapper, though he thinks of himself as an exile, has learned the 
 secrets of the new nature and belongs to it. It is his knowledge 
 that makes him essential to the action, which is again made up 
 of flight and pursuit. Once more there are girls to be rescued, 
 from white men as well as from Indians. There is another 
 Magua in Mahtoree, another Uncas in the virtuous Hard- 
 Heart. The Indians ride horses and are thus more difficult to 
 escape than the Hurons had been. The fiat prairies give fewer 
 places of concealment. But the trapper is as ready as ever with 
 new arts, and the flight ends as romance prescribes. The final 
 scene, the death of the trapper in the arms of his young friends, 
 is very touching and fine, yet reticently handled. For the 
 most part, the minor characters, the lovers and the pedant, are 
 not new to Cooper and are not notable. The family of Ishmael 
 Bush, the squatter, however, make up a new element. They 
 have been forced out of civilization by its virtues, as the trapper 
 by its vices. They have strength without nobility and activity 
 without wisdom. Except when roused, they are as sluggish 
 as a prairie river, and like it they appear muddy and aimless. 
 
78 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Ishmael Bush always conveys the impression of terrific forces 
 lying vaguely in ambush. His wife is nearly the most memor- 
 able figure among Cooper's women. She clings to her mate and 
 cubs with a tigerish instinct that leaves her, when she has lost 
 son and brother and retreats in a vast silent grief, still lingering 
 in the mind, an inarticulate prairie Hecuba. 
 
 Possibly the novel owes some of its depth of atmosphere to 
 the fact that it was finished in France and that Cooper was 
 thus looking back upon his subject through a mist of regret. 
 He had sailed for Europe with his family in June, 1826, to begin 
 a foreign residence of more than seven years which had a large 
 effect upon his later life and work. He found his books well 
 known and society at large disposed to make much of him. 
 In Paris he fraternized with Scott, who enjoyed and praised 
 his American rival. Parts of his stay were in England, Holland, 
 Germany, Switzerland, which delighted and astonished him, 
 and Italy, which he loved. Most of his time, however, he 
 passed at Paris, charmed with a gayer and more brilliant society 
 than he could have known before. He did not cease to write. 
 In January, 1828, he repeated the success of The Pilot with 
 another sea tale. The Red Rover, which has always held a place 
 among the most favoured of his books. The excitement is less 
 sustained than in The Pilot, but portions of the narrative, no- 
 tably those dealing with storms, are tremendous. The ocean 
 here plays as great a part as Cooper had lately assigned to the 
 prairie. One voices the calm of nature, one its tumult; both 
 tend to the discipline of man. In 1829 he fared better than 
 with Lionel Lincoln in another historical tale of New England, 
 The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, an episode of King Philip's War. 
 It is a powerful novel, irregular and ungenial, not only because 
 the Puritans represented were themselves unlovely, but because 
 Cooper had an evident dislike for them which coloured all their 
 qualities. This was followed in the next year by The Water- 
 Witch, which Cooper thought his most imaginative book. It 
 has a spirited naval battle, but it flatly failed to localize a 
 supernatural legend in New York harbour. 
 
 Novels were not Cooper's whole concern during his years 
 in Europe. Unabashedly, outspokenly American, he had 
 secured from Henry Clay the post of consul at Lyons, that he 
 might not seem, during his travels, a man without a covmtry. 
 
Cooper 79 
 
 As consul, though his position was purely nominal, he felt 
 called upon to resent the ignorance everywhere shown by 
 Europeans regarding his native land, and he set out upon the 
 task of educating them to better views. Cooper was not Frank- 
 lin. His Notions of the Americans (1828), while fuU of informa- 
 tion and a rich mine of American opinion for that day, was too 
 obviously partisan to convince those at whom it was aimed. 
 Its proper audience was homesick Americans. He indulged, 
 too, in some controversy at Paris over the relative cost of 
 French and American government which pleased neither nation. 
 Finally, he applied his art to the problem and wrote three 
 novels "in which American opinion should be brought to bear 
 on Etu-opean facts."' That is, in The Bravo (1831), The Heid- 
 enmauer (1832), and The Headsman (1833) he meant to show 
 by proper instances the superiority of democracy to aristocracy 
 as regards general happiness and justice. He claimed to be 
 writing for his countrymen alone, some of whom must have been 
 thrilled to come across a passage like "a fairer morning never 
 dawned upon the Alleghanies than that which illumined the 
 Alps," but he was not sufficiently master of his material, how- 
 ever stout and just his opinions, to make even The Bravo, the 
 best of the three, as good as his pioneer romances. 
 
 Before he returned to New York in November, 1833, h^ was 
 warned by his friend S. F. B. Morse that he would be dis- 
 appointed. Cooper found himself, in fact, fatally cosmopolitan 
 in the repubhc he had been justifying for seven years. Always 
 critical, he sought to qualify too sweeping praise of America 
 precisely as he had qualified too sweeping censure in Europe. 
 But he had not learned tact while becoming a citizen of the 
 world, and he soon angered the public he had meant to set 
 right. The resiilt was the long and dreary wrangling which 
 clouded the whole remainder of his life and has obscured his 
 fame almost to the present day. If he had attended the dinner 
 planned in his honour on his return, he might have found his 
 welcome warmer than he thought it. If he had been an observer 
 keen enough, he would have seen that the new phases of de- 
 mocracy which he disliked were in part a gift to the old sea- 
 board of that very frontier of which he had been painter and 
 annalist. But he did not see these things, and so he carried on 
 • A Letter to his Countrymen, p. 12. 
 
8o Chapters of American Literature 
 
 a steady fight, almost always as right in his contentions as he 
 was wrong-headed in his manner. From Cooperstown, gener- 
 ally his residence, except for a few winters in New York, to the 
 end of his life, he lectured and scolded. His Letter to his Coun- 
 trymen (1834), stating his position, and The MoniUns (1835), 
 an unbelievably dtdl satire, were the first fruits of his quarrel. 
 He followed these with five books dealing with his Etiropean 
 travels and constantly irritating to the people of both conti- 
 nents. He indulged in a heated altercation with his fellow towns- 
 men over some land which they thought theirs, although it was 
 certainly his. In 1838 he published a fictitious record, Home- 
 ward Bound and its sequel Home as Found, of the disappoint- 
 ment of some Americans who rettirn from Europe and find 
 America what Cooper had recently found it. He proclaimed 
 his political principles in The American Democrat (1838). 
 Most important of all, he declared war upon the newspapers 
 of New York and went up and down the state suing those that 
 had libelled him. He won most of the suits, but though he 
 silenced his opponents he had put his fame into the hands of 
 persons who, unable to abuse, could at least neglect him. 
 
 His soUd History of the Navy of the United States of America 
 (1839) turned his attention once more to naval affairs, with 
 which he busied himself during much of his remaining career. 
 He wrote Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1842- 
 5), and Ned Myers (1843), the life of a common sailor who had 
 been with him on the Sterling. The History led to a ftirious 
 legal battle, but generally Cooper left his quarrels behind him 
 when he went upon the sea. As a cosmopoUtan, he seemed to 
 feel freer out of sight of land, on the public highway of the 
 nations. His novels of this period, however, are tmeven in 
 merit. The Two Admirals (1842) contains one of his best naval 
 battles; Wing-and-Wing (1842) ranks high among his sea tales, 
 richly romantic and glowing with the splendours of the Medi- 
 terranean. Mercedes of Castile (1840) has little interest beside 
 that essential to the first voyage of Columbus. The two parts 
 of Afloat and Ashore (1844), dealing powerfully as they do with 
 the evils of impressment, are notable chiefly for sea fights and 
 chases. Jack Tier (1846-8) is a Itirid piratical tale of the 
 Mexican War; The Crater (1847) does poorly what Robinson 
 Crusoe does supremely; The Sea Lions (1849) has the distinc- 
 
Cooper 81 
 
 tion of marking the highest point in that religious bigotry which 
 pervades Cooper's later novels as thoroughly as the carping 
 spirit which kept him always alert for a chance to take some 
 fling at his countrymen. 
 
 The real triumph of his later years was that he wrote, in the 
 very midst of his hottest litigation, The Pathfinder (March, 
 1840) and The Deerslayer (August, 1841). One realizes, in 
 reading them, that the forest more than the ocean was for 
 Cooper a romantic sanctuary, as it was for Pathfinder the true 
 temple, full of the "holy calm of nature, " the teacher of beauty, 
 virtue, laws. Returning to these solemn woods. Cooper was 
 subdued once more to the spirit which had attended his first 
 great days. The fighting years through which he had passed 
 had left him both more mellow and more critical than at first. 
 During the same time he had gone far enough from the original 
 character of Leather-Stocking to become aware of traits which 
 should be brought out or explained. It was too late to make his 
 hero entirely consistent for the series, but Cooper apparently 
 saw the chance to fill out the general outline, and he did it with 
 such skill that those who read the five novels in the order of 
 events will notice relatively few discrepancies, since The Deer- 
 slayer prepares for nearly all that follows. In The Pathfinder, 
 undertaken to show Natty in love and to combine the forest 
 and a ship in the same tale, Cooper was at some pains to point 
 out how Pathfinder's candour, self-reliance, justice, and fidelity 
 had been developed by the life he had led in the forest. Leather- 
 Stocking, indeed, does not seem more conscious of these special 
 gifts, but Cooper does. StiU there is abimdant action, another 
 flight through the woods, a storm on Lake Ontario, a siege at a 
 blockhouse. Chingachgook, unchanged, is with Pathfinder, 
 who varies from his earlier character in little but his love for a 
 young girl whom he finally surrenders to a more suitable lover. 
 His love affair threatens for a moment to domesticate Natty, 
 but the sacrifice restores him to his old solitude. 
 
 In the final book of the series. The Deerslayer, Cooper 
 performed with full success the hard task of representing the 
 scout in the fresh morning of his youth. Love appears too 
 in this story, but Deerslayer, unable to love a girl who has 
 been corrupted by the settlements, turns to the forest with his 
 best devotion. The book is the tale of his coming of age. 
 
82 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Already a htmter, he kills his first man and thus enters the 
 long career which Ues before him. That career, however, 
 had already been traced by Cooper, and the distress with which 
 Deerslayer realizes that he has human blood on his hands 
 becomes immeasiirably eloquent. It gives the figure of the 
 man almost a new dimension; one remembers the many deaths 
 Natty has yet to deal. In other matters he is near his later 
 self, for he starts life with a steady philosophy which, through 
 all the many experiences of The Deerslayer, keeps him to the 
 end as simple and honourable as at the outset. 
 
 The novel is thus an epitome of the whole career of the most 
 memorable character American fiction has given to the world. 
 Leather-Stocking is very fully drawn ; Cooper's failure to write a 
 sixth novel, as he at one time planned, which shotdd show Natty 
 in the Revolution, may be taken as a sign that he felt, however 
 unconsciously, that the picture was finished. It is hard, 
 indeed, to see how he could have added to the scout without 
 taking something from the spy. More important still, the 
 virtue of patriotism, if carried to the pitch that must have been 
 demanded for that hero in that day, would surely have been 
 a little alien to the cool philosopher of the woods. Justic e, 
 not partisanship, is .Leather-Stocking's essential trait. In 
 him Cooper exhibited, even better than he knew, his special 
 idea that htmian character can be brought to a noble propor- 
 tion and perfection in the school of pure nature. Now this 
 idea, generally current in Cooper's youth, had an effect upon 
 the Leather-Stocking tales of the greatest moment. Because 
 their hero, as the natural man, had too simple a soul to call 
 for minute analysis, it was necessary for Cooper to show him 
 moving through a long succession of events aimed to test the 
 firmness of his virtues. There was thus produced the panorama 
 of the American frontier which, because of Cooper's incom- 
 parable fusion of strangeness and reality, at once became 
 and has remained the classic record of an heroic age. 
 
 He wrote more border tales before his death. Wyandotte 
 (1843) deals largely with the siege of a blockhouse near the 
 upper Susquehanna, and The Oak-Openings (1848), the fruit of 
 a journey which he made to the West in 1847, is a tale of bee 
 hunting and Indian fighting on the shores of Lake Michigan. 
 Full of border material, too, is the trilogy of Littlepage Manu- 
 
Cooper 83 
 
 scripts, Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1846), and The 
 Redskins (1846). Having tried the autobiographical method 
 with Miles Wallingford in Afloat and Ashore, Cooper now 
 repeated it through three generations of a New York fanuly. 
 In the last he involved himself unduly in the question pf anti- 
 rentism and produced a book both fantastic and dull ; the second 
 is better by one of Cooper's most powerful figures, the squatter 
 Thousandacres, another Titan of the brood of Ishmael Bush; 
 the first, if a Httle beneath Cooper's best work, is so only because 
 he was somewhat rarely at his best. No other novel, by Cooper 
 or any other, gives so firm and convincing a picture of colonial 
 New York. Even Cooper has no more exciting struggle than 
 that of Corny Littlepage with the icy Hudson. But the special 
 virtue of Satanstoe is a quality Cooper nowhere else displays, 
 a positive winsomeness in the way Littlepage unfolds his 
 memories (now sweetened by many years) and his humorous 
 crotchets in the same words. There are pages which read 
 almost like those of some vigorous Gait or Goldsmith. Un- 
 fortunately, Cooper did not carry this vein further. His 
 comedy Upside Down, produced at Burton's Theatre, New 
 York, 18 June, 1850, was a failure, and his last novel, The 
 Ways of the Hour (1851), lacks every charm of manner. With 
 his family and a few friends he lived his latter days in honour 
 and affection, but he held the public at a sour distance and 
 before his death, 14 September, 1851, set his face against a 
 reconciUation even in the future by forbidding any biography 
 to be authorized. The published facts of his life still leave 
 his personaHty less known to the general world than that of 
 any American writer of equal rank. 
 
 This might be somewhat strange, since Cooper was lavish 
 of intrusions into his novels, were it not that he wrote him- 
 self down, when he spoke in his own person, not only a powerful 
 and independent man, but a scolding, angry man, and thus 
 made his most revealing novels his least read ones. One thinks 
 of Scott, who, when he shows himself most, wins most love. 
 The difference further characterizes the two men. In breadth 
 of sympathies, humanity, geniality, humour. Cooper is less 
 than Scott. He himself, in his review of Lockhart, said that 
 Scott's great ability lay in taking a legend or historical episode, 
 which Scotland furnished in splendid profusion, and repro- 
 
84 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 ducing it with marvellous grace and tact. "This faculty of 
 creating a vraisemblance, is next to that of a high invention, 
 in a novelist." It is clear that Cooper felt his own inferiority 
 to Scott in "creating a vraisemblance" and that he was always 
 conscious of the relative barrenness of American life; it is 
 also tolerably clear that he himself aimed at what he thought 
 the higher quality of invention. Cooper's invention, indeed, 
 was not without a solid basis; he is not to be neglected as an 
 historian. No man better sums up in literatuie the spirit 
 of that idealistic, irascible, pugnacious, somewhat crude, and 
 half aristocratic older democracy which established the United 
 States. No one fixed the current heroic traditions of his day 
 more firmly to actual placesi No one else supplied so many 
 facts to the great legend of the frontier. Fact no less than 
 fiction underlies the character which, for all time, Cooper 
 gave to the defeated race of red men, who, no longer a menace 
 as they had been to the first settlers, could now take their 
 place in the world of the imagination, sometimes idealized, as 
 in Uncas and Hard-Heart, but more often credibly imperfect 
 and uncivilized. It was his technical knowledge of ships and 
 sailors which led Cooper to write sea tales, a province of 
 romance in which he still takes rank, among many followers, 
 as teacher and master of them all. True, Cooper had not 
 Scott's resources of historical learning to fall back upon when 
 his invention flagged, any more than he had Scott's resotuces 
 of good-nature when he became involved in argument; but 
 when, as in the Leather-Stocking tales, his invention could 
 , move most freely, it did unaided what Scott, with all his 
 subsidiary qualities, could not outdo. This is to credit Cooper 
 with an invention almost supreme among romancers. Cer- 
 tainly it is difficult to explain why, with all his faults of 
 clumsiness, prolixity, conventional characterization, and ill 
 temper, he has been the most widely read American author, 
 unless he is to be called one of the most impressive and 
 original. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Poe 
 
 THE saddest and the strangest figure in American literary 
 history is that of Edgar Allan Poe. Few writers have 
 lived a life so full of struggle and disappointment, 
 and none have lived and died more completely out of sympathy 
 with their times. His life has been made the subject of minute 
 and prolonged investigation, yet there are still periods in his 
 history that have not been satisfactorily cleared up. And the 
 widest differences of opinion have existed as to his place and 
 his achievements. But there are few today who will not 
 readily concede to him a place among the foremost writers of 
 America, whether in prose or in verse, and there are not want- 
 ing those who account him one of the two or three writers of 
 indisputable genius that America has produced. 
 
 Poe was born at^_oston, 19 January, iSpgi, the son of actor 
 parents of small means and of romantic proclivities. Before 
 the end of his third year he was left an orphan, his mother 
 dying in wretched poverty at Richmond, Virginia, 8 December, 
 181 1, and his father a few weeks later, if we may believe the 
 poet's own statement. He was promptly taken under the 
 protection of a prosperous tobacco exporter of Richmond, 
 John Allan, in whose family he Uved, ostensibly as an adopted 
 child, until 1827. In his sixth year he attended for a short 
 time the school of WiUiam Ewing in Richmond. In the 
 summer of 1815 he went with his foster-father to England, 
 and for the next five years, with the exception of a few months 
 spent in Scotland shortly after reaching England, he lived in 
 London, attending first a boarding school kept by the Misses 
 Dubourg in Sloane Street, and later the academy of the Rev. 
 John Bransby in Stoke Newington. He impressed Bransby 
 
 85 
 
86 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 as a "quick and clever boy," though embarrassed by "an 
 extravagant amount of pocket-money"; and John Allan wrote 
 of him in 1818 that he was " a fine boy " and read "Latin pretty 
 sharply." In 1816 Allan described him as "thin as a razor," 
 but in 1819 he wrote that he was "growing wonderfully." 
 
 On his return to Richmond in the summer of 1820, Poe 
 entered an academy kept, first, by Joseph H. Clarke and, later, 
 by William Burke, under whom he continued his work in the 
 languages, earning the admiration of his fellows by his readi- 
 ness at "capping verses" from the Latin and by his sldll in 
 declamation. He also wrote verses of his own, and it is said 
 that a sheaf of his juvenilia was collected in 1822 or 1823 in 
 the hope that they might be published in volume form. But 
 before the end of 1824 he had somehow broken with his foster- 
 father, and the breach between the two was never to be entirely 
 healed. "The boy possesses not a spark of affection for us," 
 wrote John Allan in November, 1824, "not a particle of grati- 
 tude for all my care and kindness towards him. ... I fear his 
 associates have led him to adopt a line of thinking and acting 
 very contrary to what he possessed when in England." The 
 immediate cause of the breach we do not know; but a parting 
 of the ways between the two, who were radically dissimilar in 
 tastes and ideals, was inevitable sooner or later. 
 
 The year 1826 Poe spent as a student at the University 
 of Virginia. Here he made a creditable record in his classes, 
 winning honourable mention in Latin and French; and he'at no 
 time fell under the censure of his instructors. At the end of the 
 year, however, because of his having accumulated gambling debts 
 of some twenty-five hundred dollars, he was withdrawn from 
 college; and with the beginning of the next year he was placed 
 by his adoptive father in his counting-house in Richmond, 
 in the hope that he might develop a taste for a business career. 
 But he had small leaning that way; besides, he had been dis- 
 appointed in a love-affair, having become engaged before going 
 to college to Miss Sarah Elmira Royster, of Richmond, who, in 
 consequence of a misunderstanding, had jilted him in his absence 
 and had betrothed herself to another. Smarting under this dis- 
 appointment and completely out of sympathy with the life 
 marked out for him by his foster-father, Poe now determined to 
 run away; and at some time in March, 1827, he left Richmond 
 
Poe 87 
 
 for parts unknown. In May he appeared at Boston, and there, 
 26 May, he was mustered into the army of the United States. 
 The next two years he served as a soldier in barracks, being 
 stationed first at Boston, then at Charleston, South Carolina, 
 and finally at Fortress Monroe. In the spring or summer of 
 1827 he brought put at Boston his first volume of poems, 
 T^terkttw and Other Poems, a collection of ten fugitive pieces, 
 all brief save one, and aU plainly imitative either of Byron 
 orof.Maore. 
 
 In February, 1829, Mrs. Allan died, and in April Poe was 
 discharged from the army, a substitute having been provided, 
 and efforts were made to obtain for him an appointment to West 
 Point. Some time intervened, however, before an appointment 
 could be procured, and it was not until July, 1830, that he was 
 admitted to the Academy. In the prece^mg December he had 
 published at Baltimore a second- Jvolunacof poems, made up 
 largely of his earUer pieces revised, but containing his long 
 poem Al Aaraaf, the most ambitious and the most promising 
 of his earHer productions. At West Point he took high rank 
 in his classes; but in October, 1830, John Allan had married a 
 second time, and Poe, concluding that there was no longer 
 any prospect of succeeding to a fortune, determined with the 
 beginning of the new year to bring about his dismissal from 
 the Academy. He adopted the very efEective means of ab- 
 senting himself from roll calls and from classes, was court- 
 martiaUed in consequence, and 6 March, 1831, was formally 
 expelled. In April a third volume of his poems appeared, 
 containing some of the best work that he ever did, but in a 
 state much inferior to that in which he ultimately left it. 
 
 During the ensuing four years Poe seems to have made his 
 home in Baltimore, though it is impossible to trace his history 
 with complete certainty throughout this period. Much of his 
 time, no doubt, was given to his prgse. tales, five of which ap- 
 peared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, in 1832,' and a 
 sixth — ^for which he won a prize of fifty dollars — in the 
 Baltimore Saturday Visiter in October, 1833; and he also 
 worked at intervals during these years on a play, Politian, 
 which, though published in part, was never completed. That 
 
 ' These stories were originally submitted in competition for a prize — won, as 
 it happens, by Delia Bacon. 
 
88 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 he lived in poverty and in much obscurity is evident from the 
 reminiscences of John Pendleton Kennedy, the novelist,^ 
 who had been one of the judges in the Visiter's contest in 
 1833 and who now proved his most helpful friend. 
 
 In the summer of 1835, Poe went to Richmond to assist in 
 the editing of The Southern Literary Messenger, and before the 
 end of the year he had been promoted to be editor-in-chief of 
 that magazine. He was now fairly launched on his career as 
 man of letters. In the columns of the Messenger he republished, 
 with slight revisions, the tales that had already appeared, and 
 in addition a number of new tales and poems, together with a 
 long line of book reviews, which promptly won for the Mes- 
 senger a popularity such as no other Southern magazine has 
 ever enjoyed. In May, 1836, relying on his suddenly acquired 
 prosperity, he married. His wife was Virginia Clemm,^ a 
 child of thirteen and the daughter of a paternal aunt, in 
 whose home he had lived for a time in Baltimore. In the 
 fall he was absent from his post for several weeks in conse- 
 quence of illness brought on by excessive indulgence in drink; 
 and though on his recovery he returned to his duties with his 
 accustomed vigour, he was tmable to satisfy his employer 
 as to his stability of habit; and with the initial number of 
 the Messenger for 1837 his resignation as editor was formally 
 announced. 
 
 From Richmond he went to New York, where he hoped to 
 find employment with The New York Review. In October, 
 1837, he was in Richmond again, posing as editor still of the 
 Messenger, though we cannot be certain that he contributed 
 anything to its columns at this time. At the end of the year 
 he was again in New York; and in the following summer he 
 moved to Philadelphia. In July he published at New York, 
 in book form, the longest of his tales, The.^Narrative of Arthur 
 Gordon Pym. 
 
 The next six years (i 838-1 844) he spent in Philadelphia. 
 During the first year he was engaged largely in hack-writing, 
 busying himself with a work on conchology (published in 
 
 ' Tuckerman, Life of Kennedy, pp. 373 f . 
 
 "A license for marriage to Virginia Clemm was procured at Baltimore in 
 September, 1835, but it has not been established that there was a wedding at 
 that time. 
 
Poe 89 
 
 1839) among other things, though he also composed at this 
 time some of the best pf his tales. In May, 1839, he became 
 associate editor of Burton's GentlemarCs Magazine, but a year 
 later he quarrelled with Burton and lost his place. From 
 April, 1841, to May, 1842, he edited Graham's Magazine. 
 And in 1843 he had for a while some tacit connection with a 
 Philadelphia weekly, The Saturday Museum. In Burton's 
 and in Graham's he published a number of the ablest of his 
 book-reviews and some of the most striking of his tales. At 
 the, end of 1839 he brought out at Philadelphia a collection of 
 his tales, in two volumes; and in 1843 a further edition of his 
 tales was projected, of which, however,' 'only one fascicle, 
 containing but two of his stories, was published. In the same 
 year he won a prize of a hundred dollars for his story The Gold 
 Bug. But at no time during these years was his income from 
 his writings or from his editorial labours sufficient to enable 
 him to live in comfort. During his later years in Philadelphia, 
 moreover, his weakness for drink had grown on him, and he 
 had as a result lost many of his friends; his wife, too, frail 
 from childhood, had become an invalid in 1841 or in 1842; 
 and so, early in 1844, the poet concluded to seek a new field. 
 In April, 1844, he moved with his family to New York; 
 and there, either in the city or at Fordham, a few miles out, 
 he lived during the remaining five years allotted to him. The 
 year 1844 was uneventful, but the year 1845 proved to be 
 the pivotal year of his history. At the end of January ap- 
 peared in the New York Evening Mirror, on which he had held 
 a minor editorial position for several months. The Raven; and 
 he became at once the most talked of man of letters in America. 
 In the stunmer he published a new volume of his tales, and in 
 the fall, a collected edition of his poems. The Raven and Other 
 Poems. Early in the year he became assistant editor of The 
 Broadway Journal; in July he became sole editor, and in October 
 editor and proprietor of this paper; and thus was enabled to 
 realize an ambition that he had cherished for more than a 
 decade, to edit a paper of his own. But owing to financial 
 embarrassments arising from various causes, he was compelled 
 to give up this paper at the end of the year. During the first 
 half of 1846 he was ill, so* he himself claimed, for several 
 months. In the middle of the year (May to October) he 
 
90 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 published, in Godey's Lady's Booh, his Literati, a series of bio- 
 graphical-critical papers dealing with the chief living writers 
 of Gotham; and the year was further made memorable by the 
 controversy with Thomas Dunn English engendered by the 
 publication of the Literati, and by a scandal growing out of his 
 friendship with the poetess, Mrs. F. S. Osgood, Early in 1847 
 the poet's wife died, and throughout the year, as indeed during 
 the preceding year, the family suffered keenly from the pinch 
 of poverty. The year 1 848 saw the culmination of two unhappy 
 love-affairs — ^first, with Mrs. Shew, who had nursed the poet 
 through a spell of illness following the death of his wife, and then 
 with Mrs. Whitman, the Rhode Island poetess; and this year 
 also witnessed the publication of his Eureka, a philosophical 
 disquisition on the origin and composition of the universe. 
 
 The year 1849 opened auspiciously for the poet; during the 
 first half he wrote at least one new tale, and several new poems, 
 including the lines For Annie, Eldorado, a revised and much 
 enlarged version of The Bells, and the last of his poems, An- 
 nabel Lee. In the summer of 1849 he went to Richmond, 
 where he renewed his addresses to the sweetheart of his boy- 
 hood. Miss Royster, now the widow Mrs. Shelton and wealthy, 
 and they became engaged for a second time. Late in Septem- 
 ber Poe left Richmond for the North, intending to bring his 
 mother-in-law, who remained loyal to him throughout the 
 years, to the South for the marriage; but at Baltimore he was 
 induced to break a temperance pledge that he had made in 
 the summer, and as a result he fell into excesses from the effects 
 of which he died 7 October, 1849. He lies btiried in the 
 churchyard of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Baltimore. 
 
 Such are the leading facts that have been established con- 
 cerning Poe's life. But despite the labours of his biographers 
 — and no American writer has had more and abler biographers 
 — there are still certain periods of his life for which our know- 
 ledge is exceedingly meagre and unsatisfactory. We have, 
 for instance, no specific knowledge as to how or where he spent 
 the two months intervening between his departure from Rich- 
 mond in March, 1827, and his mustering into the army at the 
 end of May. We are likewise ignorant both as to his where- 
 abouts and as to his activities during the year immediately pre- 
 ceding his winning of the Visiter's prize in October, 1833; and. 
 
Poe 91 
 
 the entire period from 1831 to 1835 is obscure. He sinks out of 
 sight again for six months in the middle of 1837. And a hiatus 
 of several months also occurs in his history during the first half 
 of the year 1846. For this obscurity Poe is himself mainly re- 
 sponsible. He took pleasure in mystifying his public about him- 
 self; and in a few instances he deliberately misstated the facts. ' 
 As to Poe's character and personality the most divergent 
 views have been expressed. According to Griswold, whom 
 he chose as his literary executor, Poe was a "naturally un- 
 amiable character," arrogant, "irascible, envious," without 
 "moral susceptibility" or sense of gratitude, and exhibiting 
 "scarcely any virtue in either his life or his writings." Ac- 
 cording to the Richmond editor, John M. Daniel, who saw him 
 frequently during the summer of 1849, he was sour of nature, 
 capricious, selfish, a misanthrope, possessing "little moral 
 sense. ' ' In the view of Lowell' s friend, C. F. Briggs, with whom 
 he was associated for several months in 1845 as co-editor of 
 the Broadway Journal, he was "badly made up," a "character- 
 less character," and "utterly deficient of high motive." And 
 Horace Greeley was disturbed lest Mrs. Whitman should 
 marry him, giving it as his opinion that such a union wotild 
 be a "terrible conjunction." To N. P. Willis, on the other 
 hand, who perhaps knew him better than any other outside 
 of his immediate family during his last half-dozen years, there 
 appeared, during several months of close association with him in 
 1 844-1 845, "but one presentment of the man, — a quiet, patient, 
 industrious, and most gentlemanly person, commanding the 
 utmost respect and good feeling by his unvarying deportment 
 and ability"; and in subsequent years he saw, so he declares, 
 nothing of the arrogance, vanity, and depravity of heart "that 
 were commonly attributed to him." And George R. Graham, 
 editor of the magazine that bore his name, testifies that, when 
 he knew him best (in the first half of the forties), "he had the 
 docility and kind-heartedness of a child," and that "no man 
 was more quickly touched by a kindness, none more prompt to 
 make return for an injury," and, further, that he was "the soul 
 
 ' See, in particular, in this connection, an autobiographical memorandum 
 sent to Griswold in 1841 {Works of Poe, ed. Harrison, Vol. I, pp. 344-346), in 
 which most of the dates are inaccurately given, and in which we have one of 
 several apocryphal accounts of a voyage to Europe in 1827. 
 
92 chapters of American Literature 
 
 of honour in all his transactions." Kennedy notes that he was 
 "irregular, eccentric, and querulous," but adds — as if in set re- 
 joinder to Griswold's charge that he was incapable of gratitude 
 for service done — ^that "he always remembered my kindness 
 with gratitude. ' ' As time has passed and we have come to know 
 more about Poe's life, it has become more and more evidept 
 that the view of his character held by Griswold and those who 
 sided with him was imduly harsh,' though it remains clear, 
 nevertheless, that Poe was not without regrettable traits and 
 serious weaknesses. It is plain, first of all, that he was ab- 
 normally proud and sensitive and impulsive; it is equally plain 
 that he was thoroughly undignified and ungenerous in his 
 attacks on certain of his contemporaries who had aroused his 
 envy or incurred his dislike. We have already noted that he 
 was not invariably accurate of statement, especially in matters 
 pertaining peculiarly to himself; we know, too, that he was an 
 incessant borrower, and that he neglected in some instances 
 to make good his borrowings at the appointed time, — though 
 there is no conclusive evidence of dishonesty of intent on his 
 part. And all the world knows that he sometimes drank to 
 excess. But it is also clear — contrary to the popular assump- 
 tion — that Poe was not a confirmed inebriate: the volume and 
 the quaHty of his writings sufficiently demonstrate this; and it 
 is not to be denied that he made repeated and manful efforts 
 to shake off the tyranny of drink. Nor can we read his letters 
 — in which we see the true Poe more plainly than elsewhere — • 
 without being convinced that he also possessed amiable traits 
 and noble impulses. In any estimate of his character, more- 
 over, it is but just to take into account — as, indeed, most of his 
 recent biographers have done — the influences exerted on his 
 character by heredity and by his early environment^; and it 
 should also be borne in mind that he suffered during most of 
 his later career from serious physical infirmities. ^ 
 
 » It is due to Griswold, however, to say that his account of Poe's life, though 
 inaccurate at many points and jaundiced throughout, is more to be relied on 
 than is now commonly assumed. For exposing most of Griswold's inaccuracies 
 we are indebted to Poe's English biographer, the late John H. Ingram. 
 
 "His father before -him was highly impulsive and was over-fond of drink, 
 and his foster-father was not only given to wine-bibbiag but was an arch-hypocrite 
 besides. 
 
 3 The clash of opinion with respect to Poe's character appears to be due 
 
Poe 93 
 
 It was as critic that Poe first attracted widespread atten- 
 tion. As editor of the Messenger and Burton's and Graham's 
 his chief function was that of book-reviewer; and much of the 
 work that he did for other periodicals was of the nature of 
 book-reviews and gossip about books and authors. The bulk 
 of his work in this field is journaHstic in style and of ephemeral 
 interest, much of it being the merest hack- writing; but there 
 remains a small body of critical matter that possesses genuine 
 worth and distinction, and that entitles Poe to an honourable 
 place among the literary critics of America.^ Assuredly no 
 other American critic of his day, save Lowell, may take rank 
 above him. This residue of good work comprises a score of 
 masterly book-reviews, including the memorable notices of 
 Longfellow's Ballads, Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, and 
 Dickens's Barnahy Rudge; some half-dozen essays in the 
 
 theory of criticism, of which the earliest is his Leiter to B , 
 
 and the most significant is his Poetic Principle; and a series of 
 obiter dicta, collected under the title Marginalia, which have 
 justly been held to contain much of his best work as critic.^ 
 
 Bis most distinctive gifts as critic were clearness of intel- 
 lect and a faculty for analysis. Few Americans of his time 
 had finer intellectual endowments. He also had the poet's 
 "faculty of ideality," on which he laid great stress in his judg- 
 ments of others. And he was the most independent and fear- 
 less of critics, disdaining not to attack either high or low. He 
 had not read very widely; but he knew his Milton well, and 
 probably his Shakespeare and his Pope, and he was familiar 
 
 mainly, as Willis suggested, to the fact that most of the contemporary judgments 
 adverse to him were based on his conduct during his spells of inebriation, at 
 which times (as he pathetically admitted more than once) he was largely irre- 
 sponsible. Most of these estimates, too, are based, naturally, on the poet's 
 later years, after both body and mind had become enfeebled. Poe himself 
 urged, in partial ejcplanation of his irregularities in his later years, the plea of 
 insanity; and there is reason to believe that he was at one time addicted to the 
 use of opium. 
 
 ' "Poe's critical writing was so much superior to the best of what had pre- 
 ceded it," remarks William Morton Payne {American Literary Criticism, 1904, 
 p. 14), "that one might almost be pardoned for saying that this department of 
 our literature began when, in 1835, The Southern Literary Messenger engaged 
 his services." 
 
 ' F. C. Prescott, Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 
 jtix; J. M. Robertson, New Essays towards a Critical Method, p. 117. 
 
94 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 with the chief Romantic poets of the age immediately preced- 
 ing his own; while as editor and magazinist he kept in close 
 touch with contemporary Uterature. On the other hand, he 
 was prone to exaggerate technical blemishes and to under- 
 estimate ethical and philosophical significance. And his 
 taste was not always impeccable. By his contemporaries he 
 was thought of as inexcusably harsh in his criticisms: by one 
 of them he is dubbed the "tomahawk man," by another the 
 "broad-axe man"; and Lowell remarks, in his sketch of him, 
 that he seemed "sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic- 
 acid for his inkstand." What is more to his discredit, he 
 stooped now and then to log-rolling both on his own account and 
 on behalf of his friends, and his unfavourable judgments ap- 
 pear to have been actuated in some instances by animus and 
 jealousy. But most of his critical judgments have been sus- 
 tained by time. And despite the arrogance charged against 
 him by Griswold and others, it is to be set down to his credit 
 that he ungrudgingly conceded to Longfellow and Lowell the 
 primacy among the American poets of his time and that he 
 generously proclaimed Hawthorne to be without a peer in his 
 peculiar field. His chief hobbies as critic were priginality — 
 and, per contra, imitation and plagiarism — "unity-or-botality 
 qf_^ect," consistency and "keeping," verisiniiHtude, "the 
 heresy of the didactic," provinciality, metrical imperfections 
 of whatever sort, and verbal inaccuracies and infeUcities; 
 some of which hobbies — as plagiarism — he rode over-hard. 
 But his influence in an age when wholesale adulation was the 
 rule, and when art counted for but Uttle, was naturally whole- 
 some. 
 
 Among the best known of his critical dicta is his character- 
 ization of the short story in his notice of Hawthorne's Twice- 
 Told Tales (1842). Probably no other passage in American 
 Hterary criticism has been quoted so often as the following 
 extract from this review: 
 
 A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has 
 not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but hav- 
 ing conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to 
 be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines 
 such events as may best aid him in establishing this precon- 
 
Poe 95 
 
 ceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbring- 
 ing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole 
 composition there should be no word written, of which the tend- 
 ency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. 
 And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length 
 painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with 
 a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the 
 tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and 
 this is an end unattainable by the novel.' 
 
 Scarcely less famous are some of his deliverances on the mean- 
 ing and the province and aims of poetry. Poetryi he defined 
 as the " rhythm ical creation of beauty," holding with Cole- 
 ridge, his chief master as cntic.that its "immediate object" 
 is _llplfiasure, not truth" ; and that "with the intellect or with 
 the conscience it has only collateral relations." "Poetry and 
 passion" he held to be "discordant." And humpior, also, he 
 bdieved to be "antagonistical to that which is the soul of the 
 muse proper." Sadness he declared to be the most poetic of 
 moods; and "indefinitiveness" one of the chief essentials of 
 lyric excellence. A long poem he held, with Bryant, to be 
 a "contradiction in terms." 
 
 Poe's critical doctrines find their best exemplification in his 
 own poems. He is, first of all, a poet of beauty, paying little 
 heed to morality or to the life of his fellow-men. He is, in the 
 second place, a master-craftsman, who has produced a dozen 
 poems of a melody incomparable so far as the western world 
 is concerned; and he has achieved an all but flawless construc- 
 tion of the whole in such poems as The Raven, The Haunted 
 Palace, and The Conqtieror Worm; while in The Bells he has 
 performed a feat in onomatopoeia quite unapproached before 
 or since in the English language. He is, moreover, one of the 
 most original of poets. And the best of his verse exhibits a 
 spontaneity and finish and perfection of phrase, as well as, 
 at times, a vividness of imagery, that it is difficult to match 
 elsewhere in American poetry. 
 
 But his poems of extraordinary worth are exceedingly few 
 — scarcely above a score at most — ^in which must be included 
 the earlier lines To Helen, Jsrafel, The City in the Sea, The Sleeper, 
 
 « Works of Poe, ed. Harrison, Vol. xi, p. io8. 
 
96 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 The Haunted Palace, Dream-Land, The Raven, Ulalume, For 
 Annie, and Annabel Lee. And most of his earlier verses are 
 manifestly imitative, Byron and Moore and Coleridge and 
 Shelley being his chief models; whUe much of his earlier work, 
 including all of the volume of 1827, and some of his latest — 
 notably the verses addressed to Mrs. Osgood and Mrs. Shew 
 and Mrs. Lewis — are either fragmentary and "incondite" or 
 mere "verses," or both. It has been justly said that "there 
 is almost no poet between whose best and worst verse there is 
 a wider disparity."' His range, too, is narrower than that of 
 any other American poet of front rank. Consistently with 
 one of his theories already adverted to, he wrote no long poem, 
 save the juvenile Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf, both of them 
 extremely crude performances (though Al Aaraaf contains 
 excellent passages and played a large part in his development as 
 poet), and an abortive play, Politian, which he never saw fit to 
 publish in its entirety; so that he lives as poet solely by reason 
 of his lyrics. And within the realm of the lyric he confined 
 himself to the narrowest range of ideas. Nature he employed 
 jnejely as omament or^s symbol or to fill in the background; 
 and nowhere in his poems does he deal with the life about^ 
 him, except in so far as he writes of friends and kindred. His 
 most [constant theme — ^if we 'exclude the poet himself, for 
 few writers have so constantly reflected themselves in their 
 work — ^is either the death of a beautiful woman and the grief 
 occasioned thereby, or the realm of shades — the spirit-world 
 — a subject to which he was strongly attracted, especially in 
 his middle years. . Hence, although most European critics 
 have accorded him first place among American poets, most 
 American critics have hesitated to accept their verdict. 
 
 Much of the excellence of his best poems arises from the 
 never-ending revisions to which he subjected them. The 
 Raven, for example, exists in upwards of a dozen variant forms, 
 and some of his earlier verses were so radically altered as to 
 be scarcely recognizable in their final recast. His melody, 
 especially in his later poems, grows in large measure out of his 
 all but unexampled use of parallelism and of the refrain.* 
 Not a little of his charm, moreover, both in his earlier and in 
 
 ' J. M. Robertson, New Essays, p. 76. 
 
 ' C. A. Smith, Repetition and Parallelism in English Verse, pp. 44 f. 
 
Poe 97 
 
 his later work, results from his use of symbolism. It is idle to 
 complain that his best verses— as Israfel or The Haunted Palace 
 — are superficial; and it is futile to contend that such poems 
 as Annabel Lee or the sonnet To My Mother are not sincere, or 
 that his poems, one and all, lack spontaneity. But it is not 
 to be denied that some of his best-known poems — as Lenore 
 and The Raven — exhibit too much of artifice; that The Con- 
 queror Worm and passages in still other poems approach too 
 near to the melodramatic; and that, with many readers, his 
 verses must suffer by reason of their sombreness of tone. 
 
 Poe's tales, which exceed in number his fully authenticated 
 poems, have been held by some of the most judicious of his 
 critics to constitute his chief claim to our attention. ' There 
 are those who will not subscribe to this view, but it is plain 
 that he was the roost important figure in the history of the 
 short story during his half-century. Hawthorne alone may 
 be thought of as vying with him for this distinction; but al- 
 though the New Englander is infinitely Poe's superior in some 
 respects — ^as in the creation of character and ia wholesomeness 
 and sanity7-he must yield place to him in the c reation of 
 incident, in the construction of plo t, and in the df^aicting-of 
 as intensely vivid- Sitaa.tiQP. Whether or not we allow Poe 
 the distinction of having invented the short story will depend 
 on our interpretation of terms; but at least he inyented the 
 detective story, and more than any other he gave to the short 
 story its vogue in America. 
 
 Like his poems, his tales are notably unequal. Some of his 
 earlier efforts — especially his satirical and humorous extrava- 
 ganzas, as Lionizing and Bon-Bon — are properly to be char- 
 acterized as rubbish; and he was capable in his later years 
 of descending to such inferior work as The Sphinx, Mellonta 
 Tauta, and X-ing a Paragrab. One feels, indeed, that Lowell's 
 famous characterization of him: 
 
 Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, 
 
 applies with entire justice to him as a maker of short stories. 
 The best of his narrative work is to be found in his analytical 
 
 ' E. C. Stedman in the Stedman-Woodberry edition of Poe, Vol. x, p. xiii; 
 and Robertson, I. c, p. 75. 
 7 
 
98 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 tales, as The Gold Bug or The Descent into the Maelstrom, in 
 certain stories in which he comlaries his analytical gift with the 
 imaginative and inventive gift, as The Cask of Amontillado 
 and William Wilson, or in certain studies of the pure imagina- 
 tion, as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the 
 Red Death. In aU of these he displays a skill of constru ction 
 and of condensat ion surpassed by few if any other workers in 
 his field. In some — as in The Masque of the Red Death, or in 
 Eleonora, or in his landscape studies — ^he shows himself a 
 master of English style; and in two of his briefer studies — 
 Shadow and Silence — ^he approaches the eloquence and splendour 
 of De Quincey. 
 
 His main limitations as a writer of the short story are to be 
 found in the feebleness and flimsiness of his poorer work; in 
 his all but complete lack of healthy humour; in his incapacity 
 to create or to depict character; in his morbidness of mood and 
 grotesqueness of situation.^ He suffers also in comparison 
 with other leading short-story writers of America and England 
 in consequence of his disdain of the ethical in art (though 
 neither his tales nor his poems are entirely lacking in ethical 
 value); he suffers, again, in comparison with certain present- 
 day masters of the short story in consequence of his lack of 
 variety in them e and form; and he was never e x pert i n the 
 ma nagement of dialog ue. 
 
 By reason of his fondness for the terrible and for the outr6, 
 he is to be classed with the Gothic roma ncers: he makes con- 
 stant use of Gothic machinery, of apparitio ns, c ataleptic 
 attacks , premat ure buria l, and life_aft^^^th. In several of 
 his stories — as also in his long poems, Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf 
 — ^he follows in the steps of the Orientalists. On the other 
 hand, in some of his tales of incident he achieves a realism and 
 a minuteness of detail that betray unmistakably the influence of 
 Defoe. And it is easy to demonstrate an indebtedness to divers 
 
 'His friend, P. P. Cooke, wrote of him in 1847: "For my individual part, 
 having the seventy or more tales, analjrtic, mystic, grotesque, arabesque, always 
 wonderful, often great, which his industry and fertility have already given us, 
 I would like to lead one cheerful book made by his invention, with little or no 
 aid from its twin brother imagination, ... a book full of homely doings, of 
 successful toils, of ingenious shifts and contrivances, of ruddy firesides — a. book 
 healthy and happy throughout" {^Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1848, 
 P- 37)- 
 
Poe 99 
 
 of his contemporaries, as James and Bulwer and Disraeli and 
 Macaulay. It has been proved also that he knew the German 
 romancer, E. T. A. HoflEmann, if not in the original, at least in 
 translation, and that he caught his manner and appropriated 
 his themes. ' For the rest, he drew for his materials largely on 
 the magazines and newspapers of his day, finding in a famous 
 newspaper sensation of the forties the suggestion of his Mystery 
 of Marie RogU (as he had found in another sensation, of the 
 twenties, the plot of his Politian), and taking advantage of 
 certain contemporary fads in his myth-making about mesmer- 
 ism, ballooning, premature burial, and the like; and he boldly 
 pilfered from government reports, scientific treatises, and 
 works of reference such material as he found serviceable in 
 some of his tales of adventure. Hence his originality may be 
 said to consist rather in combination and adaptation than in 
 more obviously inventive exercises of the fancy. 
 
 Poe's influence has been far-reaching. As poet, he has 
 had many imitators both in his own country and abroad, but 
 especially in France and England.'' As romancer he has 
 probably wielded a larger influence than any English writer 
 since Scott. And as critic it is doubtful whether any other of 
 his countrymen has contributed so much toward keeping the 
 balance right between art-for-art's-sake and didacticism. His 
 fame abroad is admittedly larger than that of any other Ameri- 
 can writer, and his vogue has been steadily growing among his 
 own people, 
 
 ' Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on'Jhe Tales of Edgar Allan 
 Poe. Woodberry, Life of Foe, vol. I, pp. 379-381. and passim. 
 
 "In the view of Edmund Gosse, "there is hardly one [of the later English 
 poets] whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe's influence" {Questions at 
 Issue, p. 90). On Poe's influence and vogue in France, see L. P. Betz, Edgar 
 Poe in der franzoesischen Litteratur: Studien zur vergleichenden Litteraturgeschichte 
 der neueren Zeit (1902), pp. 16-82; C. H. Page in The [New York] Nation for 
 14 January, 1909; and G. D. Morris, Fenimore Cooper et Edgar Poe, pp. 67 f. 
 (Paris, 1912). 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Transcendentalists 
 
 I . Emerson 
 
 IT becomes more and more apparent that Emerson, judged by 
 an international or even by a broad national standard, 
 is the outstanding figure of American letters. Others 
 may have surpassed him in artistic sensitiveness, or, to a 
 criticism averse to the stricter canons of form and taste, may 
 seem to be more original or more broadly national than he, 
 but as a steady force in the transmutation of life into 
 ideas and as an authority in the direction of life it§elf he has 
 obtained a recognition such as no other of his countrymen can 
 claim. And he owes this pre-eminence not only to his personal 
 endowment of genius, but to the fact also that, as the most 
 perfect exponent of a transient experiment in civilization, he 
 stands for something that the world is not likely to let die. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, bom in Boston, 25 May, 1803, 
 gathered into 'himself the very quintessence of what has been 
 called the Brahminism of New England, as transmitted through 
 the Bulkeleys, the Blisses, the Moodys, and the direct paternal 
 line. Peter Bulkeley, preferring the wilderness of Satan to 
 Laudian conformity, founded Concord in 1636; William 
 Emerson, his descendant in the fifth generation, was builder of 
 the Old Manse in the same town and a sturdy preacher to the 
 minute-men at the beginning of the Revolution; and of many 
 other ministerial ancestors stories abound which show how 
 deeply implanted in this stock was the pride of rebellion against 
 traditional forms and institutions, united with a determination 
 to force all mankind to worship God in the spirit. With 
 William, son of him of Concord and father of our poet, the 
 fires of zeal began to wane. Though the faithful pastor of the 
 First Church (Unitarian) of Boston, it is recorded of him that he 
 
 100 
 
Emerson loi 
 
 entered the ministry against his will. Yet he too had his un- 
 fiilfiUed dream of "coming out" by establishing a church in 
 Washington which should require no sort of profession of faith. 
 He died when the future philosopher was a boy of ten, leaving 
 the family to shift for itself as best it could. Mrs. Emerson 
 cared for the material welfare of the household by taking in 
 boarders. The chief intellectual guidance fell to the Aunt 
 Mary Moody Emerson, of whom her nephew drew a portrait in 
 his Lectures and Biographies. "She gave high counsels," he 
 says. Indubitably she did; but a perusal of her letters and of 
 the extracts from her journals leaves the impression that the 
 pure but dislocated enthusiasms of her mind served rather to 
 push Emerson in the direction of his weaker inclination than to 
 fortify him against himself. When a balloon is tugging at its 
 moorings there may be need of low counsels. 
 
 In 1817, Emerson entered Harvard College, and in due 
 course of time graduated. Then, after teaching for a while in 
 his brother's school in Boston, he returned to Cambridge to 
 study for the ministry, and was in the autumn of 1826 licensed 
 to preach. Three years later he was called, first as assistant 
 to Henry Ware, to the Second Church of Boston. His ministra- 
 tion there was quietly successful, but brief. In 1832, he gave 
 up his charge on the ground that he could not conscientiously 
 celebrate the Communion, even in the symbolic form customary 
 among the Unitarians. He was for the moment much adrift, 
 his occupation gone, his health broken, his wife lost after a short 
 period of happiness. In this state he went abroad to travel in 
 Italy, France, and England. One memorable incident of the 
 journey must be recorded, his visit to Carlyle at Craigenput- 
 tock, with all that it entailed of friendship and influence; but 
 beyond that he returned with little more baggage than he took 
 with him. He now made his residence in Concord, living 
 first with his mother and then with his second wife. Thence- 
 forth there was to be no radical change in his life, but only the 
 gradual widening of the circle. The house that he now bought 
 he continued to inhabit until it was burned down in 1872; and 
 then his friends, in a manner showing exemplary tact, sub- 
 scribed money for rebuilding it on the same Hnes. For a 
 number of years he preached in various pulpits, and once even 
 considered the call to a settled charge in New Bedford, but 
 
102 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 he could not overcome his aversion to the ritual of the Lord's 
 Supper and to regular prayers. 
 
 Meanwhile, by the medium of lectures delivered here and 
 there and by printed essays, he was making of himself a kind 
 of lay preacher to the world. His method of working out the 
 more characteristic of these discourses has long been known: 
 he would commonly select a theme, and then ransack his note- 
 books for pertinent passages which could be strung together 
 with the addition of such developing and connecting material 
 as was necessary. But since the publication of his Journals 
 it has been possible to follow him more precisely in this pro- 
 cedure and to see more clearly how it conforms with the inmost 
 structure of his mind. These remarkable records were begun 
 in early youth and continued, though at the close in the form of 
 brief memoranda, to the end of his life. The first entry pre- 
 served (not the first written, for it is from Blotting Book No. 
 XVIT) dates from his junior year at college and contains 
 notes for a prize dissertation on the Character of Socrates. 
 Among the sentences is this: 
 
 What is God? said the disciples, and Plato replied, It is hard 
 to learn and impossible to divulge. 
 
 And the last page of the record, in the twelfth volume, repeats 
 what is really the same thought : 
 
 The best part of truth is certainly that which hovers in gleams 
 and suggestions unpossessed before man. His recorded knowledge 
 is dead and cold. But this chorus of thoughts and hopes, these 
 dawning truths, like great stars just lifting themselves into his 
 horizon, they are his future, and console him for the ridiculous 
 brevity and meanness of his civic life. 
 
 There is of course much variety of matter in the Journals — 
 shrewd observations on men and books, chronicles of the day's 
 events, etc. — but through it all runs this thread of self-com- 
 munion, the poetry, it might be called, of the New England 
 conscience deprived of its concrete deity and buoying itself 
 on gleams and suggestions of eternal beauty and holiness. Of 
 the same stuff, not seldom indeed of the same words, are those 
 essays of his that have deeply counted ; they are but a repetition 
 to the world of fragments of this long inner conversation. 
 
Emerson 103 
 
 Where they fail to reach the reader's heart, it is not because 
 they are fundamentally disjointed, as if made up of sentences 
 jostled together like so many mutually repellent particles; but 
 because from the manner of his composition Emerson often 
 missed what he might have learned from Plato's Phaedrus 
 was the essence of good rhetoric, that is to say, the consciousness 
 of his hearer's mind as well as of his own. We hear him, as 
 it were, talking to himself, with no attempt to convince by 
 argument or enlighten by analysis. If our dormant intuition 
 answers to his, we are profoundly kindled and confirmed; 
 otherwise his sentences may rattle ineffectually about our 
 ears. 
 
 Emerson's .first published work was Nature (1836), which 
 contains the gist of his transcendental attitude towards the 
 phenomenal world, as a kind of beautiful symbol of the inner 
 spiritual life, floating dreamlike before the eye, yet, it is to be 
 noted, having discipline as one of its lessons for the attentive 
 soul. The most characteristic and influential of his books are 
 the two volumes of Essays, issued respectively in 184 1 and 1844. 
 In the former of these are those great discourses on Self- 
 Reliance, Compensation, and The Over-Soul, into which was 
 distilled the very qtiintessence of the volatile and heady liquid 
 known as Emersonianism. Other volumes followed in due 
 course. The latter pubHcations, however, beginning with 
 Letters and Social Aims (1875), are made up mainly of glean- 
 ings from the field already harvested, and were even gathered 
 by hands not his own. 
 
 Two of his addresses (now both included in the volume with 
 Nature) deserve special notice for the attention they attracted 
 at the time. The first of these is the oration before the Phi 
 Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, in 1837, a high but scarcely 
 practical appeal to the American scholar to raise himself above 
 the dust of pedantries, even out of the routine of what is 
 "decent, indolent, complaisant," and to reach after the 
 inspiration of "the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." 
 The other lecture was delivered the next year before the senior 
 class in Divinity College, Cambridge, and held up to the 
 prospective preacher about the same ideal as was presented to 
 the scholar. Historical Christianity is condemned because 
 "it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the 
 
104 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, 
 with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus." The 
 founder of Christianity saw, indeed, "with open eye the 
 mystery of the soul, " but what as a man he saw and knew of 
 man's divinity cannot be given to man to-day by instruction, 
 but only on the terms of a like intuition. The Unitarians of 
 Massachusetts had travelled far from the Calvinistic creed 
 of the Pilgrim Fathers, but Emerson's suave displacement of 
 the person of Jesus for the "chorus of thoughts and hopes" 
 in any human soul, perhaps even more his implicit rejection 
 of all rites and institutions, raised loud protest among the 
 worshippers of the day. For the most part he answered the 
 criticism by silence, but in a letter replying to one of the more 
 courteous of his opponents he used these significant words: 
 
 I could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could 
 not possibly give you one of the "arguments" you cruelly hint 
 at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what 
 argimients are in reference to any expression of a thought. 
 
 There may be some guile in this pretence to complete intellectual 
 innocence, but it is nevertheless a fair statement of a Hterary 
 method which seeks, and obtains, its effect by throwing a 
 direct light into the soul of the hearer and bidding him look 
 there and acknowledge what he sees. 
 
 Of the events of these years there is not much to relate. A 
 journey to Europe, in 1847, resulted in the only two of his 
 books which may be said to have been composed as units: 
 Representative Men (published in 1850, from a series of lectures 
 deUvered in London), which displays Emerson's great powers 
 as an ethical critic, in the larger use of that phrase, and English 
 Traits (1856), which proves that his eyes were observing the 
 world about him with Yankee shrewdness aU the while that 
 he seemed to be gazing into transcendental clouds. Into the 
 question of slavery and disunion which was now agitating the 
 country, he entered slowly. It was natural that one to whom 
 the power and meaning of institutions had little appeal and to 
 whom liberty was the all-including virtue, should have been 
 drawn to the side of the Abolitionists, but at first there was a 
 philosophical aloofness in his attitude. Only after the passing 
 
Emerson 105 
 
 of the Fugitive Slave Law and Webster's defection were his 
 passions deeply engaged. Then he spoke ringing words: 
 
 There is infamy in the air. I have a new experience. I awake 
 in the morning with a painful sensation, which I carry about all 
 day, and which, when traced home, is the odious remembrance of 
 that ignominy which has fallen on Massachusetts, which robs the 
 landscape of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour. 
 
 And the war came to him as a welcome relief from a situation 
 which had grown intolerable. 
 
 A tluird, trip to Europe was made in 1872, when his central 
 vijillwas already loosening and his faculties were losing their 
 edge. It was at this time that Charles EUot Norton talked 
 with Carlyle, and heard the old man, eight years older than 
 Emerson, expatiate on the fundamental diflEerence in their 
 tempers. And on the voyage home in the same boat, Norton, 
 who so fuUy represents the judgment of New England, had 
 much conversation with Emerson, and recorded his opinion 
 in words that, whether welcome or not, should not be forgotten : 
 
 Emerson was the greatest talker in the ship's company. He 
 talked with all men, and yet was fresh and zealous for talk at 
 night. His serene sweetness, the pure whiteness of his soul, the 
 reflection of his soul in his face, were never more apparent to me; 
 but never before in intercourse with him had I been so impressed 
 with the limits of his mind. His optimistic philosophy has hardened 
 into a creed, with the usual effects of a creed in closing the avenues 
 of truth. He can accept nothing as fact that tells against his 
 dogma. His optimism becomes a bigotry, and, though of a nobler 
 type than the common American conceit of the preeminent excellence 
 of American things as they are, has hardly less of the quality of 
 fatalism. To him this is the best of all possible worlds, and the 
 best of all possible times. He refuses to believe in disorder or 
 evil. . . . But such inveterate and persistent optimism, though it 
 may show only its pleasant side in such a character as Emerson's, 
 is dangerous doctrine for a people. It degenerates into fatalistic 
 indifference to moral considerations, and to personal responsibilities; 
 it is at the root of much of the irrational sentimentalism in our 
 American politics, of much of our national disregard of honour in 
 our public men, of much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths, 
 and of much of the common tendency to disregard the distinctions 
 
io6 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 between right and wrong, and to excuse guilt on the plea of good 
 intentions or good nature. ' 
 
 For some time there had been a gradual relaxation of 
 Emerson's hold on life. Though always an approachable 
 man and fond of conversation, there was in him a certain lack 
 of human warmth, of "bottom," to use his own word, which 
 he recognized and deplored. Commenting in his Journal (24 
 May, 1864) on the burial of Hawthorne, he notes the state- 
 ment of James Freeman Clarke that the novelist had "shown 
 a sympathy with the crime in ovir nature," and adds: "I 
 thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might 
 be more fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, 
 which, I suppose, could not longer be endtired, and he died of 
 it." A touch of this romantic isolation, though never morose 
 or "painful," there was in himself, a failtire to knit himself 
 strongly into the bonds of society. "I have felt sure of him, " 
 he says of Hawthorne in the same passage, "in his neighbour- 
 hood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — 
 that I coiald well wait his time, — ^his unwillingness and caprice, 
 — and might one day conquer a friendship. . . . Now it ap- 
 pears that I waited too long." Eighteen years later, standing 
 by the body of Longfellow, he was heard to say: "That gentle- 
 man was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten 
 his name." Such forgetfukiess, like a serene and hazy cloud, 
 hovered over Emerson's brain in his closing years. A month 
 afterwards, on 27 April, 1882, he himself faded away peacefully. 
 
 To one who examines the events of Emerson's quiet life 
 with a view to their spiritual bearing it will appear that his 
 most . decisive act was the surrender of his pulpit in 1832. 
 Nearly a centtiry earlier, in 1750, the greatest of American 
 theologians had suffered what now befell the purest of American 
 seers; and though the manner of their parting was different 
 (Jonathan Edwards had been unwillingly ejected, whereas 
 Emerson left with good will on both sides), yet there is signifi- 
 cance in the fact that the cause of separation in both cases was 
 the administration of the Lord's Supper. Nor is there less 
 significance in the altered attitude of the later man towards 
 this vital question. Both in a way turned from the ritualistic 
 
 ' Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. I, pp. 503 and 506. 
 
Emerson io7 
 
 and traditional use of the Communion, and in this showed 
 themselves leaders of the spirit which had carried the New 
 England Fathers across the ocean as rebels against the Laudian 
 tyranny of institutions. Edwards had revolted against the 
 practice of Communion as a mere act of acquiescence in the 
 authority of religion; he was determined that only those should 
 approach the Table who could give evidence of a true conversion, 
 by conversion meaning a complete emotional realization of the 
 dogma of divine Grace and election. The eucharist was not 
 a rite by conforming with which in humility men were to be 
 made participators in the larger religious experience of the race, 
 but a jealously guarded privilege of the few who already knew 
 themselves set apart from the world. He was attempting to 
 push to its logical issue the Puritan notion of religion as a 
 matter of individual and inward experience, and if he failed 
 it was because life can never be rigidly logical and because the 
 worshippers of his day were already beginning to lose their 
 intellectual grasp on the Calvinistic creed. By Emerson's 
 time, among the Unitarians of Boston, there could be no 
 question of ritualistic grace or absolute conversion, but his 
 act, nevertheless, like that of Edwards, was the intrusion of 
 unyielding consistency among those who were content to rest 
 in habit and compromise. In his old age Emerson gave this 
 account of his conduct to Charles Eliot Norton, who subse- 
 quently repeated it : 
 
 He had come to the conviction that he could not administer the 
 Lord's Supper as a divinely appointed, sacred ordinance of religion. 
 And, after much debate with himself, he told his people that he could 
 henceforth conduct the service only as a memorial service, without 
 attributing to it any deeper significance. A parish meeting was 
 held; the parish, though most kindly affected to him, could not 
 bring themselves to accept his view, — it would be tantamount to 
 admitting that they were no longer Christians. He resigned his 
 charge, but an effort was made to induce him to remain, he ad- 
 ministering the Lord's Supper in his sense, the people receiving it 
 in theirs. But he saw that such an arrangement was impossible, 
 and held to his resignation. ^ 
 
 Emerson had come to the inevitable conclusion of New 
 England individualism; he had, in a word, "come out." Ed- 
 
 ' Letters of Charles EUot Norton, vol. i, p. 509. 
 
io8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 wards had denied the commtinal eflficacy, so to speak, of rites, 
 but had insisted on inner conformity with an established 
 creed. Emerson disavowed even a conformity in faith, 
 demanding in its stead the entire Kberty of each soul to rise 
 on its own spiritual impulse. He was perspicacious and 
 honest enough to acknowledge to himself the danger of such 
 a stand. "I know very well," he wrote in his journal at the 
 time of his decision, "that it is a bad sign in a man to be too 
 conscientious, and stick at gnats. The most desperate scoun- 
 drels have been the over-refiners. Without accommodation 
 society is impracticable." But, he adds, he could "not go 
 habitually to an institution which they esteem holiest with 
 indifference and dislike"; and again, looking deeper into his 
 heart, " This is the end of my opposition, that I am not interested 
 in it." 
 
 Emerson's act of renunciation was not only important as 
 determining the nature of his career, but significant also of the 
 transition of New England from theological dogmatism to ro- 
 mantic liberty. Much has been written about the influences 
 that shaped his thoughts and about the relation of his transcend- 
 entalism to German metaphysics. In his later years it is clear 
 that the speculations of Kant and Schelling and Fichte were 
 known to him and occasionally coloiired his language, but his 
 Journals prove conclusively enough that the whole stamp of his 
 mind was taken before these sources were open to him. Indi- 
 rectly, no doubt, something of the German spirit came to him 
 pretty early through Carlyle, and a passage in his Journal for 13 
 December, 1829, shows that he was at that time already deeply 
 engaged in the Teutonized rhapsodies of Coleridge. But it 
 would be easy to lay too much stress even on this indirect 
 affiliation. Long before that date, as early as his senior year 
 in college, he is yearning "to separate the soul for sublime con- 
 templation till it has lost the sense of circumstances," and 
 otherwise giving implicit expression to the full circle of tran- 
 scendental faith. He was in fact a product of the great ro- 
 mantic movement that was sweeping over the world as it 
 listed; his ideas, so far as they came to him from books, go 
 back mainly to the Greek philosophers and the poets and 
 preachers of seventeenth-century England, as these were 
 interpreted tmder the light of the new movement. When he 
 
Emerson 109 
 
 declared, in Nature, that "the vision of genius comes by re- 
 nouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and 
 giving leave and amplest privilege to the spontaneous senti- 
 ment, " he was stating in precise terms an idea familiar to 
 Blake and to the romanticists of every land — the elevation of 
 enthusiasm above judgment, of emotion above reason, of 
 spontaneity above discipline, and of unlimited expansion above 
 centripetal control. But there was another element as strongly 
 formative of Emerson's disposition as was the current of 
 romanticism, and that was his ancestral inheritance. Ro- 
 mantic spontaneity moved in various directions in accordance 
 with the field in which it worked; in an Emerson, with all the 
 divinity of Massachusetts in his veins, it might move to repudi- 
 ate theological dogma and deny Jehovah, but it could not 
 get out of hearing of the question "What is God ? " It could not 
 faU into the too common confusion of spiritual aspiration 
 with the sicklier lusts of the flesh; it could never, for all its 
 centrifugal wandering, overstep the bounds of character. 
 Emersonianism may be defined as romanticism rooted in 
 Puritan divinity. 
 
 In literary form and style the privilege of spontaneous 
 sentiment showed itself with Emerson not in that fluency 
 which in many of his contemporaries meant mere longwinded- 
 ness, but in the habit of waiting for the momentary inspiration 
 to the neglect of meditated construction and regularity. He 
 has indeed succeeded in sustaining himself to the end in three 
 or four poems of some compass, but his noblest work in verse 
 must be sought in those quatrains which need no context for 
 their comprehension and might be called spiritual ejacula- 
 tions. Matthew Arnold has quoted for approval the two 
 familiar stanzas. 
 
 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low. Thou must, 
 
 The youth replies, / can. 
 
 and, 
 
 Though love repine and reason chafe. 
 There came a voice without reply: 
 
 "Tis man's perdition to be safe. 
 When for the truth he ought to die." 
 
"o chapters of American Literature 
 
 These quatrains are, he says, "exceptional" in Emerson. 
 They are that, and something more: they are exceptional in 
 literature. One would have to search far to find anything in 
 English equal to them in their own kind. They have the 
 cleanness and radiance of the couplets of Simonides. They 
 may look easy, but as a matter of fact the ethical epigram is an 
 extremely difficult genre, and to attain this union of gravity 
 and simplicity requires the nicest art. Less epigrammatic 
 ■ in tone but even more exquisitely finished are the Hnes entitled 
 Days, pre-eminent in his works for what may truly be called a 
 haunting beauty: 
 
 Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
 
 Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
 
 And marching single in an endless file. 
 
 Bring diadems and faggots in their hands. 
 
 To each they offer gifts after his will, 
 
 Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 
 
 I, in my pleachid garden, watched the pomp. 
 
 Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
 
 Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
 
 Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 
 
 Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 
 
 And as his verse, so is his prose. Though in one sense, so 
 far as he writes always with two or three dominant ideas in his 
 mind, he is one of the most consistent and persistent of exposi- 
 tors, yet he is really himself only in those moments of inspira- 
 tion when his words strike with almost irresistible force on the 
 heart, and awake an echoing response: "This is true; this I 
 have myself dimly felt." Sometimes the memorable para- 
 graph or sentence is purely didactic; sometimes it is highly 
 metaphorical, as is the case with the closing paragraph of the 
 Conduct of Life: 
 
 There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is 
 system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. 
 The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone 
 with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and 
 beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, 
 fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd 
 'which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings 
 
Emerson m 
 
 he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. 
 The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously command- 
 ing this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should 
 resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, 
 new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract 
 him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the 
 cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting arotmd him on 
 their thrones.-r-they alone with him alone. 
 
 There is, it need scarcely be said, a good deal in the works 
 of Emerson — ^literary criticism, characterization of men and 
 movements, reflection on the state of society — ^which Hes out- 
 side of this ethical category; but even in such essays his guiding 
 ideas are felt in the background. Nor are these ideas hard to 
 discover. The whole circle of them, ever revolving upon itself, 
 is likely to be present, explicit or implicit, in any one of his great 
 passages, as it is in the paragraph just cited — the clear caH'^ 
 \tQLSelf -reliance, announcing that "a man should learn to detect 
 and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind 
 from within " ; the-firm-assurance that, through all the balanced 
 play of circumstance, "±here is a deeper fact in the soul than 
 compensation^Jto wit, its own nature^;y3e in±uitiQii,-d,e&pite all 
 the jmsts of illusion, of the Over-Soul which is above us and 
 still-oui^selKes: "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in 
 particles; meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole; the 
 wise silence; the universal beauty . . . ; the eternal One." 
 
 Emerson's philosoph y is thus a_ Hnd of reconcilecLdualism, 
 and a man's attitude towards it in the end will be determined 
 by his sense of its sufficiency or insufficiency to meet the facts of 
 experience. One of Emerson's biographers has attempted to 
 set forth this philosophy as "a synthesis and an anticipation." 
 It is a synthesis because in it we find, as Emerson had already 
 found in Plato and Plotinus, a reconciliation of "the many and 
 the one, " the everlasting flux and the motionless calm at the 
 heart of things: 
 
 An ample and generous recognition of this transiency and 
 slipperiness both in the nature of things and in man's soul seems 
 more and more a necessary ingredient in any estimate of the uiii- 
 verse which shall satisfy the intellect of the coming man. But 
 it seems equally true that the coming man who shall resolve our 
 
"2 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 problems will never content himself with a universe a-tilt, a universe 
 in cascade, so to speak; the craving for permanence in some form 
 cannot be jauntily evaded. Is there any known mind which fore- 
 shadows the desired combination so clearly as Emerson's? Who 
 has felt more profoundly the evanescence and evasiveness of things? 
 . . . Yet Emerson was quite as firm in his insistence on a single 
 unalterable reality as in his refusal to believe that any aspect or 
 estimate of that reality could be final.' 
 
 The necessity of the dualism that underlies Emerson's 
 philosophy could scarcely be put more neatly, and the kind of 
 synthesis, or reconciliation, in which Emerson floated is admira- 
 bly expressed. But it is not so plain that this synthesis antici- 
 pates the solution of the troublesome problems of life. There 
 will be those who will ask whether the power of religion for 
 mature minds does not depend finally on its feeling for evil. 
 How otherwise, in fact, shall religion meet those harder ques- 
 tions of experience when its aid is most needed? And in like 
 manner they will say that the power of philosophy as the dux 
 vitae depends on its acquaintance with the scope and difficulties 
 of scepticism. Both religion and philosophy would seem, in 
 such a view, to rest not only on a statement of the dualism of 
 good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, but on a realization 
 of the full meaning and gravity, practical and intellectual, of 
 this dualism. Now Emerson certainly recognizes the dualism 
 of experience, but it is a fair question whether he realizes 
 its full meaning and seriousness. He accepts it a trifle too 
 jauntily, is reconciled to its existence with no apparent pang, 
 is sometimes too ready to wave aside its consequences, 
 as if a statement of the fact were an escape from its terrible 
 perplexities. Carlyle meant something of the sort when he 
 worried over Emerson's inability to see the hand of the devil in 
 human life. Hence it is that Emerson often loses value for his 
 admirers in proportion to their maturity and experience. He is 
 above all the poet of religion and philosophy for the yotmg; 
 whereas men, as they grow older, are inclined to turn from him, 
 in their more serious moods, to those sages who have supple- 
 mented insight with a firm grasp of the darker facts of human 
 natvire. That is undoubtedly true ; nevertheless, as time passes, 
 the deficiencies of this brief period of New England, of which 
 
 ' O. W. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 364. 
 
Emerson "3 
 
 Emerson was the perfect spokesman, may well be more and 
 more condoned for its rarity and beauty. One of the wings of 
 the spirit is hope, and nowhere is there to be found a purer 
 hope than in the books of our New England sage; rather, it 
 might be said that he went beyond hope to the assurance of 
 present happiness. The world had never before seen anything 
 quite of this kind, and may not see its like again. 
 
2. Hawthorne 
 
 THE romances of Hawthorne can hardly be understood 
 apart from the current of Transcendentalism in which 
 his genius was formed. Most foreigners and many of 
 his countrymen have thought of him as an affectionate student 
 of the New England past, in a small way comparable to Scott 
 with his love of Border history, and especially they have thought 
 of him as a kind of portrait painter, who magically resharpened 
 for us the already fading lineaments of Puritanism. Reflec- 
 tion might suggest, however, that the portrait he restored bears 
 an unlucky resemblance in its sombreness and its unloveliness 
 to the portrait of Edward Randolph in the Twice Told Tales, 
 and a little further thought would perhaps convince us that 
 Hawthorne usually treats Puritanism, not as the central theme 
 in his canvas, but as a dark background for the ideas and for 
 the experiences which more deeply concern him. Those ideas 
 and experiences have little to do with Puritanism except by 
 contrast ; they were partly furnished to his imagination by the 
 enthusiastic but uncritical thinkers among his acquaintance 
 who kindled rapturously at Alcott's conversations or basked in 
 the indefiniteness of Emerson's lectures, and partly they were 
 furnished by his own contact with Alcott and Emerson and 
 with their writings. Like them, he was less a Puritan than a 
 lover of the present, and if he seemed often to deal with things 
 long past, it was only because he had the faculty, more than 
 other men, of recognizing in the present whatever had served 
 its purpose or was worn out or dead. 
 
 But if as a Transcendentalist he stood aloof from Puritanism, 
 his temperament forced him to stand aloof also from the other 
 
 114 
 
Hawthorne i^S 
 
 Transcendentalists. Although their philosophy, as they liked 
 to say, was a "questioning" of life, he differed from them all 
 in being a true skeptic. To be quite precise, let us say that 
 he drew the inspiration of his romances not so much from their 
 ideas as from the neglected but inevitable conclusions of their 
 ideas. Alcott and Emerson uttered between them a set of 
 doctrines so full of apparent contradictions as to seem almost 
 double-faced. They preached the sacredness of fact as against 
 the authority of tradition; they made much of physical heredity, 
 of evolution, of fate; they pointed out the inadequacy of any 
 moral scheme to comprehend all the surprises of nature; yet 
 being inveterate optimists, both of them, and both at certain 
 moments curiously mystical, and both enjoying an outward 
 orthodoxy of manners and cultxure, they soothed their hearers 
 and seemed less dangerous than they were. Their sincerity, 
 of course, was tmquestionable, but they obscured even to 
 themselves the startKng conclusions of their own surmises, 
 and having shaken their moral world to its foundation, they 
 allowed the structure to settle again, and all this in such a 
 glamour of temperamental cheerfulness that those who felt 
 only the eloquence of their mood could depart conscious of 
 spiritual uplift, and none but the few who attended to the 
 impUcations of their specific ideas went away troubled. How 
 few these critics were is attested by the lonely position in which 
 their spokesman, Hawthorne, seems to stand. He was no 
 mystic; what attracted him in Transcendentalism was its free 
 inquiry, its radicalism, its contact with actual Ufe. In his 
 stories, therefore, he was a philosophical experimenter, in 
 whose method was no room for optiniism nor for prepossessions 
 of any kind; he had recourse to hfe in order to try out the effi- 
 cacy or the consequences of Transcendental ideas, and if the 
 result was hardly what he expected, he still pursued the hypo- 
 thesis to the bitter end. He was really the questioner, the 
 detached observer, that other Transcendentalists thought 
 they were. The soul, Emerson had said, "accepts whatever 
 befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, 
 and it is a doer only that it may the better watch." The 
 description is truer of Hawthorne's soul than of Emerson's. 
 In accepting whatever befalls, Emerson was convinced, as he 
 says in the essay on Circles, that there is a saccharine principle 
 
"6 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 in all things; small wonder that Hawthorne seems an alien 
 among such cheerful sages. When Emerson says that either 
 love or crime leads all souls to the good, that there is no straight 
 line in nature, that eA^il in the end will bless, Hawthorne ex- 
 amines the doctrine somewhat dubiously in Hepzibah and 
 Clifford Pyncheon and in Donatello; and when the cheerful 
 philosopher tells us to trust ourselves, to follow our own nature, 
 to live from the Devil if we are the Devil's children, Hawthorne 
 projects the advice experimentally in The Scarlet Letter and in 
 The BUthedale Romance. 
 
 Those who classify Hawthorne in a loose way as the 
 romancer of Puritanism sometimes speak of him also as a psycho- 
 logist. The term needs defining. To him, as to other Tran- 
 scendentalists, the fortune of a human soul was the most critical 
 of experiences; comparatively negligible were the doings of 
 society as a whole or the outward panorama of events and 
 scenes. If to be thus interested in the soul is to be a psycho- 
 logist, then Hawthorne was one, as to some extent are all 
 who write of human nature. But if the term denotes attention 
 to motives and to fine mental processes, to the anatomy, as 
 it were, of character, then Hawthorne was no such psychologist 
 as, let us say, Henry James or George Meredith. It is impor- 
 tant to realize how broad and general his ideas and his art were, 
 how completely he avoided the special and the minute. He 
 studied no subtle character, nor any character subtly. He was 
 a moralistrather _tharLa .pay^chologist. Were it not sufficiently 
 evident in the stories, themselves, the notes preserved in his 
 journals would show that his imagination was engaged first 
 by a moral idea, which he afterwards incorporated in plot and 
 in persons. When he is most successful the plot seems actually 
 to occur, and the persons really live; when his imagination 
 fails him, the incidents seem allegorical and the figures become 
 t shadowy; but in either case the abstract idea from which he 
 jstarted is likely to be clear enough, and his own personality 
 will probably be felt as standing outside the story, looking on. 
 Since he is neither novelist nor preacher, but only an inyestj:: 
 gator.Mj3iQr^ ideas, it is equally beside the mark to expect of 
 him Balzac's sense ot the social panorama, or Bunyan's certi- 
 tude of faith. 
 
 A writer who pictures life chiefly in order to^'project ab- 
 
Hawthorne "7 
 
 stract ideas is not likely to reveal in his art more of himself 
 than his general disposition. Hawthorne's biography makes 
 rich and human reading, for he was an admirable man in all 
 ways and his private life was in the best sense fortunate; if at 
 first he endtu-ed poverty, he earned success later, and even in 
 the obscure years he had the admiration of loyal friends. But 
 only in a few instances does his biography aid directly in the 
 understanding of his works, and then for the most part by 
 explaining his contact with Transcendental ideas. Of the non- 
 literary events in his life it is enough to say that he was born 
 in Salem, Massachusetts, 4 July, 1804, of an old New England 
 family; that after his father's death he was educated by his 
 mother's brothers, and in i§^ he was graduated from Bgwdoin 
 College; that among his classmates he made three lifelong 
 friends — Longfellow, the poet, Franklin Pierce, later President 
 of the United States, and Horatio Bridge, who first appreciated 
 his genius; that chiefly through Bridge's thoughtfuLness he 
 was made weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, 
 1839-1841, and surveyor at the Salem Custom House, 1846- 
 1850; that President Pierce appointed him to the consulship 
 of Liverpool, 1853-1857; that he lived in Italy for two years, 
 1 857-1 859, and that while travelling for his health, attended 
 by Pierce, he died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, 18 May, 
 1864. 
 
 The facts of his literary record are hardly more numerous, 
 but they invite more comment. His college letters to his 
 mother and his sisters show how early he mastered his superb 
 style. Indeed, they are much better written than his first 
 published story, Fanshawe (1828), which was probably com- 
 posed, in part at least, during his college days. From 1825 
 to 1837 he lived at home in Salem, laboriously perfecting his 
 short stories and sketches, and publishing them anonymously 
 or under assumed names, chiefly in Goodrich's annual. The 
 Token, and in The New England Magazine. He gives an 
 idealized account of this period in his sketches The Devil in 
 Manuscript and The Journal of a Solitary Man. In 1837, 
 again through Bridge's good offices, a publisher was found for 
 the Twice Told Tales (enlarged edition in two volumes, 1842). 
 With this practical beginning of his reputation coincided his 
 first acquaintance with the Peabody family. In all the bio- 
 
ii8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 graphies his love for Sophia Peabody has naturally filled a large 
 place, but no sufficient estimate has perhaps been made of the 
 intellectual enrichment his love brought him. It was through 
 the Peabodys that he became really alive to the philosophical 
 currents of his time. Transcendentalism had, of course, 
 enfolded him, as it had the average New Englander, in its 
 general atmosphere, and its temper is felt in some of his earliest 
 writings, but it can hardly be said to have possessed his thought 
 as it did later, and he had been in personal contact with none 
 of the leaders. The Peabodys, however, were on intimate 
 terms with Emerson, the young rhapsodist of Nature, whose 
 recent triumph in The American Scholar had more recently been 
 rendered equivocal by his Divinity School Address; and Alcott, 
 Emerson's inspirer, they knew stUl better, for Elizabeth and 
 to some extent Sophia had assisted at his Temple school in 
 Boston, and Elizabeth had published in her Records of a School 
 (1835) verbatim reports of Alcott's conversations with his 
 pupils. When The Dial was founded in 1840, Elizabeth Pea- 
 body, who by that time had organized a remarkable book store, 
 became its publisher. It was not extraordinary, therefore, 
 that Hawthorne was drawn, though with some mental qualms, 
 into the full tide of Transcendentalism, nor that upon the 
 termination of his service in the Boston Custom House, in 
 1841, he joined the Brook Farm venture, in the hope of estab- 
 lishing a home there. His note-books tell us the most inter- 
 esting aspects of this passage in his life. At the end of a year 
 and a half, completely disillusioned with the community 
 experiment, he married and settled at Concord, in the Old 
 Manse, where for neighbours he had Emerson, Alcott, and 
 Thoreau, all busy with The Dial, and where Thoreau was shortly 
 to undertake his Walden solitude. In Concord most of the 
 stories were written which Hawthorne published in 1846 as 
 Mosses from an Old Manse. A stiU later collection. The Snow 
 Image (1852), gathered up practically all of the remaining 
 sketches which he cared to preserve. His longer romances 
 show a tendency to rework or develop this earlier material, or 
 to draw upon actual scenes and events for their narrative fabric ; 
 the controlling problems, however, which the romances deal 
 with are more obviously than in the shorter stories suggested 
 by Transcendental ideas. The Scarlet Letter (1850), is de- 
 
Hawthorne ^^9 
 
 veloped from a brief description in Endicott and the Red Cross, 
 one of the Twice Told Tales. In The House of the Seven Gables 
 (1851) , Hawthorne makes use of such a curse as was pronounced 
 on his own ancestor, John Hawthorne, or Hathorne, a severe 
 magistrate in witchcraft times. In The BUthedale Romance 
 (1852) it is hard not to identify Hawthorne's Brook Farm 
 experience, though he warned us against the temptation. The 
 outward details of The Marble Faun (i860) are clearly the 
 result of observations which he made during his two years in 
 Italy. 
 
 Besides the short stories and the romances, Hawthorne 
 wrote several important books for children — the series called 
 Cfrandfg.ther' s^^hair (1-841-1842) and the two Wonderbooks 
 (i 852-1 853). He also edited his friend Bridge's Journal of an 
 African Cruiser (1845), wrote a campaign life of his friend 
 Pierce (1852), and published some of his notes on England 
 under the title of Our Old Home (1863). 
 
 If it is just to see in the early writings a picture of his native 
 temper before he was consciously engaged with Transcendental 
 doctrines, it is also true that from the first his mind was of 
 another order than Alcott's or Emerson's, and that though he 
 might be interested in the same ideas, he would treat them 
 very differently. Most philosophers can be classed roughly 
 among those who conceive of the ideal ends of life as already 
 existing in heaven, in some order or pattern which may be 
 imitated on earth, or among those who think of the ideal as of 
 something which does not yet exist, but which is implicit in 
 the universe, and toward which the universe evolves. A philo- 
 sopher of the first or Platonic type, if he notices facts at all, 
 is likely to be disconcerted by them, since they rarely conform 
 to his ideal or serve to authorize it; his comfort is in rising 
 superior to actual Hfe — ^that is, in ignoring it. Alcott was an 
 almost pure example of this type. The other kind of philo- 
 sopher is likely to entertain a respect amounting almost to 
 reverence for any concrete existing condition, because as two 
 points determine a straight line, so a recent moment observed 
 against the past gives indication of the order to come. Emer- 
 son was partly, Hke Alcott, a Platonist, but he had also a pro- 
 found and inconsistent disposition toward this other way of 
 thought; having two points of view at once, therefore, he is 
 
120 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 not only perplexing at times, but really contradictory, and it 
 is not strange that he should have proved in one aspect of his 
 genius inspiring to Maeterlinck and in the other aspect accept- 
 able to Nietzsche. Hawthorne belonged altogether to the 
 second type of thinker. Concerned primarily with the actual 
 world before him, he found a natural use for the past in the 
 explanation it might give of the present, but the present was 
 to him just as naturally the more important moment, and most 
 interesting of all was the occasional hint or prophecy of that 
 to which time through its past and present changes might be 
 tending. He was a radical, therefore, but he saw clearly that 
 this particular present will soon be no more sacred than any 
 other moment of the past, and that to devote oneself to any 
 cause as though it were a final remedy of circumstances, pro- 
 mising rest thereafter, is merely to postpone stagnation for a 
 while. With this insight he could not readily give his faith 
 to any reform or reformer; even the crusade for abolition and 
 the' iwar for the Union left him cold, for he wisely doubted 
 whether measures conceived in the root-and-branch spirit 
 might not raise more evils in the state than they were intended 
 to cure. True reform, the only kind that could enlist his 
 sympathy, must work hand in hand with nature's slowly 
 evolving but inevitable order, and so long as that order can 
 be but partially or infrequently discerned, it is best to do 
 nothing violent, nothing headlong. Even when we discern 
 the order, from time to time, we should become humble, ob- 
 serving how Uttle it resembles our own morality, our own 
 dreams of perfection. 
 
 It needs no fine perception to discover these principles or 
 attitudes in Hawthorne, for they are displayed quite simply 
 on the surface of his early stories. The significance he at- 
 tached to the present world, whatever it might be, can be 
 seen in the important group of essay sketches such as A Rill 
 from the Town Pump, David Swan, Sights from a Steeple, and 
 Main Street. Some resemblance has been found between this 
 department of his work and the essays of Addison and of 
 Irving, and certainly Addison's cheerfulness is here, and often 
 something more than Irving's fancy. But neither The Specta- 
 tor nor The Sketch Book would suggest that Addison or Irving 
 was in the habit of keeping a diary; whereas Hawthorne's 
 
Hawthorne ^^i 
 
 simple studies, of the group just referred to, are in form no- 
 thing more than episodes in a journal. The fact is of some con- 
 sequence in understanding his genius. When the American 
 and European notebooks were finally included in the complete 
 editions of his writings, they took their place, not as an appen- 
 dix or illustration of more perfect things, but on equal terms 
 with his other works; for the journal manner was suited to his 
 realistic, unprejudiced search into the world about him, and 
 his lifelong preoccupation with his diary was not, as with most 
 novelists, for the sake of books to be written later, but was 
 itself the satisfaction of a primary literary interest. Like the 
 journals, the essay sketches take the scene as they find it, 
 extract from it all that observation can, and then discard it, 
 having proved no point and exhibited no characters in con- 
 tinuous interplay, but having uncovered possibilities, hints, 
 causes, coincidences. In the simpler essays Hawthorne ob- 
 served these possibilities and coincidences in a kind of sta- 
 tionary cross-section, and left them undeveloped; but in more 
 elaborate stories he played with the ironic contrasts between 
 the order which we foresee in life and the order which time 
 brings to pass. Emerson often came out of his mysticism and 
 contemplated the "beautiful necessity," the inevitable conse- 
 quence of things, to which man must submit himself before 
 he has either happiness or power. Hawthorne was inclined 
 to stress rather man's inability to submit himself to this neces- 
 sity, since he-seldom guesses correctly what it would be. Mr. 
 HigginhoihanrC s Catastrophe is a lighter treatment of this theme 
 of consequences ; Edward Fane's Rosebud and The Wives of the 
 Dead are in a darker tone. Or sometimes Hawthorne would 
 turn the irony in another direction, by emphasizing the in- 
 cre.dible_ swiftness with which the present becomes the past, 
 and the insidiousness with which antiquity begins to show its 
 symptoms even in what seems youthful and emancipated. 
 The May-pole oj Merry Mount brings this idea home, less in thd 
 overthrow of the maskers at Merry Mount than in the ex-j 
 pressed faith of the stern Puritan leader that the troubles of 
 life come soon and unexpectedly — a confession which somehow 
 brings a chill over his own righteous success. A still better 
 illustration is Endicott and the Red Cross, which shows the 
 Puritans, who crossed the ocean for freedom of conscience 
 
122 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 and who in the moment of the story proclaim themselves 
 champions of religious liberty, as having nevertheless instituted 
 already the piUory and the stocks for those who disagree with 
 them. 
 
 The Transcendental ideas which chiefly occupied Haw- 
 thorne's thought in the long romances were the doctrines of 
 self-reliance, of compensation, and of what Emerson expressed 
 in his essay on Circles. The ideal of self-reliance was that a 
 man should live according to his own nature, by listening to 
 the dictates of the over-soul as revealed in his impulses; to 
 this end he should keep himself free of the imprisoning past, 
 and of conventional society, which embodies the past. To 
 Alcott or to Emerson this doctrine was so obviously sound that 
 they stated it with every emphasis of rhetoric and with no 
 qualifications. "Whoso would be a man must be a non- 
 conformist." Hawthorne doubtless felt the truth of the doc- 
 trine as keenly as any one, but he was alive also to the unsocial 
 results which might follow a narrow practice of it. A man 
 consciously and entirely free of the past and on his guard 
 against it might indeed possess his soul, but he might also 
 miss the essence of culture, and having renounced the finer 
 instruments of the art of life, he might so isolate himself from 
 his fellows as to become ineffective in his noblest virtues. 
 Since nature is unfolding a necessary order in and around us, 
 an order which we apprehend with difficulty, the great danger 
 of asserting ourselves is that we may thereby place otirselves 
 outside of our true development, and never return to it. This 
 danger of stepping out of the order, of doing violence to our 
 proper destiny, gave Hawthorne the theme of such stories as 
 Wakefield, The Prophetic Pictures, and Rappaccini's Daughter. 
 The doctrine of compensation, in one form or another, was 
 peculiarly dear to Transcendental optimism. jEvery action- 
 carries its reward or punishment with it. The thief is punished, 
 though the police never find him, for the price of theft is loss 
 of innocence, fear of arrest, suspicion of other men. What 
 compensation is destined for the victim of the thief, optimistic 
 Transcendentalism preferred not to investigate, but it was 
 into just such a neglected area of morals that Hawthorne liked 
 to push his inquiry. His observations brought him into a 
 certain agreement with the doctrine; because a natural order 
 
Hawthorne 123 
 
 constantly unfolds in the world, he believed in the ef3Eicacy of 
 mere time to break down conventions and to reveal a nobler 
 law, and in his historical scenes — Howe^s Masquerade, for 
 example, or The Gray Champion — ^he liked to show a fossilized 
 past at the moment when it is shattered. He could believe 
 that life, does so far make restitution, but in daily life he could 
 find no compensation for the injuries suffered by the innocent, 
 nor could he persuade himself that a noble bearing of wrongs 
 will necessarily lead to spiritual profit. Indeed, though Emer- 
 son's sunny temperament had spread its glamour over his 
 discussion of this theory, to Hawthorne the theory seemed, so 
 far as it was true, one of the darkest and most perplexing. 
 StiU less could he agree with Emerson's exaggeration of the 
 same doctrine in Circles. Optimism here, taking the bit in 
 its teeth, contended that as there is in experience no such 
 thing as a straight line, so there is practically no such thing 
 as evil — a prophetic appHcation, it would seem, of Riemannian 
 geometry to morals; that what seems hopelessly bad will in 
 the end be foimd to contain the good principle; and, quite 
 illogically, that what seems to be good will actually prove to 
 be so. 
 
 In vain produced, all rays return; 
 Evil will bless and ice will bum. 
 
 In a famous passage in Circles, Emerson acknowledges the 
 awkwardness of this position, and explains that his tempera- 
 ment dictates it. Hawthorne could not undertake any such 
 • cheerfulness, but he was profoundly concerned with the moral 
 phenomena by which Emerson may have justified his faith. 
 Here springs that paradox of experience, that mystery of sin,, 
 the question as to what sin is, which threw its shadow over 
 three at least of the four romances. Since we rarely discern 
 our true destiny, the human being who steps out of what 
 seems the moral order may really have chanced upon a sounder 
 morality; through what appears to be sin, therefore, may 
 sometimes come the regeneration of a sotd — not through re- 
 pentance, be it observed, but through sincere adherence to the 
 sin. Conversely, though a man should devote himself to the 
 highest ideal he is aware of, if that ideal does not lie in 
 
124 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Ithe true order of nature, his devotion may bring him to an 
 evil end. These possibilities, together with the implications 
 of self-reliance and compensation, furnish the moral problems 
 of Hawthorne's romances. 
 
 Hester Prynne, for example, in The Scarlet Lett er, illust rates 
 self-reliance in a way that some Emersonian s may have found 
 not~altogetEer comfortable! Snce her love for Dimmesdale 
 was the one sincere passion of her life, she obeyed it utterly, 
 though a conventional judgment would have said that she 
 was stepping out of the moral order. There is nothing in the 
 story to suggest condemnation of her or of the minister in their 
 sin; the only blame attaches to Dimmesdale's cowardice, his 
 lack of self-^liance, his unreadiness to make public acknow- 
 ledgment of his love. The passion itself, as the two lovers 
 stiU agree at the close of their hard experience, was sacred, 
 and never caused them repentance. The doctrine of compen- 
 sation is illustrated in Chillingworth, who, having determined 
 on a fiendish revenge, becomes himself a fiend. There is a 
 kind— of comment oh Emef son's cheerful doctrine in the fact 
 that this gloomy soul, marked for perdition, is a firm believer 
 in compensation; he wronged Hester's youth by marrying her, 
 and therefore he bears her no ill will for wronging him, but he 
 argues that since the minister had never received a justifying 
 harm at his hands, the secret lover should therefore be pun- 
 ished by the injured husband. As Chillingworth discusses the 
 matter with Hester, compensation seems to be at one moment 
 sheer fatalism, at another moment a primitive exacting of an 
 eye for an eye, but never does it come to a happy issue. The 
 optimistic turn in the doctrine is illustrated by Hester^or 
 perhaps it is better to say that she illustrates the optimism of 
 Circles. She has sin ned, but the sin leads her straightway to 
 a larger-^^r Like Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise, 
 ;she finds she has a career at last. ^ociaLostracism -first ^ives 
 her leisure for m editat ion and a just angle from which to attack 
 social problems, and then it permits her to enter upon a life 
 of mercy and good works which would have been closed to a 
 conventional woman. Hawthorne had described the original 
 wearer of the scarlet letter in Endicott and the Red Cross as a 
 woman who braved her shame by embroidering the guilty 
 "A" into an elaborate and beautiful emblem; so in the romance 
 
Hawthorne 125 
 
 he lets the sin elaborate itself, so far as Hester's nature is 
 concerned, into nothing but beauty. She becomes more 
 loving, more sympathetic, more tender; and intellectually 
 she becomes emancipated from the narrowness of her age, so 
 that even now she seems prophetic of what the noblest women 
 may be. Thoughts were her companions which, says Haw- 
 thorne, would have been held more dangerous than the sin 
 of the scarlet letter, had they been seen knocking at her door. 
 She saw how completely the social scheme must be altered 
 before woman can enjoy a true equality with man, and she 
 suspected the losses in the best of manhood and womanhood 
 which might be the incidental or temporary price of the belated 
 justice. 
 
 The greatness of The Scarlet Letter, on repeated readings, 
 seems to lie in this social interest, this inexorable study of the 
 world as it is, which distingtdshes Hawthorne from other 
 TranscendentaUsts. The Puritan environment is represented 
 as already dying, young as it was in the new world ; at the out- 
 set of the story Hawthorne shows us that these courageous 
 founders of reKgious Hberty in the wilderness felt the necessity 
 at once of building a prison and of setting up a pillory. The 
 ideals which a little while before were an inner light for the 
 community, carrying inevitable conviction, were now stiffened 
 into convention and leaned upon force. In making the point 
 that Hawthorne was iio_ special admirer of Puritanism, we 
 must add that neither was he a special critic of it; he used the 
 Puritan moment in our history merely to illustrate the truth 
 of aU moments, that society cojiventignalkesjtsj^deals and 
 becomes cruel, and that., time, which annihilates one set of 
 conventions, substitutes another. But some specific criticism 
 of Puritan New England, of New England in his own day, 
 may be discerned in the fortunes of Hester, and may be still 
 more clearly felt in Zenobia and in Miriam, the later heroines; 
 these are all represented as physically beautiful, and as in some 
 way estranged from life, and we wonder whether it was not 
 their beauty rather than their conduct that alienated them 
 from their environment. What career has a beautiful woman 
 in New England? — Hawthorne seems to ask, and he seems to 
 imply that if she is conventional she may live down the handi- 
 cap of beauty, but meantime she is dangerous to others and 
 
126 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 to herself. The danger to herself is indicated by the fact that 
 Hester, Zenobia, and probably Miriam, were all married for 
 their beauty, when they were very young, to men who could 
 not appreciate their greatness of soul, and whom therefore 
 they were forced to divorce or to desert. 
 
 The House of the Seven Gables is so quiet a story that Haw- 
 thorne's characteristic criticism of self-reliance or of compensa- 
 tion is not at first disturbing, but in none of his books does he 
 take more essential issue with Alcott and Emerson. On the 
 surface of the romance Hes the theme of long-delayed retribu- 
 tion — the curse of old Maule falling on each generation of the 
 usurping Pyncheons. But what punishment does after all 
 overtake the thoroughly bad man who allows his innocent 
 cousin to rest in jail for years? He dies of apoplexy, as he 
 would have died had he been the innocent cousin. And 
 what happens to his victims? It is easy to guess how Emerson 
 might have treated CHfford and Hepzibah; the innocence of 
 the imprisoned brother would somehow have been its own 
 reward, and the loyalty of the devoted sister, waiting for his 
 release, would have ennobled her character. But confinement 
 in prison is not likely to sweeten even innocence; Hawthorne 
 shows Clifford on his return to the old house a broken man, 
 irritable and unappreciative. Hepzibah's long waiting proved 
 for her a solitude almost as complete as prison confinement; 
 Hawthorne shows her as a shrivelled old maid, angular and 
 grim, with hardly a grace remaining. He had no more wish 
 than Emerson would have had to decry the ethical beauty of 
 her patient loyalty, but he could not help seeing that she, like 
 Clifford, was the victim of gross wrong, and that it is disastrous 
 to be even an innocent victim. Similarly he insists on a pre- 
 cise account of self-reliance in Holgrave, the descendant of 
 old Maule. Emerson himself could not have portrayed a 
 more thorough-going critic of the past. 
 
 "Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" asks Holgrave. "It 
 lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body. In fact, the case is 
 just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in 
 carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died 
 a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. ... A 
 dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no 
 
Hawthorne 127 
 
 longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accord- 
 ance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead 
 man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search 
 out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books ! We 
 laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos ! We are 
 sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same 
 remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients ! We wor- 
 ship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds. 
 Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's 
 icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a 
 dead man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes 
 our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves before we can 
 begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will 
 then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, 
 with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere." 
 
 How far Hawthorne agrees with Holgrave we cannot tell, 
 but there is no doubt what sort of character he thought would 
 result from a sincere practice of such philosophy. Holgrave 
 is free of the past, and thereby he is practically free of the 
 present too; his honesty and his emancipation attract the 
 reader, yet he has little or no influence. Pew men really wish 
 to detach themselves so far. Even Phoebe, the young girl 
 whom he marries, who has the natural freshness of innocence, 
 seems curiously social in comparison with this conscientious 
 rover whose one dread is that he may take root somewhere. 
 
 Hawthorne showed an increasing disposition to discuss 
 these philosophical questions in frank comment outside the 
 plot of his romances. HoUingsworth, in The Blithedale Ro- 
 mance, illustrates his fear of tampering with the natural order 
 of things, especially by organized reform; and Zenobia illus- 
 trates his reflections on self-reliance, especially where woman 
 is concerned. HoUingsworth was a determined social reformer; 
 he wished to reform criminals through an appeal to their higher 
 instincts. Hawthorne observed that such philanthropy, ad- 
 mirable in its intention, often proceeded on slight knowledge 
 of the facts. "He ought to have commenced his investigation 
 of the subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper 
 person, and examining the condition of his higher instincts 
 afterwards." As a matter of fact, HoUingsworth does ruin 
 two lives, Zenobia's and PrisciUa's, in the selfish pursuit of 
 
128 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 his philanthropic ideal, and, if he had chosen, might well have 
 furnished the state of his own heart for examination. Haw- 
 thorne comments again, making his famiHar point that a good 
 ideal brings a man to a good end only if it does not lead him 
 out of the natural sjrmpathies of life : 
 
 The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn 
 from HoUingsworth's character and errors, is simply this — that, 
 admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profes- 
 sion, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, 
 it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive 
 channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the 
 heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed 
 violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural 
 process, but should render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, 
 and insensibly influence other hearts and other lives to the same 
 blessed end. j 
 
 Zenobia is a modem and conscious Hester — or rather, her 
 experience is the reverse of Hester's, for she is a woman natu- 
 rally emancipated who is ruined by disappointed love. It is 
 this difference in their problems that makes her seem less noble 
 than Hester, less tragic than pitiful. But in portraying her, 
 Hawthorne raises more especially the question he had sug- 
 gested in The Scarlet Letter: is not such a woman, so beautiful 
 and so intellectual, an exotic creature in our society? Here 
 is the modem woman whom Hester dreamed of, but the old 
 misfortune stiU overtakes her; like Hester, she has married 
 one who could not appreciate her, but she has never found the 
 lover who should have been her mate, and she has no true 
 companionship with other women. She seems to be a for- 
 eigner, and in the New England thought of Hawthorne's time 
 foreigners had the right to be, like Zenobia, physically beautiful. 
 
 The Marble Faun repeats in Miriam the problem of Hester 
 and of Zenobia, and in Hilda, the simple Puritan girl who finds 
 peace in the Roman Catholic confessional, the story illustrates 
 beautifully Hawthorne's faith that some of our most uncon- 
 ventional impulses lead us to a practical morality. But the 
 philosophy of the book centres in Donatello, that wonderful 
 creature who begins life with the animal-like innocence which 
 radical thought seems often to desire for man, and who de- 
 
Hawthorne 129 
 
 vdops an immortal soul by committing an imptilsive murder. 
 The doctrine of Circles has its most elaborate illustration here; 
 here is the evolution of good out of sin — ^not out of repentance 
 for sin. But if the doctrine is sound, our theology needs 
 thorough revision, and Hawthorne suggests the logical change 
 in our conception of sin: 
 
 Is sia then — ^which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the 
 universe — ^is it, like sorrow, merely an element of human education, 
 through which we struggle to a higher and purer state than we 
 could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall that we might 
 ultimately rise to a far higher Paradise than his? 
 
 These problems, suggested by the Transcendental philo/ 
 sophy, occupied Hawthorne to the last. It was not in hifs 
 disposition to suggest answers to them. His distinction in 
 American literature is the extent to which he projected them 
 experimentally into life, and the sincerity with which he modifie(|i 
 them to conform to stubborn and perplexing facts. 
 
3- Thoreau 
 
 THE life of a village community is not seldom enriched by 
 the inclusion of a rebel, an original who refuses obsti- 
 nately to conform to type, and succeeds in following 
 out his idea, in contrast to the humdrum routine of his fellows. 
 When the community happens to be Concord, the picturesque 
 and historic village where the Revolution began, the Weimar 
 of American literature, and when the rebel happens to be an 
 American faun, the conjunction must restdt in no ordinary 
 enrichment. There on 12. July, .1817, just after the second 
 war with Britain, David Henry Thoreau was born to a small 
 farmer and artisan who kept a shop and painted signs. The 
 French-looking surname came by way of the Channel Islands, 
 for the author's grandfather was born in Jersey, and, in spite 
 of his British origin, had served as a sailor in a Continental 
 privateer. Thoreau passed his life in the village of his birth, 
 and now his name is indissolubly associated with it. 
 
 For a generation which plumes itself upon its "breadth," 
 no slight effort is needed to picture the life of a typical New 
 England village before the Transcendental movement had 
 broken up the hard old Puritanic crust. It was a rigid and 
 limited life made up of work, thrift, duty, and meetings. 
 Caricatured and ridiculed though it be, that old stern life 
 moulded men and women of the toughest moral and intellectual 
 fibre. Piiritanism was an intellectual creed, and led directly 
 to the cultivation of the intellect. The minister and the 
 schoolmaster were twin ruling powers. None questioned 
 the value of education; it was almost a fetish. So as a child 
 in a Puritan community, Henry Thoreau followed the regu- 
 
 130 
 
Thoreau 131 
 
 lar routine of the common school until he was ripe for the 
 tmiversity. 
 
 Thoreau became a man of letters, but he was also a wild 
 man, a fatin; he became Emerson's man, and — although it is 
 rather difficult to fit into the picture — ^he was a Harvard man. 
 He went up at sixteen and took his degree at twenty. His 
 portrait at this time shows a smooth, grave face dominated by a 
 Roman nose and overhung by a bush of fine brown hair. 
 What benefit he derived from his college years is a matter both 
 of record and of inference. "What I was learning in coUege 
 was chiefly, I think, to express myself," he writes five years 
 after leaving Harvard. Perhaps the most significant memorial 
 of his college career is the Latin letter he wrote to his sister 
 Helen, in 1840. It gave him pleasure to use the language of 
 Virgil and Cicero, for one of the many paradoxes in Thoreau's 
 life was the union of true American contempt for tradition with 
 an unaffected love of the classics. After a diatribe against 
 the narrow religiosity of New England, he draws breath to 
 praise "the Ionian father of the rest," with the enthusiasm 
 of Keats. 
 
 There are few books which deserve to be remembered in our 
 wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and 
 embodies still all the sunlight that fell in Asia Minor. No modern 
 joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height, or dim its lustre, but there 
 it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest 
 production of the mind. 
 
 From the wHdwood simplicity of Walden, he startles the reader 
 with deliverances which might have come from the Bodleian. 
 
 Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the 
 language in which they were written must have a very imperfect 
 knowledge of the history of the himian race. . . . Homer has never 
 been printed in English, nor ^schylus, nor Virgil even, — works as 
 refined, as solidly done, as beautiful almost as the morning itself; 
 for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely if 
 ever equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and 
 heroic literary labours of the ancients. 
 
 Thoreau translated the Prometheus Vinctus and tried his hand 
 at Pindar. His pages are sown with classical allusions and 
 
132 chapters of American Literature 
 
 quotations. The sunset at Cape Cod brings a line of Homer 
 into his memory "with a rush, " as the shining torch of the sun 
 falls into the ocean. He has words of just appreciation for 
 Anacreon. His odes 
 
 charm us by their serenity and freedom from exaggeration and 
 passion, and by a certain flower-like beauty, which does not pro- 
 pose itself, but must be approached and studied like a natural object. 
 
 Such genuine admiration for Greek genius is rare at any time, 
 and certainly not many American hands could have been 
 busy translating ^schylus, Pindar, and Anacreon in the 
 hurried forties and fifties of the nineteenth century. This 
 large and solid academic basis for Thoreau's cultiire is not 
 generally observed. His devotion to the Greeks rings truer 
 than his various utterances on Indian literature and philosophy. 
 Besides, he was well seen in the English classics from Chaucer 
 downwards. A few pages of A Week yield quotations from 
 Emerson, Ovid, Quarles, Channing, Relations des Jesuits, 
 Gower, Lydgate, Virgil, Tennyson, Percy's Religues, Byron, 
 Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, Simonides. As Lowell remarks, 
 "His literature was extensive and recondite." The truth is, 
 Thoreau was a man of letters, whose great ambition was to 
 study and to write books. 
 
 Dtuing and after his college career, Thoreau-taught school, 
 like the hero of Elsie Venner. He is quite frank about ^his 
 episode. "As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, 
 but simply for a livelihood, this was a failiu^e." Brief as was 
 his apprenticeship to the schoolmaster trade, one might 
 possibly conjecture that it left some mark upon him. The 
 many citations of recondite literature do not escape the suspi- 
 cion of parade and pedantry. There is a certain gusto with 
 which he inserts the botanical name of a. plant after the pictur- 
 esque vernacular, and distinguishes between Rana palustris 
 and Rana pipiens. In general, the tone he adopts towards the 
 world is that of the pedagogue dealing habitually with inferior 
 minds. 
 
 After his college days comes an episode which his biographers 
 seem inclined to slur over, perhaps from a false sense of the 
 dignity of biography, and that is the two years, from 25 April, 
 
Thoreau i33 
 
 1841, to May, 1843, which Thoreau spent under Emerson's 
 roof. By the time Thoreau left Harvard, Emerson had 
 become a power in the spiritual life of America. His brief 
 career as a Unitarian minister was already far behind him; 
 he had made his pilgrimage to Europe; he had penetrated 
 the wilds of Scotland to Craigenputtock because one Thomas 
 Carlyle, another unrecognized genius, lived there. He had 
 given in Boston those lectures on Great Men and The Philosophy 
 of History which foreshadow the great address commonly 
 called the declaration of independence for American literature. 
 He had brought out his Scottish friend's odd book. Sartor 
 Resartus, a publication which accelerated the Transcendental 
 movement. Emerson discovered the youth Thoreau as a 
 true poet, and communicated the discovery in a letter to 
 Carlyle. Thoreau became a member of Emerson's household, 
 apparently as general "help," a relationship which aU Ameri- 
 cans will understand but which will be the despair of all 
 Europeans. , 
 
 The most practical and handy person in all matters of every 
 day life, a good mechanic and gardener, methodical in his habits, 
 observant and kindly in the domestic world, 
 
 is the character Emerson gives him. There must have been a 
 cash nexus, but the essence of the relationship was the tie 
 uniting master and pupil, sage and disciple. This long and 
 close association with the great literary force of that time had 
 no shght effect in moulding Thoreau's character and determin- 
 ing his bent. 
 
 His biographer, who knew him personally, says that he imitated 
 Emerson's tones and manners so that it was annoying to listen 
 to him. 
 
 The imitation of Emerson in Thoreau's writing is equally 
 apparent. Lowell saw and condemned it in his criticism of 
 A Week. In prose there is the sentence which reads like an 
 oracle. It may be the profoundest wisdom, or it may be the 
 merest matter of moonshine. When Thoreau writes "An- 
 cient history has an air of antiquity, " or, "Give me a sentence 
 which no intelligence can understand," the critic can only fall 
 
134 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 back on the Gilbertian comment upon the young man who 
 "expresses himself in terms too deep for me." The imitation 
 of Emerson's poetry is even more marked and results in what 
 Lowell calls Thoreau's "worsification. " He had no candid 
 friend to tell him what Dryden told "Cousin Swift." There 
 was, on the other hand, no little benefit in mere contact with 
 such a personality as Emerson, much more in continual and 
 close intercourse with him. The stimulus to thought must 
 have been most potent, and Emerson's influence could not 
 but stiffen Thoreau in his natural independence and confirm 
 him in his design of living his own life. 
 
 The village rebel who will not conform rebels first against 
 the local religion. It is the obvious thing to rebel against. 
 What Thoreau dissented from was New England Puritanism, as 
 is plainly shown in "Sunday" of A Week. The atmosphere 
 of that lost religion hangs about the letter of his roommate 
 at Harvard, who became a minister in due course. One thinks 
 of the letters young Mr. Tennyson of Trinity was exchanging 
 with other Cambridge "Apostles" about the same time. The 
 salutation is "Friend Thoreau," which seems to have been 
 the accepted convention at the time. Perhaps the most 
 significant sentence in it runs: 
 
 I hear that you are comfortably located in your native town, as 
 the guardian of its children, in the immediate vicinity, I suppose, of 
 one of our most distinguished apostles of the future, R. W. Emerson, 
 and situated under the ministry of our old friend Reverend Barzillai 
 Frost, to whom please make my remembrances. 
 
 It does not appear that Thoreau after reaching manhood was 
 ever "situated under the ministry" of the Reverend Barzillai 
 Frost. In "Civil Disobedience," he writes: 
 
 Some years ago, the State met me on behalf of the Church and 
 commanded me to pay a certain &woa. toward the support of a 
 clergyman, whose preaching my father attended, but never I my- 
 self. "Pay" it said, "or be locked up in jail." I declined to pay. 
 But unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. 
 
 The recusant even rendered the authorities a reason in writing 
 for his recusancy. 
 
Thoreau ^35 
 
 Know all men by these presents that I Henry Thoreau do 
 not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society 
 which I have not joined. - 
 
 Opposition to the State followed naturally on opposition 
 to the Church. To his honour, Thoreau took a stand against 
 slavery when it was anything but popular to do so, even in the 
 State of Massachusetts. In all his words on this theme there 
 is a fire not to be found elsewhere. What roused him was the 
 spectacle of fugitive slaves escaping to the free North, and, 
 through the action of Northern courts, dragged back into 
 slavery. The State was clearly in the wrong; Thoreau, in his 
 own phrase, "declared war on the State," by refusing to pay 
 his poll-tax. He believed that such passive resistance by a 
 number of taxpayers would bring about the abolition of 
 slavery. He was therefore quite consistent with himself 
 when he stood forth from the crowd as the champion of John 
 Brown in his history-making raid on Harper's Ferry. Public 
 opinion. North and South, condemned the raid as the outrage 
 of a fanatic attempting to kindle a servile war. Thoreau 
 was of the remnant who saw its true bearing. 
 
 It was in the first year of his Walderi hermitage that 
 Thoreau was arrested and lodged in jail for refusing to pay 
 his poll-tax. He tells how he was going to the cobbler's, with 
 a shoe to be mended, when the Law laid hold of him, how he 
 spent the evening very pleasantly with the other inmates 
 of the lock-up, how he was released next morning, and im- 
 mediately started off with a berry-picking party. This ' ' grand 
 refusal" struck the imagination of Stevenson, who considers 
 it the most significant act of Thoreau, and more important 
 than his retreat in Walden. A parallel might be found in 
 Stevenson's account of his brief incarceration in a French 
 prison in the epilogue to An Inland Voyager^s^^sa., some 
 friend paid Thoreau's poll-tax for him, but he never wavered 
 in his reasoned policy of passive resistance to an unjust, 
 slavery-supporting State. At the same time, he never refused 
 to pay the highway tax, because, "I am as desirous of being 
 a good neighbour as I am of being a bad subject." "I sirriply 
 wish," he continues, "to refuse allegiance to the State, to 
 withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually." 
 
136 chapters of American Literature 
 
 His next step was a more remote withdrawal, an attempt 
 to stand aloof from his kind. It was an attempt to live by 
 himself and to himself, in fact, to turn modem hermit. Appar- 
 ently the idea had long been germinating in his mind. On 
 that far-off Harvard commencement of 1837, he took part in a 
 "conference," an obsolete academic exercise resembling a 
 medieval "disputation." He took one side of an argument 
 and a fellow-student, afterwards a judge, maintained the 
 opposite. The subject debated was "The Commercial Spirit." 
 In his set speech, the grave, shock-headed graduate from Con- 
 cord suggested that 
 
 the order of things should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should 
 be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his 
 brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul — 
 in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft 
 influences and sublime revelations of Nature. 
 
 The young collegian's division of time may have provoked a 
 smile, but the day was to come when he was to make the 
 actual experiment. Thoreau had turned against the Church, 
 e had turned against the State, and now he turned against 
 brganized society. He perceived that man was bound to the 
 wheel of circumstance, he was the passive, unquestioning slave 
 of a vain and sordid routine. One man at least would wrench 
 himself free from the mill at which he saw his fellows ceaselessly 
 toiling. He would carry out his boyhood's dream, and, by 
 reorganization of his life, obtain freedom for the things that 
 matter. By making life more simple, he would cheat cir- 
 cumstance and really begin to live. 
 
 I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze 
 from some mountainside, while my eyes revolve in an Egyptian 
 slime of health — I to be nattire looking into nature with such easy 
 sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face 
 of the sky. From such recess, I would put forth sublime thoughts 
 daily, as the plant puts forth leaves. 
 
 It only remained to choose his "recess." 
 
 Apparently the suggestion as to the particular recess came 
 from his friend, Channing, who writes, 
 
 t 
 
Thoreau i37 
 
 I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which I once 
 christened "Briars"; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and 
 there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. 
 
 Thoreau was a natural ascetic. He ate little flesh meat, but 
 subsisted almost entirely on vegetable food; he drank nothing 
 but water ; he never married. He refers in a letter to a nameless 
 lady who wished to marry him, and he calls the inverted court- 
 ship "tragic." In the Age of Faith he would have fled to 
 the wilderness for the same reason that he built his hut by 
 Walden pond, in order to save his soul. Salvation for him 
 meant escape from endless labour for the acquisition of useless 
 things. By another paradox of his career, he freed himself 
 from New England thrift by being still more thrifty. By deny- 
 ing himself and faring more scantily than his neighbours, he 
 secured leisure for pursuits they could not comprehend. 
 Thoreau is a prophet of the simple life, perhaps the first in 
 America. He uses the very term. 
 
 I do believe in simplicity. When the mathematician would 
 solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation from all encum- 
 brances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the prob- 
 lem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. 
 
 He was preaching to his friend Blake what he had already 
 practised. He had felled the pines with his borrowed axe, 
 and dug his cellar, and built his 
 
 tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, 
 and eight feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window 
 on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick 
 fireplace opposite. 
 
 It was a little smaller than the room he occupied at Harvard. 
 The materials cost less than twenty-nine dollars; and by 
 cultivating beans and other vegetables he was able to support 
 himself at an annual expense of a little more than eight dollars. 
 This was removing the encumbrances from the equation, with 
 a vengeance, but Thoreau could make a "dinner" of berries. 
 The experiment lasted from March, 1845, until September, 
 1847, and then having satisfied himself that the thing could be 
 done, he gave it up. 
 
138 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Two years later, Thoreau published his first book, A Week on 
 the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The actual voyage was 
 performed by the two brothers Henry and John in the late 
 summer of 1839 "^ ^ boat of their own making, "painted green 
 below with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements 
 in which it was to spend its existence." During his Walden 
 retirement, Thoreau worked over the original record of his 
 pleasant outing, expanding it greatly by the inclusion of very 
 various material, and had it published at his own risk by 
 Monroe in 1849. It was the year of the Argonauts, of the 
 gold-rush to California, and such literary treasure as the odd 
 book contained was not much regarded. Though favourably 
 reviewed by Ripley and by Lowell, it did not please the public, 
 and over seven hundred copies out of an impression of one 
 thousand were thrown back on the author's hands. It is 
 another of the paradoxes of Thoreau's career that since his 
 death, this failure has been edited with almost benedict- 
 ine care. 
 
 Lowell's praise of A Week can hardly be termed excessive. 
 After dwelling on its weak points, its lack of unity, its imitation 
 of Emerson, its dolorous verse, he continues, 
 
 the prose work is done conscientiously and neatly. The style 
 is compact and the language has an antique purity like wine grown 
 colourless with age. 
 
 The truth is that Thoreau with aU his genuine appreciation of 
 the classics never learned their lessons of proportion, restraint, 
 "nothing too much." Nor was the example of his master 
 Emerson likely to correct his own tendency to formlessness. 
 The principle of selection is absent. The week's excursion is 
 only an excuse for including Emersonian essays on friendship 
 and chastity, or dissertations on the Laws of Menu, or transla- 
 tions of Anacreon, till the reader asks resentfully what they are 
 doing in this dory-modeUed galhe, painted green below with 
 a border of blue, on the Merrimack and Concord, lucid streams. 
 If he had possessed the artistic instinct of Stevenson, or had 
 undergone Stevenson's rigid self-imposed discipline in the 
 writer's craft, he might have made A Week as complete a 
 little masterpiece as An Inland Voyage. A Week fails on ac- 
 
Thoreau i39 
 
 count of its scattering aim. It is neither a record of a week's 
 excursion, nor a book of essays, but a jumble of the two. 
 Thoreau's American contempt for tradition accounts for 
 the artistic failure. 
 
 Where Thoreau is not the transcendental essayist, but the 
 first-hand observer of nature, he is delightful. When discours- 
 ing on such a theme as the common sunfish, the reader wishes 
 he would never end. 
 
 The breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand 
 close by in the water and examine them at your leisure. I have 
 stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly 
 without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers 
 harmlessly, and seen them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my 
 hand approached their ova, and have even gently taken them out of 
 the water with my hand. ... As you stand thus stooping over the 
 bream in its nest, the edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a 
 singular dusty golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from 
 its head, are transparent and colourless. Seen in its native element, 
 it is a very beautiful and compact fish, perfect in all its parts, and 
 looks like a brilliant coin fresh from the mint. 
 
 If the whole book had been of this texture, it would be a classic. 
 Another element in the book which Thoreau valued slightly — 
 those incidental glimpses of a vanished America — ^wiU be prized 
 by later generations. His accounts of the mountain people he 
 discovered, of the girl combing her black hair, of his surly host, 
 Rice, and his strange inn, of the old farmer praying in the dim 
 morning pasture, of the canal boatmen, of the lockmen's house, 
 and the small-voiced but sincere hospitality of the Yankee 
 housewife oflEering the obsolete refreshment of "molasses and 
 ginger," read like pages Irving forgot to put into The Sketch 
 Book. These things are seen with the natxiraUst's clear grave 
 eyes and recorded in plain words with no attempt at oracular 
 profundity. For the sake of more such true pictures of reality, 
 how gladly would the modem reader forego the disquisitions on 
 Persius and Ossian. 
 
 The next year, iSSP, Thoreau and his friend Channing 
 made a brief raid across the border into Quebec, though the 
 record of his experience was not published until 1866, with the 
 title A Yankee in Canada. Stevenson found the book dull. 
 
140 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Still, it has an interest of its own for the light it sheds on 
 Thoreau's pecvdiar temperament, and particularly on his robust 
 Americanism, a sentiment based on traditional dislike of 
 Britain and on contempt for monarchy as an effete institution. 
 Patriotism is a curious passion. It does not seem possible to 
 love one's own country except by hating some other country. 
 Emerson defines Thoreau almost in these terms: 
 
 No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his 
 country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English 
 and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt. 
 
 With no great love for the institutions of his own land, he 
 showed his instinctive preference for them during his one 
 brief sojourn under an aUen flag. His attitude throughout 
 is one of consistent patronage to all he sees and hears. The 
 red-coats in the citadel at Quebec have the manhood drilled 
 out of them. Britain, he beheves, is "red in the knuckles" 
 with holding on to the Canadas, and must soon relax her grasp. 
 Towards the great mystery of historical Christianity, he is 
 equally contemptuous. The devout worshippers in the 
 Cathedral at Montreal, absorbed in prayer and regardless of 
 gazing strangers, suggest the parallel of his fellow Yankees 
 going to meeting on a week-day, after the cattle-fair. The 
 Sisters of Charity whom he saw in the street looked as if they 
 had cried their eyes out, "insulting the dayUght with their 
 presence." That the soldier and the religious had something 
 valuable to which he was a stranger, never occurred to him. 
 In other words, he was blind to the romance olv/ar and the 
 poetry, .of ..faith. Even the natural courtesy of the habitants 
 seems to him mere serviUty. For the American of Thoreau's 
 generation, history began with the musketry of the embattled 
 farmers at Concord bridge. Before that day, there was only 
 a dark welter of wicked kings and mad tories. These Hmita- 
 tions prevented him from reaUzing, as Parkman did, the epic 
 struggle which ended on the Plains of Abraham. He indeed 
 transcribes the inscription on the monument to Wolfe and 
 Montcalm, but the splendour and pathos of their fate leave 
 him unmoved. Still, this rigid and narrow provincialism gives 
 salt to his books and explains his revolt against convention. 
 
Thoreau 141 
 
 It was his Americanism which drove Thoreau to realize himself 
 in his own way. 
 
 In 185^,^ Thoreau published the book by which he will 
 always be best known, WoMeOr-ar- Life ^in-ihe -Woods. It is 
 by far the deepest, richest, and most closely jointed of his 
 books. It shows Thoreau at his best, and contains all that he 
 had to say to the world. In fact, he is a man of one book, and 
 that book is Walden. In plan, it is open to the same objection 
 as A Week, and might almost plead guilty to the charge of 
 obtaining a hearing under false pretences. ' ' Life in the woods ' ' 
 suggests the atmosphere of .45 You Like It and the Robin Hood 
 ballads, but not moralizings on economy and the duty of being 
 yourself. The reader who takes up the book with the idea 
 that he is going to enjoy another Robinson Crusoe will not be 
 pleased to find that every now and then he will have to listen 
 to a lay sermon, or a lyceum lecture. 
 
 Still it is the adventurous, Robinson Crusoe part that is 
 imperishable. How a man resolved to live in a new way, 
 how he borrowed an axe and began felling pines on the ground 
 that sloped southward to a wonderful pond, how he trimmed his 
 rafters, dug his cellar, bought an Irish labourer's shanty, trans- 
 ported the materials to a new site and raised the frame, appeal 
 to the open-air instinct of every man. Even how he maintained 
 the fire on the hearth, and grubbed out the fat pine roots to 
 feed it, are matters of absorbing interest. His struggle with 
 the weeds and poor soil of the two-acre patch on which he 
 raised his beans and potatoes, every item of his various accounts, 
 his food, his daily routine, his house-cleaning, have the fasci- 
 nation of a narrative by Defoe. The reader follows the solitary 
 in his swim across the lake, or through the wood to the village, 
 or about the hut, or along the rows of beans, with a zest he can 
 hardly explain to himself. The reason is that Henry Thoreau 
 in Walden wood is the same as the mariner of York on the 
 Island of Desolation; he represents once more the struggle of 
 primitive man to obtain food and shelter, in fact the epic of 
 civilization. The interest of the theme is perennial. 
 
 Walden is also the memorial of an American faun, of a wild 
 man who lived in the woods, who carried an umbrella like 
 Robinson Crusoe, to weatherfend his head, and used a micro- 
 scope to study insects with. About the same time, just after 
 
142 chapters of American Literature 
 
 leaving Harvard, Thoreau found his first arrowhead and 
 began his first journal, and the two streams of tendency ran 
 side by side in his nature till the end. Intercourse with nature 
 was even more necessary to Thoreau than intercourse with 
 books. Intercourse with human beings he thought he did not 
 need, but he was always tramping off to the village for a chat. 
 He was not a real solitary, for visitors were always coming 
 to view the progress of the odd experiment in living. Still 
 Thoreau differed widely from the ordinary gregarious man in 
 that he could manage to be alone for long periods with the 
 woods and the sky. A friend called him a poet-naturalist ; but 
 the description is not exact. He hardly views nature as a 
 poet, and he is surpassed by not a few observers of nature, who 
 have had the stimulus of Darwin. The merely pictorial in 
 nature does not much interest him, probably because he had 
 seen no pictures. To Thoreau nature is no divinity as she is 
 to Wordsworth; she is simply the pleasantest of companions, or 
 rather the pleasantest environment for a natural man. In a 
 house, in a town, he is like a creature caged. It is characteristic 
 that after swimming across the lake, he would sit in his doorway 
 all morning, "in a wise passiveness, " as Wordsworth would 
 term it. So wild creatures live in the wild, when not hunger- 
 driven. The wild things found him to be of their own kind; 
 a mouse made friends with him, a hen partridge led her brood 
 about his hut, he could take a fish out of the water in his hand. 
 Thoreau is perhaps the first to suggest the pleasure of hunting 
 animals without a gun, of learning about them without any 
 desire to kill. He was not influenced by Darwin, or such a 
 conception as the struggle for existence. Nature to hini was 
 not red in tooth and claw with ravin; it was a gentle, friendly, 
 peaceful alternative to the mean greed and futile toil of man. 
 The atmosphere of Walden is always serene and free from 
 cloud or storm. Rain and winter come in their season; but 
 they never seem to touch him; the rain does not wet, and the 
 winter does not chill. There may be a thousand nooks in New 
 England more beautiful than Walden, but they remain im- 
 known, while the pine-clad slope which this strange being 
 discovered and haunted for two years is charted as a permanent 
 addition to the world-wide map of Romance. 
 
 Thoreau has two styles, the oracular and the simple; and 
 
Thoreau HS 
 
 in Walden the simple prevails. Like the water of the pond, it 
 is clear, colourless and wholesome. Thoreau is a careful 
 writer, with an instinct for the right word which was developed 
 and strengthened by a lifelong devotion to the best books. 
 His love of the classics must have tended to purify his style 
 and increase its natural dignity. Walden is generally free 
 from oracular phrases and grotesque locutions like "eyes 
 revolve in an Egyptian slime of health." It must always re- 
 tain the deep unfailing value of all autobiography, personal 
 memoirs, "confessions." The record of a life will never fail of 
 an audience. When a man declares, /'Thus I did, thus I 
 thought, thus I felt," other men are always eager to attend 
 his tale. 
 
 The Walden experiment was not unlike the other Tran- 
 scendental experiment of Brook Farm. Both were declarations 
 of independence; both were attempts to place life on a new 
 basis; both broke down. The Greek dog-sage in his tub, the 
 English Quaker in his suit of leather, the Yankee land-surveyor 
 in his wooden hut are three object lessons to the world of the 
 ancient truth that "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
 of the things that he possesseth." The Walden experiment is 
 open to all the criticism of Lowell: "it presupposed all the 
 complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured." 
 Even for Thoreau it was not a success. In the first year, his 
 Homer lay open on the table, but he was so busy that he could 
 only read it by snatches; in the second year, he was forced 
 to set up a prosaic stove in the place of the romantic fire-place. 
 Thoreau's ideal of a world of book men, or contemplatives, 
 is a dream. Still, the experience of the ascetic always shames 
 the grossness of the worldly wiseman. If a man can live for a 
 year for eight dollars, we certainly spend too much on things 
 we could do without. Thoreau's experiment will always have 
 its appeal to hot, ambitious spirits on their first awakening to 
 the intricacy of life. The hero of Locksley Hall longs to escape 
 from ciyilization to summer isles of Eden. At least one 
 American man of letters has followed Thoreau's example by 
 going into retreat. 
 
 After living in his hut for two years, Thoreau supported 
 himself for three more by cultivating his garden, like Candide. 
 Thus he obtained the freedoms he desired, the leisure to think, 
 
144 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 and to read, and to write, and to be himself. Then he went 
 back to his land-surveying, his communing with the spirits 
 of the wild, and the compilation of his voluminous jovirnals. 
 From the latter, several volumes have been quarried for the 
 definitive edition of his works. They must always be of more 
 interest to the admirer of Thoreau and the student of literature 
 than to the general reader. 
 
 Then came the break-down of his health. It was the irony 
 of fate that the man who lived according to nature, who obeyed 
 the dictates of spare temperance, who never seemed to tire, 
 should die of tuberculosis, the scourge of civilized life. His latest 
 portrait, a daguerreotype taken in New Bedford, seven months 
 before his death, shows a hairy, innocent, pathetic face; the 
 eyes have the mute appeal of the consumptive. In 1861, the 
 stricken man made a trip to the West, in the vain hope of 
 restoration to health by change of air. He died in his birth- 
 place, Concord, on 2 May, 1862, in the second year of the 
 Civil War. He has been blamed for expressing his sense of 
 detachment from that terrible conflict, but if, like Mercutio, he 
 cries, "A plague on both your houses!" it must be remembered 
 that, Uke Mercutio, he was a dying man. His last letter, 
 dictated to his sister, concludes, "I am enjoying existence as 
 much as ever, and regret nothing." 
 
 Emerson has written an appreciation of Thoreau with 
 intimate knowledge and tender humanity. To that estimate, 
 little can be added, or taken away. LoweU and Stevenson 
 have appraised his character and his work, none too gently. 
 Of himself he said, "I am a mystic, a Transcendentalist, and a 
 natural philosopher." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Poets, Essayists, Romancers 
 I. Longfellow 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH' LONGFELLOW was born 
 in Portland, Maine, z'] February, 1807. In view of 
 what America as a whole then was and of what he 
 was destined to accomplish for the literature of the country, 
 it is difficult to see how he could have been more fortunately 
 circumstanced with respect to stock and environment. Both 
 the LongfeUows and his mother's people, the Wadsworths, 
 were weU-to-do, and they represented the best New England, 
 particularly Massachusetts, traditions, which, with the spread 
 of Unitarianism, were losing some of their rigidity. Thus the 
 child experienced little that was specially straitening, and he 
 received a training well adapted to bring out the talents that 
 soon manifested themselves. His native town furnished the 
 influence of the sea and sea-faring men ; the virgin District soon 
 to be the State of Maine afforded other impressive features 
 of nature; and the frontier situation, even if it could not make 
 strenuous a constitutionally gentle and refined disposition, at 
 least inculcated feelings of sympathy with a pioneer, rugged, pre- 
 vaiHngly practical population, which were to be of great use to a 
 poet who in after years could point to his successful fulfilment 
 of the threefold function of transmitter of Old World culture 
 to the New, shaper into verse of aboriginal, colonial, and 
 Revolutionary material, both legendary and historical, and 
 lyric interpreter of the simple thoughts and feelings of an 
 unsophisticated people. His career was well foreshadowed 
 when he published anonymously at the age of thirteen, in a 
 local newspaper, a Revolutionary battle-lyric. 
 
 After a good schooling and an introduction to the best 
 reading old and new, including Irving's Sketch Book, Long- 
 fellow, in the autumn of 1822, entered Bowdoin College as a 
 
 10 145 
 
146 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 sophomore, having Nathaniel Hawthorne as a classmate. 
 Here, as at home, he continued to come under unpretentious, 
 wholesome influences, to which were added those of rural 
 seclusion. Before he graduated in 1825, he was writing verse 
 rather copiously, and some of it was published in a literary 
 journal just founded in Boston. As is not surprising, it was 
 overpraised by a provincial public, but for a wonder, in view 
 of the vogue of Byron, it was not stormily romantic. His 
 success gave point to his plans for leading a literary life, but 
 his more experienced father held out for the law, although he 
 was willing to give his son a year of grace to be spent in less 
 uncongenial studies at Harvard. This plan was abandoned 
 because it was found feasible for Longfellow to fit himself to 
 become the first incumbent of a chair of modem languages to 
 be established at Bowdoin. 
 
 Travel and study in Europe were essential to such a design, 
 and the middle of June, 1826, saw the youth of nineteen begin- 
 ning at Havre a, European sojourn of a little more than three 
 years. Temperament and immaturity, combined doubtless 
 with a shrewd perception of the fact that great erudition was 
 not a prerequisite to successful language-teaching in Maine, 
 made it natural that Longfellow should become rather a sen- 
 timental pilgrim than a delving student or a philosophical 
 observer, and that he should make but slight use of Ticknor's 
 recommendation of Gottingen as a centre and source of the 
 exact scholarship so much needed in America. German senti- 
 ment and romance were later to mean much to the poet; but 
 Latin colour and picturesqueness meant more to the young 
 traveller. France, Spain, where he met Irving, and Italy, 
 from whose greatest writer his mature and declining years 
 derived their chief solace, were in turn visited, their manners 
 noted, their literatures studied, their languages in more than 
 poHte measure mastered. Then several months were given 
 to Germany, including a Uttle studying at Gottingen, and in 
 August, 1829, the neophyte professor was back in America 
 ready to take up the duties of his chair. 
 
 Those duties occupied him until his second visit to Europe, 
 which took place nearly six years later. He was a conscien- 
 tious and successful teacher and compiler of text-books, he 
 lectured on literary history, he wrote for The North American 
 
Longfellow H7 
 
 Review essays flavoured with scholarship, he gave a pledge to 
 society by taking to himself, in 1831, a wife, Mary Storer 
 Potter, of Portland. Except for some verse translations from 
 the Spanish and certain traces of the poet to be discovered in a 
 series of travel-sketches, which appeared in a volume entitled 
 Oidre-Mer: a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea (1835), one might have 
 been justified in supposing that without doubt the under- 
 graduate whose heart was set on "future eminence in literature " 
 would end his Hfe as a distinguished academic personage, not 
 as the most popular poet of his generation. His fate seemed 
 sealed with his acceptance of the Smith Chair of Modern Lan- 
 guages at Harvard, in succession to Ticknor, and with his 
 departure for Europe in April, 1835, in order that by study 
 of the northern literatures he might the better qualify himself 
 for his important post. 
 
 His second period of training in Europe, although shorter, 
 rendered Longfellow a greater service than his first. As he 
 was more mature, his genius was better prepared to receive a 
 definitive bent, and his experiences determined that that 
 bent should take an emotional rather than an emphatically 
 intellectual direction. After a short visit to England he spent 
 some months in Sweden and Denmark studying their litera- 
 tures with results obvious to the reader of his later poetry. 
 Then he went to Holland, where his wife fell ill and died in 
 the autumn. This meant that the ensuing winter at Heidel- 
 berg saw no notable progress made by the young professor in 
 his German studies, but did see a deep absorption of the spirit 
 of German romanticism by the young widower and the future 
 poet. The sentimental prose romance Hyperion and the col- 
 lection of poems entitled Voices of the Night, both published in 
 1839, show what bereavement and the new environment, 
 physical as well as mental and spiritual, had brought to the 
 man entering his fourth decade. We track the footsteps of 
 the naive hero of Hyperion with less confiding delight than 
 our grandfathers and grandmothers probably experienced, 
 but then we are less sentimental and more widely travelled 
 than they were, facts which of course do not warrant us in 
 arrogating to ourselves a taste necessarily superior to theirs. 
 Hyperion doubtless meant more to the author and his country- 
 men than a scholarly monograph would have meant, for what 
 
h8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 America needed just then, apparently, was some one who, 
 like Longfellow, could carry on the work begun by Irving of 
 interpreting the Old World to the New. The younger man 
 was not only better endowed with the faculty of specific poetic 
 utterai&ce, but he was naturally more fully qualified than his 
 predecessor to gratify the taste of a generation that was bci 
 ginning to be affected by the work of the newer English roman- 
 tic poets. Thus we are not surprised to find the Smith 
 Professor writing poems on European subjects instead of gram- 
 mars and histories of literature, and editing in place of text- 
 books a small collection of poems entitled The. Waif (1843), a 
 similar volume, TheEstray (1847), and the comprehensive and 
 useful Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845) . Even the ,thirty-one 
 voltunes of the much later Poems of Places (1876-1879) with 
 which Longfellow's name is more or less associated, bear wit- 
 ness to the influence of the teacher-poet's second sojourn in 
 Europe both upon him and upon American culttu"e. 
 
 But the greatest influence of that sojourn, exhibited after 
 he took up his duties at Harvard' in December, 1836, is to be 
 seen in the simple, wholesomely emotioi^al, and tmblushingly 
 didactic poems with which Longfellow now began to win the 
 hearts of his proA^incial readers. The Psalm of Life is perhaps 
 the best known and the best chosen example of these "house;^ 
 hold poems," shaU we call them? With its companion pieces 
 The Reaper and the Flowers, The Light of Stars, and Footsteps 
 of Angels, it is undoubtedly amenable to some of the harsh 
 criticism it has received from those persons who seem to 
 imagine that taste thrives only on its own exigency. But it 
 is hard to see how verses of subtler quality would have so sung 
 themselves through the length and breadth of yoimg America, 
 or could have laid so broad and deep a foundation for the fame 
 of the most heartily loved poet of his generation. 
 
 Long before that poet had reached the zenith of his reputa- 
 tion the professor had grown weary of his chair. At first he 
 worked hard enough to justify weariness, particularly at the 
 uncongenial task of supervising the instruction in the elemen- 
 tary language courses given by his assistants; but gradually, 
 whatever enthusiasm he may have had for a scholarly, academic 
 career wore itself out, and toward the end of his eighteen years 
 of service — ^he resigned in 1854 — ^he was almost querulous in 
 
Longfellow i49 
 
 his attitude toward a calling without the aid of which he 
 would probably have remained a somewhat local and minor 
 writer, his disposition scarcely prompting him to draw inspira- 
 tion from Transcendentalism or the anti-slavery movement, 
 and his genius not qualifying him to probe the heart or to 
 wander in shadowland. 
 
 Whatever its irksomeness, however, his position at Harvard 
 brought with it compensations. He soon secured a congenial 
 habitat — ^the now famous Craigie House — ^he gathered about 
 him a group of sympathetic friends, he became a distinguished 
 figtue in the most ctdtured community in America, the Cam- 
 bridge of Lowell's essay and of Colonel Higginson's books, he 
 added to his happiness and his income by a second marriage — 
 to Miss Frances Elizabeth Appleton in 1843 — and he found 
 time and incentive to write whatever he had in his mind and 
 heart to say. Reading his letters and his diaries, putting 
 together the biographical details furnished by others, and 
 constructing as best one can the man's life and spirit from his 
 writings, one is forced to the conclusion that except for a single 
 great tragedy — the accidental burning to death of his wife in 
 1861 — Longfellow's is one of the most serenely fortunate 
 careers ever led by a man of letters. Some of his critics have 
 wished that it might have been otherwise, apparently supposing 
 that, if he had been more unfortunate, his poetry would have 
 been more to their liking. It is not, however, on record that 
 any critic has deliberately wooed infelicity in order to qualify 
 himself for a fuller enjoyment of Longfellow's placid verses. 
 
 In-1842-a third- visit wasjnade to Europe, this time a short 
 one for the sake of health. It was preceded by the Ballads^ 
 and Other Poems (1841), and followed by the Poems on Slavery 
 (1842). These justly enhanced his reputation, but the 
 meritorious anti-slavery verses proved no prelude to active 
 participation in the great conflict that was leading up to the 
 Civil War. The prior volume with such pieces as The Village 
 Blacksmith, God's Acre, Maidenhood, and the egregiously 
 anabatic Excelsior, strengthened his hold upon the popular 
 heart, and in the successful ballads proper, such as The Wreck 
 of the Hesperus and The Skeleton in Armor, it gave him, in 
 addition, some incentive to address his readers in narrative 
 verse, the form of poetry in which, during his middle period. 
 
I50 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 he made himself easily the chief American master. Neither 
 in these earlier volumes, to which may be added The Belfry 
 of Bruges and Other Poems (1846), nor in Evangeline (1847) 
 and succeeding tales in verse, did Longfellow show himself to 
 be a consummate metrical and verbal artist of the highest 
 order or a poet of sustained imaginative flight; nor was he, in 
 compensation, one of those writers who produce a strong effect 
 through their subtle knowledge of human character or their ex- 
 ceptional ability to describe and interpret nature or their pro- 
 found understanding of a cotmtry or a period. Yet even in 
 these particulars he was capable of exhibiting distinguished 
 merit — witness his command of the simpler rhythms, his wide- 
 reaching metrical experimentation, his feeling for the sea, his 
 sympathetic attitude toward the Middle Ages displayed in The 
 Golden Legend (1851), his presentation of the larger natural 
 features of America in Evangeline — and in his lyrical appeal, 
 especially through his semi-didactic poems of reflection and 
 sentiment, as well as in his general narrative power, he was 
 during his life, and] he still remains, unapproached by any 
 other American poet. 
 
 The years immediately preceding his second marriage in 
 1843 were partly devoted to the composition of a poetical 
 drama in three acts. The Spanish Student, which was published 
 serially in 1842, and the next year was issued in book form. 
 It is generally and justly regarded as a failure, since Longfellow 
 exhibited neither in it nor in later poems cast in similar form 
 — The New England Tragedies (1868), Judas Maccahaeus (1872), 
 and Michael Angela (1883), — the slightest trace of dramatic 
 genius. A poet of literary derivation, so to phrase it, inspired 
 by his own wide reading, and a useful transmitter of culture 
 he could not help being from first to last, and his growing repu- 
 tation naturally prompted him to undertake elaborate works 
 in a form of art practised by preceding poets in every age. 
 His countrymen were not exigent critics, and were inclined 
 to resent it when he was accused, as by Poe and by Margaret 
 Fuller, of unoriginality ; latter-day readers are likely to skim, 
 or else altogether to neglect the dramas that are protected 
 from complete oblivion by the venerated and still venerable 
 name. If they desire any justification for their conduct, 
 such prudent readers may ejaculate " habent sua fata libelli" 
 
Longfellow ^Si 
 
 or may recall the facts that Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote Irene 
 and William Wordsworth, The Borderers. 
 
 In all probability, neither of these ominous dramatic pro- 
 ductions was in Longfellow's mind when he was writing The 
 Spanish Student, or planning his presumptive masterpiece, 
 ChristusL.A-Mystery, which finally saw the light in 1872, more 
 than twenty years after the first appearance of its second part. 
 The Golden Legend, one of the most attractive and yet one of 
 the least widely read of its author's books. Poems Swedish 
 and German, ominous in no bad sense, were in his mind when 
 he wrote his sentimental idyllic narrative in hexameters, 
 Evangeline, not perhaps the best of his longer poems, but 
 certainly the most popular both at home and abroad. Haw- 
 thorne, from whom Longfellow secured the theme of the Aca- 
 dian maiden's vain search for her lover, might have made more 
 of the pathetic story, but he would have done it for fewer 
 readers. Other writers might have improved the local colour 
 of the poem, still others might have laboured more heroically 
 to keep the hexameters from making forays across the borders 
 of prose, but it may be doubted whether any contemporary 
 could have written, on the whole, a better Evangeline, at least 
 one more suited to the taste of the period. Few of his contem- 
 poraries, however, have left behind a more negligible prose 
 romance than the story of an impossible New England village 
 which Longfellow published in 1849 under the title Kavanagh; 
 A Tale. 
 
 The end of the fifties saw the culmination of his genius in 
 the appearance of ThcjCaurtship of MUesStandish and Other 
 Poems (1858), This narrative poem, another experiment in 
 hexameters, seems to surpass Longfellow's other successful 
 achievements in the same category because it is more racy of 
 New England, fuller of humour, superior in movement and 
 in characterization. It is less popular than Evangeline, partly 
 no doubt because it is less sweet, and it seems to have made 
 less impression than its predecessor the Indian epic Hiawatha 
 (1855) — another metrical experiment, this time in rhymeless 
 trochaic tetrameters — ^partly because it is less ambitious and 
 exotic. The popularity of Hiawatha is not undeserved, how- 
 ever, since novelty and quaintness may well be set over against 
 facility and factitiousness, and since, being in a certain sense 
 
152 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 American, the poem may justly make more of a local appeal 
 than such a work as The Golden Legend based on Der Arme 
 Heinrich. Yet it may be doubted whether either Hiawatha 
 or Miles Standish did as much to establish Longfellow as the 
 most admired poet of his time as some of the unpretentious 
 poems contained in the collection entitled The Seaside and the 
 Fireside (1850), such poems, for example, as the tender Resig- 
 nation, to say nothing of the patriotic close of The Building 
 of the Ship. 
 
 From the date of the tragic accident to his wife — ^July, 
 1861 — to his death 24 March, 1882, at his home in Cambridge, 
 Longfellow's life takes on dignity without losing its quiet 
 charm, and his genius — shall we say, mellows, or slowly 
 abates in energy? There was no marked falling off in 
 the number of published volumes, in the range of his inter- 
 ests, in his hold upon his intimate friends, such as Charles 
 Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell, in his endeavours, 
 conscious and tmconscious, to deserve the affectionate 
 gratitude of his countrymen. Even in the South, for a 
 time rent away from the rest of the country politically, and 
 for a longer period estranged in sentiment, his was a Northern 
 name not anathema to the rising generation, and in Great 
 Britain he rivalled in popularity Tennyson himself. But, as 
 might have been expected, these years saw the production of 
 little, except for some excellent sonnets, that adds permanently 
 to his fame as a poet. 
 
 True, he added considerably to the mass of his narrative 
 poetry by the three series of Tales of a Wayside Inn, the first of 
 which appeared under its own name in 1863, the second and 
 third of which were included respectively in Three Books of 
 Song (1872 — along with Judas Maccabaeus), and in Aftermath 
 (1874), but save for the spirited Paul Revere' s Ride and the 
 Saga of King Olaf, of the first series, these tales in verse have 
 made only a mild impression. This is about all that may 
 justly be said with regard to the twelve poems collected in 
 Flower-de-luce (1867); it is more than should be said of The 
 New England Tragedies, the third part of Christus, consisting 
 of John Endicott and Giles Cory of the Salem Farms. These, 
 with the first part of the ambitious trilogy. The Divine Tragedy 
 (1871), constitute what may best be ambiguously denominated 
 
Longfellow ^53 
 
 "efforts." Longfellow was more fortunately employed when 
 he put himself in the company of Cowper and Bryant, and 
 sought solace for his private woes in an extensive piece of 
 poetical translation. Perhaps his true genius as a translator, 
 seen early in the Coplas de Manrique (1833), is better exempli- 
 fied in his numerous renderings of lyrics, particularly, as in 
 Uhland's The Castle by the Sea, from the German, than in the 
 faithful, meritorious version of The Divine Comedy, which ap- 
 peared in three voliunes between 1867 and 1870; but, despite 
 a certain lack of metrical charm resulting from the facile 
 character of the rhymeless lines printed in threes, the version 
 of the masterpiece to which Longfellow gave so many years 
 of love and study seems worthy of his pains and of the praise 
 it has received from other admirers of Dante. 
 
 After the appearance of the translation of Dante and of 
 the Christus, two works de longue haleine which show that the 
 retired professor of nearly twenty years' standing was not 
 open to the charge of idleness, Longfellow had still about 
 a decade to live and to continue his writing. Some of the 
 titles of his collections of verse have been already given; others 
 are The Masque of Pandora, and Other Poems (1875), KSramos; 
 and Other Poems (1878), Ultima Thule (1880), and In the 
 Harbor (1882 — posthumous). The first of these volumes con- 
 tained one of the most dignified and impressive of all his poems, 
 one of the best occasional poems in American literature, the 
 Morituri Salutamus, written for the semi-centennial of the 
 poet's class at Bowdoin. It also contained A Book of Sonnets, 
 fourteen in all, considerably extended in number in later edi- 
 tions of the poetical works. Some notable sonnets had been 
 published with the translation of Dante, and to these Long- 
 fellow's later achievements in the same form are worthy pend- 
 ants. High praise has been given to them by many critically 
 minded readers of a later generation, who have wished, in 
 default of admiration for Longfellow's earlier work, to combine 
 patriotism with acumen in their praise of a poet whose reputa- 
 tion seemed to require rather delicate handling. Both the 
 sonnets and their American encomiasts are fortunately unamen- 
 able to comments lacking in amiability, although it is open 
 to doubt whether even such a pathetic sonnet as The Cross of 
 Snow, written at the close of the poet's life in memory of his 
 
154 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 unfortunate second wife, will ever mean to the great public 
 what The Bridge and The Day is Done have meant. It is 
 perhaps more to the purpose to express satisfaction that the 
 poet was capable of making the double appeal — ^to the reader 
 who thinks he knows what to think and to the reader who 
 knows he knows how to feel. 
 
 It may be gathered from this brief survey of a long life 
 and a productive career that Longfellow's reputation, in the 
 opinion of the present writer, was amply deserved in the poet's 
 day, and rested in the main on his gifts as a story-teller in 
 verse, on his power to transplant to American literature some 
 of the colour and melody and romantic charm of the complex 
 European literatures he had studied, and, more especially, on 
 his skill in expressing in comparatively artless lyrics of senti- 
 ment and reflection homely and wholesome thoughts and 
 feelings which he shared with his countrymen of all classes 
 throughout a broad land the occupation of which proceeded 
 apace during his own span of years. Whatever he accom- 
 plished beyond this as teacher and editor and writer of prose, 
 and as self-conscious poet seeking success in the more elabo- 
 rate traditional forms of his art, is worthy, to say the least, of 
 as much praise as the similar work of his predecessors, contem- 
 poraries, and successors among American poets, and is not 
 clearly doomed to a speedier death than the elaborate produc- 
 tions of his contemporaries and successors among the British 
 poets. His place is not with the few eminent poets of the 
 world, or even of his centurj', as the admiration of the mass of 
 his countrymen and the critical lucubrations of some of them 
 might be held to imply; but it is, legitimately and permanently, 
 in the forefront of the small band of important writers in 
 verse and in prose who during the first century of the republic's 
 existence laid firmly and upon more or less democratic lines 
 the foundations of a native hterature. 
 
2. Whittier 
 
 IT was in 1638, when the great Puritan emigration to Mas- 
 sachusetts was beginning to slacken, that Thomas 
 Whittier, a youth of eighteen, possibly of Huguenot 
 extraction, landed in New England and made a home for 
 himself on the shores of the Merrimac River. The sub- 
 stantial oak farmhouse which, late in life, he erected for 
 his large family near HaverhUl, is still standing. Descended 
 from him in the fourth generation, John Greenleaf Whittier, 
 the poet, was bom in this house, i7,December, 1807. This 
 is the homestead described with minute and loving fidelity 
 in Snow-Bound, and it is typical of the many thou&a|ids of 
 its sort that dotted the New England country-side, rearing 
 in the old Puritan tradition a sturdy pioneer stock that 
 was to blossom later in the fine flower of poHtical and 
 ethical passion, of statesmanship and oratory and letters. 
 Though Whittier's family tree was originally Puritan, a 
 Quaker scion was grafted upon it in the second American 
 generation, when Joseph Whittier, the youngest son of the 
 pioneer, married Mary Peaslee, whose father had been an 
 associate and disciple of George Fox. The descendants in 
 this line remained faithful to the doctrines of the Society of 
 Friends, and the poet, although he persisted in the character- 
 istic and quaint (although ungrammatical) use of the second 
 person singular pronoun in address, found the principle of 
 non-resistance something of a strain in the days when his 
 fondest hopes were bound up in the holy cause for which his 
 friends were bearing anns and laying down their lives upon 
 the battle-field. 
 
 155 
 
156 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 The levelled gun, the battle brand 
 
 We may not take, 
 But, calmly loyal, we can stand 
 And suffer for our suffering land 
 
 For conscience' sake. 
 
 The temperament of the New England Quaker was not unlike 
 that of the New England Puritan. The one could be as cantan- 
 kerous as the other, on occasion, but when the early Puritan 
 intolerance of the sect had been smoothed away, the Quaker 
 was found to be a man whose ideals were essentially those of 
 the founders of Massachusetts, contributing to those ideals 
 his own element of kindly sympathy, his own insistence upon 
 the dignity of the individual, and his own uncompromising 
 spirit of democracy. These traits were permanently stamped 
 upon Whittier's character, and all rested upon a foundation 
 of unshakable faith in the spiritual order of the world. Chris- 
 tianity has perhaps never assumed a purer or lovelier guise 
 than it took in the lives of those New England Quakers of 
 whom Whittier was the type. 
 
 The life of the household in which the poet grew to man- 
 hood is reproduced in Snow-Bound with a fidelity which 
 makes of that poem, for its truthfulness and sincerity, one of 
 the imperishable things in American literature — a document 
 whose significance is becoming fully apparent only now that 
 the phase of life it describes has all but vanished from American 
 life, whether in New England or elsewhere. The home which 
 Snow-Bound describes was a comfortable one, as New England 
 farmsteads went, and, in poetical retrospect, its gracious human 
 aspects are raised to a prominence which somewhat obscures 
 the hard facts of the daily life of the household. It was a life 
 of toil, with meagre opportunities for recreation, and the 
 young Whittier did not have the constitution needed for its 
 requirements. The physical disabilities under which he 
 laboured all his life were doubtless traceable to the hardships 
 of these early years on the farm. 
 
 Whittier had but little education of the formal sort. There 
 were sessions of the district school for a few weeks every year, 
 and these he attended off and on. In his twentieth year, an 
 academy was opened in Haverhill, and in this institution he 
 
Whittier i57 
 
 was enrolled as a student for two terms, earning the money to 
 pay for his tuition. Meanwhile, he had been acquiring the 
 best land of education by devouring every book that he could 
 lay his hands on, including the few on the family shelf — ^mostly 
 the writings of pious Quakers — and 
 
 The Bible towering o'er the rest, 
 Of all other books the best. 
 
 One evening the district school teacher, Joshua CofSn, brought 
 to the house a volume of Burns, and read from it to the family. 
 This reading was a revelation to the boy of fourteen, who 
 eagerly sought permission to keep the book for a while. The 
 Scotch poet aroused in him the poetical stirrings which were 
 to occupy his mind from that time on, and marked an epoch 
 in the intellectual development of his boyhood. It was Bums, 
 as he confessed many years later, who made him see 
 
 through all familiar things 
 The romance underlying; 
 The joys and griefs that plume the wings 
 Of Fancy skyward flying, 
 
 and so shaped his imaginings that he became, in a more exact 
 sense than is usually connoted by such Hterary analogies, the 
 Bums of his own New England country. 
 
 From this time on, Whittier was an industrious scribbler 
 of rhymes. Most of them have been lost, but enough remain 
 to reveal a promise which may perhaps be characterized as 
 similar to that of the Poems by Two Brothers, or the Poems by 
 Victor and Cazire. The first of his verses to appear in print 
 were sent, unknown to the author, by his sister Mary to The 
 Free Press, a weekly paper just established by William Lloyd 
 Garrison in Newburyport. The boy's surprise was great 
 when he read his own composition in an issue of the paper 
 that was delivered at the Whittier farm in the summer of 1826. 
 Other pieces followed, and one day shortly afterward, Garrison 
 made a journey to the farm for the purpose of hunting up his 
 promising contributor. He found Whittier at work in the 
 field, urged the poet's father to send him to the academy, and 
 thus began what was to be the life-long friendship of these 
 
158 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 two remarkable personalities. During the next two years 
 Whittier published in the Haverhill Gazette nearly one hundred 
 poems, besides prose articles on Burns, War, and Temperance. 
 In 1828, a volume to be entitled The Poems of Adrian was 
 projected, but this venture was abandoned. In the summer 
 of that year his schooldays came to an end, and he began to 
 look about for a means of earning his living. An offer was 
 made him of the editorship of The Philanthropist, a paper 
 devoted to the cause of what is called "temperance" in the 
 current perverted sense of that term, but this offer he declined 
 in a letter containing this significant confession: "I wotild 
 rather have the memory of a Howard, a Wilberforce, and a 
 Clarkson than the undying fame of Byron." By this time, 
 he had acquired a considerable local reputation as a young 
 writer of promise, and various modest openings already lay 
 in his path. 
 
 Dtiring the next four years of his life (1828-32), Whittier 
 was the editor of papers in Boston and Haverhill, and of The 
 New England Review, in Hartford, Connecticut, besides con- 
 tributing to many others. He became a partisan of Clay and 
 the protective system, and looked askance at Jackson, "the 
 blood-thirsty old man at the head of our government." The 
 death of the elder Whittier in 1830 kept him for some time in 
 Haverhill for the settlement of the family affairs. His interest 
 in politics became more and more pronounced, and he thought 
 seriously of standing for an election to Congress in 1832 but 
 gave up the idea because he would, at the time of the election, 
 be a few weeks 'short of the legal age requirement. When 
 he identified himself, the next year, with the unpopular cause 
 of the abolitionists, he gave up all hopes of political advance- 
 ment. 
 
 Whittier's first published book was entitled Legends of New 
 England, in Prose and Verse. It appeared in 1831, and was 
 followed in 1832 by a pamphlet containing Moll Pitcher. 
 Both these publications he afterwards did his best to suppress. 
 Reform still appealed to him even more than poetry, and he 
 wrote upon one occasion: "I set a higher value on my name as 
 appended to the Antislavery Declaration of 1833 thah on the 
 title-page of any book." This Declaration was issued by the 
 Convention held in Philadelphia, in 1833, to which Whittier 
 
Whittier i59 
 
 was a delegate. In taking this momentous decision, he builded 
 better than he knew, for the poet in him was aroused, and 
 the Voices of Freedom which from that time flowed from his 
 pen were the utterances of a deeply-stirred soul, as different 
 as possible from the imitative exercises which had hitherto 
 engaged him. 
 
 The incidents of Whittier's life dtu-ing the following few 
 years may be briefly summarized. In 1835 he served a term 
 in the Massachusetts Legislature. In 1836, the Haverhill 
 homestead was sold, and he bought In Amesbury, a few miles 
 down the Merrimac, the cottage which was to be his home for 
 the rest of his life. He occupied various editorial positions, 
 which, together with activities in connection with the aboli- 
 tionist agitation, kept him moving about until 1840, when he 
 found his health badly broken and returned to Amesbury, there 
 to remain for the greater part of the half -century that was still 
 vouchsafed to him. In his abolitionist activities he proved 
 his mettle, often suffering indignities at the hands of mobs and 
 being on several occasions in no small physical peril. His 
 shrewd and persuasive political activities made him a force to 
 be reckoned with, and he kept in close touch with the leaders 
 and movements of the time, allying himself with the Liberty 
 Party of 1840, which, like the scriptural mustard seed, was 
 destined to wax into so great a tree. 
 
 In 1836, Whittier published Mogg Megone, and, in the 
 following year, a collection of his miscellaneous poems. In 
 
 1849, a comprehensive collection of his poems appeared, fol- 
 lowed a year later by Songs of Labor and Other Poems. The 
 first English edition of his collected poems also appeared in 
 
 1850. These volumes included all that he thought worth pre- 
 serving of the work of twenty years. In 1857, the "blue and 
 gold" collected edition of the poems was published in Boston. 
 From this time onward small volumes of new poems appeared 
 at intervals of about two years down to the year of the author's 
 death, AtSundown, the last of the series, bearing the date of that 
 very year (1892). Of special significance are the idyl entitled 
 Snow-Bound^^^(^i866) and the cycje called The Tent on the 'Beach 
 (1867). These two volumes marked a broadening of Whittier's 
 fame, a higher recognition of his standing as an artist, and a 
 noticeable measure of release from the financial difficulties 
 
i6o chapters of American Literature 
 
 under which he long had struggled. For the rest, the ballads, 
 lyrics, and occasional pieces which made him most famous are 
 scattered somewhat indiscriminately through the score or more 
 of his volumes. For upwards of half a century verse flowed 
 profusely from his pen, and his career did not fall into the dis- 
 tinctive periods that it is the task and the delight of the critic 
 to define and to characterize in the work of many other poets. 
 From 1840 onward Whittier made Amesbury his home, 
 although he allowed himself many protracted visits to friends 
 and relatives, to Danvers and Newburyport, to the waters 
 and mountains of New Hampshire, to Maine and the Isles of 
 Shoals. From 1847 to i860 he was associated, at long distance, 
 with TlioJ^icmaLS^a, a weekly paper published at Washing- 
 ton, and best remembered as the periodical in which Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin was first given to the world. This paper was the 
 chief medium for his expression until the establishment of 
 The Atlantic -Monthly in 1857^ in whose pages a large part of 
 his later work appeared. His seventieth birthday, in 1877, 
 was made the occasion of a celebration more elaborate than 
 had before been the reward of any American poet. He at- 
 tended the Boston dinner then given in his honour, feeling 
 
 Like him who in the old Arabian joke 
 A beggar slept and crowned Caliph woke.^ 
 
 His eightieth birthday was also celebrated, bringing to him a 
 striking memorial signed by all the members of the Supreme 
 Court bench, nearly all the members of both houses of Congress, 
 and many private citizens of the highest distinction, making 
 it clear that the nation held him in love and veneration sts one 
 of its greatest spiritual assets. He was visiting at the house 
 of a friend, a few miles from Amesbury just over the New Hamp- 
 shire border, when a cerebral hemorrhage brought him to a 
 peaceful death, 7 September, 1892. "Love to all the world," 
 were the words that played upon his lips just before the end. 
 In the classification of Whittier's work, the narrative poems 
 are the first to call for consideration. "Of all our poets he 
 is the most natural balladist," says E. C. Stedman, and through- 
 out his entire life he was always ready to turn from the strenu- 
 ous exactions of the causes which claimed his most ardent 
 
Whittier i6i 
 
 sympathies to the delightful relaxation of story-telling. From 
 childhood he was steeped in the legendry of New England, its 
 tales of Indian raids, of Quaker persecutions, of picturesque 
 pioneers, and of romantic adventure; while the wide reading 
 which made Whittier in later life a cultivated man fed his 
 narrative faculty with old-world themes, ranging all the way 
 from the Norse to the Oriental. The grim tragic economy 
 of the folk-ballad, as it sprang from the heart of the people 
 in England, Denmark, or Germany, never imparted its secret 
 to him, although in The Sisters he came near to plucking the 
 heart out of that mystery; but the ballad was to him the 
 occasion for a rambling narration, diffuse in its unfolding and 
 unrestrained in its form, often with decorative illustrations 
 drawn from quite unexpected sources, and usually shaped to 
 the point of a rather obtrusive moral. Such pieces as Maud 
 Mutter and Barclay oj Ury would doubtless have been better 
 poems without the moralizing tags which conclude them, but 
 probably they would also have been less popular. Whittier's 
 public expected a certain element of sermonizing in his verse 
 and the America of his time paid scant heed to the cry that 
 "art for art's sake" should be the guiding principle of poetic 
 practice. The best of Whittier's ballads, nevertheless, are 
 comparatively unburdened with didacticism. Among these 
 may be mentioned Pentucket, with its memories of old-time 
 Indian raids along the Merrimac; Cassandra Southwick, a 
 tale of the Quaker persecutions; The Angels of Buena Vista, 
 an echo from the battle-fields of the Mexican War; The Garrison 
 of Cape Ann, which tells how the New Englander of old van- 
 quished the powers of darkness; Skipper Ireson's Ride, a 
 spirited song of the vengeance wrought by the women of 
 Marblehead upon a sea-captain thought to have abandoned 
 the crew of a sinking ship; Mabel Martin, an idyl of the days 
 of witchcraft, and Amy Wentworth, a dainty romance of the 
 old colonial time. Upon these ballads, and many others, New 
 England childhood has been nurtured for a century, gaining 
 from them its special sense of a heritage of no mean spiritual 
 content, rich also in picturesque associations and romantic 
 memories. 
 
 The high-water mark of Whittier's artistic achievement 
 was undoubtedly reached in the years that gave birth to Snow- 
 
i62 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Bound and T%e Tent on the Beach. The latter and less im- 
 portant of these two works is a cycle of narratives in verse, 
 Jinked together in the fashion of Longfellow's Tales of a 
 Wayside Inn. The company are three in number, "Fields the 
 lettered magnate and Taylor the free cosmopoUte" being 
 foregathered on Salisbury Beach with Whittier, who thus 
 describes himself : 
 
 And one there was, a dreamer bom, 
 
 Who, with a mission to fulfil, 
 Had left the Muses' hatmts to turn 
 
 The crank of an opinion-mill. 
 Making his rustic reed of song 
 A weapon in the war with wrong. 
 
 The poems which make up the cycle fall into the general class 
 of Whittier's narrative verse; the thousand lines of octosyllabic 
 rhyme which are entitled Snow-Bound are almost in a class by 
 themselves. This idyllic description of the Whittier household 
 shut in for a week by 
 
 The chill embargo of the snow, 
 
 which bids us 
 
 pause to view 
 These Flemish pictures of old days, 
 
 is not only a poem but a social document of the highest value. 
 In the words of T. W. Higginson, 
 
 Here we have absolutely photographed the Puritan Colonial in- 
 terior, as it existed till within the memory of old men still living. 
 No other book, no other picture preserves it to us; all other books, 
 all other pictures combined, leave us still ignorant of the atmosphere 
 which this one page re-creates for us ; it is more imperishable than 
 any interior painted by Gerard Douw. 
 
 It has been said of Whittier that he could never be concise — 
 and a diffuse style is undoubtedly one of the greatest artistic 
 defects of the body of his verse — but the criticism falls fiat 
 
Whittier 163 
 
 in the presence of the lines which describe the fireplace on that 
 winter evening. 
 
 This poem has often been compared with The Cotter's Saturday 
 Night and it means to the American all and more than Btims's 
 famous poem means to the Scotsman. There is also much 
 aptitude in a comparison with Crabbe, but it has qualities of 
 wistful sentiment and tender reminiscence that are not to be 
 found in the poet of The Village and The Borough. Akin to 
 Snow-Bound, and to be mentioned as offering a foretaste of 
 its subtle charm, is the short poem The Barefoot Boy, dated 
 some ten years earlier, and cast in the same niould of retro- 
 spective yearning for the happy and wholesome days of child- 
 hogde 
 
 The most considerable section of Whittier's verse in point 
 of volume is that in which the poet voices the burning indigna- 
 tion fanned in his breast by the curse of negro slavery in 
 America. His fellow-poets — Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and 
 Emerson — were all enHsted in the warfare against this mon- 
 strous evil, and did yeoman service in the cause of freedom, 
 but Whittier alone gave himself heart and soul to the crusade, 
 from early manhood until the cause was won, froj^ the time 
 of his first association with Garrison to the time when his 
 jubilant Laus Deo acclaimed the writing into the fundamen- 
 tal law of the republic of the ban upon slavery throughout the 
 extent of its domain. Every step in the history of the conflict, 
 which is the history of the United States for the period of a 
 full generation, was seized upon by Whittier as a pretext for 
 poetical expression — the terrorizing of the pioneer abolitionists, 
 the war which the annexation of Texas made inevitable, the 
 efforts of Clay and Webster'to heal the wounds of dissension 
 by compromise, the outrage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the 
 struggle for freedom in the Territory of Kansas, the growth of 
 the modern Republican party, and the holocaust of the Civil 
 War. The majority of the poems occasioned by these themes 
 are too entirely of and for the moment to have any lasting 
 value, but their immediate effect was potent in strengthening 
 the mighty moral resolve of the nation, and they made Whit- 
 tier perhaps the best beloved of contemporary American poets. 
 When this mass of work is sifted by criticism, only a few pieces 
 seem to preserve much of the fire which made them so effective 
 
1 64 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 at the time of their publication. We may still be stirred by 
 the stanzas of Le Marais du Cygne and the marching-song of 
 TTie Kansas Emigrants: 
 
 We cross the prairies as of old 
 
 The pilgrims crossed the sea, 
 To make the West, as they the East, 
 
 The homestead of the free ! 
 
 The ballad of Barbara Frietchie still has power to thrill 
 its readers, and the terrible Ichabod, occasioned by Webster's 
 willingness to make terms with the abhorred evil of slav- 
 ery, has lost little or none of its original force. "It is a 
 fearful thing," says Swinburne, paraphrasing the Scrip- 
 tures in praise of Victor Hugo, "for a malefactor to fall 
 into the hands of an ever-Hving poet." And nowhere in the 
 Chdtiments of the French poet is there to be found a greater 
 finality of condemnation than that with which Whittier 
 stamped the subject of this truly great poem. 
 
 It will have been observed that many of the pieces already 
 mentioned belong to the class of occasional or personal com- 
 positions. This class constitutes a large fraction of the total 
 of Whittier's work. The long Hst of his friendly tributes and 
 poems written for occasions includes many that are merely 
 trivial or without any special appeal to readers for whom the 
 incidents or personalities commemorated have no longer any 
 meaning. Whittier had neither the wit nor the erudition 
 that have preserved many of the occasional pieces of Holmes 
 and Lowell from decay. The tributes to Garrison, Sumner, 
 and a few others still stand out as significant from this mass 
 of metrical exercises, and when a great occasion inspired Whit- 
 tier to song, the result was likely to be memorable, as in 
 the verses which celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, the 
 Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, the Chi- 
 cago Fire of 1871, and the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. 
 
 The deep and sincere religious feeling of the Centennial 
 Hymn is characteristic of the entire body of Whittier's verse, 
 and not merely of the poems specifically religious in their 
 subject-matter. His consciousness was shot through with a 
 sense of the divine, and the essential spirituality of his thought 
 
Whittier 165 
 
 suflfuses his expression like the sunlight in cloud-banked 
 western skies. But his religious faith was far from being of 
 the dogmatic type. "I regard Christianity as a life rather 
 than as a creed," he once said, and the whole of his writing 
 exemplifies the statement. He found in the doctrines of the 
 Society of Friends exactly the framework which his nature 
 needed, saying that "after a candid and kindly survey" of 
 all the other creeds, "I turn to my own Society, thankful to 
 the Divine Providence which placed me where I am; and with 
 an unshaken faith in the one distinctive doctrine of Quakerism 
 — ^the Light Within — ^the immanence of the Divine Spirit in 
 Christianity." In this doctrine, he says elsewhere, "will yet 
 be found the stronghold of Christendom, the sure, safe place 
 from superstition on the one hand and scientific doubt on the 
 other." The perfect expression of this simple and serene faith 
 is found in The Eternal Goodness, and still again in the very 
 last of all his poems. The sunset song of Tennyson's soul, 
 just before "crossing the bar" that divides the harbour of 
 Time from the ocean of Eternity, illustrates no better than 
 do these final lines of Whittier the matchless beauty that 
 may crown the simplest modes of expression, if only they are 
 based upon perfect faith and perfect sincerity. 
 
 While Whittier was primarily a poet, his activities as a 
 reformer and philanthropist, and his editorial work in con- 
 nection with the many papers that claimed his services, made 
 him an important writer of prose. The amount of his prose 
 writing is very great, and, although the larger part of it is 
 too ephemeral to have any place in the history of American 
 literature, the part which has been thought worthy of inclusion 
 in the standard edition of his collected works fills three of the 
 seven volumes. Much of this writing is controversial in 
 character, like the early tract on Justice and Expediency, but 
 the greater part of it belongs to the permanent literature of 
 New England history and thought. The most important 
 titles are The Stranger in Lowell, The Supernaturalism of New 
 England, Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal in the Province 
 of Massachusetts Bay, and Literary Recreations and Miscella- 
 nies. The story of Margaret Smith is almost a work of fiction. 
 It recounts the imagined observations of a yoimg woman who 
 comes from England on a visit to the Bay Colony in its early 
 
1 66 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 days. She meets the chief worthies of the time, describes the 
 landscape and the crude pioneer life, and writes of witch- 
 hunting, Quaker-baiting, and Indian warfare. G. R. Carpen- 
 ter says of this work that "no single modern volume could be 
 found which has so penetrated the secret of colonial times in 
 Massachusetts, for it is almost line by line a transcript 
 and imaginative interpretation of old letters, journals, and 
 memoirs." Its Quaker authorship, moreover, gives it just the 
 detachment needed to save it from the danger of accepting 
 too unreservedly the view of New England colonial life that 
 the leaders of the Puritan theocracy so zealously sought to 
 perpetuate. 
 
 In the history of English literature In the larger sense, 
 Whittier is probably no more than a poet of the third rank. 
 His native endowment was rich, but it was supplemented by 
 neither the technical training nor the discipline required for 
 the development of the artist. He was extremely careless about 
 his rhymes — "good Yankee rhymes, but out of New England 
 they would be cashiered," he once said of them. The con- 
 struction of his stanzas was diffuse and often slovenly. The 
 organ voice and the lyric cry were not, except at rare moments, 
 his to command. But no American who Uved in the shadow 
 of slavery and internecine strife, none who grew to manhood 
 in the generation succeeding those epic days, would dream of 
 measuring his love and veneration for Whittier by the scale 
 of absolute art. Whittier's . verse is so inwrought with the 
 nation's passion during that period of heightened conscious- 
 ness that preserved the Union and redeemed it from the ctirse 
 of slavery that it cannot be coldly and critically considered 
 by any one who has had a vital sense of the agonies and exalta- 
 tions of that critical time. To such, the invocation of Sted- 
 man's Ad Vatem will always be a truer expression of their 
 feeling than any critical judgment, for they can never forget 
 their debt to him for 
 
 righteous anger, burning scorn 
 Of the oppressor, love to humankind, 
 Sweet fealty to country and to home, 
 Peace, stainless purity, high thoughts of heaven. 
 And the clear, natural music of [his] song. 
 
Whittier 167 
 
 Fifty years ago, the verdict of thoughtful Americans ac- 
 claimed Whittier as the foremost American poet, with the 
 possible exception of Longfellow, and while now there would 
 be more dissentients from that judgment than there were 
 then, his fame still rests upon a very solid basis of acceptance 
 and esteem. And especially to those who have sprung iromt 
 the soil of New England, he will always be the incomparable j 
 poet of their childhood home, of its landscape, its legendry,' 
 and the spiritual essence of its history. 
 
3- Holmes 
 
 ONE of the best known passages in Elsie Venner is that in 
 which Hohnes asserted the existence of an aristocracy in 
 New England, or at least a caste, which "by the repeti- 
 tion of the same influences, generation after generation," has 
 "acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy." This 
 caste is composed of those whose ancestors have had the 
 advantage of college training and have practised one or another 
 of the three learned professions. The young man born in this 
 selected group is commonly slender, with a smooth face and 
 with features regular and of a certain delicacy. "His eye is 
 bright and quick, — his lips play over the thought much as a 
 pianist's fingers dance over their music, — and his whole air, 
 though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing 
 clownish." Teachers discover that he "will take to his books 
 as a pointer or setter to his field work." He may be intended 
 for the bar while his father was a minister and his grandfather 
 aphysician; and by the very fact of this heredity he "belongs 
 to the Brahmin caste of New England." 
 
 The man who thus described this caste was himself a 
 Brahmin of the strictest sect, endowed with its best qualities, 
 and devoid of its less estimable characteristics, — the tendency 
 to anaemia and to the semi-hysterical outlook of the dyspeptic 
 reformer. He was energetic, wholesome to the core, sound 
 and sane, unfailingly alert, fundamentally open-minded, never 
 tempted to crankiness or freakishness. He was bom in an 
 illustrious year, 1809, which saw the birth of Darwin and 
 Lincoln, of Tennyson and Gladstone, of Chopin, Mendelssohn, 
 
 168 
 
Holmes 169 
 
 ajtid_ Edgar Allan Poe. It was toward the end of August that 
 the Rev. Abiel Holmes, author of the Annals of America, 
 made a brief entry at the foot of a page in his almanac, " — 29. 
 son b." The son was named Oliver Wendell Holmes, the 
 Wendell being the maiden name of his mother, descended from 
 an Evert Jansen Wendell who had been one of the early settlers 
 of Albany; and thus her son could claim a remote relationship 
 with the Dutch poet Vondel: 
 
 And Vondel was a Wendell who spelt it with a V. 
 
 Through his father, the Calvinist minister, and his giand- 
 father, a physician who had served in the Revolution with the 
 Continental troops, Holmes was descended from Anne, daugh- 
 ter of Thomas Dudley, governor of Massachusetts Bay, and 
 wife of Simon Bradstreet, twice governor of the province — 
 herself the first poetess of her province and nation. The authdfl 
 of the Autocrat shared with R. H. Dana, author of Two Years 
 before the Mast, the honour of descent from this literary ances- 
 tress. Holmes was born in Cambridge, in an old gambrel- 
 roofed house that had served as General Ward's headquarters 
 at the outbreak of the Revolution: "The plan for fortifying 
 Bunker's Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast 
 room, the floor of which was covered with dents, made, it is 
 alleged, by the butts of the soldiers' muskets." Holmes's 
 mother, it may be recorded here, to account in a measure for 
 the veracity and the vigour of his Grandmother's Story of 
 Bunker-Hill Battle, was only a little girl of six when she was 
 hurried off from Boston, then taken by the British, who were 
 preceded by rumours that "the redcoats were coming, killing 
 and murdering everybody as they went along." Legends of 
 the Revolution were thick around his youth. 
 
 It was in Cambridge that Holmes grew to boyhood, 
 playing under the Washington Ekn. He was sent to what was 
 then known as a "dame's school." He had an early inclina- 
 tion to verse, and composed rhyming lines in imitation of 
 Pope and Goldsmith before he knew how to write; and £o£e^ 
 and Goldsmith rem^iijed .his masters^ in metrical composition 
 to the end of his long life. His father had a library of between 
 one and two thousand volumes, and in this the son browsed at 
 
170 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 will, reading in books rather than through them. "I like 
 books," he told us later; "I was born and bred among them 
 and have the easy feeling when I get into their presence, that a 
 stable boy has among horses." When he was fifteen he was 
 sent to Phillips Academy at Andover; and at sixteen he entered 
 Harvard, graduating in 1829, eight years after Emerson and 
 nine before Lowell. Among his classmates were James Free- 
 man Clarke and S. F. Smith, the author of America (1832). 
 He wrote freely for the college papers, both in prose and verse, 
 preserving in his collected works only a very few of his earlier 
 humorous lyrics, though these are of a quality which might 
 have made him willing to preserve others. 
 
 Upon his graduation he hesitated as to his profession, 
 spending a year at the Dana Law School without awakening 
 any liking for the law, and confessing later that "the seduction 
 of verse-writing" had made this period "less profitable than it 
 should have been." Yet it was while he was supposed to be 
 studying law, and when he was just twenty-one, that he wrote 
 the first of his poems to achieve an immediate and lasting 
 popularity. This was the ^evj^nc on QM_ Iromidgs^ pro- 
 testing against the breaking up of the frigate Constitution, 
 victor in the naval duel with the Guerriere. The glowing 
 stanzas were written in a white heat of indignation against the 
 proposed degradation of a national glory; they were published 
 in 1830 in the Boston Advertiser; they were copied in news- 
 papers aU over the country; they were reprinted on broad- 
 sides; and they accomplished their purpose of saving the 
 ship, which did not go out of commission for more than half 
 a century after Holmes had rhymed his fervent appeal for its 
 preservation. 
 
 At last he tuDiedJrQra_±heJa\5L±o-medicine, the profession 
 of his grandfather. He studied for a while at the private 
 school of Dr. James Jackson; and then he crossed the Atlantic 
 to profit by the superior instruction to be had in Paris. Half a 
 century later he recorded: 
 
 I was in Europe about two years and a half, from April, 1833, 
 to October, 1835. I sailed in the packet ship " Philadelphia " from 
 New York to Portsmouth, where we arrived after a passage of 
 twenty-four days. ... I then crossed the channel to Havre, from 
 
Holmes 171 
 
 which I went to Paris. In the spring and summer of 1834 I made 
 my principal visit to England and Scotland. ... I returned in the 
 packet ship "Utica," sailing from Havre, and reaching New York 
 after a passage of forty-two days. 
 
 On his return to America he settled in Boston as a prac- 
 tising physician, taking as his motto "the smallest fevers 
 thankfully received." He was twignt5fcseven- when he obtained 
 the degree- of doctor of medicine and when he issued his 
 earliest volume of poems. Nothing that he had written before 
 or that he was to write later was more characteristic than one 
 of the IjTics in this book, — ITheJLast Leaf. He won several 
 prizes for dissertations upon medical themes, published to- 
 gether in 1838; and the next year he was appointed professor 
 of^anatomy and physiology in the medical school of Dartmouth 
 Cdlege, a position which he held for only a brief period. In 
 1840 he married Amelia Lee Jackson. He had resumed his 
 practice in Boston, and he continued to contribute freely to the 
 literattire of his profession. He was always justly proud of his 
 share in diminishing the danger from puerperal fever and of 
 his trenchant attack upon Homeopathy and its Kindred Delu- 
 sions (1842). Then in 1847 he was called to Harszaxd. as 
 professor^ of anatomy and physiology; and this position he was 
 to fill with distinction for thirty-five years. 
 
 The career of Holmes was placid and uneventful even be- 
 yond the average of literary careers. Nothing happened to 
 him other than the commonplaces of life; he took part in 
 nothing unusual; he practised medicine for a few years and he 
 taught medical students for many years; he wrote prose and 
 verse in abundance; and in the fulness of years he died. The 
 only dates that call for record here are those of the publication 
 of his successive books. Until he was almost at the summit of 
 his half -century he was known to the general public only as a 
 writer of verse. He used prose for his discussions of medical 
 questions; and whenever he was moved to express his opinions 
 on other themes he chose the medium of metre. Those were 
 the fertile years of the Lyceum System, and Holmes went the 
 rounds of the lecture-halls like many others of the New England 
 authors who were his contemporaries; but even as a lecturer 
 he preferred rhyming verse to the customary colloquial prose. 
 
172 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Then quite unexpectedly, when he was forty-eight, an age 
 when most men shrink from any new departure disconcerting 
 to their indurated habits, he revealed himself in an entirely 
 new aspect. The Atlantic Monthly was started in 1857 with 
 Lowell as its editor; and to its early numbers Holmes con- 
 tributed The^^utocrat of the JBreakfast-Taile..- Lowell had 
 insisted as a condition precedent to his acceptance of the 
 editorship that Holmes should be a constant contributor, 
 awakening him "from a kind of lethargy in which" he was 
 ' ' half -slumbering. ' ' 
 
 Much of the vogue of the new magazine was due to the 
 novel flavour of Holmes's series of papers ; and he was persuaded 
 to follow up his first success with kindred volumes entitled 
 The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (i860), The Poet at 4he 
 Breakfast-Table (1872), and Over the Teacups (1890). For 
 the same monthly he wrote many disconnected essays, some 
 of which he sent forth in 1863 under the appropriate name 
 Soundings from the Atlantic. In the several volumes of the 
 BreJdast Table series there is a thin thread of story and the 
 obligatory wedding winds them up at the end; and in his three 
 ■ attempts at fiction, Elsie Venner (1861), The Gunrdian Angel 
 I (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885), the thread is only a 
 / little strengthened and there is no overt abandonment of the 
 \ leisurely method of the essayist. Prom the teUing of fictitious 
 biographies to the writing of the lives of two of his friends was 
 only a step; and he published a memoir of John Lothrop Mot- 
 ley in 1878 and a study of Emerson in 1884. 
 
 It was in 1883, when he was seventy-four, that he resigned 
 his professorship; and it was in 1886, when he was seventy- 
 seven, that he paid his second visit to Europe. He spent the 
 summer mainly in England, and in London he was "the lion of 
 the season." It was almost exactly half a century since his 
 first voyage across the ocean; and on his return from this second 
 voyage he wrote out a pleasantly personal narrative of Our 
 Hundred Days in Europe. At intervals, for nearly sixty 
 years, he had sent forth volumes of verse; the latest to appear 
 (in 1888) vfa&a^t\j,ent\lXe6.B.efore^§!fiMurfmt — as Longfellow 
 had called his final volume In the Harbar and Whittier had 
 felicitously styled his last book At Sundown. On 7 October, 
 1894, Holmes died at the ripe age of eighty-five, unusual even 
 
Holmes i73 
 
 among the long-lived American poets of his generation, of 
 whom he was the last to survive. 
 
 Dtiring his second visit to London, Holmes was the guest 
 of honour at a dinner of the Rabelais Club, founded to cherish 
 the memory of an earlier humorist who was also a practitioner 
 of medicine; and in his letter accepting the invitation he took 
 occasion to confess his regard for another physician-author, 
 Ambroise Par6, whom he termed "good, wise, quaint, shrewd, 
 chatty." And aU five of these characteristics he possessed 
 himself. He was a gentleman and a scholar — to revive the 
 fine old phrase — who was also a physician learned in the lore of 
 the healing art and keenly interested I'in its history. He was a 
 gentleman and a scholar, who was also a man of the world, in 
 the best sense of that abused term, — a man of the world holding 
 a modest place as a man of science. And at bottom he was a 
 Yankee, with a true Yankee inventiveness, — the hand-stereo- 
 scope he devised being the outward and visible sign of this 
 native gift, which was exhibited incessantly in his writings, 
 notably in The Physiology of Verse and in The Human Wheel, 
 its Spokes and Felloes. In prose and in verse he disclosed an 
 unfailing Yankee cleverness, whittling his rhymes and sharpen- 
 ing his phrases with an innate dexterity. 
 
 "The secret of a man who is tmiversally interesting is 
 that he is universally interested," William Dean HoweUs has 
 told us; "and this was above all the secret of the charm 
 Doctor Holmes had for every one." There is zest and 
 gusto in all that he wrote, and the reader can share the 
 writer's own enjoyment. Especially was the writer inter- 
 ested in himseK, as the true essayist must be. His delight 
 in talking about himself was complacent, contagious, and 
 innocent. "I have always been good company for myself," 
 Holmes once confessed; and this is one reason why he has 
 been pleasantly companionable to countless readers who found 
 in him a friendly quality which took them captive. His 
 egotism was as patent as Montaigne's, even if it was not so 
 frank in its expression nor so searching in its analysis. The 
 more of himself he revealed, the more he won the hearts of his 
 fellow men, who relished the gentleness and the firmness of 
 the character so openly disclosed, its kindliness, its urbanity 
 and amenity, its lack of all acerbity or acridity, its total free- 
 
174 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 dom from the rennet of meanness which curdles the milk of 
 human kindness. 
 
 In a letter which Whittier wrote for a celebration of 
 Holmes's seventy-fifth birthday, the Quaker poet singled out 
 for praise the Boston bard's '^genial nature, entire freedom from 
 jealousy and envy, quick tenderness, large charity, hatred of 
 sham, pretence and unreality, and his reverent sense of the 
 eternal and permanent." This is keen criticism. Holmes was 
 a wit, but there was no bitterness in his laughter, because it 
 lacked scorn ; and there was in it no echo of the cruel sterility of 
 Voltaire's irony. We can say of Holmes what Moore said of 
 Sheridan, that his wit 
 
 ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade. 
 
 We can say this with the weightier emphasis when we 
 recall the cheerful courtesy with which he met the vindictive 
 and virulent retorts evoked by his dissolvent analysis of the 
 abhorrent and horrible aspects of Calvinism, a disestablished 
 code inherited from a less civilized past. Holmes's influence 
 was civilizing and humanizing; and it was more important 
 than we are likely now to recognize. He had in a high degree 
 the social instinct which has given grace to French life and 
 which was perhaps accentuated in him during his two years' 
 stay in Paris in his malleable youth. He was the constant 
 exponent of good manners and of right feeling, at a period in 
 the evolution of American society when the need for this was 
 even more evident than it is now. 
 
 It was in a score of his poems and in the successive volumes 
 of the Breakfast-Table series that Holmes most completely 
 disclosed himself. His two biographies and his three novels 
 are far less important, — in fact, these other prose writings are 
 important chiefly because they are the work of the "Auto- 
 crat"; and it may be well to deal with them briefly before 
 considering his major work, in which he is expressing the 
 essence of his cheerful optimism. The less significant of his 
 two memoirs is that of Motley, a labour of love undertaken 
 in the months that followed hard upon the death of the his- 
 torian. "To love a character," said Stevenson, "is the only 
 heroic way of understanding it." Possibly an author could 
 
Holmes i75 
 
 write a vigorous life of a man he hated, since hatred is the other 
 side of love. But no author could paint a vital portrait of a 
 personality which left him indifferent; to his biographer at 
 least a man must be a hero; and no valet has yet written an 
 acceptable account of his master's life. But love needs to be 
 controlled by judgment; and Holmes, at the time he composed 
 his memoir, felt too keenly the injustice from which Motley 
 had suffered to be able to survey the career and to estimate the 
 character of the eminent historian with the detachment 
 necessary to the painting of a portrait for posterity. What he 
 did was to put forward an apology for Motley, with undue 
 insistence upon the temporary griefs of the man and with less 
 adequate consideration of the histories by which his fame is 
 supported. 
 
 The biography of Emerson is far better, even if it also is not 
 wholly satisfactory. It is in no sense an apology, for there was 
 nothing in Emerson to extenuate. It is less personal, more 
 detached, more disinterested, more comprehensive. It is 
 admirably planned, with the adroitly articulated skeleton which 
 we have a right to expect from a professor of anatomy. It is 
 rich in appreciation and abundant in phrases of unforgettable 
 felicity, for Holmes was ever the neatest of craftsmen. But 
 when all is said, we cannot repress the conviction that he was 
 out of his natural element when he undertook to deal with a 
 figure so elusive as Emerson's. Holmes's very qualities, his 
 concreteness, his sense of reality, his social instinct, tended to 
 unfit him for interpreting an intangible personality like Emer- 
 son. He was characteristically witty when he compared 
 Emerson to those "living organisms so transparent that we can 
 see their hearts beating and their blood flowing through their 
 transparent tissues"; but he did not altogether succeed in 
 making us feel the ultimate purpose for which Emerson's heart 
 beat and his blood flowed. The interest of the biography — 
 and it has its full share of the interest which animated aU that 
 Holmes wrote — is kept alive rather by the adroitness of its 
 author than by the revelation of its subject. 
 
 Such also is the interest of his three novels; they appeal to 
 those who reHsh the flavour of Holmes's personality rather 
 than to those who expect a work of fiction to be first of all a 
 story, and secondly a story peopled with accusable characters. 
 
176 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 In one of the prefaces to Elsie Venner Holmes cited the remark 
 of a dear old lady who spoke of the tale as " a medicated novel ' ' ; 
 -and he declared that he was "always pleased with her dis- 
 criminating criticism." It is not unfair to say that all three 
 novels were conceived by a physician and composed by an 
 essayist. Holmes, so Leslie Stephen asserted, lacked the 
 "essential quality of an inspired novelist," which is "to get 
 absorbed in his story and to feel as though he were watching 
 instead of contriving the development of a situation." 
 
 Of Elsie Venner Holmes himself said that the "only use of 
 the story is to bring the dogma of inherited guilt and its conse- 
 quences into a clearer point of view" ; and he declared that his 
 "heroine found her origin not in fable or romance, but in a 
 physiological conception, fertilized by a theological dogma." 
 In other words, Elsie Venner is a novel-with-a-purpose; it is a 
 fiction devised by a nineteenth-century physician to attack 
 eighteenth-century Calvinism. Perhaps a born story-teller 
 could have so constructed his narrative as to fascinate the 
 reader in spite of the argument it was intended to carry, but 
 Holmes was not a bom story-teller. He described characters 
 and places, not for their bearing on the story itself, and not 
 even for suggesting the appropriate atmosphere of the action, 
 but mainly if not solely for their own sake, and quite in the 
 manner of the character-writers who had blazed the trail for 
 the early essayists. By the side of figures thoroughly known 
 and delicately delineated, there are others, not a few, outlined 
 in the primary colours and trembling on the very verge of 
 caricature. In this we can discover the unfortunate influence 
 of Dickens, as we can perceive the fortunate influence of Haw- 
 thorne in the treatment of the abnormal heroine. And equally 
 obvious is the influence of Thackeray, who also began and 
 ended his career as an essayist. Thackeray, even if he had a 
 bias toward moralizing, confessed to the Brookfields that he 
 found his ethical lectures very convenient when he had to pad 
 out his copy to fill the allotted number of pages in the monthly 
 parts in which his larger novels originally appeared. But 
 Thackeray, after all, was a bom story-teller, an inspired 
 novelist, who got absorbed in his story and felt as though he 
 were watching and not inventing his situations. Holmes 
 lingered by the way and chatted with the reader, not from any 
 
Holmes i77 
 
 ejttemal necessity, but because digression and even disquisi- 
 tion is to the essayist the breath of life. 
 
 In The Guardian Angel, the heroine is a composite photo- 
 graph of half a dozen warring ancestors of whom now one and 
 now another emerges into view to insist upon the reappearance 
 of his or her identity in Myrtle Hazard. Yet, when all deduc- 
 tions are made, both Elsie Venner and The GiMrdian Angel 
 have many a chapter that only Holmes could have written, 
 rich in wisdom, in wit, in whimsy, and in knowledge of the 
 world. But this can scarcely be said of A Mortal Antipathy, 
 the latest of the medicated fictions and the feeblest, written 
 when its author had long passed threescore years and ten. The 
 physiological theme is too far-fetched, too unusual, too ab- 
 normal, to win acceptance even if it had been handled by a 
 master of fiction; and we may doubt whether even Balzac 
 could have dealt with it triumphantly. As Holmes dealt with 
 it, it did not justify itself; the narrative was too fragmentary 
 for fiction and too forced, while the intercalary papers lacked 
 the freshness of view and the unpremeditated ease of Holmes's 
 earUer manner as an essayist. 
 
 "The prologue of life is finished at twenty; then come five 
 acts of a decade each, and the play is over, with now and then a 
 pleasant orl:a tedious afterpiece, when half the lights are put 
 out, and half the orchestra is gone." When Holmes wrote this, 
 he could not foresee that he would be able to keep in their seats 
 more than half of the spectators, if not the most of them, to the 
 very end of his pleasant afterpiece. He was not forty when 
 he first discoursed as the "Autocrat" and he was twice forty 
 when he gossiped "Over the Teacups." In the octogenarian 
 book he may be a little less spontaneous and a little more self- 
 centred than in its predecessor of twoscore years earlier; and 
 the shadowy figures who take part in its conversations may 
 seem to talk a little because they are aware that they were 
 created on purpose to converse, instead of talking freely for 
 the hxa. of it as the solider persons who met around the break- 
 fast table were wont to do. Yet the latest of the group, even 
 if its wit be less pungent, has almost as many samples of shrewd 
 sagacity as adorned the two books that caxaeaites: the Autocrat. 
 "Habits are the crutches of old age, " Holmes tells us; and he 
 never lost the habit of cheerfulness. There is no hypocritic 
 
178 chapters of American Literature 
 
 praising of past times; on the contrary there is a blithe and 
 buoyant recognition of the gains garnered in eighty years. 
 
 Over the Teacups may be a little inferior to The Poet at the 
 Br'eakfast-Tabl'e but only as the Poet is a little inferior to the 
 Professor and the Professor to the Autocrat, because the fresh- 
 ness had faded and because we were no longer taken by surprise. 
 The Autocrat struck the centre of the target and the hit was 
 acclaimed with delight ; the later books went to the same mark, 
 even if they were not winged by an aim as unerring. No doubt, 
 a part of the immediate success of the Autocrat was due to its 
 novelty, — novelty of form and novelty of content. Holmes 
 was characteristically shrewd when he declared that "the 
 first of my series came from my mind almost with an explosion, 
 like the champagne cork; it startled me a little to see what I 
 had written and to hear what people said about it. After that 
 first explosion the flow was more sober, and I looked upon the 
 product of my wine-press more coolly"; and he added, "con- 
 tinuations almost always sag a little." Perhaps the novelty 
 of form was more apparent than real, since Steele and Addison 
 had given us a group of characters talking at large as they 
 clustered about Sir Roger de Coverley. But there is this 
 salient difference, that in The Spectator the talk is mainly for 
 the purpose of creating character, whereas in the Autocrat 
 the characters have been created that they might listen. 
 
 Yet in so far as the Autocrat has a model, this is plainly 
 enough the eighteenth-century essay, invented by Steele, 
 improved by Addison, clumsily attempted by Johnson, and 
 lightly varied by Goldsmith. Steele is the originator of the 
 form, since the earlier essay of Montaigne and of Bacon makes 
 no use of dialogue; it has only one interlocutor, the essayist 
 himself, recording only his own feelings, his own opinions, and 
 his own judgments. Steele was probably influenced by the 
 English character-writers, perhaps also by the lighter satires 
 of Horace, and quite possibly by the comedies of Moliere, — 
 notably by the PrScieuses Ridicules and the Femmes Savantes. 
 The outline Steele sketched the less original Addison fiUed 
 with a richer colour. As Holmes had begun when a child by 
 imitating the verse of Pope and Goldsmith, so as a man when 
 he wrote prose he followed the pattern set by Steele and 
 Addison. Although he was not bom until the ninth year of the 
 
Holmes i79 
 
 nineteenth century, he was really a .§urByoriroin..the.fiiglit- 
 een ^ cent uxy:; and his prose like his verse has the eighteenth- 
 century characteristics, despite the fact that he himself was 
 ever alert to apprehend the new scientific spirit of the century 
 in which he lived. 
 
 The real novelty of the Autocrat was in its content, that is 
 to say, in Holmes himself, the master talker of the BreaMast- 
 Table, in the skill with which the accent of conversation is 
 caught. The other characters are responsible for an occasional 
 remark not without individuality and point; but the Autocrat 
 himself tends to be a monopolist and to intermit his discourse 
 only that his adversary in the verbal combat may lay himself 
 open to a series of sharp thrusts in retort. This is as it should 
 be, since the others who gather about the breakfast table were 
 but ordinary mortals, after all, whereas the Autocrat was an 
 extraordinary mortal, an artist in conversation, gifted by 
 natiire and trained by long experience, a man who had thought 
 widely if not deeply about Kf e, who had read the records of the 
 past and who could revive them to shed light on the present, 
 a physician abreast of modern science and swift to bring its 
 new discoveries to bear on the old problems of life. In reading 
 the Breakfast-Table series in swift succession the reader cannot 
 help remarking the frequency with which Holmes draws on his 
 professional experience; he sees men and women through the 
 clear spectacles of the family physician; — and perhaps one 
 reason why he arrogates to himself the major part of the 
 conversation is in revenge for the silence imposed on the practi- 
 tioner by the tedious and interminable talk of his patients about 
 themselves to which the family physician has perforce to sub- 
 mit. Holmes used medical analogies and dropped into the 
 terminology of the anatomist and physiologist with the same 
 frequency that Shakespeare employed the vocabulary of the 
 theatre, even in incongruous situations finding material for 
 figures of speech in his own experience on the stage. 
 
 Holmes is not only a man of science and a man of the 
 world, he is also a humorist and a wit, — a wit who has no 
 antipathy even to the humble but useful pun, — a humorist 
 abounding in whimsy. And as a result of this fourfold equip- 
 ment his talk is excellent merely as talk. It has the flavour of 
 the spoken word; it is absolutely unacademic and totally 
 
i8o Chapters of American Literature 
 
 devoid of pedantry. Therefore it is not only delightful but 
 stimulating; it continually makes the reader think for himself 
 and turn back upon himself. Despite its acuteness, its liveli- 
 ness, its briskness, its vivacity, it never lacks seriousness, 
 without ever becoming ponderous. 
 
 It may be that Holmes does not attain to the high serious- 
 ness, the deep seriousness, of enduring philosophy; and it can- 
 not be denied that there are pages here and there which are 
 not as valid today as when they were written. It would be 
 doing the Autocrat an iU-service to compare him with his 
 remote and mighty predecessors Montaigne and Bacon. And 
 it may be admitted that there is more or less warrant for the 
 remark of John Bturoughs, to the effect that Holmes always 
 reminded him "of certain of our bird songsters, such as the 
 brown thrasher or the cat-bird, whose performances always seem 
 to imply a spectator and to challenge his admiration." Holmes 
 seems "to write with his eye upon his reader, and to calculate 
 the advance upon his reader's surprise and pleasure." To 
 admit this would be only to acknowledge the truth of the 
 French sajdng that every man has the defects of his qualities. 
 But it cannot be admitted if it implies that Holmes was unduly 
 self-conscious or affected or pretentious. In fact, much of the 
 charm of the Autocrat is due to the entire absence of affectation 
 and to the apparent spontaneity of the talk which pours so 
 easily from his lips and which discloses so abundantly the 
 winning personaUty of Holmes himself. "Every book is, in an 
 intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who 
 writes it, " so Stevenson has told us; and Holmes was fortunate 
 in that his circular letter made a friend of every one who 
 received it. 
 
 The qualities which give charm to Holmes's prose are those 
 which please us also in his verse. He has left a dozen or a score 
 of lyrics secure in the anthologies of the future. But he wrote 
 too easily and he wrote too much to maintain a high average 
 in the three hundred double-colunmed pages in which his 
 complete poems are collected. No poet or prose man can take 
 down to posterity a baggage wagon of his works, and he is 
 lucky if he can save enough to fill a saddle-bag. Holmes's 
 reputation as a poet will rise when his verses are winnowed 
 and garnered into a thin volume of a scant hundred pages 
 
Holmes i8i 
 
 wherein Old Ironsides and The Last Leaf, The Chambered 
 Nautilus and Homesick in Heaven, The Wonderful "One-Hoss 
 Shay" and The Broomstick Train, Grandmother's Story of 
 Bunker-Hill Battle, and a handful more are unincumbered by 
 the hundreds of occasional verses which were each of them 
 good enough for its special occasion and yet not good enough 
 to demand remembrance after the event. 
 
 There are a few of Holmes's loftier poems in which we feel 
 that the inspiration is equal to the aspiration; but there are 
 only a few of them, with The Chambered Nautilus at the head, 
 accompanied by Homesick in Heaven, — ^not overpraised by 
 HoweUs when he called it one of the "most profoundly pathetic 
 of the language." And Stedman was right also when he 
 suggested that Holmes's serious poetry had scarcely been the 
 serious work of his life. Even at its best this serious poetry is 
 the result of his intelligence rather than of his imagination. 
 It lacks depth of feeling and largeness of vision. It has a 
 French felicity of fancy, a French dexterity of craftsmanship, 
 a French point and polish; and also a French inadequacy of 
 emotion. "Asstiredly we love poetry in France, " said Anatole 
 France]when he was discussing the verse of Sainte-Beuve ; "but 
 we love it in our own fashion; we insist that it shall be eloquent, 
 and we willingly excuse it from being poetic." Old Ironsides, 
 fiery as its lines ring out, is eloquent rather than truly poetic. 
 
 Here again Holmes declares himself as a survival from 
 the eighteenth century, when English literature conformed to 
 French principles. His f9jjouritg.xeadingjs^chM.wasPfipe!s 
 Homer-, the couplets of which "stimulated his imagination in 
 spite of their formal symmetry." And even their formal 
 symmetry was not displeasing to his natural taste: 
 
 And so the hand that takes the lyre for you 
 
 Plays the old tune on strings that once were new. 
 
 Nor let the rh3miester of the hotir deride 
 
 The straight-backed measure with its stately stride; - 
 
 It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope; 
 
 It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope; 
 
 In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain, 
 
 Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain; 
 
 I smile to listen while the critic's scorn 
 
 Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn. 
 
i82 chapters of American Literature 
 
 The even merit of its occasional verse is one of the obvious 
 qualities of the eighteenth century which we find also in Holmes. 
 Late in life he admitted that he had become rather too well 
 known in connection with "occasions." He was intensely- 
 loyal to Boston ; and he felt that he had no right to refuse the 
 summons to stand and deliver whenever the city received an 
 honoured guest or when an honoured citizen died or went away 
 or came back. As he explained in one of these occasional pieces, 
 
 I'm a florist in verse, and what would people say 
 If I came to a banquet without my bouquet? 
 
 Late in life Holmes admitted that "many a trifling per- 
 formance has had more good honest work put into it than the 
 minister's sermon of that week had cost him"; he confessed to 
 strenuous effort over his copy of verses, insisting that " if a vessel 
 glides off the ways smoothly and easily at her launching, it does 
 not mean that no great pains have been taken to secure the 
 restdt"; and he proudly reminded his readers that "Pindar's 
 great odes were occasional poems . . . and yet they have 
 come down among the most precious bequests of antiquity to 
 modern times." The noblest example of English prose in the 
 nineteenth century, Lincoln's Gettysburg address, was also 
 evoked by an occasion. Even if Holmes's occasional verse 
 has not the lofty elevation of Pindar's odes or the pathetic 
 simplicity of Lincoln's little speech, it has almost always an 
 exquisite propriety to the event itself, an unfailing happiness 
 of epithet, a perfect adequacy to the moment of local impor- 
 tance. Its chief fault, if not its only defect, is that there is too 
 much of it, even if its average is higher than might reasonably 
 be expected. 
 
 In a letter to LoweU, Holmes declared, speaking of Boston- 
 ians in particular and yet perhaps also of Americans in general, 
 that "we Boston people are so bright and wide-awake . . . 
 that we have been in danger of thinking our local scale was the 
 absolute one of excellence — ^forgetting that 212 Fahrenheit is 
 but 100 centigrade." There is one department of poetry in 
 which Holmes can withstand without any danger of shrinking 
 the application of the centigrade scale; this is the department 
 of vers de sociStS, so called, although it is never merely society 
 verse. Perhaps Cowper's term best describes it, "familiar 
 
Holmes 183 
 
 verse, " the lyric commingled of humour and pathos, brief and 
 brilliant and buoyant, seemingly unaffected and unpremedi- 
 tated, and yet — if we may judge by the itifrequency of supreme 
 success — undeniably diSictilt, despite its apparent ease. Dr. 
 Johnson, who was himself quite incapable of it, too heavy- 
 footed to achieve its lightness, too polysyllabic to attain its 
 vernacular terseness, was yet shrewd enough to see that it is 
 
 less difficult to write a volume of lines, swelled with epithets, 
 brightened with figures, and stiffened by transpositions, than to 
 produce a few couplets, grand only by naked elegance and simple 
 purity, which require so much care and skill that I doubt whether 
 any of our authors have yet been able for twenty lines together 
 nicely to observe the true definition of easy poetry. 
 
 In this "easy poetry," which is the metrical equivalent of 
 the essay in its charm, in its grace and in its colloquial liberty. 
 Holmes has few rivals in our language. It was with strict 
 justice that L-ocker-Lampson, in the preface to the first edi- 
 tion of Lyra Elegantiarum (1867) — to this day the most satis- 
 factory anthology of vers de sociStS, — declared that Holmes was 
 "perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse." It 
 may be recorded also that Locker-Lampson paid Holmes the 
 even sincerer compliment of imitation, borrowing for two of his 
 delightful lyrics not only the spirit but also the stanza Hglmes 
 had invented for The Last Leaf. With characteristic frankness 
 the London lyrist once told an American admirer that this 
 stanza might seem easy but it was difficult, so difficult that 
 no one had handled it with complete success — except Holmes 
 and himself. 
 
 Locker-Lampson derived directly from Praed, whose verses 
 have an electric and dazzling brilliance, whereas in Holmes 
 the radiance is more subdued and less blinding. Of all the 
 writers of familiar verse no one has ever surpassed Holmes in 
 the delicate blending of pathos with humour, as exemplified 
 most strikingly in The Last Leaf, in which fantasy plays hide 
 and seek with sentiment. Scarcely less delightful in its 
 eighteenth-century quaintness is the family portrait, Dorothy 
 Q; and close to those two masterpieces are lesser lyrics like 
 Contentment, Bill and Joe, and the lines On Lending a Punch 
 Bowl and To an Insect: 
 
1 84 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 I love to hear thine earnest voice, 
 
 Wherever thou art hid, 
 Thou testy little dogmatist. 
 
 Thou pretty Katydid! 
 Thou mindest me of gentlefolks, — 
 
 Old gentlefolks are they, — 
 Thou say'st an undisputed thing 
 
 In such a solemn way. 
 
 These are only a few of the best of his lighter Ijttics, now 
 sprightly and sparkling, and now softer and more appealing, 
 often evoking the swift snule, although never demanding the 
 loud laugh, and sometimes starting the tear on its way to the 
 eyelid; and in them Holmes proved that Stedman was only 
 just when he declared that familiar verse may be "pictur- 
 esque, even dramatic," and that it may "rise to a high degree 
 of htamor and of sage and tender thought." 
 
4- Lowell 
 
 NEITHER Lowell's poetry nor prose has that obvious unity 
 of effect which characterizes the work of so many nine- 
 teenth century writers. His work does not recall, even 
 in the minds of its admirers, a group of impressions so distinct 
 and fixed as those summoned by the poetry of Whittier, Poe, 
 or Whitman, or by that of Swinburne, Morris, or Browning, 
 or by the prose of Thoreau or Emerson, of Ruskin or Arnold. 
 His work, indeed, does not have the marks of a dominant or of 
 a peculiar personality; nor does it add to literature a new group 
 of ideas or a new departure in workmanship. Though its 
 volume is large, and though a number both of his poems and his 
 essays have won a wide familiarity, there is difficulty in sum- 
 marizing their qualities of form or matter in a way that will 
 indicate with justice his importance in American literature. 
 
 This somewhat miscellaneous appeal made by his writing 
 may be ascribed in part, no doubt, to a lack of literary power 
 that prevented him from winning the triumphs that belong to 
 the great conquests of the imagination, but it is also due in 
 large measure to the variety of responses which his rich per- 
 sonality made to the changing movements of American life. 
 Other writers were surer of their message or of their art, but 
 perhaps the career of no other affords a more varied and in- 
 teresting commentary on the course of American letters, or 
 responds as constantly to the occasions and needs of the na- 
 tion's experience. It is impossible to consider him apart from 
 his time and environment, or to judge his writing apart from 
 its value for the United States. It has left something for 
 posterity, but its best energy was expended in the manifold 
 tasks which letters must perform as a builder of national 
 
 185 
 
1 86 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 civilization. It is this service which makes him an eminent and 
 in some ways our most representative man of letters. 
 
 The briefest summary of the events of his life will indicate 
 the variety of his interests and occupations. Born in i>§i;9.jn 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the colonial house where he was 
 to spend most of his Hfe, he went to Harvard College, studied 
 law — and abandoned it for a career of letters. He contributed 
 verses and sketches to the magazines, edited a few numbers of 
 an unsuccessful literary journal. The Pioneer, brought out his 
 first volume of poems, AjyJsc u:ls Life, in 184 1. a second volume 
 in 1843, and a collection of essays. Conversations on Some of the 
 Old Poets, in 1844. 
 
 In December of this year he was married to the poetess 
 Maria White. The nine years of their married life until her 
 death in 1853 mark a distinct period in Lowell's literary work. 
 He contributed constantly both prose and verse to various 
 journals, at first largely for those of the anti-slavery propa- 
 ganda; and the Mexican^War^aye. the opportunity ior,, Zii&e 
 Bi^fwPg^rs, the first of which appeared in The Boston 
 Courier of 17 June, 1846. In 1848, appeared a second collec- 
 tion of poems, thS-Completed Biglow Papers, and The Fable for 
 Critics. Lowell had won, in both popular and critical regard, 
 an assured place in what was already an important national 
 literature. The fifteen months which the family spent in 
 E\iropein 1851-52 seem to have increased his desire to widen the 
 range of his poetry, but the ambitions that thronged with the 
 return to America were interrupted by the death of his wife. 
 A period of uncertainty followed his bereavement, and_ cir- 
 cumstances gave him a new occupation. 
 
 In 1855 he delivered in Boston a course of twelve lectures 
 (unpublished) on English poetry, and as a result of their success 
 was appointed to s ucceed Longfel lowLas^Smith-Erofessor of -the 
 French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Professor 
 of Belles Lettres in Harvard College. A few months were 
 spent in Dresden in preparation for a course on German litera- 
 ture, and in the fall of 1856 he began twgnty. years'work as^ 
 teacher. In the following year he was married to Frances 
 Dunlap and resumed life in Elmwood. His professorship 
 turned his mind to criticism and scholarship, but did not hasten 
 that stronger poetic flight for which he had felt himself prepar- 
 
Lowell 187 
 
 ing. A brief-lived literary magazine, Putnam's Monthly, in 
 1853-54 had given place to one or two of his best known essays, 
 and a new literary enterprise, The Atlantic Monthly, in 1857 
 gave ftirther opporttinity for his prose. Lowell was editor of 
 the new -magazine for two years and a regular contributor of 
 reviews and articles until 1863, when he joined with Charles 
 Eliot Norton in editing The North American Review. For the 
 next dozen years his essays both political and literary appeared 
 mainly in this review. 
 
 During the Civil War, Lowell's chief contributions to 
 poetry were the new series of Biglow Papers which began in 
 the Atlantic in 1861. It was not until the war was over that 
 the great themes of national triumph through sacrifice called 
 forth the four memorial odes. Miscellaneous verse of the 
 preceding twenty years was collected in Under the Willows 
 (1868) ; but the odes and longer poems, as The Cathedral (1870), 
 Agassiz (1874), best represent both the emotional impulses 
 that followed the war and the maturity of Lowell's art. 
 
 The political interests which had engaged much of his prose 
 writing before and during the war had not interrupted his 
 increasing devotion to the study and criticism of literature. 
 He had been directing his attention less to contemporary- 
 letters and more to the masters of English and to a few of the 
 masters of foreign literature, notably Dante. The result of 
 these studies was a long^succession_of essays which make up 
 the volumes Among My Books (1870), My Study Windows 
 Jj 871 ) , and A mqng My Books, Second Series ( 1 876) . It is these 
 books which are his main contributions to literary criticism. 
 
 Lowell and his wife spent two years (1872-74) in Europe, 
 and after a brief resumption of his professorship he was ap- 
 pointed minister to Spain in 1877, and in 1880 was transferred 
 to_Engla»d. After his retirement in 1885 he spent a consider- 
 able part of his time in England until his death i n iSgi ., The 
 mission was a recognition of his distinction not merely as a 
 man of letters but as a representative of the best American 
 culture, and this distinction Lowell maintained in a number of 
 addresses on both literary and political themes, represented by 
 the volume Democracy and Other Addresses (1886). Although 
 his poetry became infrequent there was enough for a final 
 volume, Heartsease and Rue, in 1880. 
 
1 88 chapters of American Literature 
 
 To all these varied activities as poet, essajrist, htmiorist, 
 editor, teacher, scholar, and diplomat, must be added that of 
 letter writer. For Lowell's letters, in addition to their annals 
 of his personal experiences and friendships, contribute some- 
 thing to literature and history which perhaps has ceased with 
 the day of the typewriter — a record of the intimate association 
 of the high-minded. His work as a man of letters may be 
 considered most readily by the main divisions of verse and 
 prose ; but the separation is not always significant. The poetry 
 is mostly bounded by the years 1840 and 1870, and the best 
 of the essays by i860 and 1890; but there is hardly a year of his 
 half century which did not see both prose and verse. Nor can 
 the subject matter be divided by the two forms, for both 
 require attention from the historian of either the literary or the 
 political progress of the half-century. Both respond to the 
 changing events of his own Hfe, and to the greater changes that 
 transformed the nation of 1840 into that of 1890. 
 
 Lowell's youth was spent among books. Before he left 
 college he had become a wide if destdtory reader, and the study 
 of law failed to detach him from what was to become a life-long 
 devotion to the easy chair and the library. To the inheritance 
 of English blood, law, language, and religion that bound New 
 England to the mother country, he added an enthusiastic 
 appreciation for English literature. Naturally this apprecia- 
 tion was directed by the Romanticism which had reached its 
 fidl flower in English letters, by its leaders, Wordsworth, Keats, 
 Lamb, or by the gods of its idolatry, Shakespeare, Spenser, 
 and Dante. His feeling was like that which Keats had ex- 
 perienced twenty years before, when English poetry had opened 
 out a new world inviting to fresh beauty and new enterprise. 
 And this world of British letters had added since then the 
 clarion voice of Carlyle and the exqtiisite art of Keats himself 
 and of Tennyson. It is easy to trace in Lowell's early verse 
 imitation and reminiscence of the English poets of the preced- 
 ing half -century; but even more important was his acceptance 
 of their faith in poetry. With Wordsworth he believed that it 
 was to be the moral guide and spiritual inspirer, with Keats he 
 saw it opening new doors to the abode of beauty. He shared 
 the assurance of Sartor Resartus that literature was to supply 
 the new priesthood that was to direct the new age. 
 
Lowell 1.89 
 
 There were also new ideas and impulses astir in the New 
 England of Lowell's youth. The narrow Puritanism had given 
 way to Unitarianism and Transcendentalism and ' literature. 
 During the first twenty years of Lowell's life, American litera- 
 ture had taken a bulk and character which might risk com- 
 parison with the literature of any Eturopean nation during that 
 period. In his teens he was reading Emerson, Longfellow, 
 Holmes, Whittier, Hawthorne, and Prescott, and most of 
 these men were his neighbours and ready to welcome and direct 
 his first attempts at letters. There is a sense of an intellectual 
 and imaginative dawn to be found in Lowell's essays and verse, 
 a dawn that is to gladden the granite and pines of his native 
 land. With a loving admiration for the old literature, there is 
 a loyal national pride in the new; or, rather, there is a sectional 
 pride; for the patriotism is mainly a sectional patriotism, a 
 fervotu: for the New England hills and men. Boston was then a 
 long way from New York and Philadelphia — although Lowell's 
 literary adventures carried him to both cities — and the rest of 
 the nation was separated by barriers of manners and habit. 
 He was patriotically American because his beloved and awak- 
 ened New England was expected to lead the nation into new 
 spiritual adventures. 
 
 Lowell's early poems do not show much novelty of theme 
 or manner. They are on about the same subjects that all 
 men were writing verse upon in the forties, and written with 
 the same vocabulary, images, and rhj^hms. Love, nature, 
 liberty, idealism, classic story, personal moods are the themes, 
 but there is some novelty in the ingenuity of the phrases and 
 in the new fauna and flora. If he was following the English 
 romanticists he was transferring their worship of beauty to a 
 New England landscape and their religious miusings to the 
 ttutnoil of idealism that stirred the youth of Massachusetts. 
 He writes of the dandelion and the pine-tree, and his seasons 
 are the riotous June or the Indian summer of Cambridge, his 
 landscape that of Beaver Brook. All is descriptive or reflec- 
 tive; there is no narrative except when it is the mere text for 
 sentiment and moral. 
 
 Some union of art and morality, of Keats and Carlyle, Poe 
 and Emerson — that was the poet's endeavour. He wrote to 
 Briggsin 1846: 
 
190 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Then I feel how great is the office of Poet, could I but even dare 
 to hope to fill it. Then it seems as if my heart would break in 
 pouring out one glorious song that should be the gospel of Reform, 
 full of consolation and strength to the oppressed, yet falling gently 
 and restoringly as dew on the withered youth-flowers of the oppres- 
 sor. That way my madness lies. ^ 
 
 It is easy to smile at this youthful fervency, as Lowell 
 himself smiled a year or two later in The Fable for Critics. 
 
 There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb 
 With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme. 
 The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching 
 Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching. 
 
 But, with most nineteenth-century poets, Lowell was a preacher 
 as well as a singer. Poverty, tyranny, doubt, industrialism, 
 are the themes that for England distracted the attention of 
 the Muse; in the United States, the mid-century vision of 
 beauty was clouded by the presence of slavery. And if Lowell 
 was conscious that the isms, even that of the anti-slavery 
 cause, burdened his dimb up Parnassus, there was never any 
 doubt of the imperative nature of the summons of moral 
 reform. 
 
 The American reader should indeed have a special sym- 
 pathy for this avowal of high purpose; for is not this gospel of 
 reform the better genius of our nation? The material advance 
 which has conquered a continent has made us self-confident, 
 disregardful of the past, and careless of reflection, but it has 
 inspired us with a faith in our power to rebuild and move on. 
 The evils which beset us do not daunt us, and the virtues we 
 possess we would fain impose upon others. We believe in 
 propaganda, we are uneasy without some cause to further, 
 some improvement to promote. If we ever determine what 
 the American idea is, we shall evangelize the world. 
 
 It was perhaps this spirit of reform which Lowell had 
 sought to express in his Prometheus and which he had in mind 
 when in another letter to Briggs he declares "I am the first 
 who has endeavoured to express the American Idea, and I shall 
 be popular by and by. " * Popularity came first, however, when 
 
 ' Scudder, Life, Vol. i, p. 267. « Ihid. 
 
Lowell 191 
 
 fervour was linked with wit and humour in The Biglow Papers 
 with their racy Yankee dialect and their b.uniing.,geal_against- 
 the aggrsssivenessiaf-the^ave-holding Spjith. 
 
 The art of these verses has no resemblance to the art of 
 Keats, and their gospel of reform is not a glorious song of 
 consolation; but their rapid fire of wit and common sense 
 was perhaps a better expression of Lowell's temperament 
 than any of his more studied measures. Certainly no poems 
 have ever more distinctly revealed the New England temper. 
 When collected they were imbedded in a paraphernalia of 
 apparatus in which the wit is often labotired, and some of 
 them are no more than clever journalism; but the best have 
 become a lasting part of our popular literature. If this is due 
 in part to their vernacular homeliness, and in part to their 
 wit, it is also due to the moral fire of their democracy. As 
 Horace Scudder insisted, there is a connection between them 
 and another popular success of a different kind. The Vision 0} 
 Sir Launfal. There "it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery 
 issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity. "' 
 
 In 1850 Lowell wrote to Briggs: 
 
 I begin to feel that I must enter a new year of apprenticeship. 
 My poems have thus far had a regular and natural sequence. First, 
 Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to be conscious 
 of itself, then Freedom — both being the sides which Beauty pre- 
 sented to me — and now I am going to try more after Beauty herself. 
 Next, if I live, I shall present Life as I have seen it. 
 
 But, as often, Life proved a jealous mistress who would not 
 yield the field to Beauty. Change and bereavement followed, 
 and his professorship and editorship gave little incentive for 
 verse. The moral exaltation which had seemed the promise of 
 America found itself involved with all the turmoil of emotions 
 that accompany terrific war. For these, Hosea's dialect was 
 scarcely an adequate vehicle of expression, and the second 
 series of Biglow Papers, if not inferior in skill, somehow lacks 
 the entire sufficiency of the first; even when, as in the tenth 
 paper, both the pathos and valour of the great conflict soimd 
 through the verse. The passions that the war aroused were 
 
 ' Scudder, Life, Vol. I, p. 268. 
 
192 chapters of American Literature 
 
 too overpowering for poetry except the brief expression of 
 dominant feeling, as in the fine stanza written in October, 
 i86i. 
 
 God, give us peace! not such as lulls to sleep, 
 But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit ! 
 And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep, 
 Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit, 
 And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap! 
 
 In the poems written in the decade after the war there is 
 a greater depth of thought and a maturity of feeling. The 
 cause which he served broadened into the issue of the life of a 
 national democracy ; and he was called upon to sing its victories 
 and the sacrifice by which they were won. The odes are so 
 noble in sentiment and so splendid in parts that one cannot 
 forbear to regret that they do not bring an even more perfect 
 beauty to their great theme. The far-fetched figure, the halting 
 measiore, the forced rhythm occasionally intrude on verse 
 where the feeling demands all the majesty of poetic mastery. 
 And yet, national anniversaries have rarely if ever aroused 
 such paeans as these in which New England mourns her slain 
 but passes on her heritage to the larger nation. Eloquence 
 rises again and again to passionate melody, yet the feehng 
 never loses the restraining guide of thought. Lowell never 
 
 i attains greater mastery than in the thoughtful analysis and 
 noble beauty of the stanzas on Lincoln in the Commemoration 
 Ode. 
 
 The war and its aftermath left Lowell's poetic faculty some- 
 what spent. Now and then a theme would arouse his imagina- 
 tion to its earlier spontaneity. Chartres revisited summoned 
 back the recollections of its first impressions and stirred him to 
 search again the mysteries and confusions of faith. The death 
 of Agassiz recalled the Cambridge of old and its brave spirits. 
 But the visits of the Muse grew rarer, and LoweU came to find 
 his most characteristic expression in the prose essay. As the 
 close of the war relieved him from the pressing necessity of 
 political writing, he nattirally returned to literature. 
 
 Mrs. Browning, in one of her letters to her husband, 
 complains of the Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, which 
 she has just been reading, that Lowell is saying over again the 
 
Lowell 193 
 
 same things that every~one knows. There is, no doubt, a 
 certain truth in the charge, even when applied to his maturer 
 essays. Lowell introduces no new principle or methods into 
 literary criticism and he makes no search after novelties. In 
 these respects and in the part that his essays have played in 
 changing the direction of literary criticism, they may be 
 regarded as less important than those which Matthew Arnold 
 was writing during the same decade. But this is mainly due 
 to the fact that Arnold's literary criticism was a part of a 
 definite propaganda. When he gave up poetry and turned to 
 prose, it was with the pronounced intention of getting at the 
 British public, of entering on controversy, of preaching a new 
 gospel, that of Culture, which was to have its main ally in 
 criticism. Lowell's increasing use of prose was made from no 
 such incentive. The great cause to which he had been devoted 
 had been won. It was in part as a relief from controversy 
 and propaganda that he turned from political subjects to the 
 leisurely . appreciation of his favourite authors. The essays 
 have no reforms to propose. They are the summing up of 
 many hours spent in his library and his class-room. 
 
 The influence of the college makes itself felt in various 
 ways. Agassiz in science and Child in letters were among 
 Lowell's colleagues, and his years as a professor had given him 
 both an opportunity for wide reading and an acquaintance 
 with the sterner exactions of scholarship. In some cases, as in 
 the careful review of Richard Grant White's edition of Shake- 
 speare, the criticism is precise and textual. In all cases the 
 reflections about the great masters formed through years of 
 intimacy have undergone the seasoning discipline of a broad 
 and adequate scholarship. Lowell did not write on a subject 
 unless he knew a good deal about it, nor did he fail to avail 
 himself of the best that scholarship had accumulated; and such 
 habits have not been matters of course among literary critics. 
 Not only Lowell's thoroughness and accuracy, but his very 
 freedom from the bias of propaganda and from the desire for 
 novelty give his criticism an enduring sanity, a sanity which is 
 happily united with a rich and discriminating sympathy. 
 
 Lowell's essays indeed may be warmly defended from any 
 charge of ineffectuality. If he did not proclaim a definite 
 evangel, yet scarcely less potently than Arnold he preached 
 13 
 
^94 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 the gospel of culture. To a nation torn by war and largely 
 engaged in the indispensable work of economic reconstruction, 
 he taught by both precept and example the value of criticism. 
 In the renewed task of making a nation, he turned confidently 
 to literature as the record of human activity that contains most 
 that is vital for the spirit. The cause of culture, indeed, called 
 for a different service in the two countries. For Arnold in 
 England, literature was to be given a renewed allegiance in the 
 face of industrialism and science, and literature itself was to be 
 directed away from the dangers of romanticism into a wiser 
 and better poised criticism of conduct. For Lowell in the 
 United States, the nation was to be reminded of the value for 
 it of the great traditions of the old world and the need of 
 linking both conduct and letters to the best that the past 
 could offer. 
 
 One example may further suggest the different tasks of 
 literary criticism in the two countries. It was unnecessary for 
 Arnold to preach the value of medieval art. The Middle 
 Ages were still very much present in England, and they had 
 been summoned for various purposes by Scott, Carlyle, 
 Tennyson, Ruskin, and Morris. In the United States, the 
 Middle Ages are as remote as Persia or Egypt, and their 
 significance for us discernible mainly through literature. 
 Lowell took occasion later to defend his land against the 
 implication in Ruskin's remark that he could not live in a 
 country that had neither castles nor cathedrals. But for "our 
 past well-nigh desolate of esthetic stimulus" his essays were 
 supplying the past of Milton and Spenser, of Chaucer and 
 Dante. The essays on the two medieval poets are among his 
 best and have done their part in stimulating among thoughtful 
 Americans a study and appreciation of the great centuries of 
 human progress that preceded Columbus's discovery. 
 
 The personal essay as a literary form seems to require 
 maturity of mind, breadth of experience and reading, a re- 
 sponsive humour, and intensity and discrimination in taste. 
 These qualities Lowell brought to his essay writing, whether 
 the subject be drawn from nature or society or the world of 
 books. Nowhere else, unless in his letters, is his personality 
 more fully and charmingly revealed. The essays are full of 
 good things. Allusion and quotation, epigram and description, 
 
Lowell 195 
 
 whimsical epithet and graphic phrase crowd one another along 
 the page, but all move in the train of Wit and Wisdom, our 
 constant companions along the way. 
 
 The glimpses of New England village life that one receives 
 in the essays will appeal to some readers with a charm like that 
 of personality. The village has often been celebrated in 
 literature from Sweet Auburn to Spoon River, but full justice 
 has scarcely been done to the individuality and distinction 
 of the New England village of the mid-nineteenth century. 
 Cambridge was one of the best representatives of the type, 
 but there were many of them. Each was likely to have a 
 college, or at least an academy, one orthodox and one Unitarian 
 church, a few pleasant colonial houses, and many elms. Every- 
 one who lived in the village had been bom there, was proud 
 of that accident, loved whatever natural beauty its trees and 
 meadows afforded, and enjoyed a conscious satisfaction that it 
 was not Uke other places. Among the residents there might be 
 a great personage, or even a poet, and there were certain to be 
 enough teachers, ministers, doctors, judges, and writers to 
 make up a coterie where ideas circulated. During the long 
 winters, in fact, every one did considerable reading and 
 thinking. 
 
 It was for the cultivated men and women of these villages 
 that LoweU wrote. They of all persons delighted in his essay 
 On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, with its urbane 
 reproof of criticism of our lack of tubanity; for the village 
 cherished some dignity of manners and would accept a pre- 
 destined heU easier than condescension from anybody. The old 
 villages have faded, but their June gardens and winter nights, 
 their serious talk and eager reading, their self-reliance, miti- 
 gated by a sense of humour, live again in Lowell's prose. 
 
 Wit becomes less exuberant and sagacity is the leading 
 spirit in Lowell's later writing. Village society is disappearing, 
 Cambridge is becoming a large city and Harvard a university, 
 and Lowell is in Europe. Both as a poet and an essayist, he 
 had appeared in part as a mediator or ambassador between the 
 culttire of the old world and the new, between the ideals of Eng- 
 land and of the United States. In continuing this function as 
 a foreign minister, he did not escape some censure that he was 
 losing his faith in American democracy. To the reader today 
 
196 chapters of American Literature 
 
 of his later addresses, that criticism must seem groundless. To 
 be sure, his long residence abroad increased his Hking for 
 England and Englishmen; and the course of American politics 
 was a rather dismal sequel to the Gettysburg Address and the 
 Commemoration Ode. After vanquishing slavery, the nation 
 found itself facing still more dangerous evils, and was somewhat 
 loth to gird its loins for the struggle. Lowell had greeted the 
 dawn that was brightening the New England of his youth, and 
 had seen the noonday of heroic effort in the Civil War. Now, 
 as his own days were lengthening, he could be excused if he 
 saw only a dubious twilight in the America of the eighties. 
 
 As a matter of fact there is little doubt and no indifference 
 in these later writings. The maturing years had widened 
 Lowell's perspective without vanquishing the idealism of his 
 youth. He could look back on the course of the industrial 
 revolution which had transformed his New England as well as 
 older lands; and he could foresee the impending revolution 
 that science had already begun in men's standards and pro- 
 cesses. The effect of these movements on his own thought are 
 manifest in his poetry and essays mainly by implication and 
 suggestion ; but in the utterances of the last decade of his life he 
 often looks upon both his own career and the American purpose 
 directly from this more modern point of view. 
 
 In his address at Manchester, in 1884, on Democracy, he 
 declared : 
 
 By temperament and education of a conservative turn, I saw the 
 last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers saw with 
 delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change 
 (to me a sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. 
 
 Nevertheless, though opposing the single tax and State Social- 
 ism, he could see with hopefulness the portents in the air and 
 even believe that democracy was to be the fulcrum for a 
 Socialism possessing "the secret of an orderly and benign con- 
 struction. " He is wilUng to rebuild his house and believes that 
 it can be builded better. The forward call is to be found in 
 those speeches as well as in the ardent verse of youth, the call of 
 "the radiant image of something better and nobler and more 
 enduring than we are." 
 
 This moral earnestness, this desire for perfection, this zeal 
 
Lowell 197 
 
 to reform a changing but evil world, characterizes English 
 literature of the years 1 830-1 880, and American literature of 
 the same epoch. Literature in those years has preached many 
 creeds and many reforms, and it has lost something in sim- 
 plicity and certainty because it has been so much in earnest. 
 So Lowell's writing loses in certainty of art and unity of effect 
 from its very responsiveness to the shifting opportunities for 
 usefulness. But its contribution to civilization is not lessened, 
 for it has done its best to teach a new people to guide their 
 steps by the great men and great ideas of the past. 
 
 In the address on Democracy, Lowell held forth as argu- 
 ments in favour of our national institutions two of their 
 products, Lincoln and Emerson. We surely need not despair oil 
 our democracy so long as it can produce men of letters ltke[ 
 Lowell and utilize them in the service of the common wealj 
 
5. Melville 
 
 WITH the Transcendentalists might have been discussed 
 a writer who, though not allied to the group, and 
 in contact with any of them only through a robust 
 friendship for Hawthorne, yet fell tmder the influence of certain 
 Transcendental moods and ideas, from whomever caught, and 
 was by them deflected from a path which at the moment seemed 
 to promise him every honour as a romancer. Herman Mel- 
 ville, grandson of the conservative old gentleman upon whom 
 Holmes wrote The Last Leaf, and son of a merchant of New 
 York, was born there, i August, 1819 . The early death of 
 his father and the loss of the family fortune having narrowed 
 Melville's chances for higher schooling to a few months in 
 the Albany Classical School, he turned his hand to farming for 
 a year, shipped before the mast to Liverpool in 1837, taught 
 school from 1837-40, and in January, 1841, sailed from New 
 Bedford on a whaling voyage into the Pacific. Upon the 
 experiences of that voyage his principal work is founded. The 
 captain of the Acushnet, it seems, treated the crew badly, and 
 Melville, with the companion whom he calls Toby, escaped from 
 the ship to the Island of Nukuheva [Nukuhiva] in the Marque- 
 sas and strayed into the cannibal valley Typee [Taipi], where 
 the savages kept Melville for four months in an "indulgent 
 captivity." Rescued by an Australian whaler, he visited 
 Tahiti and other islands of the Society group, took part in 
 a mutiny, and once more changed ship, this time setting out 
 for Honolulu. After some months as a clerk in Hawaii, he 
 joined the crew of the frigate United States and returned by 
 the Horn to Boston, October, 1844^^ "From my twenty-fifth 
 y ear, " he told Hawthorne, " I date my life. ' ' Why he held 1 844 
 
 198 
 
Melville i99 
 
 so important is not clear; he may then first have turned to 
 authorship. Though he had kept no notes of his journeying, 
 within a year he had completed his first, book, Typee, tiiexecord 
 oLhii captivity. This was followed the next year by Omoo,^ 
 which completes his island adventures. In 1849 came Redburn, 
 based^on his earlier voyage to Liverpool, and in 1850 White- 
 Jacket, an account of life on a man-of-war. 
 
 The first two had a great vogue and aroused much wonder 
 as to the proportion of fiction and fact which might have 
 gone to their making. Murray published Typee in England in 
 the belief that it was pure fact. There were others to rank 
 it with Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast (1841) 
 as a transcript of real events. But though little is known of 
 Melville's actual doings in the South Seas, it is at least clear 
 that Typee and Omoo are no more as truthftil as Two Years 
 before the Mast than they are as crisp and nautical as that 
 inconiparable classic of the sea. Melville must be ranked 
 less with Dana than with George Borrow. If he knew the thin 
 boundary between romance and reality, he was still careless 
 of nice limits, and his work is a fusion which defies analysis. 
 White-Jacket, of these fotir books, is probably nearest a 
 plain record; Redburn has but few romantic elements. Omoo, 
 as a sequel, has not the freshness of Typee, nor has it such 
 unity. Typee, indeed, is MelvUle at all but his best, and 
 must be classed with the most successful narrations of the 
 exotic life; after seventy years, when the South Pacific seems 
 no longer another world, the spell holds. The valley of 
 Taipi becomes, in Mel^olle's handling, a region of dreams and 
 languor which stir the senses with the fragrance and colour 
 of the landscape and the gay beauty of the brown cannibal 
 girls. And yet Melville, thoroughly sensitive to the felicities 
 of that life, never loses himself in it but remains the shrewd 
 and smiling Yankee. 
 
 The charge that he had been writing romance led Melville 
 to deserve the accusation, and he wrote Mardi (1849), certainly 
 one of the strangest, maddest books ever composed by an 
 American. As in Typee, two sailors escape from a tyrannical 
 captain in the Pacific and seek their fortune on the open sea, 
 where they finally discover the archipelago of Mardi, a para- 
 
 ' The word is Polynesian for "rover." 
 
200 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 dise more rich and siiltry than the Marquesas, which becomes, 
 as the story proceeds, a crazy chaos of adventtire and satirical 
 allegory. In Mardi for the first time appear those qualities 
 which made a French critic call MelviUe "un Rabelais ameri- 
 cain, " his welter of language, his fantastic laughter, his tumultu- 
 ous philosophies. He had turned, contemporaries said, from 
 the plain though witty style of his first works to the gorgeous 
 manner of Sir Thomas Browne; he had been infected, say later 
 critics, with Carlylese. Whatever the process, he had surely 
 shifted his interest from the actual to the abstruse and symboli- 
 cal, and he never recovered from the dive into metaphysics 
 which proved fatal to him as a novelist. It was, however, while 
 on this perilous border that he produced the best of his, and one 
 of the best of American, romances; it is the peculiar mingling 
 of speculation and experience which lends Moby Dick (1851) 
 its special power. 
 
 The time was propitious for such a book. The golden age 
 of the whalers was drawing to a close, though no decline had yet 
 set in, and the native imagination had been stirred by tales of 
 deeds done on remote oceans by the most heroic Yankees of the 
 age in the arduous calling in which New England, and especially 
 the hard little island of Nantucket, led and taught the world. 
 A small literature of whaling had grown up, chiefly the records 
 of actual voyages or novels like those of Cooper in which whaling 
 was an incident of the nautical life. But the whalers still 
 lacked any such romantic record as the frontier had. Melville 
 brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much 
 curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, 
 an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts 
 of his own experience. Moby Dick, the strange, fierce white 
 whale that Captain Ahab pursues with such relentless fury, 
 was already a legend among the whalers, who knew him as 
 "Mocha Dick."' It remained for Melville to lend some kind 
 of poetic or moral significance to a struggle ordinarily conducted 
 for no cause but profit. As he handles the story, Ahab, who 
 has lost a leg in the jaws of the whale, is driven by a wild desire 
 for revenge which has maddened him and which makes him 
 identify Moby Dick with the very spirit of evil and hatred. 
 Ahab, not Melville, is to blame if the story seems an allegory, 
 
 ' See Reynolds, J. N., Mocha Dick, Knickerbocker Magazine, Ma.y, 1839. 
 
Melville 201 
 
 which Melville plainly declares it was not; but it contains, 
 nevertheless, the semblance of a conflict between the ancient 
 and,unscathable forces of nature and the ineluctable enmity of 
 man. This is the theme, but description can hardly report the 
 extraordinary mixture in Mohy Dick of vivid adventure, minute 
 detail, cloudy symbolism, thrilling pictures of the sea in 
 every mood, sly mirth and cosmic ironies, real and incredi- 
 ble characters, wit, speculation, humovu-, colour. The style 
 is mannered but often felicitous; though the book is long, the 
 end, after every faculty of suspense has been aroused, is swift 
 and final. Too irregular, too bizarre, perhaps, ever to win the 
 widest suffrage, the immense originality of Moby Dick must 
 warrant the claim of its admirers that it belongs with the 
 greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world. 
 
 Married in 1847, Melville lived for three years in New 
 York and then for thirteen years in a farmhouse near Pitts- 
 field, Massachusetts. Although he did not cease to write 
 at once, Moby Dick seems to have exhausted Icaxa.. Pierre (1852) 
 is hopelessly frantic; lsraer~Fotter (1855) is not markedly 
 original; neither are The Piazza Tales (1856), and The Confidence 
 Man (1857). The verses which he wrote in his later years, 
 his sole output, are in a few instances happy, but far more 
 often jagged and harsh. Whatever the causes of his loss 
 of power, he fretted under it and grew more metaphysical, 
 tortured, according to Hawthorne, his good friend, by uncer- 
 tainty as to a future life. That way, for Melville, was mad- 
 ness; his earlier works should have taught him that he was 
 lost without a solid basis in fact. He moved restlessly about, 
 lecturing on the South Seas during the years 1857-1860 in 
 many cities of the United States and Canada. He visited 
 Europe and Palestine. Finally, having returned to New York, 
 he was appointed to a place in the Custom House in 1866, and 
 served there for twenty years, living a private life of almost 
 entire, though voluntary and studious, seclusion. His death, 
 28 September, 1891, after nearly forty silent years, removed 
 from American literature one of its most promising and most 
 disappointing figures. Of late his fame is undergoing an en- 
 ergetic revival in both America and England. 
 
6. Mrs. Stowe 
 
 HARRIET BEECHER, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, 
 14 June, 181 1, passed her childhood and girlhood, in- 
 deed practically her entire life, in an atmosphere of 
 piety which, much as she eventually lost of its original Calvin- 
 istic rigour, not only indoctrinated her with orthodox opinions 
 but furnished her with an intensely evangelical point of view 
 and a sort of Scriptural eloquence. Her youth was spent in 
 a more diversified world than might be thought: from her 
 mother's people, who were emphatically High Church and, in 
 spite of the Revolution, some of them still Tory at heart, she 
 learned a faith and ritual less austere than that of her father, 
 Lyman Beecher; she had good teaching at the Litchfield 
 Academy, especially in composition; like all her family, she was 
 highly susceptible to external nature and passionately ac- 
 quainted with the lovely Litchfield hills; she read very widely, 
 and not only theology, of which she read too much for her 
 happiness, but the accepted secular authors of the eighteenth 
 century, as well as Burns and Byron and Scott. At the same 
 time, she justified her Beecher lineage by her ready adaptation 
 to the actual conditions under which she lived during Lyman 
 Beecher's pastorates in Litchfield and Boston, and during her 
 own career as pupil and then teacher in the school conducted 
 at Hartford by her strong but morbid sister Catherine. Al- 
 though Harriet Beecher was still a thorough child of New 
 England when she went, in 1832, to live in Cincinnati, to which 
 her father had been called as president of the Lane Theological 
 Seminary, and although her earliest sketches and tales, col- 
 lected in a volume called The Mayfio!iiiei:^i84^), deal larggly^ 
 with memories of hfit-jold home set down with an exile's affec:_ 
 
 202 
 
Mrs. Stowe 203 
 
 tktti, she grew rapidly in knowledge and experience. Married 
 in 18^6 to Professor Calvin E. Stowe of the^minary, mother 
 by 18500^ seven children, she retvirned in that year to Bruns- 
 wick, Maine, where Professor Stowe had accepted a position 
 in Bowdoin College. There, deeply stirred by the passing of 
 the Fugitive Slave Law, she began. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life 
 among the Lowly, which ran as a serial in The National Era oi 
 Washington from June, 1851, to April, 1852, and then, on its 
 appearance in two volumes in March, 1852, inetjvith.a^opular 
 reception never before or since accorded to a novel.. Its sales 
 went to the millions. Over five hundred thousand English- 
 women signed an address of thanks to the author; Scotland 
 raised a thousand pounds by a penny offering among its poor- 
 est people to help free the slaves; in France and Germany the 
 book was everywhere read and discussed; while there were 
 Russians who emancipated their serfs out of the pity which the 
 tale aroused. In the United States, thanks in part to the stage, 
 which produced a version as early as September, 1852, the 
 piece belongs not only to literature but to folklore. 
 
 That Uncle Tom's Cabin stands higher in the history ofl 
 reform than in the history of the art of fiction no one needs' 
 to say again. Dickens, Kingsley, arid Mrs. Gaskell had 
 already set the novel to humanitarian tunes, and Mrs. Stowe 
 did not have to invent a type. She had, however, no particu- 
 lar foreign master, not even Scott, all of whose historical 
 romances she had been reading just before she began Uncle 
 Tom. Instead she adhered to the native tradition, which went 
 back to the eighteenth century, of sentimental, pious, instruct- 
 ive narratives written by women chiefly for women. Leave 
 out the merely domestic elements of the book — slave families 
 broken up by sale, ailing and dying children, negro women at 
 the mercy of their masters, white households which at the best 
 are slovenly and extravagant by reason of irresponsible ser- 
 vants — and little remains. To understand why the story 
 touched the world so deeply it is necessary to understand how 
 tense the struggle over slavery had grown, how thickly charged 
 was the moral atmosphere awaiting a fatal spark. But the 
 mere fact of an audience already prepared will not explain 
 the mystery of a work which shook a powerful institution and 
 
204 chapters of American Literature 
 
 which, for all its defects of taste and style and construction, 
 still has amazing power. Richard Hildreth's The Slave; or 
 Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) and Mrs. M. V. Victor's once 
 popular "dime novel" Maum Guinea; or, Christmas among the 
 Slaves (1861) no longer move. They both lack the ringing 
 voice, the swiftness, the fullness, the humour, the authentic 
 passion of the greater book. 
 
 It has often been pointed out that Mrs. Stowe did not 
 mean to be sectional, that she deliberately made her chief 
 villain a New Englander, and that she expected to be blamed 
 less by the South than by the North, which she thought 
 peculiarly guilty because it tolerated slavery without the 
 excuse either of habit or of interest. Bitterly attacked by 
 Southerners of all sorts, however, she defended herself with A 
 Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and 
 Documents upon which the Story is Founded (1853), and then, 
 after a triumphant visit to Europe and a removal to Andover, 
 essayed another novel to illustrate the evil effects of slavery 
 especially upon the whites. Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal 
 Swamp (1856)^ has had its critical partisans, but posterity 
 has not sustained them. Grave faults of construction, slight 
 knowledge of the scene (North Carolina), a less simple and 
 compact story than in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and a larger share of 
 disquisition, — these weigh the book down, and most readers 
 carry away only fragmentary memories, of Dred's thunderous 
 eloquence, of Tom Gordon's shameless abuse of his power as 
 master, and of Old Tiff's grotesque and beautiful fidelity. 
 
 After Dred Mrs. Stowe wrote no more anti-slavery novels, 
 although during the Civil War she sent to the women of Eng- 
 land an open letter reminding them that they, so many of whom 
 now sympathized with the defenders of slavery, had less than 
 ten years ago hailed Uncle Tom's Cabin as a mighty stroke for 
 justice and freedom. A considerable part of her later life (she 
 died I July, 1896) was spent in Florida, where she had taken a 
 plantation on the St. John's River for the double purpose of 
 establishing there as a planter one of her sons who had been 
 wounded at Gettysburg and of assisting the freedmen, about 
 whom and their relation to the former masters she had more 
 
 ' Also known as Nina Gordon from the English title. 
 
Mrs. Stowe 205 
 
 enlightened views than were then generally current in the North. 
 Now an international figure, she let her pen respond too facUely 
 to the many demands made upon it : she wrote numerous di- 
 dactic and religious essays and tales, particularly attentive to 
 the follies of fashionable New York society, in which she had 
 had little experience; she was chosen by Lady Byron to publish 
 the most serious charges ever brought against the poet. In 
 another department of her work, however, Mrs. Stowe stood 
 on surer ground, and her novels of New England life — particu- 
 larly The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island 
 (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), Poganuc People (1878) — cannot 
 go unmentioned. 
 
 Weak in structure and sentimental she remained. Her 
 heroines wrestle with problems of conscience happily alien to 
 all but a few New England and Nonconformist British bosoms ; 
 her bold seducers, like EUery Davenport in Oldtown Folks and 
 Aaron Burr in The Minister's Wooing, are villains to frighten 
 schoolgirls; she writes always as from the pulpit, or at least the 
 parsonage. But where no abstract idea governs her she can be 
 direct, accurate, and convincing. The earlier chapters of The 
 Pearl of Orr's Island must be counted, as Whittier thought, 
 among the purest, truest idyls of New England. It is harder 
 now to agree with Lowell in placing The Minister's Wooing 
 first among her novels, and yet no other imaginative treatment 
 so well sets forth the strange, dusky old Puritan world of the 
 later eighteenth century, when Newport was the centre at 
 once of Hopkinsian divinity and the African slave trade. 
 Mrs. Stowe wisely did not put on the airs of an historical 
 romancer but wrote like a contemporary of the earlier New- 
 port with an added flavour from her own youthful recollections. 
 This flavour was indispensable to her. When her memory of 
 the New England she had known in her girlhood and had 
 loved so truly that Cotton Mather's Magnolia had seemed 
 "wonderful stories . . . that made me feel the very ground I 
 trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God's pro- 
 vidence," — ^when this memory worked freely and humorously 
 upon materials which it was enough merely to remember and 
 set down, she was at her later best. These conditions she 
 most fully realized in Poganuc People, crisp, sweet, spare (for 
 
2o6 chapters of American Literature 
 
 her), never quite sufficiently praised, and in Oldtown Folks, 
 like the other a series of sketches rather than a novel, but — per- 
 haps all the more because of that — still outstanding, for fidel- 
 ity and point, among the innumerable stories dealing with 
 New England. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Lincoln 
 
 THE man of many minds who upon the surface, at least, is 
 variable is not thought of ordinarily as a great leader. 
 And yet in some of the greatest of men a surface vari- 
 ableness has not in the long run prevented a constimmate 
 achievement. There is Caesar, to be pondered upon by all who 
 consider such men second rate. And in American history, there 
 is Lincoln. His life as man of action brings this out well enough. 
 He wavered during many years, hesitating between politics and 
 law, not drivingly conscious of his main bent. Still more clearly 
 is this brought out by his personal life and by those literary and 
 mystical phases that are linked so intimately with the personal. 
 The changes of his mood are at times bewildering. He is often 
 like a wayfarer passing through successive strata of light and 
 darkness, the existence of which does not seem to be explained 
 by circumstance, of whose causes neither he nor his observers 
 have explanation. Did they arise from obscure powers within? 
 Were they the reaction of an ultra-sensitive nature to things 
 without that most people were not able to perceive? He speaks 
 of himself in one of his letters as superstitious. Should the 
 word give us a hint? Whatever theory of him shall eventually 
 prevail, it is sure to rest on this fact: he was a shrouded and a 
 mysterious character, a man apart, intensely reticent, very 
 little of whose inner life has been opened to the world. 
 
 It is significant that he was not precocious. The touching 
 picture, preserved in several memories — the lonely, illiterate boy 
 with a passion for reading, indulging the passion at night by a 
 cabin fire — this picture has nothing of early cleverness. Of the 
 qualities that appear after his advent, it is the moral not the 
 mental ones that were clearly foreshadowed in his youth. The 
 
 207 
 
2o8 chapters of American Literature 
 
 simplicity, the kindliness, the courage, the moderation of the 
 matured man have their evident beginnings in the boy. His 
 purely mental characteristics appeared so gradually, so unos- 
 tentatiously, that his neighbours did not note their coming. 
 Today, seen in the perspective of his career, their approach is 
 more discernible. To one who goes carefully through the twelve 
 volumes of the chronological edition of Lincoln's writings, 
 though the transition from characterlessness to individuality 
 is nowhere sudden, the consciousness of a steady progress in 
 mental power, of a subtle evolution of the literary sense, is 
 unmistakable. The revelation gains in celerity as one proceeds. 
 But there is no sunburst, no sudden change of direction. And ■ 
 yet, for all the equivocality of the early years, one ends by won- 
 dering why the process has seemed vague. It is like that type 
 of play whose secret is not disclosed until just before the 
 curtain but which, once disclosed, brings all preceding it into 
 harmony. 
 
 So of the literary Lincoln. Looking back from the few great 
 performances of his fruition, why did we not earlier foresee 
 them? There are gleams all along that now strike us as the 
 careless hints of a great unseen power that was approaching. 
 But why — considering the greatness of the final achievement — 
 were they no more than gleams? 
 
 Here is an original literary artist who never did any delib- 
 erate literary work, who enriched English style in spite of him- 
 self under pressure of circumstances. His style is but the flexi- 
 bility with which his expression follows the movements of a 
 peculiar mind. And as the mind slowly unfolds, becomes over- 
 cast, recedes, advances, so, in the main, does the style. The 
 usual symptoms of the literary impulse are all to seek. He is 
 wholly preoccupied with the thing behind the style. Again the 
 idea of a nature shrouded, withdrawn, that dwells within, that 
 emerges mysteriously. His youth, indeed, has a scattered, un- 
 emphatic intimation of something else. What might be called 
 the juvenilia of this inscrutable mind include some attempts at 
 verse. They have no literary value. More significant than his 
 own attempts is the fact that verse early laid a strong hold 
 upon him. Years later, when the period of his juvenilia may 
 be counted in the past, as late as 1846, in denying the author- 
 ship of a newspaper poem he added: "I would give all I am 
 
Lincoln 209 
 
 worth and go in debt to be able to write so fine a piece." Even 
 in the first period of his maturity he could still lapse into verse. 
 A visit to his former home in 1844 called forth two poems that 
 have survived. One was a reverie in the vein of 
 
 O Memory ! thou midway world 
 
 Twixt earth and Paradise, 
 Where things decayed and loved ones lost 
 
 In dreamy shadows rise. 
 
 The other was a description of an idiot, long a famiUar village 
 figure. Commenting on this poem, Lincoln refers to his 
 "poetizing mood." His official biographers tell us that his 
 favourite poets were Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, and Tom 
 Hood, and add that his taste was "rather morbid." Byron's 
 Dream was one of his favourites. It is a commonplace that he 
 never tired of the trivial stanzas beginning 
 
 Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud. 
 
 When his writings come to be edited as literary remains — 
 not merely as historical data — ^the period of his juvenilia wUl 
 close with the year 1842. The first period of his maturity will 
 extend to the close of his one term in Congress. Or, it may be, 
 these two periods will be run together. To repeat, there are no 
 sharp dividing lines across this part of his life. He was thirty- 
 three in 1842; forty when he retired from Congress. Either 
 age, in such a connection, is strangely removed from the pre- 
 cocious. In his writings before the end of his thirty-third year 
 there is nothing that would have kept his name alive. However, 
 even as early as twenty-three, in an address to the "People of 
 Sangamon County" subnoitting himself as a candidate for the 
 legislature, Lincoln revealed two, at least, of the character- 
 istics of his eventual style — ^its lucidity and its sense of rhythm. 
 Boy as he was, he was little touched by the bombastic rhetori- 
 caUty of his day. On this side, from the first, he had purity of 
 taste. His sense of rhythm — ^faintly to be sure — ^was also begin- 
 ning to assert itself in 1832. Lincoln's sense of rhythm was far 
 deeper, far more subtle, than mere cadence. In time it became 
 a marvellous power for arranging ideas in patterns so firmly, 
 so clearly, with such unfaltering disposition of emphasis that 
 14 
 
210 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 it is impossible to read them into confusion — as is so easy to do 
 with the idea-patterns of ordinary writers. And with this sense 
 of the idea-pattern grew up at last a sense of cadence most del- 
 icately and beautifully accompanying, and reinforcing, the 
 movement of the ideas. In 1832 there were but gleams of all 
 this — ^but genuine gleams. 
 
 The ten years following, sterile from the point of view of 
 production, are none the less to the student of Lincoln's mind 
 most important. As to literary workmanship in these years, 
 what he did to develop his power of expression — in all but the 
 vaguest outline the story is gone. That he read insatiably, that 
 he studied and practised law, that he won local fame as an oral 
 story-teller and as an impromptu debater, these details are 
 preserved. With these is another tradition borne out by his 
 writing. He was a constant reader of the Bible. This intro- 
 duces the most perplexing question of his inner life. What was 
 his religion? The later Lincoln — the one to whom, perhaps, we 
 get the clue in these ten years between twenty-three and thirty- 
 three — ^is invariably thought of in popular local tradition as a 
 man of piety. But on this point what do we know? Lincoln 
 has left us no self revelation. His letters, with the exception 
 of one group, are not intimate. His native taciturnity, in this 
 respect, was unconquerable. 
 
 Though born in a family of Baptists, he never became a 
 member of the Baptist or of any church. Except for one amaz- 
 ing fragment he has left no writings that are not more or less 
 obscure where they touch on religious themes. It is a curious 
 fact that in the index to the voluminous oflEicial Life the word reli- 
 gion does not occur. As against this singular negative evidence 
 there are anecdotes of a religious attitude. But the historian 
 learns to question the value of all anecdotes. Nevertheless the 
 tradition of Lincoln's piety — of his essentially religious nature 
 — ^will not down. A rooted tradition, almost contemporary, is 
 more significant than anecdotes, less susceptible of that constant 
 dramatic heightening which makes the anecdote in retelling 
 more and more positive. Now, the traditional Lincoln is a man 
 overshadowed, a man of infinite gentleness whose pity seems to 
 be more than mere friendliness or generosity. His own world, 
 though uninformed as to his specific beliefs, persistently con- 
 ceived of him as a mystic, as a walker apart with God. For 
 
Lincoln 211 
 
 evidence to support this impression we naturally look to his 
 intimate letters. If we may judge by the surviving correspond- 
 ence, this man, of whose friendliness ten thousand authentic 
 instances testify, seems none the less to have lived and died 
 solitary. The one mitigating experience appears in his early 
 friendship for Joshua F. Speed. Cordial, trustful, sympathetic 
 he was with many friends. The group of letters written to 
 Speed in 1842 are in a vein that sets them apart. Both men 
 had suffered through their emotions, and each in an analytical, 
 self-torturing way. Upon Lincoln the sudden death of Ann 
 Rutledge, with whom he thought himself in love at twenty- 
 three, is supposed to have had, for the time at least, a deeply 
 saddening effect. A second love affair was lukewarm and ended 
 happily in divergence. The serious matter, his engagement to 
 Miss Mary Todd, led to such acute questioning of himself, 
 such painful analysis of his feeling, such doubt of his ability to 
 make her happy, that the engagement was broken off. Within 
 a month he had written: "I am now the most miserable man 
 living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole 
 human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. " 
 (23 January, 1841 .) Two years were to elapse before the harm 
 was repaired and Lincoln and Miss Todd married. Meanwhile 
 Speed, becoming engaged, suffered a similar ordeal of intro- 
 spection, of pitiless self-analysis. He too doubted the reality 
 of his feeling, feared that he would be wronging the woman he 
 loved by marrying her. Lincoln's letters to his unhappy friend 
 are the most intimate utterances he has left. Sane, cheerful, — 
 except for passing references to his own misfortune, — ^thought- 
 ful, they helped to pull Speed out of the Slough of Despond. 
 
 As nothing in these letters has the least hint of the perfunc- 
 tory their reverent phrases must be accepted at face value. 
 That a belief in God, even in God's personal direction of human 
 affairs, lies back of these letters, is not to be doubted. Never- 
 theless the subject remains vague. Lincoln's approach to it is 
 almost timid. There is no hint of dogma. But the fact that 
 he here calls himself superstitious sends us back to his earliest 
 days, to his formative environment, seeking for clues to the 
 religious life he may have inherited. 
 
 Loneliness was the all-pervading characteristic of that Ufa. 
 The pioneer cabin, whether in Kentucky, Indiana, or Illinois, 
 
212 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 was an island in a wilderness. The pioneer village was merely a 
 slightly larger island. Both for cabin and for village, the near 
 horizon encircled it with the primeval. This close boundary, 
 the shadow of the old gods, is a mighty, neglected factor in all 
 the psychological history of the American people. In the Hves 
 of the pioneers, scattered over the lonely West, it is of first 
 magnitude. It bore in upon them from every point of the com- 
 pass, the consciousness of a world mightier than their own, the 
 world of natural force. To a sensitive, poetic spirit, tempera- 
 mentally melancholy, that encircling shadow must have had 
 the effect of the night on Browning's David, though without 
 producing the elation of David. That the mysticism of the 
 primitive should have developed to full strength in a dreamer of 
 these spiritual islands, but that it should not have risen victo- 
 rious out of the primeval shadow, is explicable, perhaps, by two 
 things — by the extreme hardness of pioneer life and by the lack 
 of mental fecundity in these men whose primitive estate was a 
 reversion not a development. While their sensibilities had re- 
 covered the primitive emotions, their minds, like stalled engines, 
 merely came to a pause. Except for its emotional sensing of the 
 vast unseen, the religious life of the pioneer islands lay most of 
 the time dormant. It is a fact of much significance that the 
 Western pioneers were not accompanied by ministers of relig- 
 ion — which is one detail of the wider fact that their migration 
 was singly, by families, not communal. What a vast difference 
 between the settlement of a colonial community, bringing with 
 it organized religion, and these isolated, almost vagrant, move- 
 ments into the West with organized religion left behind ! Most 
 of the time, in the places where Lincoln's boyhood was passed, 
 there were no public religious services. Periodically a circuit- 
 rider appeared. And then, in a terrific prodigality, the pent-up 
 reUgious emotion burst forth. The student of Dionysus who 
 would glimpse the psychology of the wild women of the Ecsta- 
 sies, if he is equal to translating human nature through widely 
 differing externals, may get hints from the religious passion of 
 the pioneer revival. Conversely, Dionysus will help him to 
 understand the West. That there was not much Christianity 
 in all this goes without saying. It was older, simpler, more 
 elemental. But it was fettered mentally in a Christian phrase- 
 ology. Out of this contradiction grew its incoherency, its mean- 
 
Lincoln 213 
 
 inglessness. With the passing of one of these seasons of storm- 
 ful ecstasy, there was left in its wake often a great recharge of 
 natural piety but nothing— or hardly anything— of spiritual 
 understanding. 
 
 And out of these conditions grew the spiritual life of Lincoln. 
 He absorbed to the full its one great quaUty, the mystical 
 consciousness of a world transcending the world of matter. He 
 has no more doubt of this than all the other supreme men have 
 had, whether good or bad; than Napoleon with his impatient 
 gesture toward the stars, that night on shipboard, and his 
 words, "There must be a God." But when it comes to giving 
 form to what he feels encompassing him, then Lincoln's lucid 
 mind asserts itself, and what has imposed on his fellow- villagers, 
 as a formulation, fades into nothing. And here is revealed a 
 characteristic that forms a basal clue. His mind has no bent 
 toward this sort of thinking. Before the task of formulating 
 his religion he stands quite powerless. His feeling for it is 
 closer than hands or feet. But just what it is that he feels im- 
 pinging on him from every side — even he does not know. He 
 is like a sensitive man who is neither a scientist nor a poet in 
 the midst of a night of stars. The reality of his experience 
 gives him no power either to explain or to express it. 
 
 Long afterward, in one of his most remarkable fragments, 
 the reality of his faith, along with the futility of his religious 
 thinking, is wonderfully preserved. It was written in Septem- 
 ber, 1862. The previous February the death of one of his 
 children had produced an emotional crisis. For a time he was 
 scarcely able to discharge his official duties. This was followed 
 by renewed interest in religion, expressing itself chiefly by con- 
 stant reading of Scripture. Whether any new light came to him 
 we do not know. But in the autumn he wrote this : 
 
 The will of God prevails. In great contests, each party claims 
 to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one 
 must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at 
 the same time. In the present Civil War it is quite possible that 
 God's purpose is something quite different from the purpose of 
 either party; and yet the human instrumentalities working just as 
 they do, are the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost 
 ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest 
 and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the 
 
214 chapters of American Literature 
 
 minds of the now contestants, He could either have saved or de- 
 stroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest be- 
 gan. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either 
 side any day. Yet the contest proceeds. 
 
 Six months later one of the great pages of his prose called 
 the nation to observe a day of "national humiliation, fasting, 
 and prayer. ' ' That the Dionysian and circuit-riding philosophy 
 had made no impression on his mind is evinced by the silences 
 of this singular document. Not a word upon victory over ene- 
 mies — eagerly though, at the moment, he was hoping for it — 
 but all in the vein of this question: 
 
 And insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like 
 individuals, are subjected to punishment and chastisement in this 
 world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war 
 which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon 
 us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national 
 reformation as a whole people? 
 
 The context shows that he was not — as the abolitionists wished 
 him to do — merely hitting at slavery over the Lord's shoulder. 
 The proclamation continues the fragment. This great mystic, 
 pondering what is wrong with the world, wonders whether all 
 the values, in God's eyes, are not different from what they seem 
 to be in the eyes of men. And yet he goes on steadfast in the 
 immediate task as it has been given him to understand that 
 task. So it was to him always — the inscrutable shadow of the 
 Almighty for ever round about him; the understanding of His 
 ways for ever an insistent mystery. 
 
 To return to Lincoln's thirty-third year. Is it fanciful to 
 find a connection between the way in which his mysticism devel- 
 ops — ^its atmospheric, non-dogmatic pervasiveness — and the 
 way in which his style develops? Certainly the literary part of 
 him works into all the portions of his utterance with the grad- 
 ualness of the daylight through a shadowy wood. Those seven 
 years following 1842 show a gradual change; but it is extremely 
 gradual. And it is to be noted that the literary quality, so far 
 as there is any during these years — for it comes and goes — ^is 
 never incisive. It is of the whole, not of the detail. It does not 
 appear as a gift of phrases. Rather it is the slow unfolding of 
 
Lincoln 215 
 
 those two original characteristics, taste and rhythm. What is 
 growing is the degree of both things. The man is becoming 
 deeper, and as he does so he imposes himself, in this atmospheric 
 way, more steadily on his language. 
 
 Curiously enough it is to this period that his only comic 
 writings belong. Too much has been said about Lincoln's hu- 
 mour. Almost none of it has survived. Apparently it was nei- 
 ther better nor worse than the typical American humour of the 
 period. Humorously, Lincoln illustrated as an individual that 
 riotous rebound which so often distinguishes the nature pre- 
 dominantly melancholy; and as a type, he illustrates the 
 American contentment with the externals of humour, with bad 
 grammar, buffoonery, and ironic impudence. His sure taste as 
 a serious writer deserts him at times as a reader. He shared 
 the illusions of his day about Artemus Ward. When he tried 
 to write humorously he did somewhat the same sort of thing — 
 he was of the school of Artemus. 
 
 A speech which he made in Congress, a landmark in his de- 
 velopment, shows the quality of his humour, and shows also that 
 he was altogether a man of his period, not superior in many 
 small ways to the standards of his period. The Congress of the 
 United States has never been distinguished for a scrupulous use 
 of its time; today, however, even the worst of Congresses 
 would hardly pervert its function, neglect business, and trans- 
 form itself into an electioneering forum, with the brazenness of 
 the Congresses of the middle of the last century. In the summer 
 of 1848, with Zachary Taylor before the country as the Whig 
 nominee for president, Lincoln went the way of all fliesh polit- 
 ical, squandering the time of the House in a jocose electioneering 
 speech, nominally on a point before the House, really having no 
 connection with it — ^in fact, a romping burlesque of the Demo- 
 cratic candidate, Cass. As such things went at that day, it was 
 capital. It was better than most such speeches because, grant- 
 ing the commonplace thing he had set out to do, Lincoln's 
 better sense of language gave even to his romp a quality the 
 others did not have. 
 
 We come now to the year 1849, to Lincoln's fortieth birth- 
 day, and probably to another obscure crisis in his career. For 
 thirteen years at least, politics had appeared to contain his 
 dominant ambition. Amid btu-sts of melancholy of the most 
 
2i6 chapters of American Literature 
 
 intense sort, in spite, it would seem, of occasional fits of idle- 
 ness, he seems in the main to have worked hard; he had made 
 headway both in politics and in law; he had risen from grinding 
 poverty to what relatively was ease. Now, he made the sur- 
 prising decision to abandon politics. The reasons remain ob- 
 scure. However, he carried his decision into effect. What the 
 Hterary student might call his second period extends from his 
 abandonment of politics to his return, from 1849 to 1855 — or 
 perhaps through the famous Douglas controversy in 1858. 
 
 It was a period of slight literary production — even including 
 the speeches against Douglas — but of increasingly rapid liter- 
 ary development. One curious detail perhaps affords a clue 
 worth following up. Shortly after his return from Congress 
 Lincoln, with several other middle-aged men, formed a class 
 that met in his law office for the study of German. Was this an 
 evidence that his two years in the East had given him a new 
 point of view? Was this restless mind, superficially changeable, 
 sensitive to its surroundings, was it impressed — ^perhaps for the 
 moment, overawed — by that Eastern culture of the mid-cen- 
 tury, of the time — so utterly remote it seems today! — ^when 
 German was the soul's language in New England? Lincoln had 
 visited New England, on a speech-making invitation, as a con- 
 sequence of his romp against Cass. He was made much of by 
 the New England Whigs — ^perhaps for what he was, perhaps 
 as a Western prodigy uncouth but entertaining. From New 
 England, and from his two years in Congress, he came home to 
 forsake politics, to apply himself with immense zeal to the law, 
 to apply himself to the acquisition of culture. The latter pur- 
 pose appears before long to have burned itself out. There was 
 a certain laziness in Lincoln alongside his titanic energy. It 
 would seem that the question whether he could keep steadily 
 at a thing depended not on his own will but on the nature of 
 the task. With those things that struck deep into the parts of 
 him that were permanent he was proof against weariness. But 
 with anything that was grounded on the surface part of him, 
 especially on his own reactions, to the moment, it was hit or 
 miss how long he would keep going. Whatever it was that 
 started him after formal education in 1849, it had no result. 
 In the rapid development of the next few years his new-found 
 enthusiasm disappears. It is the native Lincoln moving still 
 
Lincoln 217 
 
 upon his original bent, though with swiftly increasing mentality, 
 who goes steadily forward from the able buffoonery of the 
 speech against Cass to the splendid directness of the speeches 
 against Douglas. 
 
 In these years he became a very busy man. At their close 
 he was one of the leading lawyers of the state. Two things 
 grew upon him. The first was his understanding of men, the 
 generality of men. He always seemed to have known men's 
 hearts. This was the gift of his mysticism — ^the gift which 
 mysticism has often bestowed upon natures predisposed to 
 kindness. Almost inevitably this gift produces sadness. Lin- 
 coln did not form an exception. The pity of men's burdens, 
 the vision of the tears of the world falling for ever behind its 
 silences, was as real in this peasant dreamer of our rude West 
 as in that clerkly mediaeval dreamer whom Walter Pater has 
 staged so magically in the choir at Amiens. But the exquisite 
 melancholy of the singer in the high church with its glorious 
 windows can easily slide down smooth reaches of artistic con- 
 templation into egoism. The rough, hard world of the West, 
 having less of refuge for the dreamer, made the descent less 
 likely. Nevertheless its equivalent was possible. To stifle com- 
 passion, or to be made unstable by compassion, was a possible 
 alternative before the rapidly changing Lincoln of the early 
 years of this period. What delivered him from that alternative, 
 what forced him completely around, turning him permanently 
 from all the perils of mysticism while he retained its great gift, 
 may well have been his years of hard work, not in contemplating 
 men but in serving them. The law absorbed his compassion; 
 it became for him a spiritual enthusiasm. To lift men's bur- 
 dens became in his eyes its aim. The man who serves is the 
 one who comes to understand other men. It is not strange, 
 having such native equipment for the result, that Lincoln 
 emerged from this period all but uncannily sure in his insight 
 into his fellows. 
 
 The other thing that grew upon him was his power to reach 
 and influence them through words. The court room was his 
 finishing academy. The faculty that had been with him from 
 the start — directness, freedom from rhetoric — was seized upon 
 in the life-and-death-ness of the legal battle, and given an edge, 
 so to speak, that was incomparable. The distinction between 
 
2i8 chapters of American Literature 
 
 pure and applied art, like the distinction between pure and 
 applied mathematics, is never to be forgotten. Applied art, the 
 art that must be kept in hand, steadily incidental to an ulterior 
 purpose, affords, in a way, the sharpest test of artisticality. 
 Many a mere writer who might infuse himself into an imagina- 
 tive fantasy would fail miserably to infuse himself into a state- 
 ment of fact. To attend strictly to business, and yet to be 
 entirely individual — this is a thriUing triumph of intellectual 
 assimilation. This is what Lincoln in these years of his second 
 period acquired the power to do. When he emerges at its close 
 in the speeches against Douglas, at last he has his second man- 
 ner, a manner quite his own. It is not his final manner, the one 
 that was to give him his asstwed place in literature. However, 
 in a wonderful blend of simplicity, directness, candour, joined 
 with a clearness beyond praise, and a delightful cadence, it has 
 outstripped every other politician of the hour. And back of its 
 words, subtly affecting its phrases, echoing with the dreaminess 
 of a distant sound through all its cadences, is that brooding 
 sadness which was to be with him to the end. 
 
 Another period in Lincoln's literary life extends from his 
 return to politics to the First Inaugural. Of aU parts of his 
 personal experience it is the most problematic. At its opening 
 there rises the question why he returned to politics. Was there 
 a crisis of some sort about 1855 as, surely, there was about 1849? 
 His official biographers are unsatisfying. Their Lincoln is exas- 
 peratingly conventional — always the saint and the hero, as 
 saint-heroes were conceived by the average American in the 
 days when it was a supreme virtue to be "self-made." That 
 there was some sort of failure of courage in the Lincoln who 
 gave up politics in 1849 is of course too much for official biog- 
 raphy to be expected to consider. But it might perceive some- 
 thing besides pure devotion to the public weal in Lincoln's 
 return. That this successful provincial lawyer who had made 
 a name for conscientiousness should be deeply stirred when 
 politics took a turn that seemed to him wicked, was of course 
 quite what one would expect. And yet, was the Lincoln who 
 returned to the political arena the same who had withdrawn 
 from it? Was there not power in him in 1855 that was not in 
 him in 1849? May it not be that he had fled from his ambition 
 in an excess of self-distrust, just as in his love affair doubt of 
 
Lincoln 219 
 
 himself had led him for a time to forsake what he most desired? 
 And may not the new strength that had come to him have 
 revived the old ambition, blended it with his zeal for service, 
 and thus in a less explicit way than his biographers would have 
 us think, faced him back toward politics. Be that as it may, 
 his literary power, which took a bound forward in the excite- 
 ment following the Nebraska Bill, holds itself at a high level for 
 several years, and then suddenly enters into eclipse. Beginning 
 with the speech at Springfield on the Dred Scott case, including 
 the "house divided" speech, the Douglas speeches, and closing 
 with the Cooper Union speech in February, i860, there are a 
 dozen pieces of prose in this second manner of Lincoln's that 
 are all masterly. If they had closed his literary career we 
 should not, to be sure, particularly remember him today. In 
 his writing as in his statesmanship it was what he did after 
 fifty — the age he reached 12 February, 1859 — that secures his 
 position. None the less for surety of touch, for boldness, for 
 an austere serenity with no hint of self -distrust, these speeches 
 have no superiors among all his utterances, not even among the 
 few supreme examples of his final manner. Reading these 
 speeches it is hard to believe that this man in other moods had 
 tasted the very dregs of self -distrust, had known the bitterest 
 of all fear — that which rushes upon the dreamer from within, 
 that snatches him back from his opportunity because he doubts 
 his ability to live up to it. 
 
 The confident tone of these speeches makes all the more 
 bewildering the sudden eclipse in which this period ends. The 
 observer who reaches this point in Lincoln's career, having pon- 
 dered upon his previous hesitation, naturally watches the year 
 i860 with curious eyes, wondering whether 1841 and 1849 will 
 be repeated, whether the man of many minds will waver, turn 
 into himself, become painfully analytical, morbidly fearful, on 
 the verge of a possible nomination for the Presidency. But the 
 doubtfulness of the mystics — who, like Du Maurier's artists, 
 "live so many lives besides their own, and die so many deaths 
 before they die" — is not the same thing as the timidity of the 
 man afraid of his fate. Hamlet was not a coward. The impres- 
 sion which Lincoln had recently made upon the country was 
 a true impression — that he was a strong man. However, not 
 his policies, not his course of action, had won for Lincoln his 
 
220 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 commanding position in his party in i860, but his way of saying 
 things. In every revolution, there is a moment when the man 
 who can phrase it can lead it. Witness Robespierre. If the 
 phraser is only a man of letters unable to convert literature 
 into authority, heaven help him. Again witness Robespierre. 
 Although if we conclude that the average American in the 
 spring of i860 was able to read through Lincoln's way of hand- 
 ling words deep enough into his character to perceive his power 
 to handle men, we impute to the average American an insight 
 not justified by history, yet that average man was quite right 
 in hearing such an accent in those speeches of the second man- 
 ner as indicated behind the literary person a character that was 
 void of fear — at least, of what we mean by fear when thinking 
 of men of action. That Lincoln wanted the nomination, wel- 
 comed it, fought hard for his election, only the sentimental 
 devotees of the saint-hero object to admitting. Nor did his 
 boldness stop at that. Between the election and New Year's 
 Day, the secession of South Carolina and the debates in Con- 
 gress forced the Republicans to define their policy. The Presi- 
 dent-elect, of course, was the determining factor. Peace or war 
 was the issue. There is no greater boldness in American history 
 than Lincoln's calm but inflexible insistence on conditions that 
 pointed toward war. No amiable pacifism, no ordinary dread 
 of an issue, animated the man of the hour at the close of i860. 
 Then, in the later winter, between his determination Of the 
 new poUcy and his inauguration, came the eclipse. All the 
 questions roused in the past by his seasons of shadow, recur. 
 Was it superstition? Was it mystical premonition? Was there 
 something here akin to those periods of intense gloom that 
 overtook the Puritans of the seventeenth century? In a few 
 respects there are points of likeness between Lincoln and Crom- 
 well. In most respects, the two men are widely dissimilar. 
 But in their susceptibility to periodic and inexplicable over- 
 shadowing they are alike. With Cromwell, besides his mysti- 
 cism, there was a d^nite, an appalling dogma. Though Lincoln 
 did not carry the weight of Cromwell's dogma, perhaps the 
 essential thing was the same in both— the overwhelming, en- 
 compassing sense that, God being just and otir Father, human 
 suffering must somdiow be the consequence of our human sins. 
 Endow Cromwell with Lincoln's power of expression, and we 
 
Lincoln 221 
 
 can imagine him in one of his grand moments writing that piece 
 of superb humility, the Fast Day Proclamation. Again, was it 
 superstition, was it premonition, that created in Lincoln, as he 
 faced toward Washington, a personal unhappiness? No recol- 
 lection of Lincoln is more singular than one preserved by his 
 law partner with regard to this period of eclipse. He tells of 
 Lincoln's insistence that their sign should continue to hang over 
 the office door ; of his sad eagerness to have everyone understand 
 that his departure was not final; of his reiteration that some day 
 he would come back, that his business would be resumed in the 
 plain old oflfice just as if nothing had happened. 
 
 Lincoln was so absolutely the reverse of the rhetorician that 
 when he had nothing to say he could not cover up his emptiness 
 with a lacquer of images. Never his the florid vacuousness of 
 the popular orators of his day. When his vision deserted him, 
 his style deserted him. It is confidently asserted that he never 
 was able to press a law ease unless he wholly believed in it. 
 Strong evidence for the truth of the tradition is the obedience 
 of his style to the same law. It behaved in this way, the eclipse 
 being still upon him, when he was subjected to the misfortune of 
 having to speak out of the shadow, in February, 1861, on his 
 way to the inauguration. He could not escape this misfortune. 
 The notions of the time required the President-elect to talk all 
 the way from his home to the White House. This group of 
 speeches forms an interlude in Lincoln's development so strange 
 that the most psychological biographer might well hesitate to 
 attack its problem. As statecraft the speeches were ruinously 
 inopportune. Their matter was a fatuous assurance to the 
 country that the crisis was not really acute. As Uterature, his 
 utterances have Httle character. The force, the courage, the 
 confident note of the second manner had left him. His partisans 
 were appalled. One of the most sincere among them wrote 
 angrily "Lincoln is a Simple Susan." 
 
 And then, lightning-like, both as statecraft and as literature, 
 came the First Inaugural. Richard was himself again. He was 
 much more, he was a new Richard. The final manner appeared 
 in the First Inaugural. All the confident qualities of the second 
 manner are there, and with them something else. Now, at 
 last, reading him, we are conscious of beauty. Now we see 
 what the second manner lacked. Keen, powerful, full of char- 
 
222 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 acter, melodious, impressive, nevertheless it had not that 
 sublimation of all these, and with that the power to awaken the 
 imagination which, in argumentative prose, is beauty. 
 
 Lincoln had apparently passed through one of those inde- 
 scribable inward experiences — always, it seems, accompanied 
 by deep gloom — which in mystical natures so often precede a 
 rebirth of the mind. Psychology has not yet analyzed and 
 classified them. But history is familiar with a sufficient number 
 to be sure of their reality. Prom Saul agonizing in his tent to 
 Luther throwing his inkpot at the devil; from Cromwell wrest- 
 ling with the Lord to Lincoln striving to be vocal when his mind 
 was dumb — in a hundred instances there is the same range of 
 phenomena, the same spiritual night, the same amazing dawn. 
 
 And now the most interesting of the literary questions con- 
 cerning Lincoln presents itself. It is to be borne in mind that 
 he was essentially non-rhetorical. He towers out of the literary 
 murk of his day through his freedom from rhetoric. And 
 yet, pernicious as it is, mere rhetoricity has its base in genuine 
 artistic impulse. It is art perverted and made unreal, just 
 as sentimentality is sentiment perverted and made unreal. 
 And just as the vision of conduct which sentimentaUty per- 
 ceives — and spoils — ^is an essential to noble living, so the 
 vision of word-use which rhetoric perceives and spoils is es- 
 sential to literature. Hitherto Lincoln had been ultra-sensi- 
 tive to the spoiling done by rhetoricality. Had he been duly 
 sensitive to the vision which the word-jobbers of his day had 
 degraded to their own measure? It may be fairly doubted. 
 But hereafter, in the literary richness of the final manner, no 
 one can doubt the fulness and the range of his vision as an imag- 
 inative artificer in , words. Had any new influence, purely 
 literary entered into his life ? One hesitates to say , and yet there 
 is the following to consider. Lincoln submitted his First Inaug- 
 ural to Seward. Several of Seward's criticisms he accepted. 
 But Seward, never doubting that he was worth a dozen of the 
 President in a literary way, did not confine himself to criticism. 
 He graciously submitted a wholly new paragraph which Mr. 
 Lincoln might, if he cared to, use as peroration. It read: 
 
 I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow 
 countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds 
 
Lincoln 223 
 
 of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be 
 broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battle- 
 fields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and 
 all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize 
 in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel 
 of the nation. 
 
 One of the most precious pages in the sealed story of Lin- 
 coln's inner life would contain his reflections as he pondered 
 this paragraph. Deeply as he knew the hearts of men, here — ^in 
 spite of its lack of weight — ^was something that hitherto he had 
 not been able to use. The power of it in affecting men he must 
 have understood. If it could be brought within his own instru- 
 ment, assimilated to his own attitude, a new range would be 
 given to his effectiveness. Was he capable of assimilating it? 
 We do not know how he reasoned in this last artistic crisis; but 
 we do know what he did. He made Seward's paragraph his 
 own. Into the graceful but not masterly — the half-way rhetor- 
 ical — words of Seward he infused his own quality. He reorgan- 
 ized their feeble pattern by means of his own incomparable 
 sense of rhythm. The result was the concluding paragraph of 
 the First Inaugural: 
 
 I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must 
 not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not 
 break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretch- 
 ing from every battlefield and every patriot grave to every living 
 heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the 
 chorus of the Union when again touched as surely they will be, by 
 the better angels of our nature. 
 
 The final Lincoln, in the literary sense, had arrived. Though 
 an ultra-deUcate critic might find a subdivision of this final 
 period in the year 1862, the point is minute and hardly worth 
 making. During the four years remaining in his life, his style 
 has always the same qualities: flexibility, directness, pregnancy, 
 wealth. It is always applied art, never for an instant unfaithful 
 to the business in hand. Never for an instant does it incrust 
 the business, — as the rhetorician would do, — nor ever overlay 
 it with decoration. At the same time it contrives always to 
 compel the business to transact itself in an atmosphere that is 
 
224 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 the writer's own creation; an atmosphere in which great 
 thoughts are enriched by golden lustres, while ordinary thoughts 
 bear themselves as do poor souls transfigured, raised momen- 
 tarily to a level with the great by a passionate vision Of great 
 things. 
 
w 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Whitman 
 
 ALT WHITMAN once declared his Leaves of Grass to 
 be "the most personal of all books ever published." 
 
 This is no book; 
 Who touches this, touches a man. 
 
 Thus he fits Hazlitt's description of Montaigne as one who 
 dared to set down as a writer what he thought as a man. This 
 being the claim of the volume, it becomes highly important to 
 determine the character of the author. Evidently Whitman 
 was not, in any conventional sense of the term, that "average 
 man" whose praises he sang, else even his novel form of expres- 
 sion would hardly have stiificed to keep his poetry so long a 
 time from the masses. He was a man and a writer who could 
 be hated as an impostor or adored as a Messiah but who was 
 in any case a challenge to discussion. Much light is thrown 
 on his character, of course, by the autobiographical parts of 
 his writings; but here it is frequently difficult to determine 
 which incidents belong to his outward and which to his inner, 
 or imaginative, life, so deftly do his vicarious mystical experi- 
 ences blend with the sublimations of his own deeds, and so 
 carefully have many of those deeds been mystified or concealed. ' 
 
 ' For instance, a poem, Once I Pass'd Through' a Populous City, taken by many 
 biographers to support the theory that Whitman had a romance with a lady of high 
 social standing during his 1848 visit to New Orleans, proves to have been addressed, 
 in the original draft of the poem, not to a lady but to a "rude and ignorant man "; 
 
 « 225 
 
226 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Much remains for painstaking research to accomphsh. This 
 chapter attempts to set forth only the facts of his biography 
 which are well established or establishable. 
 
 Bom in the same year as Lowell, Whitman may be said to 
 represent the rgots and trunk of democracy, while Lowell 
 may be likened to its flowers or fruits. Whitman, for his 
 part, could hardly have been, or wished to be, a flower; it 
 was not in his ancestry, his education, or his environment. 
 Blending in his own nature the cotirage, the determination, 
 and the uncompromising Puritan idealism of good, if somewhat 
 decadent, Enghph ancestry with the placid slowness,^ self- 
 esteem, stubbornness, and mysticism of better Dutch (and 
 Quaker) ancestry, Walt^ Whitman was bom 31 May, i gjg, 
 at the hamlet of West Hills, a few miles south of Huntington, 
 Long Island. His father, Walter Whitman, was a farmer 
 and later a somewhat nomadic carpenter and moderately suc- 
 cessful housebuilder, who, ' although, like the poet's excellent 
 mother, he had even less education than their nine children 
 were destined to have, was something of a free thinker. The 
 Whitmans moved to Brooklyn about 1823-25,3 but Walt, 
 until he went to live in Washington during the Civil War, con- 
 tinued to be more or less under the wholesome influence of 
 the country. Throughout childhood, youth, and earlier man- 
 hood he retttmed to spend summers, falls, or even whole years 
 at various parts of the Island, either as a healthy roamer en- 
 joying aU he saw, or as a school-teacher, or as the editor of a 
 country paper, or as a poet reading Dante in an old wood 
 and Shakespeare, -^schylus, and Homer within sound of the 
 lonely sea, and mewing his strength for the bold flights of his 
 
 on the other hand, the poem Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd, to which no bio- 
 grapher has attached particular personal significance, can be shown to have been 
 addressed, about 1864, to a married woman with whom Whitman was in love and 
 with whom he maintained for a time a correspondence notwithstanding the 
 jealous objections of her husband. 
 
 " This description does not allow for a high temper, displayed on occasion, 
 which Whitman seems to have inherited from his father. 
 
 ^ Shortened from Walter to distinguish the son from his father, but not used 
 in connection with his published writings until 1855. 
 
 'The exact date is uncertain. Whitman gives 1822-3 once, 1823 twice, 1824 
 twice, and 1825 once; the earliest record in the directory of the city (Spooner) 
 is 1825. At any rate Whitman was probably accurate in his statement that he 
 was "still in frocks. " 
 
Whitman 227 
 
 fancy. Perhaps it was a certain disadvantage that while he 
 was thus "absorbing" and learning to champion the common 
 people, the "powerful uneducated persons," among whom 
 he moved on equal terms though not as an equal, he was 
 Uttle thrown, in any influential way, among people of refinement 
 or taste. In his old age nobility and common humanity 
 jostled each other in his hospitable little parlour — or kitchen ; 
 but during his youth the breadth of his view and the democracy 
 of his sympathy were somewhat limited, not so much in theory 
 as in fact, by the conditions that surrounded him. At the 
 same time his native "egotism," as he frankly calls what 
 Emerson would probably have softened to "self-reliance" 
 had it been a trifle less arrogant, was being abnormally devel- 
 oped, even for a genius, by conditions little fitted to correct it. 
 Nevertheless, he thus early learned lessons from nature and 
 from human nature which were as indispensable to the inspir- 
 ing and shaping of his liberating art and his democratic 
 philosophy as was his outdoor life in developing his remark- 
 ably sensitive and healthy physical constitution. 
 
 Whitman's youth in Brooklyn, though full of interest, was 
 uneventful. As a child of six he was flattered by Lafayette's 
 chancing to lay his hands on him during a visit to the city 
 in 1825. He attended the public school for a few years, im- 
 pressing his teacher, Benjamin Buel Halleck, only with his 
 good nature, his clumsiness, and his poverty of special promise. 
 He ran with the boys of the street and was famUiar with the 
 city and its environs, especially with Fulton Ferry, whose 
 slip was not far from his home. Not Irving, not Charles 
 Lamb was more intimately or passionately fond of city 
 life, with its opportunities for human contact and for varied 
 sights, than was Whitman, both as boy and man. When 
 about eleven years old he left school to become an office-boy, 
 first to a lawyer and then to a doctor, the former of whom 
 kindly afforded him opportunities for reading such books as 
 the Arabian Nights and the poetry and romances of Scott. 
 At twelve he was learning to set type, in a building once used 
 as Washington's headquarters, under the instruction of a 
 veteran printer who had many tales to tell of Revolutionary 
 heroism. Next he went to set type for a few dollars a week 
 on Aldin Spooner's Star. He had already felt the satisfaction 
 
228 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 of authorship when "sentimental bits" had appeared from 
 his pen in the newspapers. Later he became a compositor 
 on unknown journals in New York. 
 
 In May, 1836, Whitman went down to his father's farm at 
 Hempstead, and then began a wandering career as a well-liked 
 but not altogether successful country school-teacher. He 
 taught somewhat after the fashion of the transcendentalists, 
 substituting moral suasion for the f ertde, and ' ' boarding round ' ' 
 in at least seven different districts in Queens and Suffolk 
 counties, but seldom remaining more than a few months at 
 any one school. His mind was but half on his work, and after 
 two years of teaching he sought Qune, 1838), a more congenial 
 occupation in starting a village newspaper. The Long Islander, 
 at Huntington. On this he did all the work, even to deliver- 
 ing the papers on horseback; but he did it so irregularly that 
 in less than a year his financial backers entrusted the little 
 sheet to more punctual hands. Again teaching had to be 
 resorted to. When living at Jamaica (1839-41) Whitman 
 spent some of his time, apparently after school hours, in learn- 
 ing the printing business in the office of James J. Brenton's 
 Long Island Democrat, to the pages of which he contributed a 
 considerable number of sketches and essays replete with juvenile 
 philosophy, as well as a number of patriotic and sentimental 
 poems in conventional measures. The poet's tendency to 
 dream — to loaf and invite his soul — to the neglect of more 
 earthly duties, a tendency that was to become a tradition 
 wherever he thereafter worked, had already marked him as an 
 unusual person. He was even then dreaming of composing 
 a ponderous and prophetic book to teach men, among other 
 things, the danger of riches. The Quaker's attitude toward 
 truth and the mystic's attitude toward nature were already 
 discernible in his writings. But his life was unhappy, fuU of 
 irresolution and unrest, and frequently given to a morbid 
 brooding on death, while his enormous capacity for sentimental 
 friendship, equalled only by his capacity for taking delight in 
 external nature, had already taught him to sing of imretumed 
 affection, and drove him, no doubt, to take refuge, like 
 Narcissus, in self-admiration. Yet he took part in the sports 
 and merry-makings of the village and was interested in the 
 political campaigns of the day, himself attaining some promi- 
 
Whitman 229 
 
 nence as a stump speaker in Queens County and even in New 
 York City. 
 
 Then, in the summer of 1841, he definitely and finally threw 
 in his lot with the city, and the second important period of his 
 development began. Heretofore the highly sensitive youth 
 had been almost ladylike in his sentiments, often morbid in his 
 contrary moods, but puritanically strict in word and deed. At 
 twenty-two his passionate nature demanded a sort of reaction. 
 He "sounded aU experiences of life, with aU their passions, 
 pleasures, and abandonments, " ' and became, in another sphere 
 of indulgence, something of a dandy. He was developing his 
 personality meanwhile, and he was learning to write. 
 
 . Whitman's early pieces written in New York reflect the 
 wave of sentimentality which was, in the forties, sweeping over 
 the country, and display, along with their humanitarian feeling, 
 a fondness for melodramatic extravagance which c&,used him 
 later to wish them all ' ' quietly dropp'd in oblivion. ' ' He was a 
 reformer pleading for the aboHtion of intemperance (including 
 the use of tobacco, tea, and coffee), of capital punishment, and 
 of slavery; and urging, as the constructive side of his reform, 
 the need of a native American drama, opera, and literature. 
 His intergst_in„the Jheatre and the opCTa was a^ vital one, the 
 constant satisfaction of which was made possible by his having 
 a pressman's pass. Here he received many hints for his de- 
 clamatory and rhythmical style of verse. Altogether more 
 than a score of tales, sketches, essays, and poems have been 
 found which belong to this period. To these must be added a 
 crude and hasty dime novelette, Franklin Evans, ^ addressed, 
 in the cause of temperance, not to the "critics" but to "the 
 PEOPLE," and evidently written to order. In this period Whit- 
 man was connected with some of the best city magazines and 
 newspapers as contributor, compositor, or editor. The most 
 important position that he held was that of editor of The Daily 
 
 ' John Burroughs, in Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, 1867, p. 81. 
 The substance, if not the phrasing, of this indefinite though suggestive passage 
 was supplied by Whitman liimself . 
 
 * This was republished, in compressed form, tmder the caption Fortunes of a 
 Country Boy, by J. R. S. in The Brooklyn Eagle (November, 1846) as an "original 
 novel. " Death in the School Room, The Child's Champion, Little Jane, The Death 
 of Wind- Foot, and a few poems were similarly twice published by Whitman, in 
 tiie lax. fashion of the day. 
 
230 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 [and Weekly] Brooklyn Eagle, a connection which extended from 
 February, 1846, to January, 1848, when a "row with the boss, " 
 on account of Whitman's unreliability, and with "the party," 
 on account of his progressive Barnburner politics, made it 
 necessary for him to shift for a new position. This was 
 readily found on The Daily Crescent, a paper about to be 
 launched in New Orleans. 
 
 The trip which, with his favourite brother Jeff, Whitman 
 made in the spring of 1848 by rail, stage, and Mississippi steam- 
 boat to New Orleans, his residence in that city for three months, 
 and his return by way of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes' 
 were rather less important than has commonly been supposed. 
 It is doubtful whether the experience brought into his life a 
 great but secret romance, ^ and it appears certain that he was 
 not by it first made conscious of his mission as a poetic prophet. 
 But the journey did give him a new and permanent respect' 
 for the undeveloped possibilities of his country, especially in the 
 South and West, and it gave him opportunities for the study of 
 the French and Spanish elements in New Orleans ; while his ob- 
 servation of the South's "peculiar institution" caused him to 
 remain, though a radical Free-Soiler, one careful not to be classed 
 with the Abolitionists. But if this journey was of only meas- 
 urable importance, perhaps" others were of greater; for, though 
 details are almost entirely unknown, it is practically certain 
 that he made still other visits to the South. ' 
 
 Notwithstanding the attractiveness that the new atmos- 
 phere had for all that was Southern in Whitman's tempera- 
 ment, he soon haughtily resigned his position, because of a 
 
 'Whitman's fullest and best account of the trip south was printed in the 
 early numbers of the Crescent. This was not preserved in his collected prose edi- 
 tions, but a considerable portion of it was reprinted in The Yale Review, September, 
 
 1915- 
 
 ^ Whitman never married. In old age he confided to John Addington 
 
 Symonds the information that, though unmarried, he had had six children, from 
 intimate relations with whom he had been prevented by circumstances '"con- 
 nected with their fortune and benefit." For a fuller discussion of this confession 
 and the questions arising out of it than is here possible the reader is referred to the 
 biographies by Binns, Perry, Edward Carpenter, Bazalgette, De Sflincourt, and 
 Traubel. 
 
 5 Several lines of evidence point to this conclusion. Here it will be sufficient 
 to refer to Whitman's autobiographical note published in The Critic, 28 February, 
 1885, over the pseudonym "George Selwyn." 
 
Whitman 231 
 
 diflEerence with his employers, and left for home 27 May. 
 Almost immediately after his arrival he was engaged by Judge 
 Samuel E. Johnson to edit (and nominally to own) a new Free- 
 Soil paper, the weekly' Brooklyn Freeman, as the organ of those 
 Democrats with whom Whitman, but not the party leaders 
 behind the Eagle, had sympathized the year before. The new 
 paper appeared 9 September, but it had the hard fortune to be 
 burnt out, with no insurance, in a great conflagration that 
 swept the city that very night. But the Freeman was revived 
 in November, and, though a small and apparently a very out- 
 spoken sheet, it attained a large circulation. The nature of the 
 political warfare in those days of personal invective may be 
 suggested by Whitman's valedictory, pubhshed when, without 
 explanation, he resigned the paper, 11 September, 1849, into 
 the hands of those who would compromise, as he would not, 
 with his political opponents : 
 
 To those who have been my. friends, I take occasion to proffer 
 the warmest thanks of a grateful heart. My enemies — and old 
 hunkers generally — I disdain and defy the same as ever. 
 
 Of the next six years of Whitman's life comparatively little 
 is known. He is said to have been connected with certain 
 newspapers,^ to have run a book-store and printing establish- 
 ment, and to have assisted his aging father, now suffering from 
 paralysis, in building small houses for sale. He had here an 
 opportunity for money-making which, to the disappointment 
 of the family, he allowed to pass unimproved. What is more 
 important, he was growing rapidly in his inner life, as he at- 
 tended lectures, read miscellaneous magazine articles, Shake- 
 speare, Epictetus, the Hebrew and the Hindoo bibles, and 
 Emerson, and loafed on the shores of Coney Island, timing the 
 new poetry he was composing to the rhythmic beat of the sea. 
 Somewhere in this period probably belongs the mystical ex- 
 perience, described in the poem Song of Myself, Section 5, 
 
 ' Changed to a daily in April, 1849. ^ 
 
 ^ An article in the Springfield Republican, 28 March, 1892, states that Whitman 
 helped to edit Levi D. Slamm's Plebeian; and a letter from Whitman's friend, 
 T. H. Rome, the first printer of the Leaves of Grass, to Wm. E. Benjamin (Sep- 
 tember, 1898) mentions the fact that after his return from New Orleans Whitman 
 conducted for a short time an advertising sheet called The Salesman. See also 
 Heame's city directory for 1851 and 1852. 
 
232 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 which clarified his vision "of the world as love" and fused his 
 purposes in life, and which some biographers, attaching to it 
 more significance than did Whitman himself and forgetting 
 that he had other such experiences, are inclined to consider the 
 most important fact in his biography. At any rate, the book of 
 which he had dreamed since adolescence and of which he had 
 as early as 1847' written many passages was now, in 1854-5, 
 written and rewritten, and printed in Brooklyn, without a 
 publisher, in July, 1855. 
 
 The purpose of the author in writing this unique volume 
 may be stated in his own comprehensive words, written in 1876: 
 
 I dwelt on Birth and Life, clothing my ideas in pictures, days, 
 transactions of my time, to give them positive place, identity — 
 saturating them with the vehemence of pride and audacity of free- 
 dom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form 'd America from 
 the folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling 
 anti-democratic authorities of Asiatic and European past — ^my en- 
 closing purport being to express, above all artificial regulation and 
 aid, the eternal Bodily Character of One's-Self . 
 
 The plan for his poetic life-work was to have been completed, 
 he tells us in the Preface to the 1876 edition, by composing 
 
 a further, equally needed volume, based on those convictions of 
 perpetuity and conservation which, enveloping all precedents, 
 make the unseen soul govern absolutely at last. 
 
 The perfecting of this latter work, dealing with the soul and 
 immortality, had proved beyond his powers and failing health, 
 but a fair idea of what it meant to set forth is to be found, no 
 doubt, in The Two Rivulets (1876). 
 
 If Emerson's American Scholar address was the intel- 
 lectual declaration of American independence, this first 
 edition of Leaves .of Grass, though only a thin imperial 
 octavo of ninety-five pages with a hastily written but 
 vigorous and far-sighted explanatory preface, was j;he„_first^ 
 gun in a major campaign of the war that was to win that 
 
 'A Whitman manuscript notebook in the possession of Thomas B. 
 Hamed, one of the poet's friends and literary executors, preserves these earliest 
 known specimens of modem free verse. They have recently been published by 
 the present writer in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Wait Whitman (1921). 
 
Whitman 233 
 
 independence. Of the form taken by so audacious a mes- 
 sage space is wanting for accurate description. It may be 
 said, however, that, denying to itself rhyme, regular metre, 
 stanza forms, literary allusions, and "stock 'poetical' touches" 
 in general, it frequently achieved, nevertheless, a deep and 
 satisfying rhythm of its own — sometimes pregnant gnomic 
 utterances, sometimes a chant or recitative, occasionally a burst 
 of pure lyricism. Just where, if anywhere, "Whitman found the 
 hint for this flexible prose-poetic form critics have not agreed. 
 Perhaps Biblical prosody, Ossian, the blank verse of Shakespeare 
 and Bryant, the writings of Blake, the prose of Carlyle and 
 Emerson, and his own impassioned declamation all assisted; 
 but full allowance must be made for the unquestioned original- 
 ity of his own genius, working slowly but courageously for the 
 fuller liberation of song. ' 
 
 The book, expecting opposition, was met by almost com- 
 plete disregard. Except for a few copies which found their way 
 to England and were later to secure for Whitman ardent dis- 
 ciples and his first English editor, WiUiam Michael Rossetti,' 
 there was practically no sale. Most of the reviews in the peri- 
 odicals that noticed the book at all were as scandalized as 
 had been anticipated; but a highly congratulatory letter 
 from Emerson, who evidently recognized in Whitman the 
 disciple he then professed to be, compensated for all neglect or 
 abuse from other quarters, and a sentence from it was put to 
 good, if indelicate, use as advertising on the back of the second 
 edition (1856), a volume much larger than the first and more 
 open to criticism because of its attempt to combat prudery in 
 America by a naturalistic but fragmentary treatment of the 
 facts of sex. Of this patent and confessed indebtedness to 
 
 ' In one of the anonymous reviews which Whitman saw fit to write, in 1855, 
 of his own first edition, he disclaims any model: "The style of these poems, there- 
 fore, is simply their own style, just bom and red. Nature may have given the 
 hint to the author of 'Leaves of Grass,' but there esdsts no book or fragment of a 
 book which can have given the hint to them. " In Re Walt Whitman, p. 16. 
 
 The first poem known to have been published in this measure was Blood-Money, 
 which appeared in Horace Greeley's Tribune (Supplement), 22 March, 1850. But 
 Isle of La Belle Riviire, published in the Cindimati Post, 30 April, 1892, was writ- 
 ten, in what is now called imagist verse, at the age of thirty (1849-50), while New 
 Year's Day, 1848, written in an album just before Whitman's departure for New 
 Orleans, shows a tendency to break away from conventional forms. By far more 
 important are the Harned manuscript notebook specimens already mentioned. 
 
234 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Emerson, who had brought the simmering pot of Whitman's 
 literary and patriotic ambition to a boil, Whitman had no 
 cause to feel ashamed; for though lacking Emerson's sanity 
 and mature idealism, he had a greater sympathetic, active, 
 and emotional equipment than had the Concord sage. If 
 Whitman was, as he said, "a child, very old, " Emerson was a 
 man, very young. It was almost as if the older champion of 
 individuality had meditated the philosophy by which the 
 younger was to Hve; but whereas the Emersonian gospel, ad- 
 dressing itself to the idealism of its readers, "breeds the giant 
 which destroys itself, " Whitmanism, appealing strongly to the 
 religious sentiment, has already had the ironical fate of developing 
 something not unlike a cult, both at home and in other countries. 
 
 Of course such a book failed to bring in royalties, and 
 Whitman again fell back on the drudgery of editing a newspaper, 
 in this instance the bantling Daily Times (Brooklyn). Just 
 when this editorship began (1856 or 1857) is not easily deter- 
 mined, but it ended probably in the early part of 1859, after 
 the editor had repeatedly rebuked certain church officials for 
 the, as he thought, unfair treatment they had accorded to 
 one Judge Culver, then the defendant in an ecclesiastical trial. 
 At odd times Whitman wrote the new poems, including that 
 incomparable Ijnric, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, which 
 appeared now and then in the pages of the Bohemian Saturday 
 Press, and the many others which were to be included in the 
 i860 edition of the Leaves. The country was full of lecturers 
 in 1858, and Whitman planned to become one, both to support 
 himself and to supplement the Leaves, which could hardly as yet 
 have been called a success. But though he disciplined himself 
 in a style of oratory only less novel than that of his poetry, 
 writing "barrels of lectures" on religion, democracy, language, 
 aesthetics, and politics, and though the desire thus to present his 
 message in a more personal fashion than any sort of authorship, 
 even his own, could afford, persisted throughout life, only a few 
 memorial addresses — such as the tribute to Lincoln — and a few 
 public readings of his own poems written for college commence- 
 ments or other special occasions ever came of it. 
 
 Meanwhile Whitman was widening the circle of his ac- 
 quaintance. Emerson not only called on him frequently when 
 in the city but sent Alcott, Moncure Conway, and Thoreau to 
 
Whitman 235 
 
 do likewise. Lord Houghton also came, and Bryant crossed 
 the river to share with him long walks into the country. These 
 were the days of Whitman's Bohemianism. A negligent, 
 open-throated attire and great soft hat that one might associate 
 with a carpenter or a sailor he insisted on wearing, Richter-like, 
 wherever he went. In the earlier years of his journalism he had 
 worn a high hat, cane, and boutonnidre; now the dandy had 
 given place to a man dressed in a habit more in keeping with 
 his new r61e as the national bard of democracy en masse. The 
 affectations in his dress were, however, of less importance than 
 the inner character of the man. And that character was one 
 of great human sympathy and magnetism, possessing a charm 
 which those who felt it most were least able to explain. He 
 spent, as from childhood he had done, much time among the 
 people — ^boatmen, pilots, omnibus drivers, mechanics, fishermen 
 — going anywhere to "feed his hunger for faces. " He visited 
 prisons, attended the sick in hospitals, drove all one winter 
 the stage of a disabled driver, and mingled as a meditative 
 observer among the liberal-minded and light-hearted Bohe- 
 mians at Pfafl's restaurant. In i860 he went to Boston and 
 published, through Thayer and Eldridge, his third edition, full 
 of the echoes of this life, in which he had not always been a 
 mere observer. Until the war drove its publishers to the wall, 
 the book had a fair sale. The poems of two new groups — 
 Enf(mi.diAdam, celebrating the love, usually physiological, 
 between the sexes, and Calamus, celebrating that "adhesive- 
 ness" or "manly attachment" which Whitman then considered 
 the true cement of a democracy — ^have in the past provoked 
 much severe criticism and indignant defence, and the former 
 were the occasion, at various times, of a threatened official 
 prosecution, of a temporary exclusion of the book from the 
 mails, and of the author's being dismissed from a government 
 clerkship. Emerson had urged Whitman to be more tactful 
 and worldly-wise, but the latter's inner conviction that he was 
 right and his stubborn determination to go ahead in the chosen 
 course blinded him to the value of tact and condemned him to 
 suffer from a reputation that he did not really deserve. What- 
 ever may be the true interpretation of these poems, one finds it 
 difficult to understand either the character or the writings of 
 Whitman unless one's eye is kept on the chronology of his pub- 
 
236 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Hcations, a feat which his method of grouping has rendered rather 
 difficult; for he was a growth, as his poems were, in which a 
 heroic and loving soul gradually freed itself from the passions of a 
 very human and earthly body. His reaction from the asceticism 
 of his adolescence was strong, tumultuous, almost tragic, but it 
 was only a reaction ; and when the war had passed over him with 
 its purification and its pain, and when he had suffered severely 
 in his personal affections, he sang more and more of the soul. 
 
 Whitman's optimistic faith in democracy was put to the 
 severest possible test by the outbreak of the Civil War. But he 
 did not come into personal touch with its heroic and pathetic 
 sides until, in December, 1862, he went down to the front at 
 Fredericksburg to look after his younger brother, an officer in 
 a volunteer regiment, who had received a slight wound in battle. 
 Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities Whitman had begun 
 writing (June, 1861) for the weekly Brooklyn Standard a serial 
 history of the city, entitled Brooklyniana, based on his own re- 
 miniscences, his conversations with older citizens, and his rather 
 desultory historical reading. He had likewise been composing 
 a few of the vivid war poems in Drum-Taps. But as the war 
 became more serious he suspended this writing and took a 
 loitering trip through many of his old haunts on Long Island, 
 fashing, sailing, meeting people in the unceremonious manner of 
 the country, and doubtless pondering the gloomy problems of 
 the war. The early Whitman, so inadequately reported in the 
 biographies, was preparing to give place to the well-known 
 serious and noble Whitman of the Washington hospitals; and 
 this leisurely visit was, one chooses to think, a farewell to the 
 light-hearted irresponsibility of his protracted youth. Return- 
 ing to Brooklyn in the fall, he took up the Brooklyniana again 
 and occupied himself with it almost until the accident to George 
 Whitman called hkn to the Virginia battle-field. 
 
 Thence he casually drifted into the finest employment of his 
 life, that of caring for sick and wounded soldiers on the field and, 
 especially, in the many military hospitals in and about Washing- 
 ton. He lived frugally, supporting himself for a time by doing 
 copjdng' and by contributing wonderftdly vivid sketches of his 
 
 ' It is probable that Whitman had been reduced to the necessity of doing copy- 
 ing before, for the Brooklyn city directory (Lain) for i860 gives "Walt Whitman, 
 copyist." 
 
Whitman 237 
 
 experiences to the Brooklyn Eagle and Union and the New York 
 Times. ' To supply the little comforts and necessities of the hun- 
 dred thousand soldiers, Northern and Southern, to whom, as he 
 estimated, he ministered courage and cheer, he privately raised 
 several thousand dollars from friends and correspondents in the 
 North. When he obtained a salaried position in 1865, a gener- 
 ous portion of his earnings went into the same fund. But 
 chiefly he gave himself, in undisguised affection. The full 
 tenderness, almost motherliness, of this large-hearted, self- 
 sacrificing man can be fully understood only in the modest but 
 realistic account of his daily activities preserved in the letters 
 written to his mother at the time and in the hospital-notebook 
 jottings printed in Specimen Days. It woiold be a questionable 
 service to Whitman to affirm that these three years of slow mar- 
 tyrdom sanctified the whole of his life; but it is literally true 
 that the deepest and best instincts in him never before had 
 fotmd such full and beautiful expression. Partly, at least, as 
 a result of his hospital service his magnificent health was lost, 
 and the last-twenty years of his life were those of a paralytic 
 cripple. 
 
 ""Whitman's poetic power was stiU at its height. Drum-Taps, 
 — the poetic complement to Specimen Days and The Wound- 
 Dresser, — a booklet charged with the pathos and the spirituality 
 of the war, was published in 1865, with the profotmdly moving 
 dirge for the martyred Lincoln. In Democratic Vistas (1871) 
 he made use of prose, though with unequal success. 
 
 This period was also important because of the friendships 
 that it made or fostered. Perhaps the most important was 
 that with William Douglas O'Connor. When, in 1865, Whit- 
 man had been employed for several months in the Interior 
 Department under Secretary Harlan, the latter, on learning that 
 he was the author of Leaves of Grass, had him summarily dis- 
 missed; then O'Connor came to his friend's defence in a bril- 
 liant and passionate, though lU-advised, polemic, The Good 
 Gray Poet, the title of which gave the bard a fit and enduring 
 sobriquet. The advertising value of such a polemic, or of such 
 an incident, though it was rated highly by Whitman and by 
 some of his friends, may now be questioned. Thanks to such 
 
 ' Most of these letters were reprinted in Specimen Days or in The Wound- 
 Dresser. 
 
238 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 staunch friends, however, Whitman was soon settled, for the 
 eight following years, in a comfortable clei;kshi£ in the 
 Attorney-General's Department. Another close'friend and 
 enthusiastic fisciple then and later was John RurrQi3ghs,_ wh.o - 
 pub]ishedjn.i867Jj3afetldQgraphicaland criticd study oflhe- — 
 _ppet. An attachment more similar to those of the New York 
 days was Whitman's singular friendship for Eete^oylejjin un- 
 schooled young Confederate soldier, now a street-car conductor, 
 with whom, notwithstanding the disparity in their ages and in- 
 terests, the poet spent much of his leisure time. To him Whit- 
 man wrote the letters which were, after his death, published by 
 one of his literary executors under the appropriate title Calamus. 
 But this comfortable and congenial life was destined to a sud- 
 den end. Just when Whitman was beginning to make literary 
 friends abroad — Rudolf Schmidt in Denmark, Freiligrath in Ger- 
 many, Madame Blanc in Prance, Edward Dowden in Ireland, 
 and in England William Rossetti, Swinburne,' Robert Bu- 
 chanan, Roden Noel, John Addington Symonds, Tennyson, and 
 Anne Gilchrist — and when he was beginning to become some- 
 what favourably known abroad through Rossetti's expurgated 
 selection. Poems by Walt Whitman (1868), and through frag- 
 mentary translations in Continental countries, an attack of 
 paralysis (January, 1873) compelled him first to suspend and 
 finally to give up his clerical work. Taking his savings, enough 
 to tide him over the first few years of invalidism, he went to Hve 
 with his brother. Colonel George Whitman, in Camden, New 
 Jersey. A leisurely trip to Colorado in 1879, a longer one to 
 Canada in the following year, and various briefer visits and 
 lecture journeys — ^now to New York, now to visit his friend Bur- 
 roughs at his home on the Hudson, now to his own Long Island 
 birthplace, but oftenest to recuperate and to write charming 
 nature descriptions at his retreat on Timber Creek — except for 
 these furloughs Whitman was to spend the remainder of his 
 days, and to be buried, in Camden. In March, 1884, he bought 
 a little house (328 Mickle Street, now 330) with the proceeds 
 from the very successful Philadelphia edition of the Leaves in 
 1882. 
 
 This period, the final act of Whitman's unique life, was natur- 
 
 " Swinburne, who had in Songs before Sunrise hailed Whitman as a new force 
 In literature, considerably retracted his prase in later publications. 
 
Whitman 239 
 
 ally not a climax of achievement, though it was a severe test of 
 his patience and optimism, a test which, on the whole, he stood 
 with unassuming courage. He sent forth occasional contribu- 
 tions to various American and British magazines and news- 
 papers, besides new editions of his works. The most notable 
 of these latter was the autographed Centennial or Author's 
 Edition in two volumes of prose and verse (1876), designed to 
 be sold in England, his best market, in order to relieve the 
 straitened circumstances of the author, who was then "para- 
 lyzed . . . poor . . . expecting death," and who had been 
 fleeced by his New York publishers; Specimen Days and Colled 
 (1882-3), a "diary of an invalid," which contains some of 
 Whitman's most characteristic prose and is a storehouse of 
 autobiographical data; and Nqsgmber Boughs (1888), contain- 
 ing reprints of short poems that Whitman had been writing 
 regtdarly for the New York Herald and of miscellaneous prose 
 essays that had appeared elsewhere, the most significant of 
 these being A Backwc^^Clance O'er Travel' dJELoads. 
 
 New friends were made, as faithful as the old. One was Dr. 
 Richard Maurice Bucke^ f Canada, who, like Burroughs, hailed 
 the Leaves of .G?:a5i„as^lthe-.ifiHe. of jigtsesaSi" and wrote 
 (i 883) the first comprehensive biography of its author, to set him 
 forth as a mystical saviour of the modern world. Another was 
 Thomas B. Harned^Jn whose hospitable home the poet met, 
 diuing these later years, not a few American and foreign 
 notables. A third was Horace Traubel.who luitil Whitman's 
 death was his daily visitor, who, mthout pay, assisted him in 
 his dealings with printers and publishers, and who has for some 
 years been publishing a minute diary of his talks with the poet 
 during 1888-92. These three friends became, by Whitman's wUl, 
 his literary e^utors. Space is wanting to mention even the most 
 prominent of that host of other visitors, American and foreign, 
 who made Camden the object of their pilgrimages, some with 
 a selfish desire to secure the poet's bold autograph, others with 
 a reverent wish to pay homage to a liberator of the soul. One 
 of the most sincere and unreserved of these tributes was that 
 proffered by Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, the English author (then a 
 widow), who through his poetry came to love the man ' and who 
 
 ' The love-letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman have been edited and 
 published by Thomas B. Hamed. 
 
240 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 later with her children spent two years (1876-1878) in Phila- 
 delphia in order to be near him. Assistance of a substantial 
 nature from abroad, due in part to the efforts of Mrs. Gilchrist, 
 who had been the first woman to defend the Children 0/ Adam 
 poems in print, together with s imil ar if somewhat later help 
 from a growing number of friends and readers in America, 
 lightened the burdens of Whitman's last years, affording him 
 comforts that would otherwise have been denied him and giv- 
 ing him hope that the tide of disapproval and misunderstand- 
 ing which he had been breasting for half a lifetime was beginning 
 at last to turn. When a complication of maladies finally re- 
 sulted in his death, 26 Mardi, 1892, he had "positively ap- 
 peared, " a prophet and a poet not without honour even in his 
 own country. He was buried, with tmique but impressive 
 ceremony, beside a number of near relatives, in a massive and 
 costly tomb which he had bmlt for the purpose the preceding 
 year. Most of his property, valued at a few thousand doUars, 
 was left for the support of an imbecile brother, to care for whom 
 Whitman had for many years saved money from his own 
 small income. 
 
 The influence of Whitman has in the past taken three 
 directions. Those of his readers who, like himself, attach most 
 significance to the revolutionary and the rehgious elements in 
 his writings have naturally been somewhat indifferent as to 
 whether a place could be found for Whitman among the recog- 
 nized literary coteries. To them he has been a seer profound 
 enough and a lover sincere enough to render ordinary literary 
 criticism an impertinence — unless such criticism would content 
 itself with mere exegesis. On the other hand a growing number 
 of readers have seen in Whitman — quite aside from a person- 
 ality which, for aU its philosophical breadth and its friendly 
 sweetness, was hampered by an occasionally repellent senti- 
 mental egotism and a marked deficiency in taste — a geniiine 
 artist and a true poet. AU manner of Hberal political, socio- 
 logical, and religious movements have been fathered on Whitman 
 the seer and prophet; while Whitman the poet has become the 
 legitimate founder of the various forms of modem free verse. 
 Criticism that confounds this twofold claim and this twofold 
 appeal of Whitman's writings is destined to make little pro- 
 gress, as is also that criticism which considers the two methods 
 
Whitman 241 
 
 of approach to be necessarily exclusive. Still a third class of 
 readers, uninterested in poets or prophets, as such, have gone 
 to Whitman for the refreshing presence of a man and a writer 
 who was entirely himself and who loved nature and his feUow 
 men. 
 16 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The New Nation 
 
 I, Mark Twain 
 
 SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, more widely known 
 as Mark Twain, was of the "bully breed" which Whit- 
 man had prophesied. Writing outside "the genteel 
 tradition, " he avowedly sought to please the masses, and he 
 was elected to his high place in American literature by a tre- 
 mendous popular vote, which was justified even in the opinion 
 of severe critics by his exhibition of a masterpiece or so not 
 unworthy of Le Sage or Cervantes. Time will diminish his 
 bulk as it must that of every author of twenty-five volumes; 
 but the great public which discovered him still cherishes most 
 of his books; and his works, his character, and his career have 
 now, and will continue to have, in addition to their strictly 
 literary significance, a large illustrative value, which has been 
 happily emphasized by Albert Bigelow Paine's admirable 
 biography and collection of letters. Mark Twain is one of our 
 great representative men. He is a fulfilled promise of Ameri- 
 can life. He proves the virtues of the land and the society in 
 which he was bom and fostered. He incarnates the spirit of 
 an epoch of American history when the nation, territorially 
 and spiritually enlarged, entered lustily upon new adventures. 
 In the retrospect he looms for us with Whitman and Lincoln, 
 recognizably his countrymen, out of the shadows of the Civil 
 War, an unmistakable native son of an eager, westward- 
 moving people — unconventional, self-reliant, mirthful, profane, 
 
 242 
 
Mark Twain 243 
 
 realistic, cynical, boisterous, popular, tender-hearted, touched 
 with chivalry, and permeated to the marrow of his bones with 
 1;he sentiment of democratic society and with loyalty to Ameri- 
 can institutions. 
 
 By his birth at Florida, Missouri, 30 November, 1835, he 
 was a Middle-Westerner; butByliis inheritance from the rest- 
 less, sanguine, unprosperous Virginian, his father, who had 
 drifted with his family and slaves through Kentucky and 
 Tennessee, he was a bit of a Southerner and still more of a mi- 
 grant and a seeker of fortune. His boyhood he spent in the 
 indolent semi-Southern town of Hannibal, Missouri, which, as 
 he fondly represents it, slept for the most part like a cat in the 
 sun, but stretched and rubbed its eyes when the Mississippi 
 steamboats called, teasing his imagination with hints of the 
 unexplored reaches of the river. When in 1847 his father died 
 in poverty brightened by visions of wealth from the sale of 
 his land in Tennessee, the son was glad to drop his lessons and 
 go to work in the office of the Hannibal Journal. There, 
 mainly under his visionary brother Orion, he served as printer 
 and assistant editor for the next six years, and in verse and 
 satirical skits made the first trials of his humour. In 1853, 
 having promised his mother with hand on the Testament "not 
 to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor, " he set out on an ex- 
 cursion into the world, and worked his way for three or four 
 years as printer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk, 
 and Cincinnati. 
 
 Through the winter of 1856-7 he pleased himself with a 
 project for making his fortune by collecting cocoa at the head- 
 waters of the Amazon; and in the spring of 1857 he actually 
 took passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans. But falling 
 into conversation with the pilot, Horace Bixby, he engaged him- 
 self with characteristic impulsiveness as an apprentice to that 
 exacting, admired, and, as it then seemed to him, magnificently 
 salaried king of the river. In return for five hundred dollars 
 payable out of his first wages Bixby undertook to teach him the 
 Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis so that he should 
 have it " by heart. " He mastered his twelve hundred miles of 
 shifting current, and became a licensed pilot. In the process 
 he acquired without the slightest consciousness of its uses 
 his richest store of literary material. 
 
244 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 "In that brief, sharp schooling," he wrote many years later, "I 
 got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types 
 of hviman nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or his- 
 tory. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, 
 I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that 
 I have known him before — met him on the river. " 
 
 This chapter of his expaience was ended abruptly by the out- 
 break of the Civil War and the closing of the river. His brief 
 and inglorious part in the ensuing conflict he has described, 
 with decorations, in his Private History of a Campaign that 
 Failed, a little work which indicates that he rushed to the aid 
 of the Confederacy without much conviction, and that two 
 weeks later he rushed away with still less regret. Eventually, 
 it should be remarked, General Grant became his greatest liv- 
 ing hero, and his attitude towards slavery became as passion- 
 ately Northern as that of Mrs. Stowe. 
 
 Meanwhile he went West. On 26 July, 1861 , he was sitting 
 on the mail-bags behind the six galloping horses of the over- 
 land stage headed for Carson City, Nevada, as assistant to his 
 brother Orion, who through the good offices of a friend in 
 Lincoln's cabinet had been appointed Territorial secretary. 
 On his arrival, finding himself without salary or duties, he 
 explored the mining camps and caught the prevailing passion 
 for huge quick wealth. First he bought "wild-cat" stock; 
 then he located a vast timber claim on Lake Tahoe; then he 
 tried quartz mining in the silver regions; prospected for gold 
 in the placer country; and, in daily expectation of striking it 
 fabulously rich, sank his brother's salary in the most promising 
 "leads." 
 
 That his claims did not "pan out" well is clear from his ac- 
 cepting in4862 a position as local reporter for the Virginia City 
 Enterprise at twenty-five dollars a week, having commended 
 himself to the editor by a series of letters signed "Josh." 
 Thus began his litfiraiy career. In reporting for this paper the 
 sessions of the Legislatu'fe-a-t Carson City he first employed 
 the signature "Mark Twain," a name previously used by a 
 pilot-correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune but ultimately 
 commemorating the leadsman's cry on the Mississippi. His 
 effervescent spirits, excited by the stirring and heroically con- 
 
Mark Twain 245 
 
 vivial life of a community of pioneers, found easy outlet in the 
 robust humour and slashing satire of frontier journalism. In 
 1863 Artemus Ward spent three glorious weeks revelling with 
 the newspaper men in Virginia City, recognized the talent of 
 Mark Twain, and encouraged him to send his name eastward 
 with a contribution to the New York Sunday Mercury. A 
 duel occasioned by some journalistic vivacities resulted in his 
 migration in 1864 to San Francisco, where in 1864 and 1865 
 he wrote for The Morning Call, The Golden Era, and The Cali- 
 fornian; and fraternized with the brilliant young coterie of 
 which Bret Harte was recognized as the most conspicuous light. 
 In a pocket-hunting excursion in January, 1865, he picked up a 
 very few nuggets and the nucleus for the story of Jim Smiley 
 and his Jumping Frog, which appeared in the New York Satur- 
 day Press in November and swiftly attained wide celebrity. 
 In the following spring he visited the Sandwich Islands on a '. 
 commission from the Sacramento Union, called upon his first , 
 king, explored the crater of Kilauea, struck up a friendship with ; 
 the American ministers to China and Japan, and made a great 
 "scoop" by interviewing a group of shipwrecked sailors in the '■ 
 hospital at Honolulu. Later he wrote up the story for Harper's 
 Magazine; his appearance there in 1866 he calls his dSbut as a 
 literary person. 
 
 Returning to San Francisco, he made his first appearance as 
 a humorous lecturer in a discourse on the Sandwich Islands, 
 delivered with his sober, inimitable, irresistible drawl to a 
 crowded and applausive house on the evening of 2 October, 
 1866. From this point his main course was determined. 
 Realizing that he had a substantial literary capital, he set out 
 to invest it so that it would in every sense of the word yield the 
 largest returns obtainable. To the enterprise of purvejdng 
 literary entertainment he, first in America, applied the wide- 
 ranging vision and versatile talents of our modem men of 
 action and captains of industry: collecting his "raw material," 
 distributing it around the world from the lecture platform, send- 
 ing it to the daily press, reworking it into book form, inventing 
 his own type-setting machinery, and controlling his own print- 
 ing, publishing, and selling agencies. He did not foresee this 
 all in 1866; but it must have begun to dawn upon him as a great 
 possibility. 
 
246 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 By repeating his Sandwich Islands lecture widely in Cali- 
 fornia and Nevada he provided himself with means to travel, 
 and revisited his home, returning by way of Panama and New 
 York. In May, 1867, he published his first book. The Cele- 
 brated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, 
 and lectured in Cooper Institute. Then on 8 June he sailed on 
 the Quaker City for a five months' excursion through the 
 Mediterranean to the Holy Land, first reported in letters to 
 The Alta-California and the New York Tribune, and immortal- 
 ized by his book Innocents Abroad. On 2 February, 1870, he 
 married his most sympathetic reader and severest censor, 
 Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, a sister of one of the 
 Quaker City pilgrims who had shown him her photograph in the 
 Bay of Smyrna. After a brief unprofitable attempt to edit a 
 newspaper in Buffalo, he naoved-injjSTJLtoJIaxtford^onnecti- 
 cut, and in 1874 built there the home in which he lived for the 
 next seventeen years experiencing, among many diversities of 
 outer fortune, the high adventures in the history of his genius. 
 It was there, or during this period, that he wrote his greatest 
 books and reached the full maturity of his humour and dramatic 
 energy. 
 
 He formed a close association with his neighbour Chartes 
 Dudley Warner; was taken under the editorial wing of William 
 Dean. JHowells and into his intimate friendship; contributed 
 Ito The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and The North 
 {American Review; and ultimately made some progress with 
 such festive New Englanders as O. W. Holmes, F. J. Child, 
 and T. B. Aldrich; but his head was white before he became as 
 much of a lion in Boston and New York as he had been in 
 Carson City and San Francisco. At various times he made 
 extended sojourns ia England, Italy, France, Germany, and 
 Austria, particularly in his later years in seasons of pecuniary 
 retrenchment. He reaped a fortune by contracting for the 
 publication of Grant's Memoirs and his royalties were steadily 
 large; but bad ventures in his publishing business, his some- 
 what lavish style of living, and his unperfected type-setting 
 machine, in which he sank $200,000, pushed him finally into 
 bankruptcy. He had extended his reputation, in 1873 by 
 lecturing for two months in London ; he made a big reading tour 
 with G. W. Cable in 1884-5; and in 1895, at the age of sixty, 
 
Mark Twain 247 
 
 disdaining the advantages of bankruptcy, he set out on a lectur- 
 ing tour of the world which took on something of the aspect 
 of a royal progress and ended in the triumphant discharge of all 
 his obligations. Then he collected another fortune and built 
 himself his mansion Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut. 
 
 In his last years he spent a good deal of time in New York 
 and Washington, and a variety of causes kept him pretty 
 steadily in the public eye as a figure of national interest : his 
 valiant^as.suniptiQn of his -debts, his great tour, his growing 
 habit of commenting on public affairs, the publication of sec- 
 tions of his autobiography, his domestic bereavements, and the 
 foreign tributes and honours which gradually assured his some- 
 what incredulous countrymen that he was a great man of 
 letters. His first academic recognition had come from Yale 
 University, which created him Master of Arts in 1888; in 
 1901 Yale and in 1902 the University of Missouri conferred 
 upon him the degree of Doctor of Letters; but the crowning 
 academic glory fell in 1907 when the University of Oxford called 
 him_acrosa the sea and robed him in scarlet and made him 
 Doctor of Literature, amid, as he noted, "a very satisfactory 
 hurrah " from the audience. On his return from a trip to the 
 Bermudas he died 21 April, 1910. 
 
 Mark Twain's literary independence is generally conceded. 
 Except for a certain flavour of Dickens in The Gilded Age there 
 is hardly an indication of any important relationship between 
 him and modern writers. He was a lover of the elemental in 
 the midst of the refinements of an English and an American 
 Victorian Age. " I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne 
 and those people," he said. "And as for 'The Bostonians,' I 
 would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read 
 that." Modem fiction generally impress^dhim asnamby-pam- 
 bj^ and artificial. Jane Austen was his pet abhorrence, but he 
 also detested Scott, primarily for his Toryism, and he poked 
 fun atj Cooper for his inaccuracies. His taste for books was 
 eminently masculine. The literary nourishment of his style 
 he appears to have found chiefly in history, travel, biography, 
 and such works of imagination as one puts on a ' 'five-foot shelf " 
 — Shakespeare and the Bible, Suetonius's Lives of The CcBsars, 
 Malory, Cellini, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, the Memoirs of Casanova, 
 Lecky 's History of Civilization, and Carlyle's French Revolution, 
 
248 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 In his prose as in the verse of Whitman there is an appear- 
 ance of free improvisation concealing a more or less novel and 
 deliberate art. "So far as I know," wrote W. D. Howells in 
 1901 , " Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing 
 the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing 
 that comes into his mind without fear or favour of the thing that 
 went before, or the thing that may be about to follow. " Be- 
 side this assertion of a spontaneity approaching artlessness let 
 us put Professor Matthews's caution: "His colloquial ease 
 should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhet- 
 oric. " In a letter to Aldrich he acknowledges great indebted- 
 ness to Bret Harte, "who trimmed and trained and schooled me 
 patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of 
 coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters 
 that have found a certain favour in the eyes of even some of the 
 very decentest people in the land. ' ' Finally, let the reader who 
 doubts whether he was conscious of his own art read carefully 
 his little article, How to Tell a Story, beginning : " I do not claim 
 that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to 
 know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost 
 daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many 
 years. " The art which he had learned of such American mas- 
 ters of oral rhetoric as Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, and J. H. 
 RHey he tested and developed in print and by word of mouth 
 with constant reference to its immediate effect upon a large 
 audience. Those principles the observance of which he found 
 essential to holding and entertaining his public he adopted and 
 followed; but literary "laws" which proved irrelevant to his 
 business as entertainer of the masses he disregarded at pleasure 
 as negligible or out of place in a democratic .^Esthetic. Howells 
 calls him "the Lincoln of our literature"; and with that hint 
 we may add that Mark Twain's power and limitations are alike 
 related to his magnanimous ambition to beguile all the people 
 all the time. 
 
 Let us begin our illustration of his literary character with 
 a review of his five great books of travel. Against every one 
 of them the charge might be brought that it is iU-composed : 
 the chapters follow a certain chronological and geographical 
 order; but the paragraphs frequently seem to owe their juxta- 
 position to the most casual association of ideas. This license. 
 
Mark Twain 249 
 
 however, is the law and studied practice of his humour. "To 
 bring incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and 
 sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that 
 they are absurdities, is the basis," he declares, "of the Ameri- 
 can art." He is speaking here specifically of the humorous 
 story; but obviously he applies the same principle to the book 
 of travel, which, as he conceives it, is a joyous miscellany. It 
 is a miscellany but with ingredients preconsidered and formu- 
 lable. He is as inflexible as Aristotle on the importance of 
 choosing a great subject. He holds with the classicists that 
 the proper study of mankind is man. He traverses in each 
 book territory of world-wide interest. He describes what 
 meets his eye with rapid, vivid, unconventional eloquence. 
 He sketches the historical background in a highly personal 
 fashion and gives to his interlarded legends an individual 
 twist. While he imparts a good quantity of information, useful 
 and diverting, he keeps the thread of his personal adventures 
 spinning, rhapsodizes for a page, then clowns it for another, or 
 introduces an elaborate burlesque on the enthusiasm of previous 
 travellers. It is a prepared concoction. 
 
 The Innocents Abroad justified the formula on which it was 
 constructed by selling nearly a hundred thousand copies at 
 three dollars and a half apiece within the first three years. 
 Its initial success was due partly to its novelty and partly to 
 the wide interest which the excursion itself had excited. Both 
 these advantages it has now relinquished, yet, as his biographer 
 tells us, it remains the most popular of all Mark-Twain!s.±rawd~- 
 books, and still "outsells every other book in its particular 
 field." Time has not reduced the rich variety of its famous 
 topics, though time has somewhat altered the nature of cu- 
 riosity with regard to the conduct of the pilgrims; but even 
 though their type of tourist were now quite extinct one might 
 still gratify the historical sense by acquaintance with a repre- 
 sentative group of Americans on a tremendous picnic with 
 spirits high in rebotmd from the long depression of the Civil 
 War. One hears in the book the rollicking voice of the ex- 
 pilot, ex-miner, the joyously insolent Western American, eman- 
 cipated from all terror of the minor or Sunday-school vices, 
 fortified by certain tolerant democratic standards of his own, 
 well acquainted with the great American cities, equipped with 
 
250 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 ideas of natural beauty and sublimity acquired on the Missis- 
 sippi, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Pacific, the Sandwich 
 Islands, setting out to see with his own unawed eyes how much 
 truth there is in the reported wonders of the "little old world." 
 Mark Twain describes Europe and the East for men, roughly 
 speaking, like himself. He does not undertake to tell them how 
 they ought to look at objects of interest, but quite resolutely 
 how these ob j ects of interest strike a thoroughly honest Western- 
 American eye. He is obliged to report that the barbers, billiard 
 tables, and hotel accommodations of Paris are inferior; that the 
 paintings of the Old Masters are often in a bad state of repair 
 and, at best, betray to a democrat a nauseous adulation of 
 princely patrons; that the French grisettes wear mustaches; 
 that Vesuvius and Lake Como are nothing to Kilauea and Lake 
 Tahoe; that priest-ridden Italy is a "museum of magnificence 
 and misery ' ' ; and that under close inspection the glamour of the 
 Holy Land gives way to vivid impressions of fleas, beggars, 
 hungry dogs, sandy wastes, and the odours of camels. But this 
 young traveller with so much of the iconoclastic Don Juan 
 in him has also a strain of Childe Harold. For him as for 
 Byron the deepest charm of the old world is the charm of 
 desolation and decay, felt when the dingy paleces of Venetian 
 doges or the ruined marbles of Athens are bathed in the moon- 
 light. And he like Byron gains many an effect of his violent 
 humour by the abruptness of his transitions from the sublime 
 to the ridiculous or vice versa. He interprets, for example, with 
 noble gravity the face of the Sphinx: 
 
 After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face 
 was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity 
 not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as 
 never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. 
 If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. . . . All who 
 know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished 
 and faces that have vanished — albeit only a trifling score of years 
 gone by — ^will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in 
 those grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they 
 knew before History was bom — ^before Tradition had being — things 
 that were, and forms that moved, in a vague era which even Poetry 
 and Romance scarce know of — and passed one by one away and 
 
Mark Twain 251 
 
 left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age, 
 and uncomprehended scenes. 
 
 But one turns the page and comes upon the engineer who feeds 
 his locomotive with mummies, occasionally calling out pet- 
 tishly, "D — n these plebeians, they don't bum worth a cent — 
 pass out a king." 
 
 In Roughing It (1872) he chose a subject doubtless less 
 interesting to some good people of the Atlantic seaboard than a 
 European tour — the narrative of, his journey across theplains 
 to_CarsDn..City, and Jus life and adventures in Nevada, Cali- 
 fornia, and the Sandwich Islands. Various critics, however, 
 have preferred it to Innocents Abroad as a truer b ook ; and in a 
 sense the preference is justifiable. As literal history, to be sure, 
 or aa aAitobiography , i^isjmtnistocrtlisc Mark Twain follows 
 his own advice to Rudyard Kipling: "Young man, first get 
 your facts; then distort them as you please." He distorts the 
 facts in Roughing It, and vitalizes them by a poetical enlarge- 
 ment and interpretation thoroughly characteristic of native 
 Western humour. In painting frontier manners, no longer an 
 outsider, as he was in Europe, he abandons the attitude of one 
 exposing illusions, and seeks to exhibit the West under the 
 glamour of imagination. His coyote, turning with a smile 
 upon the pursuing hound and vanishing with a "rushing sound, 
 and the sudden splitting of a long crack in the atmosphere" — 
 his coyote is a beast of fable; so is his jackrabbit; so is his bron- 
 cho; so is his Brigham Young. On all his pioneers, his stage- 
 drivers, his miners, his desperadoes, his boon-companions he 
 has breathed with a heroizing emotion recollected in literary 
 tranquillity. In the clear light of the vanished El Dorado of 
 his youth they and their mountains and forests loom for him 
 larger than common nature, more passionate, more picturesque. 
 
 J^-^PramfrTtbreeid^^iSSoy sprang from no such fund of de- 
 lightful experience and mellow recollection but fror" gn py. 
 pedition to Europe jieUfeera4;dyjundextakeaJnjQrder to escape 
 from the growing harassment of .busi^fiss responsibilities and to 
 coUecFniaterial for a book. Before he could work himself into 
 a satisfactory writing mood he found it necessary to invent a 
 new humorous attitude and literary character. His new in- 
 vention has three parts. In the first place, he announces him- 
 
252 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 self an enthusiastic and intrepid pedestrian but actually presents 
 himself as a languid and timorous person travelling luxuriously 
 with agent and courier by railway, steamboat, carriage, raft, 
 or by any means to avoid the use of his legs. Secondly, he 
 professes himself a devoted student of art and decorates his 
 pages with infantile sketches. Finally, he assumes the air of a 
 philologist seriously studying the German language. The first 
 of these devices he handles in many places ingeniously and 
 pleasantly, presenting an amusing satire on the indolent middle- 
 aged tourist who climbs his Alps by telescope and gets his 
 thrills on his hotel veranda out of the books of Edward Whym- 
 per; but in the elaborate burlesque ascent of the RifHeberg the 
 humour becomes crudely farcical and tiresome. His drawings 
 are not very expressive; and from their fewness it may be in- 
 ferred that he discovered the fact. Some fellow philologists 
 have found inexhaustible satisfaction in the German legends in 
 German-English and in the appendices treating of "the awful 
 German language" and the German newspaper — ^possibly also 
 in the violent attack on Wagnerian opera. Other favourite 
 passages of various qualities are those dealing with the grand 
 affair between M. Gambetta and M. Fourtou, the sunrise on Mt. 
 Riga, and the 47-mile hunt for a sock in Chapter XIII ; but the 
 humorous jewel of the collection is "Baker's Bluejay Yarn" in 
 Chapter III — a trivial incident touched with imagination and 
 related in a supremely delicious manner. The serious writing, 
 as in the description of the Jungfrau and Heidelberg and the 
 student duels, is so good that one wishes there were more 
 of it. 
 
 For Ltf&onUie Mississippi ^1883) Mark Twain drew again 
 from the treasure of Western material, which he had amassed 
 before he became a professional humorist; and that distin- 
 guished connoisseur, the ex-Emperor William II of Germany, 
 therein agreeing with the portier of the author's lodging in 
 Berlin, informed the author that it was his favourite American 
 book. More strictly speaking, it is the first twenty of the 
 fifty-five chapters that do for the Mississippi Valley what 
 Roughing It does for the Far West, namely, invest it with the 
 charm of recollected experience^ and imaginative apprehension. 
 The latter part of the book, which might have been called "The 
 Mississippi Revisited, " is the journalistic record of an excursion 
 
Mark Twain 253 
 
 made with a stenographer in 1882; it contains interesting auto- 
 biographical notes, admirable descriptive passages, a remarkable 
 diatribe on Sir Walter Scott for perpetuating outworn chivalry 
 in the South, an account of a meeting with G. W. Cable and 
 Joel Chandler Harris in New Orleans, and miscellaneous yams 
 and information ; but it is of distinctly secondary value. Stead- 
 ily throughout the first twenty chapters the writer is elate with 
 his youthful memories of the drowsy towns by the river, the 
 old barbaric raftsmen, the pride and power of the ancient race 
 of pilots, and the high art and mystery of piloting those in- 
 finitely various waters in the days before the war. The moon- 
 light, one of his characters fancies, was brighter before the war; 
 and he himself, travelled now and acquainted with glory, has 
 experienced, he beheves, nothing so satisfying to his inmost 
 sense as his life in that epical calling with its manly rigours, its 
 robust hilarity, its deep, wholesome, unrefiective happiness. 
 The spirit that, years before, inspired Emerson's blandly ex- 
 pressed desire to make Concord and Boston Bay as memorable 
 as the storied places of Europe becomes in these pages clear, 
 strong, resounding: it is the new national pride declaring the 
 spiritual independence of America. Not in peevish envy, with 
 no anxiety about the ultimate answer, out of his knowledge and 
 the depths of his conviction Mark Twain cries: "What are all 
 the rivers of Damascus to the Father of Waters? " 
 
 The material for F ollowing the Equator (xSgj) lie collected 
 under the strain of debt, jU health, and the fatigues of the im- 
 mense lecture-tour, .undertaken in 1895. - In Australasia, to 
 which the first half of the book is given, the people impress him 
 as Englishmen democratized, that is to say, as Americans, and 
 the ci ties and towns offer little noteworthy. In order to exhibit 
 novelties he is obliged to present the history of the early set- 
 tlers, the aborigines, and the fauna; and as he gets up his facts 
 by visits to museums and hasty digestion of Australasian liter- 
 ature, his treatment strikes one as, for him, noticeably second- 
 hand and uninspired. He also introduces later a good deal of 
 "lifted" material of a vivid sort in his account of the Sepoy 
 Mutiny, Suttee, and the Thugs — and here we may note his 
 taste for the collection of atrocious incident. India, however, 
 for which Kipling had sharpened his appetite, inspired him to 
 the task of imparting his oppressed sense of her historic and 
 
254 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 scenic immensities, stricken with plagues, famines, ferocious 
 beasts, superstitions, over-population, and swooning heat : 
 
 a haunting sense of the myriads of human lives that have blossomed, 
 and withered, and perished here, repeating and repeating and re- 
 peating, century after century, and age after age, the barren and 
 meaningless process; it is this sense that gives to this forlorn, un- 
 comely land power to speak to the spirit and make friends with it; 
 to speak to it with a voice bitter with satire, but eloquent with 
 melancholy. 
 
 There are satirical and witty disquisitions on imperialistic 
 morality apropos of Madagascar, the Jameson Raid, Cecil 
 Rhodes, and the British dealings with the Boers. The bar- 
 barity of the civilized in contact with the so-called backward 
 peoples excites his indignation, but history and travel show him 
 its universality and quiet his sensibilities to a state of tolerant 
 contempt for all unregenerate mankind: "Christian govern- 
 ments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discuss- 
 ing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they 
 were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable 
 world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere." 
 
 Mark Twain's fiction, a large and highly diversified section 
 of his total output, should be regarded as, hardly less than the 
 travel books, the work of a humorist whose most characteristic 
 form was a medley in divers keys. His critical champions used 
 to allege that recognition of his sterling literary talent was de- 
 layed by his reputation as a creator of laughter. At the present 
 time the danger is perhaps rather that some of his novels and 
 tales will be unduly disparaged precisely because criticism has 
 been persuaded to take them too seriously. With an instinct 
 for an ingenious plot and unquestionable power of characteriza- 
 tion within certain limits, Mark Twain sometimes lacked the 
 ability and the patience and even the desire to carry a long piece 
 of ficti on through in the key on which he began . He would begin 
 ' a story, for example, on the key of impressive realism, shift to 
 commonplace melodrama, and end with roaring farce; and this 
 amounts to sajang that he did not himself steadily take his 
 fiction writing seriously. He sometimes took it very lightly, 
 like an improvising humorist; and the discords which affect 
 
Mark Twain 255 
 
 the severely critical ear as blemishes probably struck his own 
 ear as a joke. There is amusement in the most uneven of his 
 novels if one relaxes to the point of reading it in the mixed 
 moods in which it was written. 
 
 The most uneven of his novels is The Gilded Age, begun in 
 collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in February, 1873, 
 on the spur of a dinner-table challenge, and finished in the 
 following April. The authors were proud of their performance ; 
 and it has admirable points. The title is a masterly epigraph 
 on the flushed, corrupt period of the Reconstruction. The 
 stage is set as for the representation of "the great American 
 novel," with scenes in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, St. 
 Louis, and villages of New England and Tennessee. The plot 
 is designed to bring typical Easterners and Westerners into 
 diverting sentimental, financial, and political relations. There 
 is a lively satirical play upon a wide range of clearly conceived 
 characters and caricatures, exhibiting most of the elementary 
 passions from love-making and fortune-hunting to bribing Con- 
 gressmen and murder; and the sanguine, speculative XZloloxiel 
 Sellg g, said to have been modelled on a relative of Mark Twain's 
 but certainly also modelled on Orion Clemens and on Mark 
 Twain himself, is an American rival_toJ!d!isawber. The book 
 bristles with interesting intentions and accomplishments; yet 
 its total effect is a bewildering dissonance of moods and styles, 
 which fills one with regret that Mark Twain did not cut loose 
 from his literary partner and work out by himself the story of 
 Obedstown, Tennessee, opened by him with a rich realistic flow 
 in the first eleven chapters. With all its demerits on its head, 
 the novel sold forty thousand copies within a couple of months 
 after publication, and a play bmlt around the character of 
 Sellers was immensely successful on the stage. Later, in col- 
 laboration with Howells, Mark Twain made a second Sellers 
 play showing the hero aspiring to an English earldom ; and this 
 he worked over into The American Claimant (1891), a gener- 
 ally farcical romance streaked with admirable realistic passages. 
 One may mention here also, as springing perhaps from ex- 
 perience not utterly remote from that of Sellers, Clemens's 
 exhibition of the effect upon character produced by expectation 
 of unearned v^ealth in two capital shOTt stories: The Man that 
 Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899) and The $jo, 000 Bequest (1904). 
 
256 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Tom Sawyer, his second extended effort in fiction and his 
 first masterpiece, he began as a play in 1872 and published in its 
 present form in 1876. The long incubation contributed to its 
 unsurpassed unity of tone. But the decisive fact is that his 
 irresponsible and frequently extravagant fancy is here held in 
 check by a serious artistic purpose, namely, to make an essen- 
 tially faithful representation of the life of a real boy intimately 
 known to him by memory and by introspection and by those 
 deductions of the imaginative faculty which start from a solid 
 basis of actuality. His own boyhood, we may believe, and 
 that of his companions in Hannibal, lives in this intensely 
 vital narrative. It is significant of his unwonted austerity in 
 the composition that he wrote to HoweUs on its completion: 
 "It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults. 
 It is only written for adults." He had some justification for 
 feeling that his newly finished manuscript broke a long taboo. 
 He had taken a hero who was neither a model of youthful vir- 
 tues nor a horrible example but was distinguished chiefly by 
 pluck, imagination, and vanity, and had made him leader of 
 a group of average little Missouri rascals running loose in an 
 ordinary small river town and displaying, among other sponta- 
 neous impulses, aU the ' ' natural cussedness ' ' of boyhood. Fur- 
 thermore he had made a central incident of a rather horrid 
 murder. Remembering the juvenile fiction of the Sunday- 
 school library, he suspected that the story of these fighting, 
 fibbing, pilfering, smoking, swearing scapegraces was not for 
 young people. But Howells, after reading about Aunt Polly, 
 the whitewashing of thefenee, Tom's schoolboy love, Huckand 
 the wart-cure, and the pirates' island, ordered the profanity 
 deleted, and declared it the best boy story ever written ; and that 
 was near the truth. In the two sequels Tom Sawyer Abroad 
 (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (i8g6), the plots are rather 
 flimsy contrivances of the humorous fancy, but the stories 
 are partly redeemed by the established reality of the actors 
 and the raciness of the narrative which comes from the mouth 
 of Huck Finn, a personage whom Mark Twain had taken over 
 directly from his recollections of Hannibal. 
 
 TTie Prince and the Pauper (1881), a first venture in histori- 
 cal romance, was deliberately written for children and tested 
 in the process of composition on the author's daughters. The 
 
Mark Twain 257 
 
 plot, suggested by Charlotte M. Yonge's TTie Prince and the 
 Page, is fascinating to the youthful imagination; and the no- 
 tion underlying it is to the older reader the most characteristic 
 element in the book. The exchange of clothes and stations 
 effected by Tom Canty and Prince Edward, later Edward VI, 
 provided for the prince opportunities for feeling the common lot 
 which the democratic author would gladly have given to all the 
 monarchs of Europe. Occasionally writing over the heads of 
 his audience, he utilizes the situation to express his inveterate 
 sense of the evil of monarchical institutions and in particular 
 his peculiarly flaming indignation at obsolete Enghsh penal 
 laws. Humorous situations, sometimes tragically humorous, 
 are abundant ; but neither in the simple and vigorous prose of 
 the narrative nor in the archaic style of the dialogue does one 
 find at full strength the idiom and the first-hand observation 
 for which one values Tom Sawyer. The Prince and the Pauper 
 is a distinguished book in the class to which Little Lord Fauntle- 
 roy was added in 1886; but it is overshadowed by Mark Twain's 
 own work. 
 
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) overshadows it; 
 but that is nothing. Huckleberry Finn exceeds even Tom Saw- 
 yer almost as clearly as Tom Sawyer exceeds The Prince and the 
 Pauper. Mark Twain had conceived the tale in 1876 as a 
 sequel to the story of Tom. In the course of its long gestation 
 he had revisited the Mississippi Valley and had published his 
 superb commemoration of his own early life on the river. He 
 wrote his second masterpiece of Mississippi fiction with a desire 
 to express what in Tom Sawyer he had hardly attempted, what, 
 indeed, came slowly into his possession, his sense of the half- 
 barbaric charm and the romantic possibilities in that grey 
 wilderness of moving water and the rough men who trafficked 
 on it. He had given power to the earlier story by the representa- 
 tion of characters and incidents which are typical of the whole 
 of American boyhood in rural communities in many parts of the 
 country. He gave power to Huckleberry Finn by a selection of 
 unusual characters and extraordinary incidents which are 
 inseparably related to and illustrative of their special environ- 
 ment. He shifted heroes, displacing quick-witted, imaginative 
 Tom by the village drunkard's son, because Huck in his hard, 
 nonchalant, adventurous adolescence is a more distinctive pro- 
 
 17 
 
258 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 duct of the frontier. He changed the narrator, letting Huck 
 tell his own story, in order to invest the entire narrative in its 
 native garb and colour. Huck perhaps exhibits now and then 
 a little more humour and feeling for nature than a picaro is 
 entitled to possess; but in the main his point of view is well 
 maintained. His strange captivity in his father's cabin, the 
 great flight down the river, the mysteries of fog and night and 
 current, the colloquy on King SoUermun, the superbly inci- 
 dental narrative of the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, the 
 appealing devotion and affectionateness of Nigger Jim, Huck's 
 case of conscience, — all are stamped with the peculiar comment 
 of Huck's earthy, callous, but not insensitive soul. The stuff 
 and manner of the tale are tmique, and it is as imperishably 
 substantial as Robinson Crusoe, whether one admire it with 
 Andrew Lang as "a nearly flawless gem of romance and hu- 
 mour" or with Professor Matthews as "a marvellously accurate 
 portrayal of a whole civilization." 
 
 A Connecticut Yankee in King^ Arthur's Court itSSg) is 
 a work of humorous invention set in motion by G. W. Cable, 
 who first brought Malory's Morte d' Arthur to Mark Twain's 
 attention. For assignable reasons it has not had the universal 
 admiration enjoyed by Huckleberry Finn; Andrew Lang, for 
 example, could not bring himself to read it; yet one might 
 plausibly argue that it re prese nts Mark Twain more completdy- 
 than any other single book on his list, and so may serve as a 
 touchstone to distinguish those who care for the man from those 
 who only care for some of his stories. It displays every variety 
 of his style from the mock-heroic and shirt-sleeve journalese of 
 the Yaakee's familiar vein to the careful euphonies of his de- 
 scriptions of English landscape and the Dantean mordancy 
 of the chapter "In the Queen's Dungeons." It exhibits his 
 humour in moods from the grimmest to the gayest, mingling 
 scenes of pathos, terror, and excruciating cruelty with hilarious 
 comic inventions and adventures, which prove their validity for 
 the imagination by abiding in the memory : the sewing-machine 
 worked by the bowing hermit, the mules blushing at the jokes 
 of the pilgrims, the expedition with Alisande, the contests with 
 Merlin, the expedition with Bang Arthur, Launcelot and the 
 bicycle squad, and the annihilation of the chivalry of England. 
 The hero is, despite the title, no mere Yankee but Mark Twain's 
 
Mark Twain 259 
 
 "personal representative" — acquainted with the machine 
 shops of New Haven but acquainted also with navigation on the 
 Mississippi and with Western journalism and with the use of 
 the lariat. The moment that he enters "the holy gloom" of 
 history he becomes, as Mark Twain became when he went to' 
 Europe, the representative of democratic America, preaching 
 the gospel of commonsense and practical improvement and 
 liberty and equality and free thought inherited from Franklin, 
 Paine, Jefferson, and IngersoU. Those to whom Malory's 
 romance is a sacred book may fairly complain that the ex- 
 hibition of the Arthurian realm is a brutal and libellous travesty, 
 attributing to the legendary period of Arthur horrors which 
 belong to medieval Spain and Italy. Mark Twain admits the 
 charge. He takes his horrors where he finds them. His wide- 
 sweeping satirical purpose requires a comprehensive display of 
 human ignorance, folly, and iniquity. He must vent the flame 
 of indignation which swept through him whenever he fixed his 
 attention on hiunan history — indignation against removable 
 dirt, ignorance, injustice, and cruelty. As a radical American, 
 he ascribed a great share of these evils to monarchy, aristocracy, 
 and an established church, and he made his contemporary 
 references pointed and painful to English sensibilities. A 
 Connecticut Yankee is his. Don Quixote, a„sincere book, fuU of 
 lifelong convictions earnestly held, a book charged with a rude 
 iconoclastic humour, intended like the work of Cervantes to 
 hasten the end of an obsolescent civilization. Whether it will 
 finally be judged a great book will depend in considerable 
 measure on factors outside itself, particularly on the prosperity 
 of western democratic sentiment in the world at large. Since 
 the War of the German Invasions there has been an increase of 
 Quixotism in his sense, and what used to be considered his 
 unnecessary rage at windmills now looks like prophetic tilting 
 at giants. 
 
 The volume containing Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those 
 Extraordinary Twins, published in 1894, P^^ ^^ predisposed to 
 value because it is another specimen from the Mississippi 
 ' ' lead. ' ' It adds, however, relatively so little that is distinctive 
 to the record that one is tempted to use it as an unsurpassable 
 illustration of haphazard method in composition. The pic- 
 ture of a two-headed freak had given him the cue for a "howl- 
 
26o Chapters of American Literature 
 
 ing farce." When he began to write, the contemplated short 
 story swiftly expanded, and there developed unexpectedly un- 
 der his hand serious characters, and a tragic situation unrelated 
 to the initiating impulse. After long study he extracted the 
 "farce" by "Cassarean operation," and appended it with 
 amusing explanations to the "tragedy" which it had set in 
 motion. Ptidd'nhead Wilson, disfigured by vestiges of the 
 farce in the incredible Italian twins, is, like The Gilded Age, a 
 discordant medley with powerful character-drawing in Roxana 
 and her half-breed son, and with a somewhat feebly indicated 
 novelty in the philosophical detective Pudd'nhead. 
 
 The last certified claimant for a position in the front rank 
 of the novels isjjoan of Arc (1896), a romance containing as its 
 core the ascertained facts concerning one of the most problem- 
 atic figures in secular history, and as its important imaginative 
 expansion Mark Twain's conception of her familiar charm and 
 his pictures of the battles and scenes of state and trials through 
 which she passed. As in the somewhat similar case of the 
 supernatural powers of Jesus, of which he was certainly scepti- 
 cal, he says nothing to raise a doubt of the Maid's divine assist- 
 ance; he neither explained nor attempted to explain away 
 Joan's mystery. Her character, her Voices, and her mission he 
 presents throughout with an air of absolute reverence and 
 indeed at times with almost breathless adoration. For the 
 reader in whom illusion is not destroyed by constant involim- 
 tary attention to the line where fact meets fiction the total 
 impression is doubtless both beautiful and deeply moving. In 
 the last section, at least, which deals with the trial and martjT- 
 dom, the most impatient reader of historical romance can 
 hardly escape the pang of actuality; he is too near the facts. 
 Recognizing that the book was quite out of his customary 
 vein, Mark Twain published it first anonymously; yet in 1908 
 he wrote : " I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books and it is 
 the best ; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me 
 seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; 
 12 years of preparation & 2 years of writing. The others 
 needed no preparation, & got none." This much we must 
 admit: we are glad to have Joan of Arc on the shelf beside A 
 Connecticut Yankee to complete our conception of that versa- 
 tile and representative American whom we call Mark Twain. 
 
Mark Twain 261 
 
 Without it, and its little companion-piece, In Defence of Harriet 
 Shelley (1894), we should have a harder task to prove, against 
 those that take him for a hard unsanctified philistine, his invin- 
 cible chivalry and fineness in relation to womankind, feelings 
 precious in a free society, and fostered, as we like to think, by 
 a thoroughly established American tradition. 
 
 But if we value a book in proportion to its saturation with 
 its author's most distinctive qualities and in proportion to its 
 power, exerted or latent, to affect the general literary current, 
 we shall hardly rate Joan of Arc among Mark Twain's most 
 interesting or significant books. In its utterly reverent treat- 
 ment of the traditional and the supernatural it impresses one 
 as a counterpoise obviously unequal to the task of making a 
 balance with the great burden of naturalistic and radically 
 iconoclastic writing in the other scale. 
 
 Mark Twain counts as an influence because he is an innova- 
 tor. The great notes of his innovation from Innocents Abroad 
 to A Connecticut Faw^ee are: first, thfi-jdisillusionedjtreatment 
 of his tory; second, the fearless, exploitation- of. "the natural., 
 man," or, the next thing to it, "the free-bom American"; 
 and, lastly^ certain strain of naturalistic pessimism. In the 
 first class go the foreign-travel books, The Prince and the 
 Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee; and the impulse properly 
 proceeding from them is imaginative satire. In the second 
 class go Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, 
 Huckleberry Finn, Adam's Diary, and Eve's Diary; and from 
 such work has proceeded an observable impulse to the cultiva- 
 tion of the indigenous, the elemental, the primitive, and, per- 
 haps, the brutal and the sensual. For the third class one can 
 glean representative paragraphs only here and there among the 
 writings published in Mark Twain's lifetime; but the posthu- 
 mously published philosophical dialogue What is Man? (1905) 
 and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), a romance, and some of 
 the letters are steeped in a naturalistic melancholy and tinged 
 with a philosophical bitterness of which American literature 
 before Mark Twain showed hardly a trace. That strain seems 
 likely to be influential too, and, unfortunately, not always in 
 connection with the fine bravado of his American faith, which 
 occasionally required an antidote to its natural insolence. 
 
2. Howells 
 
 IN the days of Fenimore Cooper it seemed a difficult task to 
 naturalize romance in the United States, so accustomed 
 was the national imagination to think of fiction as belong- 
 ing to more ancient regions and of the American soil as being 
 the home of facts, without glamour or mystery. Romancers 
 had to prepare the soil as well as find the seed. Within a 
 generation, however, their work had been done with such 
 thoroughness that the rise of realism in America was notably 
 slower than in Europe. Balzac and Thackeray had no Ameri- 
 can contemporaries. Our native realists all came later, in- 
 structed by the art of Turgenev and Tolstoy, Flaubert and 
 Zola. The interval was devoted to the cult of local colour, which 
 applied the amiable charm of Irving or the quaint raciness of 
 Dickens to all the nooks and corners of the country. For the 
 most part the local colour writers, followers of Bret Harte as a 
 rule, were incurably sentimental, optimistic, romantic. What 
 especially interested them, and their readers, was the signs of 
 the past in the Old South or in New England, or the vivid face 
 of adventure on the new frontier. They liked to portray curi- 
 ous characters and unusual incidents, and in most sections of 
 the country they resisted the importation of realistic doctrine 
 and practice. 
 
 It was perhaps a certain bareness in Middle Western life, 
 lacking both the longer memories of the Atlantic States and 
 the splendid golden expectations of California, that very 
 early established in the upper Mississippi valley the realistic 
 tradition which descends unbroken through the work of Eggles- 
 ton, E. W. Howe, Hamlin Garland, and Edgar Lee Masters. 
 
 262 
 
Howells 263 
 
 From the Middle West, too, came the principal exponent of 
 native realism, in himself almost an entire literary movement, 
 almost an academy. William Dean Howells was bom at 
 Martin's Perry, Ohio,jLMarch,,j[837,^the grandson of a Welsh 
 Quaker and the son of a country printer and editor. Like his 
 friend Mark Twain he saw little of schools and nothing of 
 colleges, and like him he got his systematic literary training 
 from'enforced duties as a printer and journalist. But, unlike 
 Mark Twain, he fell as naturally into the best classical tradi- 
 tions as Goldsmith or Irving, who, with Cervantes, earliest 
 delighted him. In My Literary Passions Howells has deli- 
 cately recorded the development of his taste. At first he 
 desired to write verse, and devoted months to imitating Pope 
 in a youthful fanaticism for regularity and exactness. From 
 this worship he turned, at about sixteen, to Shakespeare., 
 particularly to the histories ; then to Chaucer, admired for his 
 sense of earth in human life; and to Dickens, whose magic, 
 Howells saw, was rough. Macaulay taught him to like criti- 
 cism and furnished him an early model of prose style. Thack- 
 eray, Longfellow, Tennyson followed in due course. Having 
 taught himself some Latin arid Greek and more French and 
 Spanish, Howells took up German and came under the spell 
 of Heine, who dominated him longer than any other author 
 and who showed him once for all that the dialect and subjects 
 of literature should be the dialect and facts of life. 
 
 Poems in the manner of Heine won Howells a place in the 
 Atkmtic, then the very zenith of his aspiration, and in i860 he 
 undertook the reverent pilgrimage to New England which he 
 recounts with such winning grace in Literary Friends and 
 Acquaintance. Already a journalist of promise, and some- 
 thing of a poet, he made friends wherever he went and was 
 reconfirmed in his literary ambitions. At the outbreak of the 
 Civil War appointedJDjiited^tates-CQnsul at Venice, married at 
 Paris in 1862 to Miss Elinor G. Mead of Vermont, he spent four 
 years of almost undisturbed leisure in studying Italian litera- 
 ture, notably Dante, as the great authoritative voice of an age, 
 and Goldoni, whom Howells called "the first of the realists." 
 In Italy, though he wrote poetry for the most part, he formed 
 the habit of close, sympathetic, humorous observation and dis- 
 covered the ripe, easy style which made him, beginning with 
 
264 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Venetian Ldfe (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), one of the 
 happiest of our literary travellers. From such work he moved, 
 by the avenue of journalism, only gradually to fiction. On his 
 return to the United States in 1865 he became, first, editorial 
 contributor to The Nation for a few months, and then assistant 
 editor and editor of the A tlantic until 1 88 1 . 
 
 The literary notices which he wrote for the Atlantic during 
 these years of preparation would show, had he written nothing 
 else, how strong and steady was his drift toward his mature 
 creed. Not alone by deliberate thought nor even by the 
 stimulus of polemic was he carried forward, but rather by 
 a natural process of growth which, more than an artistic 
 matter, included his entire philosophy. Prom his childhood 
 he had been intensely humane — sensitive and charitable. This 
 humaneness now revealed itself as a passionate love for the 
 truth of human life and a suspicion, a quiet scorn, of those 
 romantic dreams and superstitious exaggerations by which less 
 contented lovers of life try to enrich it or to escape it. "Ah! 
 poor Real Life," he wrote in his first novel, "can I make 
 others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face?" 
 Perhaps Their Wedding Journey (1871) ought hardly to be 
 called a novel, but it is a valuable Howells document in its 
 zeal for common actuality and in its method, so nearly that of 
 his travel books. A Chance Acquaintance (1873), more strictly 
 a novel, for the first time showed that Howells could not only 
 report customs and sketch characters felicitously but could 
 also organize a plot with delicate skill. A young Bostonian, 
 passionately in love with an intelligent but unsophisticated 
 inland girl, who returns his love, is so little able to overcome 
 his ingrained provincial snobbishness that he steadily con- 
 descends to her until in the end he suddenly sees, as she sees, 
 that he has played an ignoble and vulgar part which con- 
 vincingly separates them. Nothing could be more subtle 
 than the turn by which their relative positions are reversed. 
 The style of A Chance Acquaintance, while not more graceful 
 than that of Howells's earlier books, is more assured and crisp. 
 The central idea is clearly conceived and the outlines sharp 
 without being in any way cruel or cynical. The descriptions 
 are exquisite, the dialogue both natural and revealing, and 
 over and through all is a lambent mirth, an undeceived 
 
Howells 265 
 
 kindliness of wisdom, which was to remain his essential 
 quality. 
 
 In i86§ he had published a n^etrical novel, No Love Lost, 
 and in 1871 a volume of Suburban Sketches; he continued to 
 write criticism and later began to write farces ; but an increas- 
 ing share of his energy now went to novels. The study of the 
 conflict between different manners or grades of sophistication, 
 taken up at about the same time by Henry James, concerned 
 Howells largely, and appears in A Foregone Conclusion (1875), 
 The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), and A Fearful Responsibility 
 (^1881). Writing of spiritualism and Shakerism in An Undis- 
 covered Country (1880), he made clear his suspicion of those 
 types of otherworldliness. And in 1882, with the publication 
 ot.A_MQdSTM^ Instance, Howells assumed his proper rank as the 
 chief native American realist, generally accepted also as the 
 principal critic of realism. 
 
 The superiority of this book to all that had gone before 
 can less justly be said to lie in its firmer grasp of its materials, 
 for Howells from the first was extraordinarily sure of grasp, 
 than in its larger control of larger materials. It has a richer 
 timbre, a graver, deeper tone. Marcia Gaylord, the most 
 passionate of all his heroines, is of all of them the most clearly 
 yet lovingly conceived and elaborated. In the career of her 
 husband, Bartley J. Hubbard, Howells accomplishes the dif- 
 ficult feat of tracing a metamorphosis, the increase of sel- 
 fishness and vanity, fed in this case by Marcia's very devotion, 
 into monstrous growths of evil without a redeeming tincture 
 even of boldness — ^mere contemptibility. The process seems 
 as simple as arithmetic, but, like all genuine growth, it actually 
 resists analysis. The winter scenes of the earlier chapters, 
 faithful and vivid beyond any prose which had yet been written 
 about New England, drawn with an eye intensely on the fact, 
 have stiU the larger bearings of a criticism of American village 
 life in general. The subsequent adventures of the Hubbards in 
 Boston, though so intensely local in setting and incident, are 
 applicable everywhere. Squire Gaylord's arraignment of his 
 son-in-law in the Indiana courtroom vibrates with a passion 
 seldom met in Howells ; and Hartley's virtual offer of his former 
 wife to his former friend belongs with the unforgettable, unfor- 
 givable basenesses in fiction. After these episodes, however, it 
 
266 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 must be owned that an anticlimax follows in Halleck's discovery 
 that his New England conscience will now forever hold him 
 from Marcia because he had loved her before she was free. 
 
 Between i88l, when Howells resigned from the Atlantic, 
 and 1886, when he began to write for Harper's, he had some 
 years of leisure, particularly signalized by the publication in 
 1884 of the novel which brought him to the height of his 
 reputation as well as of his art. The theme of The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham is the universal one, very dear in a republic, of the 
 rising fortunes of a man who has no aid but virtue and capacity. 
 Lapham, a country-bred, "self-made" Vermonter, appears 
 when he has already achieved wealth, and finds himself drawn, 
 involuntarily enough, into the more difficult task of adjusting 
 himself and his family to the manners of fastidious Boston. 
 A writer primarily satirical might have been contented to 
 make game of the situation. Howells, keenly as he sets forth 
 the conflict of standards, goes beyond satire to a depth of 
 meaning which comes only from a profound understanding of 
 the part which artificial distinctions play in human life and 
 a mellow pity that such little things can have such large con- 
 sequences of pain and error. The conflict, however, while 
 constantly pervasive in the book, does not usurp the action; 
 the Lapham family has serious concerns that might arise in 
 any social stratum. Most intense and dramatic of these is the 
 fact that the suitor of one daughter is believed by the whole 
 family to be in love with the other until the very moment of his 
 declaration. The distress into which they are thrown is 
 presented with a degree of comprehension rare in any novel, 
 and here matched with a common sense which rises to some- 
 thing half-inspired in Lapham's perception — reduced to words, 
 however, by a friendly clergyman — that in such a case super- 
 fluous self-sacrifice would be morbid and that, since none is 
 guHty, one had better suffer than three. A certain rightness 
 and soundness of feeling, indeed, govern the entire narrative. 
 As it proceeds, as Lapham falls into heavy business vicissitudes 
 and finally to comparative poverty again, and yet all the time 
 rises in spiritual worth, the record steadily grows in that dignity 
 and significance which, according to Howells's creed is founded 
 only on absolute truth. 
 
 Silas Lapham marked the culmination of Howells's art, 
 
Howells 267 
 
 approached the next year in the exquisite interlude Indian 
 Summer, gayly, lightly, sweetly, pungently narrating the loves 
 of a man of forty, and not quite approached in The Minister's 
 Charge (1887), which shows a homespun poet moving in the 
 direction of comfortable prose. But Howells had not yet 
 shaped his final philosophy, which grew up within him after he 
 had left Boston for New York in 1886 and had established his 
 connection with Harper's Magazine. Again, as from the A tlantic 
 literary notices, light falls upon his growth from the monthly 
 articles which he wrote for "The Editor's Study" between 
 1886 and 1 89 1. Chiefly discussions of current books. Con- 
 cerned with poetry, history, biography nearly as much as 
 with fiction, these essays remarkably encouraged the growth 
 of realism in America, and most eloquently commended to 
 native readers such Latin realists as Valera, Valdls, Gald6s, and 
 Verga, and the great Russians Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and 
 Tolstoy. It will not do to say that these foreign realists moulded 
 Howells, for his development, whatever his readiness to assimi- 
 late, was always from within outward, but it helps to distinguish 
 between the Howells who lived before 1886 and the one who 
 lived after that date, to say that the earlier man had one of his 
 supreme literary passions for the art of Turgenev, and that the 
 later Howells, knowing Tolstoy, had become impatient of even 
 the most secret artifice. For Tolstoy was Howells's great 
 passion. "As much as one merely human being can help 
 another I believe," said Howells, "that he has helped me; he 
 has not influenced me in sesthetics only, but in ethics, too, so 
 that I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew 
 him." Tolstoy's novels seemed to Howells as perfect as his 
 doctrine. "To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is 
 the highest beauty, all other works of fiction that have been 
 written. . . . [He] has a method which not only seems without 
 artifice, but is so. " 
 
 This was some ten years after Howells had first read 
 Tolstoy, ten years during which, in spite of Tolstoy's example, 
 he had not at aU reverted to the preacher but had published 
 many merry farces and had begun to be sunnily reminiscent 
 in A Boy's Town (1890) But though too much himself to be 
 converted from his artistic practice, Howells had broadened 
 his field and deepened his inquiries. A Hazard of New Fortunes 
 
268 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 (1889), in which Basil and Isabel March, the bridal couple of 
 Their Wedding Journey, now grown middle aged, give up 
 Boston, as Howells had himself recently done, for a future in 
 New York, is not content to point out merely the unfamiliar 
 fashions of life which they meet but is full of conscience regard- 
 ing certain evils of the modem social order. Or rather, How- 
 ells had turned from the clash of those lighter manners which 
 belong to Comedy and had set himself to discuss the de^er 
 manners of the race which belong to morals and religion. He 
 wrote at a moment of hope : 
 
 We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the 
 direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich 
 seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hope- 
 lessly repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through 
 the dreams of Henry George, through 'the dreams of Edward 
 Bellamy, through the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the 
 past, seemed not impossibly far off.' 
 
 In this mood Howells's theme compelled him so much that 
 the story moved forward almost without his conscious agency, 
 "though," he carefully insists, "I should not like to intimate 
 anything mystical in the fact." A Hazard of New Fortunes 
 outdoes all Howells's novels in the conduct of different groups 
 of characters, in the superb naturalness with which now one 
 and now another rises to the surface of the narrative and then 
 retreats without a trace of management. New Englanders, 
 New Yorkers, Southerners, Westerners, aU . appear in their 
 true native colours, as do the most diverse ranks of society, and 
 many professions, in their proper dress and gesture. The 
 episode of the street-car strike, brought in near the end, 
 dramatizes the struggle which has been heretofore in the novel 
 rather a shadow than a fact, but Howells, artist first then 
 partisan, employs it almost wholly as a sort of focal point to 
 which the attention of all his characters is drawn, with the 
 result that, having already revealed themselves generally, 
 they are more particularly revealed in their varying degrees 
 of sympathy for the great injustice out of which class 
 war arises. In this manner, without extravagant emphasis, 
 = Preface dated July, 1909. 
 
Howells 269 
 
 Howells judges a generation at the same time that he portrays 
 it in the best of all novels of New York. 
 
 Howells's Tolstoyanism appears still more frankly in his 
 two Ulgpiaii, . tales, A Traveller from Altruria- (iSg^) and 
 Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), in which he compares 
 America with the lovely land of Altruria, where all work is 
 honourable and servants are unknown, where capital and 
 interest are only memories, where equality is complete, and 
 men and women, in the midst of beauty, lead lives that are 
 just, temperate, and kind. The stem tones of Tolstoy How- 
 ells never learned, or at least never used,* for he could not lose 
 his habitual kindness, even when he spoke most firmly. It 
 was kindness, not timidity, however, for though he held steadily 
 to his art he did not keep silence before even the most pop- 
 ular injustices. He plead for the Chicago "anarchists " and he 
 condemned the annexation of the Philippines in clear, strong 
 tones ; no good cause lacked the support of his voice. He was 
 extraordinarily fecund. After 1892 he .succeeded , George 
 T^illiam Curtis in "The Easy Chair" of Harper's and wrote 
 monthly articles which, less exclusively literary than the 
 "Editor's Study" pieces, carried on the same tradition. His 
 most significant critical writings, chiefly concerned with the 
 art he himself practiced, are found in Criticism and Fiction 
 (1891), Heroines of Fiction (1901), and Literature and Life 
 (1902). Reminiscences and travels assiune a still larger 
 place in his later work. After A Boy's Town came My 
 Literary Passions (1895), and then Literary ^Friends and Ac- 
 quaintance (igoo), of accovmts of the classic age of Boston 
 and Cambridge easily the best. He revisited Europe and 
 left records in London Films (1905), Certain Delightful Eng- 
 lish Towns (1906), Roman Holidays (1908), Seven English 
 Cities (1909), Familiar Spanish Travels (19 13), in which he 
 occasionally drew his matter out thin but in which he was 
 never for a page dull, or untruthful, or sour, after the an- 
 cient habit of travellers. . My M ark Twain (1910) is incom- 
 parably the finest of all the interpretations of Howells's great 
 friend, while Years_of My Youth (19 16), written when the 
 author was nearly eighty, is the work of a master whom age 
 had made wise and left strong. In 1909 he was chosen presi- 
 dent of the American Academy, and six years later he received 
 
270 chapters of American Literature 
 
 the National Institute's gold medal "for distinguished work 
 in fiction." He died ii May, 1920. 
 
 The Institute rightly judged that, important as Howells is 
 as critic and memoir-writer, he must be considered first of all a 
 novelist. His later books of fiction make up a long list. That 
 he could produce such an array of fiction is sign enough that he 
 had not been overpowered by humanitarianism ; a better sign 
 is the fact that these later novels are even kinder, gayer, 
 mellower than the early ones. In them his investigation moves 
 over a wide area, which includes the solid realism of The Land- 
 lord at Lion's Head (1897) and The Kentons (1902) ; the sombre 
 study of a crime in The Quality of Mercy (1892); the keen 
 statement of problems m An Imperative Duty (1892) and The 
 Son of Royal Langhrith (1904); happier topics as in Miss 
 Bellard's Inspiration (1905) ; and, very notably, subtle explor- 
 ations of what is or what seems to be the supersensual world in 
 The Shadow of a Dream (1890), Questionable Shapes (1903) — 
 short stories, Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) — short 
 stories, and The Leatherwood God (1916), which last, the study 
 of a frontier impostor who proclaims himself a god, best hints 
 at Howells's views of the relation between the real world which 
 he had so long explored and so lovingly portrayed and those 
 vast spaces which appear to be beyond it for the futile tempting 
 of religionists and romanticists. 
 
 Holding so firmly to his religion of reality, and with his 
 varied powers, it is not perhaps to be wondered at that Howells 
 produced in his fourscore books the most considerable tran- 
 script of American life yet made by one man. Nor, of course, 
 should it be wondered at, that in spite of his doctrine of imper- 
 sonality the world of America as he has set it down is full of 
 his benignance and noble health, never illicit or savage and 
 but rarely sordid. His natural gentleness and reserve, even 
 more than the decorous traditions of the seventies and 
 eighties, kept him from the violent frankness of, say, Zola, 
 whose books Howells thought "indecent through the facts 
 that they nakedly represent." What Howells invariably 
 practiced was a kind of selective realism, choosing his ma- 
 terial as a sage chooses his words, decently. Most of his 
 stories end "happily, " that is, in congenial marriages with good 
 expectations. He did not mind employing one favoured situ- 
 
Howells 271 
 
 ation — in which a humorous husband and a serious wife find 
 themselves responsible for a young girl during her courtship — 
 so often as to suggest a personal experience. Not without some 
 complaint, he nevertheless not too rebelliously accepted the 
 modem novelist's fate of writing largely for women, a sex 
 which in Howells's world appears as often shallow and change- 
 ful and almost always quite unreasonable. Thus limited as to 
 subjects by his temper and his times, he was likewise limited 
 as to treatment. On every ground he preferred to make 
 relatively little of impassioned or tragic moments, believing 
 that the true bulk of life is to be represented by its common- 
 places. ' ' It will not do, ' ' he wrote, speaking of the ducal palace 
 at Weimar, ' ' to lift either houses or men far out of the average ; 
 they become spectacles, ceremonies ; they cease to have charm, 
 to have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone 
 there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with 
 all the little delightful differences repressed iii those who repre- 
 sent and typify. "' (The pendulum had swung far since the 
 days when Cooper and Hawthorne repined over the democratic 
 barrenness of American manners !) No one has written more 
 engaging commonplaces than HoweUs, though perhaps some- 
 thing like the century which has elapsed since the death of Jane 
 Austen — Howells's ideal among English novelists — will have 
 to pass before the historian can be sure that work artistically 
 flawless may be kept alive, lacking malice or intensity, by ease 
 and grace and charm, by kind wisdom and thoughtful mirth. 
 
3- Henry James 
 
 HENRY JAMES was bom an American and died an 
 Englishman. He might never have formally trans- 
 ferred his allegiance had it not been for the War and 
 our long delay in espousing the Allied cause. He became a^Brit- 
 ish. subject in July, 191 5. The transfer had, however, been 
 virtually made many decades earlier. Of the two ruling pas- 
 sions of James, one was surely his passion for "Europe." Of 
 this infatuation the reader will find the most explicit record 
 in his fragmentary book of reminiscences. The Middle Years 
 (191 7), record and whimsical apology which may well serve 
 the needs of other Americans pleading indulgence for the same 
 offence. James loved Europe, as do aU "passionate pilgrims," 
 for the thick-crowding literary and historical associations 
 which made it seem more alive than the more bustling scene 
 this side the water. Going to breakfast in London was an 
 adventure, — ^being not, as at Harvard, merely one of the inci- 
 dents of boarding, but a social function, calling up "the ghosts 
 of Byron and Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart 
 and Rogers and tutti quanti." In America, James had never 
 so taken breakfast except once with a Boston lady frankly 
 reminiscent of London, and once with Howells fresh from his 
 Venetian post, and so "all in the Venetian manner." Every- 
 body in Victorian London had, as he calls it, references — that 
 is, associations, appeal to the historic imagination; and, as he 
 humorously confesses, "a reference was then, to my mind, 
 whether in a person or an object, the most becoming ornament 
 possible." It was "with bated breath" that he approached 
 the paintings of Titian in the old National Gallery ; and when, 
 in the presence of the Bacchus and Ariadne, he became aware, 
 
 272 
 
Henry James 273 
 
 at the same moment, of the auburn head and eager talk of 
 Swinburne, his cup for that day ran over. With the best of 
 introductions to the Rome of Story, the London of Lord 
 Houghton, the highest ambition of James was to establish 
 "connections" of his own with a world in which everything 
 so bristled with connections; and it is he who lets us know 
 with what joy he found himself, on the occasion of his first 
 visit to George EHot, running for the doctor in her service, 
 since thereby "a relation had been dramatically determined." 
 
 But it is only in the light of his other ruling passion that 
 we can rightly understand the force of his passion for Europe. 
 Even more rooted was his love for art, the art of representation. 
 All his pilgriming in London and elsewhere was by way of 
 collecting a fund of material to draw upon "as soon as ever one 
 should seriously get to work." And is it surprising that he 
 should have been impressed with the greater eligibility of the 
 foreign material; that his impressions of New York and Boston 
 seemed to him "negative" or "thin" or "flat" beside the cor- 
 responding impressions of London? The old world was one 
 which had been lived in and had taken on the expressive char- 
 acter of places long associated with human use. It was not 
 simply the individual object of observation, but the "cross-ref- 
 erences"; or, again, the association of one object with another 
 and with the past, making up altogether a "composition." 
 Whatever person or setting caught his attention, it was always 
 because it "would fall into a picture or a scene." Of the 
 heroine of The American, a young French woman of rank, the 
 hero observed that she was "a kind of historical formation." 
 And along with his material, James found abroad a favourable 
 air in which to do his work. There he found those stimulating 
 contacts, there he could observe from within those movements 
 in the world of art, which were of such prime importance for his 
 own development. Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors, 
 represents the deprivations of a man of letters, strikingly 
 suggestive in many ways of James himself, condemned to labour 
 in the provincial darkness of " WooUett Massachusetts." 
 
 In all this our American author seems identified with 
 
 anything but the American scene; and the case is not altered 
 
 when we consider his stories on the side of form. His form is 
 
 not American, nor his preoccupation with form. It is as 
 18 
 
274 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 strictly international as that of Poe. James was a profound 
 admirer of Hawthorne; but so was he an admirer of Balzac 
 and of George Sand, and it is probably to later models than 
 any of these that he owes whatever is most characteristic in 
 his technique. There is at any rate nothing here drawn from 
 American sources rather than from European; nothing which 
 we can claim as our production. 
 
 Yet we have reasons for our claim upon him. This very 
 passion for Europe, as he has exhibited it in himself and in so 
 many of his creatures, this European "adventure" of Lam- 
 bert Strether and Isabel Archer (of The Portrait of a Lady) — 
 what more purely American product can be conceived ? Even 
 to the conscientiousness with which young James did his 
 London sightseeing, mindful of his own feeble health, which 
 threatened to cut it short, and above all mindful "that what 
 he was doing, could he but put it through, would be inti- 
 mately good for him ! ' ' 
 
 Altogether his theme turned out to be quite as much 
 American character as European setting. We must not 
 forget how predominantly his novels, and how frequently 
 his short stories, have for their subject Americans, — Americans 
 abroad, or even Americans at home seen in the light of foreign 
 observation. In this connection the novels in particular 
 may be divided into three groups, falling chronologically 
 into three periods. In the first period, extending from Roderick 
 Hudson to The Bosfonians, 1875 to 1885, the leading characters 
 are invariably Americans, though the scene is half the time 
 abroad. In the second period, from The Princess Casamassima 
 to The Sacred Fount, 1885 to 1901, the novels confine them- 
 selves rather strictly to English society. In the third period, 
 from The Wings of the Dove to the novels left unfinished at the 
 author's death, 1902 to 1917, James returned to his engross- 
 ing, and by far his most interesting, theme of Americans in 
 Paris or Venice or London. Not a very original contribution to 
 literature is the American scene itself — the New York of 
 Washington Square (1881), the Boston of The Europeans (1878) 
 and The Bostonians; and none of these novels was included by 
 James in the New York Edition. His American settings are 
 but palely conceived; and his figures do not find here the 
 proper background to bring them out and set off their special 
 
Henry James 275 
 
 character. But the crusading Americans — variegated types, 
 comic and romantic — with the foreign settings in which they 
 so perfectly find themselves, these make up a local province as 
 distinct in colour and feature as those of Cable and Bret Harte, 
 — a province quite as American, in its way, and for the artist 
 quite as much of a trouvaille, or lucky strike. 
 
 These Americans abroad fall naturally into two classes. 
 The first are treated in the mildly comic vein, as examples 
 of American crudeness or simplicity. Such are the unhappy 
 Ruck family of The Pension Beaurepas, — poor Mr. Ruck who 
 had come abroad in hopes of regaining health and escaping 
 financial worries, and his ladies whose interest in the old world 
 is confined to the shops where money can be spent. Perhaps 
 we might refer to this class Christopher Newman, the self- 
 possessed and efl&cient American business man, hero of The 
 American (1877); though in his case the comedy of character 
 is by no means broad, and is strictly subordinate to the larger 
 comedy of social contrast. In general, these people are treated 
 not unkindly; and there is the one famous instance of Daisy 
 Miller, in which the fresh little American girl is so tenderly 
 handled as to set tears flowing — a most unusual proceeding 
 with James. Generally the Americans emerge from the inter- 
 national comedy with the reader's esteem for sterling virtues not 
 always exhibited by the more sophisticated Europeans. In 
 the later group of stories in particular, the American character, 
 presented with no hint of comic bias, actually shines with the 
 lustre of a superior spiritual fineness. This is what Rebecca 
 West has in mind in her somewhat impatient reference to 
 James's characters as American old maids, or words to that 
 effect. 
 
 And here we have the very heart of his Americanism, if we 
 may make bold to call it that. There is something in James's 
 estimate of spiritual values so fine, so immaterial, so indifferent 
 to success or happiness or whatever merely practical issues, 
 as to suggest nothing so much as the transcendentalism of 
 Emerson, the otherworldliness of Hawthorne. There is here a 
 psychology not of Scott or Thackeray, not even of George 
 Eliot, still less of any conceivable Continental novelist; and 
 one can hardly refer it to any but a New England origin and 
 a date in New England's silver age. 
 
276 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 William James, the novelist's grandfather, was an Irishman 
 settled in Albany. He was described in a New York news- 
 paper of 1832 as "the Albany business man " ; and he laboured 
 so well at business that he left several millions to be divided 
 among twelve heirs. Otherwise the relatives of the novelist 
 were quite innocent of practical affairs. His father, Henry 
 James, was a philosopher-clergyman, a friend of Emerson's, 
 who carried with him everywhere the entire works of Sweden- 
 borg. Henry James, Jr., was bom 15 April, 1843, in New 
 York; but he went to Europe as a babe in arms. Two years 
 later, still in long dothes and waggling his feet, he noted from 
 the carriage window ' ' a stately square surrounded with high- 
 roofed houses and having in the centre a taU and glorious 
 column" — the reader will recognize the Place Vend6me. 
 From the earliest times, in New York and Albany, all his 
 conceptions of culture had a transatlantic origin. The 
 caricatures of Gavami, Nash's lithographs of The Mansions of 
 England, the novels of Dickens read aloud in the family circle, 
 — these fed his imagination. He and his brothers went regu- 
 larly to a New York bookseller for a boys' magazine published 
 in London. Even their sense of a "political order" was 
 derived from Leech's drawings in Punch. Their education 
 was amazingly various and spasmodic, — better adapted, one 
 might suppose, to the formation of novelists than of philo- 
 sophers. Dozens of private schools and tutors succeeded one 
 another in bewildering rapidity in New York, not to speak of 
 later instruction in Bonn and Geneva, in Paris and London, 
 back and forth. 
 
 All this while the main occupation of the future novelist 
 was the contemplative observation of character. The world of 
 Albany and New York was a world not of vulgar persons but 
 of artistic "values." Everyone was interesting as a "type": 
 type of "personal France" or of French "adventuress" (refer- 
 ring to early governesses), type of orphan cousins, type of wild 
 young man. Cousin Henry was a kind of Mr. Dick, cousin 
 Helen a kind of Miss Trotwood. James's account in A Small 
 Boy and Others shows him in those early days a mere vessel of 
 impressions suitable to the uses of art. All this was fostered 
 by the kind of discipline, or no discipline, maintained by their 
 metaphysical father. For religion, the boys went to all the 
 
Henry James 277 
 
 churches, and, we gather, in much the spirit in which they 
 approached any other assthetic experience. As for livelihood, 
 or occupation, the father was always inclined to discourage any 
 injmediate decision upon that point, lest a young man might 
 prematurely limit the development of his inner life. We are 
 reminded how small a place is taken in the stories of James by 
 what men do to earn a living. In America, it seemed, there 
 were — apart from the unique case of Daniel Webster — ^but two 
 possible destinies for a young man. Either he went into 
 business or he went to the dogs. But the immediate family and 
 connections of James were always aspiring to that more liberal 
 foreign order in which was offered the third alternative of a 
 person neither busy nor tipsy, — a cultivated and agreeable 
 person of leisure. 
 
 In i860 the family went to live in Newport, so that the 
 older brother might work in the studio of William Morris 
 Hunt; and Henry, who had earlier haunted the galleries of 
 Paris with his brother, welcomed this occasion to frequent a 
 place devoted to the making of pictures. In 1862, William 
 being at Lawrence Scientific School, Henry entered the Har- 
 vard Law School; still noting, in boarding-house or lecture- 
 room, personalities, chiaroscuro, mise en seine, more than the 
 precedents of law. The Civil Ws^r was the one distinctly 
 American fact which seems to have penetrated the conscious- 
 ness of Henry James. While he was prevented by lameness 
 from going to war himself, it was brought home to him, for 
 one thing, by the participation of two of his brothers. But 
 the war, like everjrthing else, was followed by him, however 
 breathlessly, as a spectacle rich in artistic values. In 1864 
 the family were living in Boston, and from 1866 they were 
 definitely settled in Cambridge, William entering the Harvard 
 Medical School in that year; and in these days the young 
 author was forming excitingly important literary connections. 
 One friendship dating from this time was that with E. L. God- 
 kin, editor of the newly fotmded Nation. But most important 
 no doubt was that with the Nortons of Shady Hill, who later 
 introduced him to London society. 
 
 In 1870 died the person to whom James refers with the 
 greatest personal affection, his cousin Mary Temple, the model 
 for Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, as he tells us, and 
 
278 chapters of American Literature 
 
 also — as we guess — ^for Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady 
 and more than one other of his loveliest American women. 
 Of her death he says "we felt it together as the end of our 
 youth." So far he brings the family record in his Notes of a 
 Son and Brother (19 14). Meanwhile in 1869 occurred the 
 visit to London recorded in The Middle Years. To 1872 
 belongs a perhaps equally memorable visit to Italy. And 
 from that time forward until his death, 28 February, 1916, 
 he lived abroad ; during the first years largely in Italy and 
 France ("inimitable France" and "incomparable Italy"), and 
 then, from about the year 1880, in the England of his adop- 
 tion, — ^making his bachelor home in London or in the old 
 Cinque Port of Rye. But he continued almost to the end to 
 publish his novels and tales in the great American magazines, 
 so that his first appeal was generally to the public here. 
 
 Evidences of the honour in which he was held in England 
 were the Order of Merit conferred upon him at New Year's, 
 1916; and his portrait by Sargent, undertaken on the occasion 
 of his seventieth birthday, at the invitation of some two hun- 
 dred and fifty English friends. At the outbreak of the War, 
 none was more enthusiastic for the cause of the Allies, which 
 was associated with everything he held most precious. His 
 feeling for England at this time, on looking out across the 
 channel from his Sussex home, is described in what is perhaps 
 his latest piece of writing. Within the Rim, published in the 
 Fortnightly Review in August, 191 7. It has been said that his 
 mortal illness was provoked by the vigour with which he took 
 up the work of relief for suffering Belgium and France. 
 
 James began his literary career as an anonymous contribu- 
 tor of reviews to The North American Review and The Nation; 
 and such reviews and literary news-letters he continued to 
 write for many years. Only a small part of his critical writing 
 has appeared in book form; and it still remains for the curious 
 to trace the development of his literary theory from the 
 beginning. His books of faction were frequently supplemented, 
 too, with books of impressions, in which he might commune 
 at length with the spirit of places, — English, French, American, 
 Italian. He also wrate-many- playa, a few of which made 
 brief appearances on the London stage. But they were 
 
Henry James 279 
 
 "talky " and untheatrical ; and he succeeded neither in purging 
 the theatre of the commercialism he deprecated nor even in 
 taking the pubUc fancy himself. His first attempts at fiction 
 were printed in The Atlantic Monthly and The Galaxy; but he 
 hardly emerges as an author of account before the appearance 
 of The Passionate Pilgrim in 1871. His first important novel 
 -was .Roddick. Hudson, published in The Atlantic in 1875. His 
 first and only approach to popularity, whether in long or short 
 story, was made by Daisy Miller in 1878. The New York 
 Edition of his novels and tales, published during the years 
 1907 to 1909, is of the greatest interest because of the extended 
 discussion of his own work and the account of his imaginative 
 processes found in the Prefaces. It is, however, very far from 
 being a complete collection even of his works of fiction. It is 
 simply the choice made by James at that late date, and accord- 
 ing to his taste as it had then developed, of such of his stories 
 as he wished to be known by. It remains to be seen how far 
 posterity will submit to his judgment in the matter. 
 
 The threefold grouping of his novels already suggested was 
 in connection with the treatment of American themes. In 
 reference to form and method a more illuminating division 
 would be one of two periods: first, Roderick Hudson to The 
 Tragic Muse, 1 875-1 890; and second, The Spoils of Poynton to 
 The Sense of the Past, 1896-19 17. 
 
 In the novels of the first group, he includes, in general, 
 more material than in the later ones, more incident, a greater 
 number of characters, a more extended period of time ; and he 
 treats his material in the larger, more open, more lively manner 
 of the main English tradition. He also chooses, in the earlier 
 period, what may be considered more ambitious themes in 
 the matter of psychology. In Roderick Hudson, for example, 
 he undertakes to trace the degeneration of a man of genius, a 
 young American sculptor, when given the freedom of the 
 artistic life in Rome. This evolutionary — or revolutionary — 
 process of character, suggestive of George Eliot, is a "larger 
 order ' ' than he would ever have taken on in the later period. In 
 The Tragic Muse he reverts to the theme of the artistic tempera- 
 ment — this time in disagreement with the world of affairs; 
 and he develops it by means of two great interrelated stories, 
 one dealing with an actress, one with a painter. In the later 
 
28o chapters of American Literature 
 
 years he would not have undertaken thus to tell two stories at 
 the same time; and perhaps the artistic temperament itself 
 would have seemed to him too ambitious a theme. In the 
 earlier period, again, we find him sometimes treating subjects 
 touching on political or the more practical social problems, 
 though indeed his interest was never primarily in the problems. 
 The Bostonians is a somewhat satirical study, at one and the 
 same time, of the Boston character and of feminism ; while in 
 The Princess Casamassima the leading persons are revolution- 
 ary socialists, and political murder lurks in the background. 
 Probably the best, as well as the best liked, of the earlier 
 novels is The Portrait of a Lady (1881), which records at 
 length the European initiation of a generous-souled American 
 girl. 
 
 In the course of six years between the first and second 
 periods no novel of James was published; but during that 
 intOTmcame_ the culmination of hia long.activit3JL.as_a_shQrt- 
 stor y writ er. It was his tendency always to subordinate incident 
 to character, to subordinate character as such to situation — or 
 the relations among the characters ; and in situation or charac- 
 ter, to prefer something rather out of the ordinary, some aspect 
 or type not too obviously interesting but calling for insight and 
 subtlety in the interpretation. Good examples, in the short 
 story, of this predilection are The Pupil, The Real Thing, and 
 The Altar of the Dead, all appearing in the early nineties; and 
 a little later. The Beldonald Holbein and The Turn of the Screw, 
 most haunting of ghost stories. In The Beldonald Holbein 
 the beautiful great lady has chosen for her companion a 
 supposedly unattractive middle-aged American woman, who 
 will admirably serve as a foil to her beauty. But certain 
 painters of her acquaintance having discovered that the foil is 
 herself remarkably "beautiful" — that is, distinguished, signi- 
 ficant of feature, a subject worthy of Holbein — it becomes 
 necessary to send her back home and get another companion 
 with less character engraved upon her countenance. How one 
 of the artists gets his revenge by painting Lady Beldonald 
 in all the splendour of her mediocrity is not the point of interest ; 
 the point of interest is the fine discrimination shown by artist 
 — and author, and reader — in evidence of their superior good 
 Jtaste. 
 
Henry James 281 
 
 ^sch tale of -Jamesis thus an "initiation" into some social 
 or artistic or spiritual value not obvious to the vulgar. And 
 each tale is a quiet picture, a social, study, rather than the 
 smart anecdote prescribed by our doctors of the "short- 
 story. ' ' James is not rigorous in his limitation of the short 
 story to the magazine length ; so that his tales are as likely to 
 take the form of the more leisurely nouvelle as of the brief and 
 sketchy conte. And so it was not surprising to find a tale 
 intended originally for a magazine short story enlarging itself 
 by insensible degrees into what is practically a novel. Such 
 was the case with The Spoils of Poynton, one of his finest stories, 
 which has the length of a novel, together with the restricted 
 subject-matter, the continuity, and economy of the short 
 story. 
 
 But these traits, it is clear, had already grown to be James's 
 ideals for a narrative of whatever length. They were the 
 ideals of many of the foreign novelists whose personal influence 
 had swayed him in Paris ; and to a considerable extent those of 
 George Eliot, whose influence upon him must have been me- 
 diate, working through her French imitators, as well as em- 
 anating directly from her own work. More and more, serious 
 novelists were denying themselves the breezy and picturesque 
 variety of materials, the broad free stroke, of the old masters, in 
 favour of a dramatic limitation, a dramatic closeness of weave, 
 a^ scientific rmnuteness of detail, arf intimate psychological 
 notation, ajKra pictorial (as distinguished from picturesque) 
 consistency of tone,-: — all of which we find in their extremest 
 development in the later novels of James. This is what 
 makes the international character of his art. Note should 
 be taken, of course, of a certain fussiness and long-windedness, 
 as well as a certain tendency to the abstract, which are partly 
 to be set down to the score of personal idiosyncrasy. But in 
 general he is clearly following the ideals of George Eliot, of 
 Flaubert, of Turgenev. Perhaps too we should admit the 
 suggestion of F. M. Hueffer, who would trace back the lineage 
 of James, through Stendhal and other French writers, ulti- 
 mately to Richardson, the early master of the technique of 
 manifold fine strokes, of the close and sentimental study of 
 souls. 
 
 Along with The Spoils of Poynton may be mentioned. 
 
282 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 among the later novels, The Sacred Fount (1901) and What 
 Maisie Knew (1897) as partaking somewhat of the nature of 
 long short stories. What Maisie Knew is, by the way, in a 
 class by itself, not merely for reasons of technique too special 
 to be considered here, but also by reason of the great charm of 
 the little girl, — so naive, so earnest, so much a lady and so 
 much a girl, whose experience of evil is the subject of the story. 
 For the full-fledged novels of the later period, it wiU suffice 
 to state br efiy the themes of The Awkward Age (1899) and The 
 Golden Bowl (1904) — ^without prejudice, however, to the special 
 claims of The Ambassadors, the novel considered by James 
 himself to be his most perfect work of art. The Awkward Age 
 is concerned with the adjustment called for in a certain London 
 circle by the emergence of the jeunefille and the consideration 
 due her innocence of the world. The adjustments prove to be 
 very extensive, but almost wholly subjective, and leaving 
 things very much where they were before so far as any outward 
 signs go. The book is almost literally all talk, — the talk of 
 people the most "civilized" and "modem," people the most 
 shy of ' ' vulgarity, ' ' who have ever been put in a book. It is a 
 fascinating performance — ^for those who have the patience to 
 read it. The Golden Bowl is a study of a theme not unlike 
 that of The Portrait of a Lady. It is the story of an American 
 girl who marries an Italian prince, and the strategy by which 
 she wins his loyal affection. The time covered is much shorter 
 than that in the Portrait, the important characters only about 
 half as many, the amount of action much smaller : and there is 
 little change of scene as compared with the earlier novel. 
 The length of the book is about the same; and the space saved 
 by these various economies is devoted to the leisurely develop- 
 ment of a single situation as it shaped itself gradually in the 
 minds of those participating, the steady deepening of a sense 
 of mystery and misgiving, the tightening of emotional tension, 
 to a degree that means great drama for all readers for whom it 
 does not mean a very dull book. 
 
 ""For many readers it certainly means a very dull book. In 
 this recipe for a story almost everything has been discarded 
 which was the staple of the earlier English novel, even of 
 George Eliot, — exciting incident, dramatic s'tuation, highly- 
 coloured character and dialogue, humour, philosophy, social 
 
Henry James 283 
 
 comment. Indeed, we may almost say the story itself has 
 been thrown out with the rest. For in the later novels and 
 tales of James there is not so much a story told as a situation 
 revealed; revealed to the characters and so to us; and the 
 process of gradual revelation, the calculated "release" of one 
 item after another — that is the plot. It is as if we were 
 present at the painting of a picture by a distinguished artist, 
 as if we were invited to follow the successive strokes by which 
 this or that detail of his conception was made to bloom upon 
 the canvas ; and when the last bit of oil had been applied, he 
 should turn to us and say "Now you have heard SordeUo's 
 story told." Some of us would be satisfied with the excite- 
 ment of having assisted at such a function, considering also 
 the picture which had thus come into being. Others, — and 
 it is human nature, no doubt, — ^would exclaim in vexed 
 bewilderment "But I have heard no story told!" 
 
 The stories jof James tend to be records of seeing rather 
 jthan of doing. The characters are more like patients than 
 . agents ; their business seems to be to register impressions ; to 
 receive illumination rather than to make up their minds and 
 set about deeds. But this is a way of conceiving our human 
 business by no means confined to these novels ; is it not more 
 or less characteristic of the whole period in which James wrote? 
 One passes by insensible degrees from the world of Renan to 
 that of Pater and Swinburne, and thence to that of Oscar 
 Wilde and of writers yet living, in whom the cult of impres- 
 sions has been carried to lengths yet more extreme. 
 
 Among all these names the most significant here seems 
 to be that of Walter Pater, whose style and tone of writing — 
 corresponding to his intellectual quality and bias — more 
 nearly anticipate the style of James than do those of any 
 other writer, English or French. It does not matter that 
 Pater's subject is the art of the past and James's the life of 
 the present. No two writers were ever more concerned with 
 mere "impressions," and impressions mean for them dis- 
 criminations, intimate impressions, subtle and finely sym- 
 pathetic interpretations. None ever found it necessary, in 
 order to render the special quality of their impressions, to try 
 them in so many different lights, to accompany their state- 
 
284 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 merits with so many qualifications and reservations : impulses 
 giving rise to sentences more curiously complex and of longer 
 breath than were ever penned by writers of like pith and 
 moment. They were both of them averse to that raising of the 
 voice, that vehement or emphatic manner, characteristic of 
 the earlier Victorians and supposed to be associated with 
 strong feelings and firm principles. These reasonable and 
 well-bred writers, if they ever had strong feelings or firm 
 principles, could be trusted to dissimulate them under a tone 
 of quiet urbanity. They abhorred abrupt transitions and 
 violent attitudes. They proceed ever in their discourse 
 smoothly and without marked inflection, softly, as among 
 tea-tables, or like persons with weak hearts who must guard 
 themselves against excitement. There is a kind of hieratic 
 gentleness and fastidiousness, — and yet withal a hint of breath- 
 less awe, of restrained enthusiasm, — in the manner in which 
 . they celebrate the mysteries of their religion of culture, their 
 religion of art. 
 
 This, we say of James, is anything but American, indige- 
 nous; this is the Zeitgeist; this is the spirit of England in the 
 "aesthetic nineties" reacting against the spirit of England in 
 the time of Carlyle. But then we think of the "passionate 
 pilgrimage" of Isabel Archer and the others; we think of 
 James's Middle Years; we think, it may be, of ourselves and 
 eastward prostrations of our own. And we reahze that what 
 the romancer has conjured up is a world not strange to our 
 experience. His genius is not the less American for present- 
 ing us, before all things, this vision of a bride rushing into the 
 arms of her bridegroom : vision of the mystic marriage (shall 
 we say?) of new-world faith and old-world culture. 
 
4- Lanier 
 
 THE conditions of Reconstruction were inimical to the pro- 
 duction of literature. The life of the South, always 
 sluggish, now became stagnant. A country of farms 
 and plantations, there were in it few large cities to foster an 
 intellectual life. The large planters whose travel and experi- 
 ence in government and statesmanship rendered them natural 
 leaders were downcast by the sudden destruction of their 
 wealth in slaves and soil. The poor whites lived too close to 
 mother earth, and were too densely ignorant to furnish a public 
 for literary activity. The isolation of the whole South was 
 heart-sickening. Newspapers were few and ill-informed. 
 Schools and colleges were few and far between. Even the will 
 to attend them had to be fostered with great care. In short, 
 literature in the section was impossible except for those with 
 an unquenchable longing for expression. Nevertheless, in 
 these devastated regions here and there existed persons with 
 just such unquenchable longings, and they increased in num- 
 ber as the economic conditions of the South improved and 
 despondency gradually waned. Southern orators lifted up 
 voices that grew more and more hopeful. Northern periodi- 
 cals and Northern publishers were hospitable, were even eager 
 to give the South a hearing. The old rhetoric gave way to a 
 less turgid idiom. Recrimination and defiance went out of 
 date. Within a generation the sting of defeat was succeeded 
 in many quarters by a new national spirit and a new allegiance 
 to a common flag. 
 
 The most salient figure in this change, in fact the most dis- 
 tinguished man of letters of the New South, is Sidney Lanier, 
 who was admirably endowed with a double gift — music and 
 poetry. He was born in Macon, Georgia, 3 February, 1846. 
 
 285 
 
286 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 His father was a lawyer of undistinguished abilities but of 
 cultured and literary tastes. His mother was devotedly re- 
 ligious, and reared her family in the strict Presbyterian faith. 
 His grandfather's hotel, the Lanier House, was the centre of 
 a cordial, hospitable social hfe. The city of Macon, a pro- 
 sperous commercial centre, counted among its citizens many 
 wealthy plantation owners but few who aspired to higher edu- 
 cation or intellectual achievement. Even his father's literary 
 interests seem to have been confined to Shakespeare and 
 Addison and Sir Walter Scott — to the items of that self- 
 sufficient culture which reigned everywhere in the South 
 before the Civil War. 
 
 Although Scott and Froissart fired Lanier's young mind with 
 ideals of chivalry, the thing which set him apart from the Macon 
 school boys was his remarkable musical ability. At seven he 
 had made himself a reed flageolet, and on receiving a flute at 
 Christmas he soon organized quartets and bands among his 
 playfellows. Indeed, it was because of his leadership in serenad- 
 ing parties at Oglethorpe, which he had entered shortly before 
 his fifteenth birthday, that his father brought him home to 
 spend a year in the Macon post office. When he returned to 
 Oglethorpe as a junior he began to play the violin with such 
 effect that he would at times lose consciousness for hours. His 
 father, fearing this stimulation, induced him to return to the 
 flute and discouraged him as much as possible from devotion to 
 music. The result is seen in the boy's journal: 
 
 The prime inclination — that is, natural bent (which I have 
 checked, though) of my nature is to music, and for that I have the 
 greatest talent; indeed, not boasting, for God gave it me, I have an 
 extraordinary musical talent, and feel it within me plainly that I 
 could rise as high as any composer. But I cannot bring myself to 
 believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small 
 a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I 
 might do. 
 
 His later life seems to bear out the assumption that America, 
 by his father's soHcitude and the social pressure of Southern 
 opinion at the time, was deprived of another distinguished 
 name in music. 
 
Lanier 287 
 
 The life at Oglethorpe was a period of intellectual advance 
 for Lanier. The major influence was exerted by James Wood- 
 row of the department of science, who took the boy on long 
 rambles, or on long drives, when the two of them would talk 
 about everything either of them was interested in. Woodrow 
 thought so much of Lanier that he secured for him an appoint- 
 ment as tutor. Better still, he gave the future poet a zest for 
 science that remained with him to the end, and a vision of the 
 intellectual life which shaped his aspirations and his future 
 conduct. Giving up music as a possible career, Lanier resolved 
 to spend two years in Heidelberg and to return to a professor- 
 ship in some American college. 
 
 Then came the cataclysm of Civil War, and with it for 
 Lanier a period of storm and stress that tossed him this way 
 and that for a dozen years. At the outbreak he was enthusi- 
 astic at the prospect of a South more wealthy than history 
 had yet seen. Macon, he thought, was to become a great art 
 centre whose streets were to be lined with marble statues like 
 imto Athens of old. At the close of the college year he, like 
 nearly all the other teachers and the students of Oglethorpe, 
 enlisted for service. The war itself was not an unmixed evil to 
 Lanier. Although he saw some exciting service as a signal- 
 man along the James River, he was for three years allowed 
 ample time for study and for cherishing that passion for the 
 very highest which grew with his years. He now began to 
 contemplate a literary life as his vocation. To his father 
 he wrote in 1864, "Gradually I find that my whole soul is 
 merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of 
 writing poetry. " He began his_novfil,.,.24ge?^ Lilies, -and sent 
 several poems to his father for criticism. In 1864, however, 
 he was transferred to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he 
 served as signal officer on the blockade runners. In November 
 he was captured in the Gulf Stream and sent to Point Lookout 
 Prison in Maryland. There he continued to play the flute, 
 which won him the friendship of Tabb. He busied himself 
 with German poetry, but the prison conditions were so loath- 
 some as to induce a breakdown in health. He came out 
 emaciated to a skeleton, and when he finally reached Macon 
 in March he fell ill and lingered near death for two months. 
 Thereafter his life was an unavailing search for health. 
 
288 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 The fact that members of his family "who used to roll in 
 wealth are, everyday, with their own hands ploughing the little 
 patch of ground which the war has left them, while their wives 
 do the cooking and washing," did not disturb him. What he 
 felt most keenly was the intellectual stagnation of the South. 
 Already in 1866 he was, with characteristic breadth and lack 
 of prejudice, writing thus to a Northern friend: 
 
 You are all so alive up there, and we are all so dead down here! 
 I begin to have serious thoughts of emigrating to your country, 
 so that I may live a little. There is not enough attrition of mind 
 on mind here to bring out any sparks from a man. 
 
 Even among these untoward surroundings he continued to 
 foster his literary ambitions. In another letter he continues: 
 
 We have no newspapers here with circulation enough to excite 
 our ambition, and, of course, the Northern papers are beyond our 
 reach. Our literary life, too, is a lonely and somewhat cheerless 
 one; for beyond our father, a man of considerable literary acquire- 
 ments and exquisite taste, we have not been able to find a single 
 individual who sympathized in such pursuits enough to warrant 
 showing him our little productions — so scarce is "general culti- 
 vation" here. 
 
 I am thirsty to know what is going on in the great art world up 
 there; you have no idea how benighted we all are. I have only 
 recently begun to get into the doings of literary men through "The 
 Round Table" which I have just commenced taking. 
 
 That journal not only satisfied his thirst for the doings of the 
 great world but helped to foster the national spirit which he 
 was to voice more clearly than other poets of his section, and 
 to fire his own ambition for a literary career. Several of his 
 earlier poems appeared in its pages. 
 
 To the same inspiration may be traced his visit to New 
 York in 1867 to find a publisher for Tiger Lilies. Possibly it 
 was the reputation he gained from its publication which caused 
 him to marry in the face of the precarious future. The 
 setting up of the state governments under the Reconstruc- 
 tion Act of 1867 made the prospect for him, as for hundreds 
 of others, even darker and more discouraging. Despairing 
 
Lanier 289 
 
 of earning a living by his pen, and seeing that Southern 
 colleges were so poor as "to hold out absolutely no inducement 
 in the way of support to a professor," he yielded in January, 
 1869, to his father's solicitation and betook himself to the 
 study of law. 
 
 The work in the law office kept him very busy. He did 
 indeed write a few humorous dialect poems, published in var- 
 ious local papers, but in general his resignation was that ex- 
 pressed in a letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne in 1870 : 
 
 I've not put pen to paper, in the literary way, for a long time. 
 How I thirst to do so, how I long to sing a thousand various songs 
 that oppress me, unsung, — is inexpressible. Yet, the mere work 
 that brings bread gives me no time. I know not, after all, if this 
 is a sorrowful thing. Nobody likes my poems, except two or 
 three friends, — ^who are themselves poets, and can supply them- 
 selves! 
 
 But music regained its ascendancy over him. Letters to his 
 wife written in 1869, 1870, and 1 87 1, on visits to New York, 
 reveal the intensity of his pleasure in a vioHn solo, or the 
 singing of Nilsson, or Theodore Thomas's orchestra, where he 
 plunged into an amber sea of music and came away from 
 what he felt might have been heaven. 
 
 The turning point of his life came in San Antonio, Texas, 
 whither he went in the winter of 1872-3 for his health. He 
 filled in part of his time there with "literary projects, but the 
 inspiration of his stay was found in a group of German mu- 
 sicians, who received "amid a storm of applause" his flute- 
 playing before the Maennerchor. In February, 1873, he 
 played before "a very elegant-looking company of ladies and 
 gentlemen. ' ' He reported : 
 
 I had not played three seconds before a profound silence reigned 
 among the people. . . . When I allowed the last note to die, a 
 simultaneous cry of pleasure broke forth from men and women that 
 almost amotmted to a shout, and I stood and received the congratu- 
 lations that thereupon came in, so wrought up by my own playing 
 with (hidden) thoughts, that I could but smile mechanically, and 
 make stereotjrped returns to the pleasant sayings, what time my 
 heart worked falteringly, like a mouth that is about to cry. 
 
 19 
 
290 chapters of American Literature 
 
 Two weeks later he wrote: 
 
 I have writ the most beautiful piece "Field-larks and Black- 
 birds," wherein I have mirrored Mr. Field-lark's pretty eloquence 
 so that I doubt he would know the difference betwixt the flute 
 and his own voice. 
 
 In the summer he confessed to Hayne: 
 
 Are you, by the way, a musician? Strange, that I have never 
 before asked this question, — when so much of my own life consists 
 of music. I don't know that I've ever told you, that whatever turn 
 I have for art is purely musical; poetry being, with me, a mere 
 tangent into which I shoot sometimes. I could play passably on 
 several instruments before I could write legibly; and since then, 
 the very deepest of my life has been filled with music, which I have 
 studied and cultivated far more than poetry. 
 
 Inspired with this new faith, he again repaired to New 
 York, this time determined to settle his future. He revelled 
 in the musical associations which he quickly formed. By 
 November he had been engaged by Asger Hamerik for the posi- 
 tion of first flute in the new Peabody Orchestra forming in 
 Baltimore. On 29 November he wrote his declaration of 
 independence to his father: 
 
 Why should I, nay, how can I, settle myself down to be a third- 
 rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life as long as 
 there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do some other thing 
 so much better. Several persons, from whose judgment there can 
 be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest 
 flute-player in the world; and several others, of equally authoritative 
 judgment, have given me an almost equal encouragement to work 
 with my pen. . . . My dear father, think how for twenty years, 
 through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, 
 through the tmcongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a 
 bare army and then of an exacting business life, through aU the 
 discouragements of being wholly unacquainted with literary people 
 and literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all these depress- 
 ing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumer- 
 ate, those two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my 
 heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you 
 as to me, that I begin to have alright to enroll myself among the 
 
Lanier 291 
 
 devotees of those two sublime arts, after having followed them so 
 long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness. 
 
 Thus he entered upon the third and final period of his life, 
 one of feverish activity. During the winter succeeding his 
 great resolution he grew rapidly in the intellectual grasp of 
 music. He had the soul of an artist, and gradually acquired 
 the technical skiU to bring the most out of his instrument. 
 Still the strength of his renderings always resided in the emo- 
 tion he imparted. His conductor testifies : 
 
 His conception of music was not reached by any analytical 
 study of note by note, was intuitive, spontaneous; like a woman's 
 reason: he felt it so, because he felt it so, and his delicate perception 
 required no more logical form of reasoning. His playing appealed 
 to the musically learned and unlearned — for he would mesmerize 
 the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority 
 of the momentary living inspiration to all the rtdes and shifts of 
 mere technical scholarship. 
 
 The next year he still yearned for a musical career. He 
 told Dr. Leopold Damrosch, then conductor of the Phil- 
 harmonic Society of New York, that music "is not a matter 
 of mere preference, it is a spiritual necessity. I must be a 
 musician, I cannot help it." But the conference with Dam- 
 rosch impressed Lanier with the great handicap he suffered in 
 lack of thorough technical training. Though he continued 
 to gain intense joy from music, literature more and more 
 occupied his thoughts and monopolized his time. 
 
 In February, iSy ^q, Corn, which he had conceived the preced- 
 ing summer and had rewritten during the winter, appeared in 
 Lippincott's Magazine. It was one of the earliest Southern 
 poems to receive publication in a Northern periodical. Nota- 
 ble, too, is the fact that the verses are not an effort to escape 
 into some dreamland but the presentation of a widespread 
 problem of Georgia agriculture. 
 
 Corn attracted favourable attention, notably from Gibson 
 Peacock, editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. Within 
 a month Lanier was at work on a second ambitious poem, 
 J^he^_Symphony, which appeared in June, and which brought 
 him the friendship of Bayard Taylor. The firm of Lippincott 
 
292 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 was able to fill Lanier's time with hackwork. The whole 
 summer was spent in preparing "a sort of spiritualized guide- 
 book" to Florida. Yet he was happy. He wrote of himself 
 as one 
 
 who, after many days and nights of tribulation and bloody sweat, 
 has finally emerged from all doubt into the quiet and yet joyful 
 activity of one who knows exactly what his Great Passion is and 
 what his God desires him to do. As for me, life has resolved simply 
 into a time during which I must get upon paper as many as possible 
 of the poems with which my heart is stuiied like a schoolboy's 
 pocket. 
 
 When at the instance of Bayard Taylor he was appointed to 
 write the cantata for the Centennial Exposition to be held in 
 Philadelphia, he was jubilant. His patriotic fervour pro- 
 duced also The Psalm of the West. A place among American 
 poets he challenged by bringing out a slender volume of poems 
 late in the same year. 
 
 Because of a severe illness he was ordered South for the 
 winter of 1876-7, but there he continued to throw off "a sort 
 of spray of little songs" and to hope for "that repose which 
 ought to fill the artist's firmament while he is creating. " 
 
 The four remaining years of his life were spent in an unavail- 
 ing search for that repose. He endeavoured to make sure 
 where next week's dinners were coming from before carrjong 
 out his ambitions for creative work. He continued his con- 
 nection with the Peabody Orchestra, but his chief endeavour 
 turned him aside, this time into the field of scholarship. He 
 wandered about in Old and Middle English, and ranged far in 
 the Elizabethan period. These enthusiastic studies resulted 
 in lectures at the Peabody Institute, and in 1879 in his appoint- 
 ment as lecturer in Johns Hopkins University. The Science of 
 English Verse and The English Novel are the products of those 
 two years, besides some books for boys and many poems. But 
 consumption had made such advances that it was feared that 
 he would not live to complete his last series of lectures. Indeed, 
 those who listened to him momentarily feared that he wotild 
 not survive to the end of the hour. In May, 1881, he was 
 taken to the mountains of North Carolina, where he died 
 7 September. 
 
Lanier 293 
 
 What shall be said of the product of this eager and varied 
 effort? Shall we lament the incompleteness and immaturity of a 
 life fourteen years longer than Keats's and ten years longer than 
 Shelley's? Shall we bemoan the constant battle with disease, 
 which yet left to Stevenson the energy for an exquisitely 
 wrought style? Shall we bewail the hard necessity of winning 
 his daily bread in a land devastated by civil war and depressed 
 by corrupt government, and the consequent removal to a more 
 congenial and invigorating clime far from friends and family? 
 Or shall we endeavour merely to disengage the essential char- 
 acteristics and achievements of this troublous activity, so that 
 his contribution to our American heritage may stand out clear? 
 
 He did, of course, aigage in too much hackwork for his own 
 good or his reputation. Yet so exuberant was his activity that 
 he dispatched all of these tasks with zest. His "sort of spirit- 
 uaUzed guide-book" to Florida contains many descriptions 
 over which he must have lingered and which bear witness to a 
 quick eye and a rich humour. He puts into the whole book, 
 too, much of himself, his love of music, his over-refining intellect, 
 his relish of local tradition. His boys* books, the Froissart and 
 King Arthur and the rest, reveal even more of the man. He 
 had from early youth cherished a reciuring interest in the 
 deeds and heroes of chivalry. They answered to an innate 
 knightliness of spirit which was fostered by his Southern 
 up-bringing. He would pick up the volume as it came fresh 
 from the printers, familiar though it was by reason of the prep- 
 aration and the proof-reading, and con page after page with 
 pure delight. In his introductions he never learned to ad- 
 dress his young readers, but through the mature style gleams 
 his absorption in this fresh new world of romance. 
 
 The same personal reaction appears in his critical writings. 
 The zeal with which he pursued these researches during the 
 last years of his life astonishes one who remembers the meagre 
 initiation he had received at college into the methods of scholar- 
 ship. The attainments, too, of those few years are consider- 
 able. He read with an assiduity that helped to shorten his 
 days and with a whole-souled enthusiasm and moral earnest- 
 ness' that lent to his utterances much of the fluency and 
 high seriousness of Ruskin. But even greater than Ruskin's 
 is his tendency to wander. He did not keep the goal in view. 
 
294 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 He did not sift and arrange and clarify with a dominant 
 impression in mind. He sauntered along the broad highway, 
 frequently wandering off into the leafy woods and lingering 
 there intent on the strange foliage. Consequently his critical 
 writings are an amazing collection of individual vagaries and 
 intuitive insights. Shakespeare and his Forerunners contains 
 such surprising pronouncements as that Drummond of Haw- 
 thomden is "one of the chief glories of the EngUsh tongue." 
 Yet he could often divine an essential quality, as in his remark 
 on Chaucer's works as "full of cunning hints and twinkle-eyed 
 suggestions which peep between the lines like the comely faces 
 of country children between the fence-bars as one rides by." 
 The same want of the perspective and balance that come 
 from broad and profound knowledge characterizes his lectures 
 on The English Novel. His effort to trace the conception of 
 personality from the time of the Greeks was a perilous under- 
 taking for one who knew so little of Greek life and was so little 
 acquainted with the sociological impHcations of any such in- 
 vestigation. The limitations of his upbringing also militated 
 against success. The strict Presbyterian training of his child- 
 hood as well as an inherent moral bias conspired to give him a 
 strongly ethical view of literature: 
 
 Indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how 
 artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run 
 back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire 
 with moral beauty just as with artistic beaut}'-; that he, in short, 
 who has not come to that state of quiet and eternal frenzy in which 
 the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, 
 burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not the great 
 artist. 
 
 Consequently he fervently wished that the novels of Fielding 
 and Richardson might be "blotted from the face of the earth. " 
 Consequently, too, "in some particulars Silas Marner is the 
 most remarkable novel in our language," and its author the 
 greatest of English novelists. The preachments in which he 
 again reminds one of Ruskin are the most interesting portions, 
 because in them the man Lanier shines out and his cherished 
 and innate convictions lie bare. 
 ^ The most valuable critical work of Lanier is imdoubtedly 
 
Lanier 295 
 
 his Science of English _ Verse. For the consideration of the 
 structure of English verse he was peculiarly well prepared. 
 His own unusually sensitive organism enabled him to respond 
 very dehcately to musical effects in verse. Besides, the early 
 imptilse to science given by Professor Woodrow in that "farci- 
 cal college" of his boyhood stimtilated him to an investigation 
 of the physics of sound and to a desire for reducing to law the 
 apparent chaos of English versification. The result was pioneer 
 work which appealed to many as the most sensible treatment 
 of the subject which had then appeared. What] differentiates 
 this treatment from preceding ones is the insistence that the 
 laws of music and verse are identical, that every foot represents 
 a mathematically equal time interval. Length of interval, and 
 not accent, is therefore the determining element in prosody. 
 The valuable feature of this theory is that it emphasizes the 
 relation of music and poetry and the fundamental importance 
 of rhythm in poetry. Its unfortunate feature is that it insists 
 too strongly on law. No such mathematical relation exists. 
 Accent normally appears at equal time intervals and an 
 accented syllable tends to acquire length. But Lanier wrote 
 long before the psychological investigation of rhythm had 
 begun. He therefore could not see the impossibility of trying 
 to reduce to one rule all the innumerable individual senses of 
 rhythm. Not only no two poets but no two readers would 
 exactly coincide in their sense of rhythm. Lanier was on the 
 right road. He merely made the mistake of taking his own\ 
 sense of rhjrthm for a universal law. 
 . Of his other prose writings the letters are the most im- 
 portant. They reveal the man with unusual ftdlness — the 
 pulsating sea of emotion in which he lived, his exuberance, his 
 passionate love of music, his wavering literary ambition, his 
 buoyancy and htimour and occasional despondency, together 
 with his intellectual interests and preferences. Few letters writ- 
 ten in America are more interesting. Yet on first dipping into 
 them one is repelled by the same qualities which frequently 
 give one pause in his other writings. The style seems highly 
 artificial, fanciful in its imagery, strained and rhetorical in its 
 phrasing, bookish and precious in its diction. Even in his last 
 years he was rarely simple and direct, for he had from boyhood 
 so steeped himself in the older writers of our tongue, Shakes- 
 
296 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 peare in particular, that a plain and natural way of putting 
 things would have seemed to him insipid, inane, and inartistic. 
 The literary glamour which he casts over his writings, which 
 draws attention from the thought itself to some supposed 
 felicity of expression, never entirely left him. Yet some of his 
 later books, particularly where he is pouring forth his con- 
 victions on music, literature, and life, possess all the fluency of 
 the Old South, without ceasing to be strong, luminous, and 
 eloquent. 
 
 These shortcomings have been explained away on the 
 ground that his prose is the. prose of a poet. Certainly it is as a 
 poet that he jumps to the front rank among Southern writers. 
 The single volume of his verse, gathered with loving care by his 
 wife three years after his death, is paramount among his 
 writings. Upon that comer-stone must be reared whatever 
 reputation he may attain in American letters. Yet his poetry 
 too suffers from defects similar to those in his prose. His verse 
 in general betrays a lack of spontaneity without obtaining that 
 finish, that technical polish, that wedding of word and thought 
 which Tabb achieved. There are, to be sure, moments of fine 
 phrasing, intermittent flashes from the heaven of song: 
 
 Music is love in search of a word 
 or 
 
 For when God frowns, 'tis then ye shine. 
 
 But the general impression is of an elaborated verse, not a 
 gush of words from the heart. Indeed, it seems to have been 
 Lanier's practice to write out the ideas of his poems in prose 
 before turning them into verse. Not many of his poems sang 
 themselves over in his soul before he committed them to paper. 
 He was, on the other hand, forever haunted by ideas for 
 poems. As an obscure lawyer in Georgia he complained to 
 Paul Hamilton Hayne of the "thousand various songs that 
 oppress me, unsung." Even after he had won the ear of the 
 nation, he wrote to Gibson Peacock : 
 
 I'm taken with a poem pretty nearly every day, and have to 
 content myself with making a note of its train of thought on the 
 back of whatever letter is in my pocket. I don't write it out, 
 because I find my poetry now wholly unsatisfactory. 
 
Lanier 297 
 
 Sometimes a poem, like The Symphony, would shake him like a 
 James River ague until he had finished it. Sometimes he 
 would revise patiently, as in Corn, In general it is true that he 
 did not work in that calm serenity which might have brought 
 him closer to perfection of form. There is one blemish, how- 
 ever, that no amount of revision would have eliminated. His 
 exuberant fancy betrayed him into conceits as far fetched 
 as ever disfigured Donne or Crashaw or Tabb. An ox in a 
 clover field becomes "the Course-of -Things, " and the rising 
 sun is "the Build-fire Bee. " He did not see the grotesqueness 
 of such comparisons, but cultivated them as original adorn- 
 ments to his verse. 
 
 Some of the dissatisfaction with the form of his verse is due 
 to his theory that the principles of music and of metrics are 
 identical. His sense of rhythm did not allow sufficient empha- 
 sis for accent as marking the equal intervals of time. But he 
 was, naturally, enamoured of his own theory and felt happier 
 when he put it into practice. Of Special Pleading, composed 
 in 1875, he wrote: "I have allowed myself to treat words, 
 similes, and metres with such freedom as I desired. The result 
 convinces me I can do so safely. " Thereafter he developed his 
 own peculiar style more courageously, sometimes with beautiful 
 effect, but often with the resulting impression of a straining for 
 form. In Sunrise, for example, there is a passage descriptive of 
 approaching dawn, beginning. 
 
 Oh, what if a sound should be made! 
 
 which is unsurpassed in American poetry for its rendering of the 
 ecstasy in the poet's heart. Yet only a few lines above this 
 marvellous description is a section beginning. 
 
 Ye lispers, whisperers; singers in storms 
 
 which illustrates how far his attention wandered from the 
 thought in his elaboration of form, how he forgot that words are 
 primarily symbolic, and that beauty of verse depends on poetic 
 and beautiful thoughts. 
 
 Indeed, it must be confessed that Lanier's thought is Uable 
 on analysis to be found commonplace and prosaic. This qual- 
 ity is partly due to a didacticism that issued from an un- 
 
298 chapters of American Literature 
 
 swerving devotion to the ideal. From his youth he cherished 
 a longing for the very highest. How amid the uninspiring 
 surroundings of his boyhood he should have developed this 
 allegiance to the "sweet, living lands of Art" is another of those 
 mysteries with which the history of literature abounds. Yet 
 there is no mystery about the moral purpose which led him to 
 employ poetry to combat intolerance, brutality, and com- 
 mercialism. It was bred into him at his mother's knee. There 
 is no cynicism in his verse. There is a very strong religious 
 strain. Not only does he curiously eschew aU mythological 
 allusions as being pagan in spirit, but he expresses a deeply 
 religious view of life in many poems, as in The Crystal and that 
 quaint but unsurpassed Ballad of Trees and the Master. 
 
 His idealism is also revealed in his eager intellectual inter- 
 ests. Here too he triumphed over his untoward surroundings, 
 as the brief sketch of his life has indicated. Pathetic witness 
 to this inherent bent is found in a letter to Bayard Taylor: 
 
 I could never describe to you what a mere drought and famine 
 my life has been, as regards that multitude of matters which I 
 fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one 
 is in conversational relationship with men of letters, with travellers, 
 with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things. 
 Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation in the 
 South since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely 
 not dying. 
 
 Such complaints did not remain topics of conversation or 
 correspondence. He sought in poetry no refuge from the hard 
 conditions of life. Rather is he one of the leaders of the New 
 South because he grasped at the intellectual and social problems 
 of the time. He dealt with the necessity of planting com for 
 cotton, with the nascent oppression of labour by capital, with 
 the mission of music and art. His reading of Emerson in the 
 winter of 1876-7 revived an earlier penchant for metaphysics 
 and led to such poems as A Florida Sunday and Individuality. 
 If these abstruse problems are not handled with power, they at 
 least do honour to the author's lofty purpose and sincerity of 
 execution. 
 
 It must be conceded, too, that the profound and abiding 
 interests of his life — ^love and nature — are peculiarly Southern 
 
Lanier 299 
 
 in their colouring and substance. It is characteristic that love 
 is for him not that fleshly passion which has thrilled and burned 
 in verse since Sappho. It is a kneehng adoration, an ideal 
 emotion, the only love which one of his purity of life would 
 avow. He has been well called the .SitL Galahad-oL American 
 literature. My Springs shows how deep and sincere was the 
 inspiration he received from his dearest partner in misfortune 
 and ill-health. But there was mingled with the personal de- 
 votion to one woman a chivalric devotion to women which came 
 partly from the Southern ideals of his day. There is in his 
 poetry no better expression of this than in The Symphony. 
 
 Nature was to him almost equally dear, and even more 
 Southern in its appeal. He found nothing within to answer 
 to the wild and rugged majesty of the mountains. He felt no 
 expansion of the soul in viewing the limitless plains of Texas. 
 The broad sand-flats of Florida roused only a longing for the 
 Georgia hills. Indeed, the only scene which called forth a love 
 of broad, free places was the long and often viewed marshes at 
 Brunswick, Georgia, which will go down in American literature 
 in the eloquent and musical Marshes of Glynn. It remains 
 true, however, that his love for nature was a delicate and 
 passionate love, the love of an attentive and scrupulous obser- 
 ver of leaves and plants and the thousand minute details of 
 the summer woods. So personal was the solace and uplifting 
 of nature that he addressed her various forms with terms of 
 endearment, more warm than Tabb, yet precisely like St. 
 Francis of Assisi. He sings of the "fair cousin Cloud," the 
 "friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves." Of himself it was 
 true that. 
 
 With hands agrope he felt smooth nature's grace. 
 Drew her to breast and kissed her sweetheart face. 
 
 The Southern aspect of nature lives again in his verse. 
 
 Though his abiding interests were Southern, he was not 
 narrowly Southern in his outlook. On the contrary, it has 
 already been indicated that much of Lanier's distinction 
 among Reconstruction poets lies not only in his interest in the 
 problems of his own time but likewise his sympathy and 
 comprehension in voicing the new idea of nationality. The 
 
300 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 freedom from prejudice which led him to resume relations with 
 a Northern friend at the close of the war, fitted him to sing the 
 meditations of Columbia at the Philadelphia Centennial in 
 1876. There was nothing mean or narrow in his make-up. 
 The breadth of his own soul and the exalted purpose of his 
 life responded quickly to the new outlook before the nation. 
 He leaped far ahead of his section in grasping and appropriating 
 what he might of the new quickening spirit, but he was largely- 
 influential, with Lamar and Grady, in bringing the South to 
 share in that quickening influence. He likewise revealed to 
 the North, even before Grady, the possibilities of the recently 
 vanquished section, and thereby hastened that spiritual rap- 
 prochement which went on steadily increasing to the end of 
 the century. If Lanier had only had for poetic expression that 
 genius which he apparently possessed for music, what position 
 might he not have attained? With what ftdl-throated ease 
 then would the South at the Reconstruction period have sung 
 out its inmost heart ! 
 
5- Harris 
 
 APART from its purely literary significance, Uncle Remus: 
 his Songs and his Sayings makes a threefold claim upon 
 our interest, (i) In the character of Uncle Remus the 
 author has done more than add a new figure to literature; he 
 has typified, a race and .thus perpetuated a vanishing civUiza- 
 Jion. (2) In the stories told by Uncle Remus the author has 
 brought the folk-tales of the negro into literature and thus laid 
 the foundation for the scientific study of negro folk-lore. His 
 work has, therefore, a purely historical and ethnological value 
 not possessed in equal degree by any other volume of American 
 short stories. (3) In the language spoken by Uncle Remus 
 the author has i&Eroducesd a dialect so accurately and so 
 adequately that each story is worth studying as marking a stage 
 in the development of primitive English. 
 
 The life of Joel Chandler Harris was comparatively un- 
 eventful though it was an ideal preparation for the work that 
 he was to do. He was born in Eatonton, Putnam County, 
 Georgia, 9 December, J848, — a date now celebrated annually 
 in all Georgia schools. It is a remarkable fact that the middle 
 counties of Georgia have produced the most representative 
 humorists of the South. Middle Georgia was also before the 
 war the most democratic part of the slaveholding states, a 
 circumstance not without its influence upon the development 
 of Harris's genius. 
 
 "The sons of the richest men," he tells us, "were put in the 
 fields to work side by side with the negroes, and were thus taught 
 to understand the importance of individual effort that leads to 
 personal independence. It thus happened that there was a cordial, 
 and even an affectionate, understanding between the slaves and their 
 
 301 
 
302 chapters of American Literature 
 
 owners, that perhaps had no parallel elsewhere. The poorer whites 
 had no reason to hold their heads down because they had to work 
 for their living. The richest slave owners did not feel themselves 
 above those who had few negroes or none. When a man called 
 his neighbour 'Colonel,' or 'Judge,' it was to show his respect, 
 nothing more. For the rest, the humblest held their heads as high 
 as the richest, and were as quick, perhaps quicker, in a quarrel." 
 
 Young Harris owed little to the schools but much to a 
 country printing office and to a large library in which it was 
 his privilege to browse at will. At the age of twelve he read 
 one morning the announcement that a new newspaper, The 
 Countryman, was to be started a few rtules from Eatonton. 
 The editor, Joseph Addison Turner, the owner of a large 
 plantation and many slaves, was a man of sound but old- 
 fashioned literary taste and wished his paper to be modelled 
 after The Spectator of Addison and Steele. This announce- 
 ment kindled the ambition of young Harris, who was already 
 familiar with the best literature of Queen Anne's time and to 
 whom the very name Spectator recalled days and nights of 
 indescribable delight. He applied at once for the vacant 
 position of office boy, received a favoturable answer, and de- 
 voted the rest of his life to journalism in his native State. 
 The duties of his new position were not onerous, and he foimd 
 time, or took time, to hunt foxes, coons, opossums, and rabbits 
 whenever he wished, and to make himself familiar with every 
 nook and corner of the surrounding country. 
 
 It was in these early years that Harris laid the foundation 
 for his future work. There was not a negro myth or legend 
 in which he was not interested ; there was not a negro custom or 
 peculiarity that he did not know; and there was not a sound 
 or idiom of the negro language that he could not reproduce. 
 
 "No man who has ever written," says Thomas Nelson Page, 
 "has known one-tenth part about the negro that Mr. Harris 
 knows, and for those who hereafter shall wish to find not merely 
 the words but the real language of the negro of that section and the 
 habits of mind of all American negroes of the old time, his works 
 will prove the best thesaurus." 
 
Harris 303 
 
 In addition to his interest in the life about him Harris soon 
 came to have an equal interest in Turner's large library. 
 Among his favourite books were the writings of Sir Thomas 
 Browne, the essays of Addison and Steele, and later the Bible 
 and Shakespeare. His best loved writer, however, from first 
 to last, and the one whose genius was most like his own, was 
 goldsmith. 
 
 "The only way to describe my experience with The Vicar of 
 Wakefield," he said in his later years, "is to acknowledge that I 
 am a crank. It touches me more deeply, it gives me the ' all-overs ' 
 more severely than all others. Its simplicity, its air of extreme 
 wonderment, have touched and continue to touch me deeply." 
 
 Among the writers of New England Harris seems to have 
 cared least for Emerson and most for Lowell. 
 
 " Culture," he once wrote, "is a very fine thing, indeed, but it is 
 never of much account either in life or in literature, unless it is used 
 as a cat uses a mouse, as a source of mirth and luxtuy. It is at its 
 finest in this country when it is grafted on the sturdiness that has 
 made the nation what it is, and when it is fortified by the strong 
 common sense that has developed and preserved the republic. 
 This is culture with a definite aim and purpose . . . and we feel 
 the ardent spirit of it in pretty much everything Mr. Lowell has 
 written." 
 
 In the march through Georgia, General Sherman's army 
 devastated the Turner plantation, and The Countryman was 
 of course discontinued. After various experiences with differ- 
 ent newspapers Harris joined the staff of The Atlanta Constitu- 
 tion in 1876. At this time he was known chiefly as an essayist 
 and poet, but he began almost immediately to publish some 
 of the plantation legends .that he had heard from the lips of 
 the negroes before and during the war. The first volume of 
 these stories. Uncle Remus: his Songs and his Sayings, the Folk- 
 Lore of the Old Plantation, was published in 1880. It contained 
 thirty-four plantation legends or negro folk-tales, a few planta- 
 tion proverbs, nine negro Songs, a story of the war, and twenty- 
 one sayings or opinions of Uncle Remus, all supposed to be 
 sung or narrated by Uncle Remus himself. In iSSiappeared 
 
304 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Ni^ts with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Planta- 
 tion. This contained sixty-nine new legends and was prefaced 
 by an interesting Introduction. Among the new legends were 
 a few told by Daddy Jack, a representative of the dialect 
 spoken on the coastal rice plantations of South Carolina and 
 Georgia. These two volumes represent the author's best work 
 in the domain of negro dialect and folk-lore, and were accorded 
 instant recognition as opening a new and deeply interesting 
 field both to literature and ethnology. Among the later works 
 that continue the Uncle Remus tradition may be mentioned 
 Uncle Remus and his Friends (1892), Mr. Rabbit at Home (1895), 
 The Tar-Baby Story and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), 
 Told by Uncle Remus (1905), Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit 
 (1907), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910). There were 
 also numerous stories of the War and of the Reconstruction 
 period. 
 
 A year before his death Harris founded Uncle Remus' s 
 Magazine, which survived him only a few years. Immediately 
 after his death in 1908 the Uncle Remus Memorial Association 
 was formed, the purpose of which was to purchase the home of 
 the writer of the Uncle Remus stories, near Atlanta, and to 
 convert it into a suitable memorial. This has now been done. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that Harris came at a time when 
 the interest in the negro was at its height. His value as literary 
 material had been realized in part, but no satisfactory portrait 
 of him had been drawn. The war, too, with its attendant 
 saturnalia of Reconstruction, was over, and the negro was try- 
 ing to fit himself into a new political and industrial regime. It 
 is true also that Uncle Remus has characteristics very different 
 from those with which the negro had hitherto been represented 
 in literature. The character of Uncle Remus is noteworthy 
 not only because it represents both a type and an individual, 
 but because the type is now nearly extinct. Before the war 
 every large plantation or group of plantations had its Uncle 
 Remus; today he lingers here and there in a few villages of the 
 South, but is regarded more as a curiosity, a specimen, a relic 
 of the past than as a part of the present. 
 
 As portrayed by Harris, UndeRemus sums up the past and 
 dimly hints the future. The character was modelled in part 
 
Harris 305 
 
 after that of an old negro, Uncle George Terrell, whom Harris 
 had learned to know intimately on the Turner plantation. 
 The Uncle Remus of the stories is eighty years old, but still 
 moves and speaks with the vigour of youth. 
 
 He had always exercised authority over his fellow-servants. 
 He had been the captain of the corn-pile, the stoutest at the log- 
 rolling, the swiftest with the hoe, the neatest with the plough, and 
 the plantation hands still looked upon him as their leader. ' 
 
 His life spanned three distinct and widely divergent periods; 
 he had looked out upon three worlds — the South before the 
 war, the South during the war, and the South after the war. 
 He is tenderly cared for by his former owners, "Mars John" 
 and ' ' Miss Sally " ; he has his own little patch of ground around 
 his cabin; and he is devotedly attached to Miss Sally's "little 
 boy." In spite of their difference in years, the child and the 
 old man have one point in common : they both look out upon 
 the world with eager, wide-eyed interest. Uncle Remus ex- 
 presses their common point of view in a conversation with 
 Brer Ab. Brer Ab had been telling Uncle Remus of some of 
 the miraculous things seen by a coloured woman in a trance: 
 
 "She say she meet er angel in de road, and he pinted straight ter 
 de mornin' star, and tell her fer ter prepar'. Hit look mighty cu'us, 
 Brer Remus." "Cum down ter dat. Brer Ab," said Uncle Remus, 
 wiping his spectacles carefully, and readjusting them — "cum down 
 ter dat, an' dey ain't nufSn' dat ain't cu'us." ^ 
 
 Acting on this Aristotelian maxim. Uncle Remus explains 
 to the little boy the mysteries of animal life, especially as they 
 embody themselves in the character of the rabbit and the fox. 
 The humour is entirely unconscious. It is not that of the 
 Uebermensch, for the humour of the Uebermensch springs 
 from the consciousness of intellectual power, and is, moreover, 
 direct, cynical, self-assertive, masterful. The humour of Uncle 
 Remus represents the world of the Underman; it has no rea- 
 soned philosophy but springs from the universal desire to 
 correlate the unknown with the known and to explain the most 
 
 ' Nights with Uncle Remus, p. 400. 
 
 " Uncle Remus: his Songs and his Sayings, p. 212. 
 
306 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 mysterious things by reference to the most obvious. If the 
 rabbit lost his long tail on a certain historic occasion, then all 
 the rabbits since born will have short tails. In fact, Uncle 
 Remus's philosophy is perfectly consistent in one thing : all 
 physical characteristics, whether native or acquired, find their 
 explanation not in past conditions but in past events. The 
 slow influence of environment jdelds place to a prompt and 
 obliging heredity. 
 
 After all, however, the language of Uncle Remus is more 
 interesting than his philosophy. In the picttiresqueness of his 
 phrases, in the unexpectedness of his comparisons, in the 
 variety of his figures of speech, in the perfect harmony between 
 the thing said and the way of saying it, the reader finds not 
 only a keen aesthetic delight but even an intellectual satisfac- 
 tion. It is probable that Uncle Remus's vocabulary would be 
 found, on investigation, to be narrowly limited. If so, he is a 
 striking evidence of the varied effects that can be produced 
 with but few words provided these words have been thoroughly 
 assimilated. He leaves the impression not of weakness but of 
 strength, not of contractedness but of freedom. What he says 
 has not only been thought through but seen through and felt 
 through. 
 
 It is only after repeated readings that one realizes how 
 completely the character of Uncle Remus is revealed, or rather 
 how completely he is made to reveal himself. There are not 
 many subjects within his range, or beyond it, on which he has 
 not somewhere registered an interesting opinion. If animals 
 are his specialty, he is none the less willing to comment on 
 negroes before and after the war, his favourite dishes, revivals, 
 courtship, Christmas, witches, and religion. These are some of 
 the elemental things about which his thoughts play and through 
 which we come at last to know him and to revere him. No- 
 where in American literature has an author succeeded better 
 in harmonizing a typical character with an individual character 
 than has been done in the character of Uncle Remus. What 
 James Fenimore Cooper did for the Indian, Harris has in fact 
 pone for the negro. Just as Chingachgook is the last of the 
 {Mohicans, so Uncle Remus is the last of the old-time negroes. 
 Jn literature he is also the first. 
 
Harris 307 
 
 But Uncle Remus is interesting not merely in himself but 
 also for the folk-tales of which he is the mouthpiece. These 
 tales mark indeed the beginning of the scientific study of negro 
 folk-lore in America. The author had, however, no ethnologi- 
 cal purpose in publishing the Uncle Remus stories, and was 
 greatly surprised to learn afterwards that variants of some of 
 his tales had been found among the Indians of North and 
 South America, and in the native literature of India and Siam. 
 Variants of the Tar-Baby story, for example, have been found 
 among the Natchez, Creek, and Yuchi Indians'; among the 
 West Indian islanders^; in Brazil'; in Cape Colonyi; among the 
 Bushmen of South Africa*; along the lower Congo*; in West 
 Central Africa^; among the Hottentots*; and among the 
 Jatakas or "Birth-Stories" of Buddha.' 
 
 As to the accuracy with which the Uncle Remus stories are 
 reproduced, the author speaks as follows : ' ° 
 
 With respect to the folk-lore series, my purpose has been to 
 preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to 
 wed them permanently to the quaint dialect — if, indeed it can be 
 called a dialect — through the medium of which they have become a 
 part of the domestic history of every Southern family; and I have 
 endeavored to give the whole a genuine flavor of the old planta- 
 tion. Each legend has its variants, but in every instance I have 
 retained that particular version which seemed to me to be the most 
 characteristic, and have given it without embellishment and without 
 exaggeration. 
 
 The animals that figure in these stories are, in addition to 
 the fox and the rabbit, the opossum, the cow, the bull, the 
 terrapin, the turtle, the wolf, the frog, the bear, the lion, the 
 
 ' Journal of American Folk-Lore, July-Sept., 1913, p. 194. 
 'Andrew Lang's At the Sign of the Ship (Longman's Magazine, Feb., 1889). 
 ' Romero's Cantos do Brazil. 
 < South African Folk-Lore Journal, vol. i. 
 5 James A. Honey's South African Folk-Tales (1910), p. 79. 
 ^ The Sun, New York, 17 March, 1912. 
 7 The Times, New York, 24 Aug., 1913. 
 
 ' Toni von Held's Mdrchen und Sagen der afrikanischen Neger (Jena, 1904), 
 p. 72. 
 
 » Indian Fairy Tales, selected and edited by Joseph Jacobs (1910), p. 251. 
 '" Uncle Remus: his Songs and his Sayings, Introduction, p. 3. 
 
3o8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 tiger, the pig, the billy goat, the deer, the alligator, the snake, 
 the wildcat, the ram, the mink, the weasel, and the dog; 
 among their feathered friends are the buzzard, the partridge, 
 the guinea-fowl, the hawk, the sparrow, the chicken, and the 
 goose. Why the rabbit should be the hero rather than the fox 
 has been differently explained. Harris's own view seems, 
 however, most in accord with the facts: 
 
 The story of the rabbit and the fox, as told by the Southern 
 negroes . . . seems to me to be to a certain extent allegorical, 
 albeit such an interpretation may be unreasonable. At least it is a 
 fable thoroughly characteristic of the negro; and it needs no scienti- 
 fic investigation to show why he selects as his hero the weakest and 
 most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in 
 contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue that 
 triumphs, but helplessness ; it is not malice but mischievousness. 
 
 The origin of these tales is still in a measure unsettled, and 
 there is urgent need of more scientific investigation of them. 
 For a while it was thought that the negroes learned these 
 stories from the Indians. It is at least certain that many of 
 the Uncle Remus stories are current among the Indians of 
 North and South America. It is equally certain that more is 
 known of Indian folk-lore than of negro folk-lore. The present 
 status of the question is overwhelmingly in favour of an Afri- 
 can origin. The negro slaves, in other words, brought these 
 stories with them from Africa to Brazil and the United States. 
 The Indians in both countries learned them from the negroes. 
 
 Of the negro dialect in general as spoken in the United 
 States today, there are four varieties : 
 
 (i) The dialect of Virginia, especially of Eastern or Tide- 
 water Virginia. It is best represented in the works of Thomas 
 Nelson Page. Broad a is retained in this dialect and there is a 
 vanishing y sound (as in few) heard after c and g when broad a 
 follows: larst {lasf),farst (fast), grahss (grass), pahsture (pasture), 
 chahmber (chamber), pahf (path), cyarn' (can't), kyars (cars), 
 gyardin (garden). Broad a is also heard in cyar (carry) and 
 dyah (there). Such forms as gyardin, seegyar, kyards, kyarvin' 
 knife are also used by Uncle Remus, but they are evidences of 
 
Harris 309 
 
 Virginia influence. Uncle Remus himself says, though he had 
 dropped the broad a, that he "come from Ferginny." 
 
 (2) The dialect of the Sea Islands of the South Atlantic 
 States, known as the Gullah (or Gulla) dialect. The name is 
 probably derived from Angola, as many of the rice-field negroes 
 of South Carolina and Georgia are known to have come from 
 the west coast of Africa. This diminishing dialect is spoken 
 on the rice plantations of coastal South Carolina and Geor- 
 gia as the Uncle Remus dialect is spoken on the cotton and 
 tobacco plantations farther inland. Gullah diverges widely 
 from English and in its most primitive state is, as Harris says, 
 "merely a confused and untranslatable mixture of English 
 and African words." Though it was used in a diluted form 
 here and there by Poe and Simms and though Harris employs 
 it for some of the stories in his Nights with Uncle Remus, it 
 can hardly be said to have found a place in literature. It has 
 given us, however, the only pure African word still current in 
 negro speech, the word buckra, meaning boss or overseer. Tote, 
 meaning to carry, which long claimed a place beside buckra, 
 has been found in American writings of so early a date as to 
 preclude the theory of African origin. 
 
 (3) The dialect spoken by the Creole negroes of Louisiana. 
 This dialect is of course not English but French, and is best 
 represented, though sparingly, in the works of George W. Cable. 
 Its musical quality and the extent to which elision and con- 
 traction have been carried may be seen in the following love 
 song of the Creole negro Bras-Coupe, one of the characters in 
 Cable's Grandissimes. An interlinear translation is added : 
 
 En haut la montagne, zami. 
 
 On the mountain chain, my friends, 
 
 Mo p6 coup^ canne, zami, 
 
 I've been cutting cane, my friends, 
 
 Pou' f^ i'a' zen', zami. 
 
 Money for to gain, my friends, 
 
 Pou' mo bailie Palmyre. 
 
 For my fair Palmyre. 
 
 Ah! Palmjnre, Palms^-e, mo c'ere, 
 
 Ahl Palmyre, Palmyre, my dear. 
 
310 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Mo I'aiin^ 'ou — mo raim^ 'ou. 
 / love you — / love you. 
 
 (4) The Uncle Remus dialect, or the dialect spoken by the 
 negroes in the great inland sections of the South and South-west. 
 Though there have been changes in vocabulary and a decline in 
 vigour and picturesqueness of expression, due to the influence 
 of negro schools and to the passing of the old plantation life, 
 this is the dialect still spoken by the majority of the older 
 negroes in the country districts of the South, especially of the 
 far South. The characteristics of this dialect consist wholly in 
 adaptation of existing English words and endings, not in the 
 introduction of new words or new endings. The plurals of all 
 nouns tend to become regular. Thus Uncle Remus says foots 
 (feet), toofies (teeth), and gooses (geese), though the old plural 
 year is retained. The relative pronoun who is not used, its 
 place being taken by which (or w'ich), what (or w'at), dat, and 
 the more interesting which he and which dey, corresponding to 
 Chaucer's that he and that they. Thus: "She holler so loud dat 
 Brer Rabbit, which he wuz gwine by, got de idee dat she wuz 
 callin' him." 
 
 Another interesting characteristic of the Uncle Remus 
 speech is found in the present tense of verbs. Uncle Remus 
 does not say, for example, / make, you make, he makes, we make, 
 you make, they make, but J makes, you makes, he makes, we 
 makes, you makes, dey makes. Negro dialect, like the dialect 
 of all illiterate peoples, is an ear dialect. The eye has nothing 
 to do with it. The law of analogy, therefore, which is nothing 
 more than the rule of the majority, has unfettered operation. 
 The illiterate man, whether black or white, hearing the third 
 person singular with its invariable .s-ending far more frequently 
 than he hears any other form of the present tense, makes it 
 his norm and uses it for all forms of both numbers. The same 
 is true of the verb to be, though is has not in the language of 
 Uncle Remus entirely succeeded in dispossessing am and are. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Short Story 
 
 THE period between the dvU^War in America and the 
 outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 may be 
 termed in the history of prose fiction thC'-Era-of the 
 Short Story. Everywhere, in France, in Russia, in England, 
 in America, more and more the impressionistic prose tale, the 
 conte — short, effective, a single blow, a moment of atmosphere, 
 a glimpse at a cUmactic instant — came, especially in the 
 magazines, to dominate fictional literature. Formless at first, 
 often overloaded with mawkishness, with essay effects, with 
 moralizing purpose, and dominating background, it grew 
 constantly in proportion and restraint and artistic finish until 
 it was hailed as a new genre, a peculiar product of nineteenth 
 century conditions, one especially adapted to the American 
 temperament and the American kultur. 
 
 That the prose story was no innovation pectiliar to later 
 literature, is an axiom that must precede every discussion of it. 
 It is as old as the race; it has cropped out abundantly in every 
 literature and every period. That it has taken widely differing 
 forms during its long history is also axiomatic. Every genera- 
 tion and every race has had its own ideals in the matter, has 
 set its own fashions. One needs remember only The Book 0/ 
 Rulh, The Thousand and one Nights, the Elizabethan novella, 
 the Sir Roger de Coverley papers, Johnson's Rambler, Hannah 
 More^jnoxaLtales, and the morbid romance of the early nine- 
 teenth-century annuals. The modern short story is only the 
 latest fashion in story telling — short fiction d. la mode. 
 
 In America the evolution of the form may be traced through 
 at least four stages. It began with_jthe .eighieenth-centtuy 
 tale of the Hannah More type, colourless, formless, undramatic, 
 
 3" 
 
312 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 "subservient," to use a contemporary phrase, "only to the 
 interest of virtue" — a form peculiarly adapted to flourish in 
 the Puritanic atmosphere of the new nation. Such stories as 
 Chariessa, or a Pattern for the Sex and The Danger of Sporting 
 with Innocent Credulity, both from Carey's Columbian Magazine 
 established in 1786, satisfied the American reading public for 
 half a century. 
 
 ;, Then came the work of Washington Irving' — ^the blending 
 of the moral tale with the Addisonian essay, especially in its 
 Sir Roger de Coverley phase. The evolution was a peculiar 
 one, a natural result of that isolation of early America which 
 belated aU its art forms and kept it always a full generation 
 behind the literary fashions of London. Irving's early en- 
 thusiasms came from the shelves of the paternal library rather 
 than from the book stalls of the vital centres where flowed the 
 current literature of the day. To the impressionable youth 
 Addison and Steele and Goldsmith were as fresh and new as 
 they had been to their first readers. The result appears in his 
 first publication. Salmagundi, a youthful Spectator, and later 
 in his first serious work. The Sketch Book, another essay periodi- 
 cal since it was issued in monthly numbers — a latter-day Bee. 
 Never did he outgrow this formative influence: always he was 
 of the eighteenth century, an essayist, a moralist, a sketcher 
 of manners, an antiquarian with a reverence for the past, a 
 sentimentalist. His sketchy moral essays and his studies of 
 manners and character grew naturally into expository stories, 
 illustrations, narratives of a traveller set in an atmosphere 
 attractive to the untravelled American of the time, all imagi- 
 nation and longing. He added to the moral tale, of his day 
 characterization, humour, atmosphere," literary charm, but he 
 add,ed_ no element of . constructive art. He lacked the dra- 
 matic; he overloaded his tales with descriptions and essay 
 material; and he ended them feebly. His stories, even the 
 classic Rip Van Winkle, are elaborations with pictorial intent 
 rather than dramas with culminative movement and sharp 
 outlines. They are essays rather than short storieSj^--- 
 
 Irving advanced the short story more by his influence than 
 by his art. The popularity of The Sketch Book and the others 
 that followed it, the tremendous fact of their author's European 
 
 ' See also Chap. 11. 
 
The Short Story 313 
 
 fame, the alluring pictures of lands across the sea, the romantic 
 atmosphere, the vagueness and the wonder of it, laid hold 
 mightily upon the imagination of America. They came just 
 in time to capture the young group of writers that was to rule 
 the mid-century. The twenties and the thirties in America 
 were dominated by The Sketch Book. All at once came an 
 outburst of Irvingesque sketches and tales. That the unit of 
 measure in American fiction is a short one is to be accounted 
 for in a very great degree by the tremendous influence of 
 Irving in its early formative period, and indeed to a date later 
 than is commonly realized. 
 
 For the new form there sprang up in the twenties a new 
 vehicle, the annual. For two decades the book-stands were 
 loaded with flamboyantly bound gift books — The Token, The 
 Talisman, The Pearl, The Amaranth, and the others, elaborate 
 Sketch Books varied soon by echoes from the new romanticism 
 of Europe. Never before such a gushing of sentiment, of 
 mawkish pathos, of crude terror effects, and vague Germanic 
 mysticism. From out of it all but a single figure has survived, 
 the sombre Hawthorne' who was genius enough to turn even 
 the stuff of the annuals into a form that was to persist and 
 dominate. Hawthorne added soul to the short story and 
 made it a form that could be taken seriously even by those 
 who had contended that it was inferior to the longer forms 
 of fiction. He centred his effort about a single situation and 
 gave to the whole tale unity of impression. Instead of elabora- 
 tion of detail, suggestion; instead of picturings of external 
 effects, subjective analysis and psychologic delineation of 
 character. Hawthorne was the first to lift the short story into 
 the higher realms of art. . 
 
 The forties belong to Poe.* With him came for the first 
 time t he science of the short stor y, the treatment of it as a 
 distinct art form with its own rules and its own fields. Laws 
 the form was bound to have if it was to persist. As the century 
 progressed and as modern science swept from men's minds the 
 vague and the generalizing and the disorderly, there came 
 
 ' See also Chap. iv. Here may be mentioned, however, one short story before 
 Hawthorne which seems rather to anticipate him than to follow Irving, William 
 Austin's tantalizing Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, of which the first part appeared 
 in 1824. 
 
 » See also Chap. iii. 
 
314 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 necessarily the demand for more reality, for sharper ojatHnes, 
 for gre ater attention J;o logical order. The modem short 
 story is but the fiction natural, and indeed inevitable, in a 
 scientific age, and Poejwas the^first to perceive the new tendency 
 and to formulate its laws. 
 
 In Poe's opinion the short story owed its vogue in America 
 to the great number of literary magazines that sprang up 
 during the mid years of the century. "The whole tendency of 
 the age is magazineward," he wrote in the early forties. The 
 quarterlies are 
 
 quite out of keeping with the rush of the age. We now de- 
 mand the legal artillery of the intellect; we need the c u rt, fhp. rp n- 
 densed , the pointed, the readily diffused — in place of the volumi- 
 nous, the verbose, the detailed, the inaccessible. . . . It is a sign of 
 the times — an indication of an era in which men are forced upon 
 the curt, the condensed, the well digested, in place of the volu- 
 minous — in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation. 
 
 Ekiioa, he contended, to be scientific must.J)eJbjie f, mu gt 
 yidda^ totality of impressipn at .a.,5i£lgk.,aiiting. The writer 
 must concentrate upon a single effec t. 
 
 If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this 
 effect, he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition 
 there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or 
 indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. 
 
 As he wrote this, Poe was thinking of his own art more than 
 of Hawthorne's. He had been a magazinist all his life, and he 
 had learned to view the tale from the standpoint of the editor. 
 He who has but a brief space at his command in which to make 
 his impression, must condense, must plan, must study his 
 every word and phrase. AU. of his s tories are single strokes, 
 swift m oments of emoti on, D efoe-like massings"nOftta.ilR w Tffi 
 exactness of diction, skilful openings, harrowing closes. 
 
 More than this we may not say. He did not work in the 
 deeps of the human heart hke Hawthorne; he was an artist 
 and only an artist, and even in his art he did not advance further 
 than to formulate the best short story technique of his day. 
 His tales are not to be classified at all with the products of 
 later art. They lack sharpness of .Diith'n e. Rnjui^p., and-tha t 
 
The Short Story 3i5 
 
 sense of reality which makes of a ta le an actual piece of hum an 
 life. His creations are tours de forc e: thev reflect no eart Ely 
 soil, thev are weak in charac tQiaz 9.tignt _and_thdr^ d,^alogue — 
 as witness the conversation of the negroes in The Gold 
 Bug — is wooden and lifele ss. Poe was a critic, keenly obser- 
 vant of the tendencies of his day, sensitive to literary values, 
 scientific, with powers of analysis that amounted to genius. 
 He was not the creator of the short story; he was the first to 
 feel the new demand of his age and to forecast the new art and 
 formulate its laws. 
 
 In the realm of the short story Poe was a prophet, peering 
 into the next age, rather than a leader of his own time. Until 
 later years his influence was small. He had applied his new 
 art to the old sensational material of the thirties — old wine 
 in new bottles. The annuals and aU they stood for were passing 
 rapidly. Putnam's Magazine noted in February, 1853, the 
 great change that had come over the literature for the holiday 
 period. 
 
 It used to be the custom to issue when Christmas approached 
 an almost endless variety of "Gifts, " "Remembrances, " " Gems, " 
 "Tokens," "Wreathes," "Irises," "Albums," &c, with very bad 
 mezzotint engravings and worse letter-press, — ephemeral works, 
 destined to perish in a few weeks; but that custom appears to be 
 rapidly passing away. 
 
 The decline of the old type of story explains why Hawthorne 
 turned to the production of long romances. The age of the 
 Hawthomesque short story had passed. With the fifties had 
 come a new atmosphere. To reaUze it one has but to read 
 for a time in Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Magazine and. 
 the annuals and then to turn to Harper's Magazine, established ; 
 in 1850, Putnam's Magazine, in 1853, and The Atlantic Monthl^J, 
 in 1857. 
 
 In England it was the period of Dickens and Thack-' 
 eray and Reade and George Eliot, the golden age of the 
 later novel. American magazines like Harper's were pub- 
 lishing serial after serial by British pens, yet the demand for 
 short fiction increased rather than declined. During its first 
 year The Atlantic Monthly published upward of thirty-three 
 short stories by twenty-three different authors, or an average of 
 
3i6 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 almost three in every number. It was no longer fiction of the 
 earlier type. A new demand had come to the short story 
 writer; in the "Introductory" to the first volume of Putnam's 
 Magazine the editor announced that American writers and 
 American themes were to predominate, adding that "local 
 reality is a point of utmost importance." In the first volume 
 of the Atlantic, Emerson struck the new note: "How far 
 off from life and manners and motives the novel still is. Life 
 lies about us dumb"; and in the same volume a reviewer of 
 George Eliot notes " the decline of the ideal hero and heroine." 
 "The public is learning that men and women are better than 
 heroes and heroines." By 1861 a writer Hke Rebecca Harding 
 Davis could open her grim short story, Life in the Iron Mills, 
 with a note like this; 
 
 I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean 
 clothes, and come right down with me, — here into the thickest of 
 the fog and mud and effluvia. I want you to hear this story. 
 There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain 
 dumb for centuries : I want to make it a real thing for you. 
 
 The fifties and sixties in America stand for the dawnin g of 
 .^efiniteness, of localized reality, of a feeling left on the reader 
 of actuality and truth to human life. 
 
 The first significant figure of the transition was ^ose 
 Terry (1827-92), later better known as Rose Terry Cooke, 
 who has the distinction of having contributed seven short 
 stories to the first eight ntunbers of the Atlantic. Bom in 
 Connecticut — the heart of New England, a school teacher 
 with experience in country districts, she wrote with knowledge 
 and conviction of the area of life that she knew. In her long 
 series of stories beginning in the forties with unlocalized ro- 
 mantic tales in Graham's and extending throughout the transi- 
 tion period into the seventies and eighties, and ending with a 
 final collection as late as 1 891, one may trace every phase of 
 the American short story in half a century. Her early Atlantic 
 narratives lean decidedly in the direction of the Young Ladies' 
 Repository type of fiction, sentimental, leisurely, moralizing, 
 and yet even in the poorest of them there is a sense of actuality 
 that was new in American short fiction. They were not ro- 
 mances; they were homely fragments of New England rural 
 
The Short Story 317 
 
 life. The heroine may be introduced in this unromantic fashion : 
 "Mrs. Griswold was paring apples and Lizzie straining squash." 
 Here for the first time we may find dialect that rings true, and, 
 moreover, here for the first time are sprightUness and rollicking 
 humour, varied at times with tragedy and true pathos. As 
 one traces her work from Atlantic to Atlantic, a gradual increase 
 in power impresses one until after her declaration of independ- 
 ence at the opening of Miss Lucinda (August, 1861) — " I 
 offer you no tragedy in high life, no sentimental history of 
 fashion and wealth, but only a little story about a woman who 
 could not be a heroine" — ^it is felt that she has found herself 
 and that with her later work like Odd Miss Todd, Freedom 
 Wheeler's Controversy with Providence, The Deacon's Week, 
 and last of all and in many ways her best, T he Town and Country 
 Jdouse, the final story in her collection Huckleberries, she has 
 passed into the new period and taken a secure place with the 
 small group of masters of the short story. Unlike Harriet 
 Prescott Spofford, whose gorgeous In a Cellar and The Amber 
 Gods fiuttered for a time the readers of the early sixties, she 
 was able to heed the voice of the new period and to grow and 
 outgrow, and it was this power that made her the pioneer 
 and the leader not only of the group of depicters of New Eng- 
 land Hfe, but of the whole later school of makers of localized 
 short fiction realistically rendei'ed. 
 
 K-Ose Terry came gradually, an evolution, without noise or 
 sensation; not so Fitz- James O'Brien (1828-62), who, after his 
 The Diamond Lens (January, 1858), was hailed loudly as a new 
 Poe. O'Brien's career in America was meteoric. He appeared 
 unheralded, in 1852, an adventurer who had been educated in 
 Dublin University, and who had squandered a rich patrimony 
 in London. For ten years he lived in the Bohemian circles of 
 New York, writing impetuously, when the mood was upon 
 him, temperamental, Celtic-souled material which he published 
 here and there in the magazines — Harper's, Putnam's, the 
 Atlantic, until, enlisting in one of the first regiments of volun- 
 teers, he fell in one of the earliest skirmishes of the Civil War. 
 His short stories What Was It ? and The Wondersmith have 
 undoubted power, but they are not to be compared with the 
 best work of Hawthorne and Poe. What O'Brien might have 
 done had he lived into the next period of the short story it is 
 
3i8 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 idle to conjecture. As it is, he must be regarded only as an 
 episode, a passing sensation, and he might be dismissed un- 
 mentioned but for the fact that he was an undoubted influence 
 in the period of transition. To the art and the impressionism 
 of Poe he added the new element of actuality. His shuddery 
 tale What Was It? is laid in a New York boarding-house 
 with convincingness. Even his Hawthorne-like fantasia The 
 Wondersmith has as a background a New York slum street 
 drawn with all the pitiless realism of a Zola. O'Brien added 
 the sense of actuality to Poe's unlocalized romance, but his 
 influence was not large. 
 
 Another figure in the transition was Edward Everett Hale 
 ( 1 822-1 909), whose The Man without a Country, first pub- 
 Ushed in 1863, has been accepted generally as an American 
 classic. Little else that he has written, and he wrote much in 
 many fields, gives promise of surviving, and the reasons why 
 this should survive are not immediately evident. As a short 
 story it would seem to have almost fatal defects. It may be 
 used as an example of mid-century diffuseness, its moralizing 
 intent is only thinly veiled, it is episodic, and it does not culmi- 
 nate. Undoubtedly its timehness — ^it is a document in the 
 history of the war — ^and its genuine atmosphere of patriotism 
 account partly for its success, but there are more vital reasons. 
 It is really a work of art. With all its episodes it presents 
 but a single situation,^nd that situation at the close has been 
 so worked upon that it becomes to the reader a haunting 
 presence, never to be forgotten. Moreover, there is xeaU-ty- 
 to the story. Everything- is in the concrete. The author 
 adds specific detail to detail with the skill of a Defoe until, in 
 spite of its manifest impossibility, the tale becomes alive, a 
 piece of actual history, a htmian document. Few modem 
 
 writers have surpassed Hale in what may be called the art .of 
 
 verisimilitude. He was the precursor of Stockton. A story 
 like My Double and how he Undid me is manifestly a tour de 
 force, yet one is in danger of gravely accepting it as a fact. 
 Hale added to the short story not alone the sense of reality; 
 he added plausibility as well. 
 
 With Henry James' the period of transition came to an 
 end. From 1865, when he published his first story, until 1875, 
 
 ' See also Chap. viii. 
 
The Short Story 3i9 
 
 the date of Roderick Hudson, he devoted himself to short fiction, 
 contributing fourteen stories to the Atlantic alone, and he 
 brought to his work not only the best art America had evolved, 
 but the best of England and France as well. He was a scien- 
 tist, an observer, a tabulator, as cool and accurate as even 
 his brother William James, the psychologist. Unlike O'Brien 
 and the others, he threw away completely the machinery of 
 the mid-century tale — ^not without regret it would appear from 
 his Romance of Certain Old Clothes and other early tales — and 
 sought only the uncoloured truth. The art of Poe, especially 
 the French adaptations of that art, he retained, but he rejected 
 all the rest of Poe's outfit. That he understood the full pos- 
 sibilities of the supernatural as short story material we know 
 from his grim tale The Turn of the Screw, but the field was 
 little to lus taste. He was a naturalist rather than a super- 
 naturalist, and his sensitive and fastidious soul could not endure 
 the harsh and the horrible. In an early story, My Friend 
 Bingham (1867), he wrote: "I am of a deep aversion to stories 
 of a painful nature . . . the literature of horrors needs no 
 extension." He rejected allegory and mystery and vague im- 
 pressionism as unscientific. He condemned the tradition that 
 "a serious story of manners shall close with the factitious 
 happiness of a fairy tale." He was a scientist; his second 
 paper in the Atlantic is a defence of George Eliot, scientist. 
 ToJboth of them the first requisite of fiction was the truth, 
 the truth told directly, simply, concretely. 
 
 An age of science could no longer tolerate the unrelieved 
 black and white of the earlier periods, but demanded shades, 
 traces of white found even in the black. According to James, 
 a, short story was the analysis of a situation, the psychological 
 phenomena of a group of men and women at an interesting 
 moment. Given two, three, four diflEerent temperaments, 
 ' bring them into a certain situation, and what would be the 
 action and reaction? The story was a problem to be solved. 
 Little was to be said about the characters: they were to reveal 
 themselves, gradually, slowly as they do in actual life, by long 
 continued dialogue, by little unconscious actions and reactions, 
 by personal pecvdiarities in dress, manners, movement, revealed 
 by a thousand subtle hints, descriptive touches, insinuations. 
 Under such conditions the movement of the story must be 
 
320 chapters of American Literature 
 
 slow: in some of his work there seems to be no story at all, 
 only the analysis of a situation. The method requires space: 
 James has stretched the length of the short story to its ex- 
 treme. The Aspern Papers, the bare story of which could 
 have been told in three pages, dragged through three maga- 
 zine instalments. Twenty-eight of the one hundred and 
 three stories in Henry James's final list are long enough to 
 appear as volumes. Yet one may not doubt they are short 
 stories: they are each of them the presentation of a single 
 situation and they leave each of them a tinity of impression. 
 
 James was the most consummate artist American literature 
 has produced. He was fastidious by nature and by early 
 training. He had studied his art in France as men study sculp- 
 ture in Italy, and he had learned the French mastery of form. 
 Nowhere in his writings may we find slovenly work. His 
 opening and closing paragraphs are always models, his dialogue 
 moves naturally and inevitably, — ^in all the story despite its 
 length nothing too much, — and everywhere a brilliancy new in 
 American fiction. He is seldom spontaneous; always is he the 
 conscious artist; always is he intellectual; always is he working 
 in the clay of actual life, a realist who never forgets his problem 
 to soar into the uncharted and the unscientific realms of the 
 metaphysical and the romantic. 
 
 The chief criticism of the short stories of James must con- 
 cern their spirit rather than their form. The tendency of 
 science has been to repudiate the spiritual. Romance with 
 intuition in place of sense perception found at least the heart. 
 With James the short story became an art form simply, cold 
 and brilliant, a study of the surface of society, manners, endless 
 phenomena jotted down in a note-book, human life from the 
 standpoint of the laboratory and the test tube. Beyond the 
 brilliant art of Henry James, the impressionistic study of 
 situations from the standpoint of scientific truth, the American 
 short story has never advanced. He gave distinctness to the 
 form. Nevertheless, he is not a supreme master: that domi- 
 nating factor in life that eludes scapel and test-tube he never 
 found, and, neglecting it, he falls inevitably into second .place- 
 as an interpreter of human life. 
 
 That James and others of his school, like T. B. Aldrich, for 
 instance, and H. C. Bunner, could have directed the short stoiy 
 
The Short Story 321 
 
 permanently into the channels that it has followed in France, 
 is doubtful. The great success in the middle seventies of the 
 anonymous Saxe Holm's Stones, with their mid-century senti- 
 ment and romantic atmosphere, would imply that America at 
 heart was still what it was in the days of Hawthorne and the 
 annuals. What might have happened had James and Howells 
 and Aldrich had full control it is idle to speculate; what did 
 happen was the sudden appearance of a short story that 
 stampeded America and for two decades set the style in short 
 fiction. Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp, whatever 
 one may think of its merits, must be admitted to be the most 
 inflijential short story ever written in America if it may be 
 judged by its imitators. 
 
 Francis Bret Harte was born in 1839 at Albany, where his'/ 
 father, a scholar and an itinerant teacher of languages, hap- 
 pened at the time to be stationed. A youth of frail physique, 
 he became a precocious reader, preferring a Hawthorne-like 
 seclusion among books to playground activities among boys of 
 his own age. From his childhood he was predisposed to litera- 
 ture; he dreamed over it, and he began to make poems even in 
 his early school days. His removal to California at the age of 
 fifteen, five years after the first gold rush, came from no initia- 
 tive of his. To the deUcate youth dreaming over his books 
 it was an exile at the barbarous ends of the world. For a 
 time he lived at his mother's home at Oakland — ^after a nine 
 years' widowhood she had married again — and then half 
 heartedly he began to support himself as a school teacher, as a 
 private tutor, as a druggist's clerk, and later as a type-setter 
 on a rural newspaper. There is Httle doubt that for a time 
 he saw something of mining Ufe during a visit to Humboldt 
 County, but the experience was brief. He had no taste for 
 the rough life of the border. The greater part of his seven- 
 teen years in California he spent in San Francisco, first as 
 type-setter, then as editor in various newspaper and maga- 
 zine establishments. He was a man of the city, a professional 
 literary worker, a poet, and a dreamer over the work of the 
 older poets and romancers. 
 
 Harte came to the short story by way of Irving. His first 
 dream was to do for the lands of the Spanish missions what 
 Irving had done for the highlands of the Hudson. As early as 
 
322 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 1863 he had contributed to The Atlantic Monthly his Legend 
 of Monte del Diablo, which, with half a dozen other pieces 
 written during the same period, breathed the soul of The 
 Sketch Book. Poe had affected him not at all, but he had read 
 much in the French, and he had been from his boyhood a 
 devotee of Dickens. When in 1868, therefore, he found him- 
 self editor of the new Overland Monthly, which was to be the 
 Atlantic Monthly of the Pacific coast, it was not strange that 
 he should have evolved for its second number a short story 
 like The Luck of Roaring Camp. The time was ready for 
 such a production, and the place was ready: it could have come 
 only during the decade following the war, and, moreover, it 
 could have come only from CaUfomia. 
 
 The story was woven of four strands: first, there was the 
 Dickens sentiment, melodrama, theatric presentation of lowly 
 material; second, there was the "French art that had been 
 adapted from Poe — ^form, finesse, nothing too much; third, 
 there was the'unusualness of background, new skies, strange 
 types, presented by one who seemingly had been a part of what 
 he told, a voice of the ne^ spirit of the age in America; and, 
 finally, over it all there was a reminiscence of Irving, that impal- 
 pable atmosphere of romance which covers it with the soft haze 
 of remembered things, of the far-off and the idealized. Only 
 the third was new, the "local colour" we have come to call it, 
 that touch of strangeness added to the picture by means of 
 strongly picturesque characters and scenes hitherto unknown 
 to the reader, A mere spice of novelty it was, a detail of stage 
 setting wholly subsidiary to the vital elements of the tale, 
 and yet it was largely this single element that gave The Luck 
 of Roaring Camp its enormous vogue and that made its author 
 — ^at least in America — ^the most influential writer of short 
 stories in a generation. 
 
 And yet Harte was an effect rather than a cause. America 
 was ready for local colour. He was the voice that started the 
 avalanche that was bound to come sooner or later. The Civil 
 War had liberated America from provinciaHsm. It had done 
 away with the boundaries of New England, of the South, of 
 New York, of the West. The new emphasis was now upon 
 the nation rather than upon the state or section. The first 
 railroad across the continent was completed in 1868. Now 
 
The Short Story 323 
 
 everjrwhere were problems national in scope. The tremendous 
 activities of the war were now transferred to the breaking of the 
 great West, to the building of new cities and industries, and 
 to the extending into every part of the continent of a network 
 of communication. Books of travel like Bowles's Across the 
 Continent and King's The Great South began to appear, and all 
 at once the nation awoke to a realization of its own riches, of 
 its own picturesque diversity. The long period of the settle- 
 ment had bred individualism; it had covered America with 
 little isolated areas as provincial as if they were the only settle- 
 ments on the continent. The era following the war was an 
 era of self-discovery. America was as full of new and interest- 
 ing life and environment as even Europe, and for two decades 
 and more American writers exploited the strange new riches of 
 the land as the first wave of placer miners excitedly rifle the 
 nugget pockets of a new-found bonanza. Eagerly the public 
 read of the picturesque conditions that had evolved from the 
 California rush of '49; it wondered at the new world that Mark 
 Twain revealed in his Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and 
 that Cable opened in old Creole New Orleans, and at the gro- 
 tesque Hoosier types revealed by Eggleston; it thrilled with 
 astonishment at Charles Egbert Craddock's pictures of the 
 dwellers in the Tennessee Mountains, and at Octave Than- 
 et's revelations of life in the canebrakes of Arkansas; and it 
 lingered over the Old South before the war as revealed by 
 Johnston, and Harris, and Page. 
 
 •Never was movement launched with more impetus. No 
 sooner had The Luck of Roaring Camp reached the East than 
 the foremost publishing house of Boston hailed it as a new 
 classic. Its author immediately was offered ten thousand 
 dollars a year to write for The Atlantic Monthly, and the pro- 
 gress of his train east as he came to accept his unprecedented 
 commission was indicated by daily bulletins in the newspapers 
 as if he were a royal personage on a tour of the land. When was 
 short story ever so advertised before? No wonder that every- 
 body at the earliest opportunity read it, and later, in 1870, 
 bought the book of short stories to which it gave the title. 
 
 Harte's arrival in Boston marks the climax of his career. 
 We need not follow him to Europe whither he afterwards went 
 to spend the rest of his Hfe, or read widely in his voluminous 
 
324 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 later product. The work in that first collection containing 
 The Luck of Roaring Camp he never surpassed, though over 
 and over for years he repeated its characters and backgrounds 
 in stories of California life. If he is to endure it will be on 
 
 {account of the title story, or Tennessee's Partner, or The Out- 
 
 \ casts of Poker Flat. 
 
 Like James, Harte was a conscious artist, a workman who 
 had served a careful apprenticeship. His stories are models 
 of condensation, his characters are as distinct and as striking 
 as are those of Dickens, his climaxes are dramatic, and his 
 closing effect is always impressively theatric. Sentiment he 
 used with a free hand, but he kept it more within control than 
 did the creator of Little Nell. Fiction with him, as with Poe, 
 was a deliberate thing, to be written with the reader always 
 in mind. His unit necessarily was short. He had no power 
 to trace the growth of a soul or to record the steps of an evolu- 
 tion. His one attemp t at a^ novels Gabriel Conroy, was a 
 failure. He could make a situation dramatic, he could make 
 alive a climactic moment in a reckless career, but he was 
 powerless to deal with the resultant effects from a complexity 
 of motives and situations. What he added to the short story 
 of his time, aside from the obvious local colour, was the drama- 
 tic element. His stories move, they culminate, they may be 
 translated with little change into acting plays. Moreover, 
 Harte was the first prominently to bring into the short stoiy, 
 the element of paradox. It is the object of the theatrical 
 always to move strongly the emotions, to keep interest taut 
 by swift change and by unexpected turns. With Harte para- 
 ii0X—be.caine ^almost a_ mannerism. Everywhere anticlimax: 
 in a desperado suddenly an outburst of Christlike self-sacrifice; 
 from a mild youth with seraphic countenance a fiendish out- 
 burst; from a seeming clergyman, all in a moment, profanity. 
 
 The weakness of Harte was his lack of sincerity and of 
 moral background. Unlike Cable and Page, he stood apart 
 from his material, cold and unmoved, and sought not the 
 truth but effect upon the reader. Every one of his extreme 
 characters may have had somewhere a counterpart, and every 
 separate incident, no matter how starthng, may actually have 
 happened at some time during the mining era, but the assem- 
 bling of all this mass of exceptions and of isolated extremes into 
 
The Short Story 325 
 
 pictures that give the impression that they represent the ordi- 
 nary course of life everywhere in ^ California during a period is 
 in reality a violation of the truth. The stories are unnatural: 
 they have about them the atmosphere of the theatre. They 
 are melodrama: they are compounded of the stage properties of 
 the showman. Great as has been his influence, Harte cannot 
 rank with the supreme masters of the short story. Lacking 
 sincerity and sympathy and moral background, he becomes a 
 picturesque incident rather than a permanent force. 
 
 After the enormous publicity given to Harte and the 
 universal praise accorded his work both in America and in 
 Europe, one might expect to find that a sudden change came 
 over the spirit of American fiction. A change there was, 
 indeed, but it was not sudden. One may leaf through whole 
 volumes of such periodicals as Harper's Magazine and find no 
 hint of the new vogue. Artists like James and Aldrich went 
 on with their work as if The Luck of Roaring Camp had never 
 been written. The writers who were to be infiuenced — that 
 group which later was to be known as the "local colour school " 
 — ^in 1870 were just beginning to find themselves, and they fell 
 under the spell of Harte just as Longfellow and his circle in 
 earlier days had fallen under the spell of Irving, It was not 
 until the eighties and the early nineties that the tide which 
 had begun in The Overland Monthly in 1868 came to its full. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting transition during the period 
 is that which may be traced in the work of Constance Fenimore 
 Woolson_Xi8382-94), a grandniece of Cooper, a native of New 
 Hampshire, and a dweller successively by the Great Lakes, 
 in the South, and in Italy, where she died. At the beginning 
 of the seventies Miss Woolson was writing unlocalized poetic 
 stories for Harper's, A Merry Christmas, An October Idyl, 
 and the like, tales that might have come from the early 
 period of Rose Terry Cooke. But soon one notes a change, a 
 new sense of the value of background and of strongly indi- 
 vidualized types for characters. By 1874 she was choosing 
 the West for her materials. Her Solomon is a study of a unique 
 character in an isolated German settlement on One-leg Creek 
 which flows into the Tuscarawas River in Ohio, and her 
 Jeanette and most of the other stories in Castle Nowhere (1875) 
 deal with the primitive French habitants on Mackinac and 
 
326 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 the islands of Lake Superior. She had been reading Harte. 
 Later, in the South, she was stirred by the desolation and the 
 poverty wrought by the war, and now with her heart in her 
 work she wrote the first post-bellum Southern short stories 
 founded upon the contrast between what was and what had 
 been. And still later in Italy she caught again the soul of a 
 people and wrought it into the tales to be collected under 
 the title The Front Yard. With each voltime there had been 
 an increase in definiteness, in picturesque characterization, in 
 dramatic effect. She worked withor.t dialect and she threw 
 over her work the soft evening light, yet was she a realist, as 
 Harte never was, and unHke him too she worked always with 
 insight and sympathy. Stories Hke her The Front Yard are 
 constructed of the materials of life itself. One cannot forget 
 them. 
 
 A transition from another source is to be found in the stories 
 of .-SaraJir Ome Jewett (i 849-1 909), who also stands on the 
 border line between the real and the romantic. She was 
 affected not at all by Harte, but by Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry 
 Cooke. In her Deephaven (1877) she struck the new note of 
 the decade, concreteness, geographical locality made so definite 
 and so minutely real that it may be reckoned with as one of 
 the characters in the story. Rose Terry Cooke had written 
 of New England; Miss Jewett wrote of Deephaven, which was 
 Berwick, Maine, her native town. Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. 
 Cooke wrote of the New England flood tide; Miss Jewett wrote 
 of the ebb, not despairingly like Miss Wilkins and the depressed 
 realists, but reverently and gently. Oyer all her work is the 
 hint of a glory departed, that Irving-like atmosphere which is 
 the soul of romance. She delighted in decaying old seaports 
 with their legends of other and better days, of old sea captains 
 meUow and reminiscent, and of dear old ladies serene in spite 
 of the buffets of time. 
 
 Her knowledge of her materials was intimate and thorough. 
 All through her girlhood she had ridden much with her father, a 
 country doctor, as he went his daily round among his patients. 
 From him she learned the soul of the region, and she sympa- 
 thized with it, and later she interpreted it in story after story 
 based accurately upon what she knew. Unlike Mrs. Cooke, 
 she came late enough to avoid the mid-century gush of senti- 
 
The Short Story 327 
 
 ment. With^her it became pathos, the pathos of sympathy 
 j^d miderstanding; there is a grip of it in each one of her tales. 
 One does not cry over a story like A White Heron, but one feels 
 at the end of it Uke finding the sturdy little heroine and calling 
 her a good girl. No art can go farther. Her delight was in the 
 ^simple and the idyllic rather than in the dramatic. A story 
 Uke A Native of Winhy has very little of plot; but no tale was 
 ever more worth the telling. It is a quivering bit of human 
 life, a section of New England, a tale as true as a soul's record 
 of yesterday. 
 
 There remains the element of style. She was one of the 
 few creators of the short story after the seventies who put into 
 her work anjrthing like distinction. She was of the old school 
 in this, of the school of Irving and Hawthorne and Poe. In- 
 deed her style has often been likened to Hawthorne's, effort- 
 less, limpid, stm-clear in its flowing sentences, and softened and 
 mellowed into a Sleepy-Hollow atmosphere — ^the perfect style, 
 it would seem, for recording the fading glories of a charming 
 old regime. 
 
 Her best stories are perhaps Miss Tempy's Watchers, The 
 Dvlham Ladies, The Queen's Twin, A White Heron, and A 
 Native o/ Winby. Lightness of touch, humour, pathos, perfect 
 naturalness— rthese are the points of her strength. She was a 
 romanticist, equipped with a camera and a fountain pen. - 
 
 To touch the seventies anywhere is to touch romance. 
 Even HoweUs was not fully a reaHst until into the eighties. 
 The new local colour work was. not primarily realism. The 
 new writers who now sprang up to portray local peculiari- 
 ties in all parts of the land sought, even as Harte had done, 
 to throw an idealized atmosphere over their pictures. One 
 thinks of Mrs. Jackson and Ratnona and of Eggleston and 
 The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and, in the realm of the short story, 
 of George W. Cable and Charles Egbert Craddock. 
 
 Cable was one of the discoveries of Edward King during 
 his touFoTthe South for Scribner's Monthly in 1872. It was 
 in New Orleans that he found him working as a humble clerk 
 by day, and by night dreaming over a collection of reading 
 matter as foreign to his work-day world as that which once 
 had engaged another dreaming clerk, Charles Lamb. Among 
 his enthusiasms were the old Spanish and French archives of 
 
328 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 the city; old relations of the priest-explorers; French novels — 
 Hugo, Merim6e, About; English Hterature and American — 
 Thackeray, Dickens, Poe, Irving. The composite of all this, 
 plus a unique and evanescent quality which we call personality, 
 was already finding form in sketches and stories which Cable 
 was writing for himself and for the New Orieans papers. Some 
 of his stories he showed to King, who advised him to send them 
 to Scribner's. One of these, 'Sieur George, was published the 
 following year; others came at intervals. The young artist 
 was not to be hurried; it was not for half a dozen years that 
 enough had accumtdated to make a volume. He had grown 
 slowly upon the American consciousness, but the growth had 
 been steady and sound. Old Creole Days (1879) was accepted 
 at once as a masterpiece, and there has been no revulsion of 
 feeling. 
 
 This collection, together with Madame Delphine the sum- 
 total of his really distinctive short stories, owes its charm not 
 alone to quaintness and strangeness of materials. It is as redo- 
 lent of Cable as The Luck of Roaring Camp is of Harte. Cable's 
 technique and his atmospheres may have been influenced by 
 the French, but his style, — epigrammatic, Gallic in its swift 
 shiftings and witty insinuations, daintily light, exquisitely 
 pathetic at times, exotic always in its flavour of the old Creole 
 city so strange to Northern readers, — all this is his own. No 
 one has excelled him as a painter of dainty femininity, as a 
 master of innuendo and suggestion, as a creator of exotic at- 
 mospheres. Whether his backgrounds are realistically true 
 we do not ask, and whether his characters are actual types we 
 do not care. They are true to the fundamentals of human 
 life, they are alive, they satisfy, and they are presented ever 
 with exqtiisite art. Old Creole Da ys stands unique,, one of 
 the undisputed masterpieces in the realm of the short story, 
 American or foreign. 
 
 Two distinct schools rtiled the short fiction of the seventies, 
 that vital seed-time of a period : the school of unlocaUzed art, 
 timeless and placeless, as Poe and Hawthorne had written it, 
 and the new "local colour" school of Harte, which was going 
 more and more to extremes. A few there were like Henry 
 James who went on with their work utterly oblivious of 
 the new demand for the violently localized. T. B. Aldrich 
 
The Short Story 329 
 
 was one. His little story Marjorie Daw was published in the 
 Atlantic five years after Harte's sensational d6but. A trivial 
 thing it was compared with such tragedies as Tennessee's 
 Partner or Madame Delphine, an American humorous anecdote 
 elaborately expanded, with a "point" at the end to be followed 
 by laughter, yet its appearance marked a new stage in the 
 history of the American short story. Tales already there had 
 been that had held a sensation in the last sentence. The Amber 
 Gods had ended with the startling words: "I must have died 
 at ten minutes past one." But in Marjorie Daw the device 
 was handled with a skill that made the story a model for later 
 writers. After Aldrich, Stockton and Bunner and O. Henry 
 and all their dexterous companions. 
 
 Aldrich brought a style to the short story as distinctive 
 as Cable's, a certain patrician elegance, yet a naturalness and a 
 simplicity that concealed everywhere its art, for art is the soul 
 of it; every sentence, every word a studied contribution toward 
 the final effect. There is no moral, no hidden meaning, no 
 exotic background to be displayed, no chastening tragedy; 
 it is a mere whimsicality light as air, a bit of American comedy. 
 The laugh comes not from what is told but from the picture 
 supplied by the reader's imagination. All of ,Aldrich's thin 
 repertoire of short stories is of the same texture. He riiay be 
 compared with no American writer. To find a counterpart 
 of Marjorie Daw one must go to the French — to Daudet for 
 its whimsical lightness of touch, and to Maupassant for its 
 exquisite technique. 
 
 But the interest created by the appearance of Marjorie 
 Daw was mild compared with that accorded to Frank R. 
 Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger? (1884). Sto^ton (1834- 
 1902) had not the technique of Aldrich nor his naturalness 
 and ease. Certainly he had not his atmosphere of the beau 
 monde and his grace of style, but in whimsicality and un- 
 expectedness and in that subtle art that makes the obviously 
 impossible seem perfectly plausible and commonplace, he sur- 
 passed not only him but Edward Everett Hale and all others. 
 After Stockton and The Lady or the Tiger ? it was realized even 
 by the uncritical that short story writing had become a subtle 
 art and that the master of its subtleties had his reader at his 
 mercy. 
 
330 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 The best of Stockton's short work is to be found in his 
 Negative Gravity, The Transferred Ghost, The Remarkable 
 Wreck of the " Thomas Hyke, " and The Late Mrs. Null. It is 
 like nothing else in American literature: everywhere paradox 
 presented with the utmost gravity, everywhere topsy-turviness 
 and anticlimax and the grotesquely unexpected. There is 
 little of substance in it all; it is opera bouffe, amusing, delightful, 
 ephemeral. Even now Stockton is remembered only for 
 The Lady or the Tiger? and the present generation considers 
 even that story clumsy work when compared with the creations 
 of his successor, O. Henry. 
 
 Another who did much to advance the short story toward 
 the mechanical perfection it had attained to at the close of 
 the century was Henry Cuyler Btmner (1855-96), editor of 
 Puck and creator of some of the most exquisite vers de sociStS of 
 the period. The title of one of his collections. Made in France: 
 French Tales with a U. S. Twist, forms an introduction to his 
 fiction. Not that he was an imitator; few have been more 
 original or have put more of their own personality into their 
 work. His genius was Gallic. Like Aldrich, he approached 
 the short story from the fastidious standpoint of the lyric poet. 
 With him, as with Aldrich, art was a matter of exquisite touches, 
 of infinite compression, of almost imperceptible shadings. 
 The lurid splashes and the heavy emphasis of the local colourists 
 offended his sensitive taste: he would work with suggestion, 
 with microscopic focussings, and always with dignity and 
 elegance. He was more American than Henry James, more 
 even than Aldrich. He chose always distinctively native 
 subjects, — New York City was his favourite theme, — ^and his 
 work had more depth of soul than Stockton's or Aldrich's. 
 The story may be trivial, a mere expanded anecdote, yet it is 
 sure to be so vitally treated that, like Maupassant's work, it 
 grips and remains, and, what is more, it lifts and chastens or 
 explains. It may be said with assurance that Short^ Sixes 
 marks one of the high places which have been attained by the 
 American short story, particularly when the art of the form is 
 considered. 
 
 In the same group belongs Ambrose Bierce (1838-1914?), 
 though in mere point of time he is to be counted with the 
 California group of the early Overland Monthly days. A 
 
The Short Story 33i 
 
 soldier of the Civil War, editor of the San Francisco News Letter 
 in 1866, associate editor, with the younger Tom Hood, of 
 London Fun in 1872, author in London of the brilliant satirical 
 fables Cobwebs from an Empty Skull in 1874, then in California 
 again as editor of The Argonaut and The Wasp, and finally a 
 resident of Washington, D. C, he was one of the most cos- 
 mopolitan of American writers. It was not until 1891 that 
 his Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, later changed to In the 
 Midst of Life, gave him a place with the short story writers, a 
 very prominent place some critics would insist. Power un- 
 doubtedly he had, a certain scintillating brilliance, and a 
 technique almost uncanny. His world was the world of Poe, 
 timeless and placeless, ghastly often, chilling always and 
 unnerving. -At his best he was Poe returned after a half century 
 equipped with the short story art of the new generation. Few 
 have surpassed him in precision of diction, in reserve, in the 
 use of subtle insinuation and of haunting climax. Some of 
 his tales cling in one's soul like a memory of the morgue. His 
 failure wasJiis,artificiality and his lack of sincerity .and. of truth 
 to the facts of human life. Like Poe, he was a man of the 
 intellect only, a craftsman of exquisite subtlety, an artist 
 nierely for the sake of his art. 
 
 With the eighties the short story came in America fully to 
 its own. Up to 1884 it had generally been regarded as a 
 magazine form, a rather trivial thing as compared with the 
 stately novel. Hawthorne had abandoned the form early 
 with the implication that he had used it as a prentice exercise. 
 Harte no sooner had gained recognition than he began on 
 Gabriel Conroy. Henry James, though it must be noted that 
 it was after his long English residence, while revising his 
 work declared that he had felt a sense of reUef when he aban- 
 doned the frail craft of the short story where he ever had felt 
 in danger of running ashore. Scarcely one of the later group 
 of short story writers but sooner or later sought permanence 
 in what, though they might not have confessed it, seemed 
 to them the more permanent and dignified form of fiction. 
 
 Beginning in 1884, however, collections more and more 
 began to dominate the output of fiction. Henry James in 
 1885 gathered up his scattered work of a decade and put it 
 forth as Stories Revived. Others followed him, until seven 
 
332 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 years later the critic Copeland could devote an entire Atlantic 
 article to the short -story collections of the year. The full 
 tritimph came in 189 1, which produced this significant list of 
 collections: Elsket, and Other Stories, Thomas Nelson Page; 
 Balaam and his Master, Joel Chandler Harris; Flute and Violin, 
 James Lane Allen; Otto the Knight, Octave Thanet (Alice 
 French); Main-Travelled Roads, Hamlin Garland; Gallegher, 
 and Other Stories, Richard Harding Davis; Fourteen to One, 
 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Huckleberries Gathered from New 
 England Hills, Rose Terry Cooke; Iduna, and Other Stories, 
 George A. Hibbard; Three Tales, William Douglas O'Connor; 
 Uncle of an Angel, Thomas A. Janvier; Zadoc Pine, and Other 
 Stories, Bunner; With My Friends, Brander Matthews; Rudder 
 Grangers Abroad, Stockton; The Adventures of Three Worthies, 
 Clinton Ross. 
 
 1884 was the climactic year in the history of the short 
 story inasmuch as it produced The Lady or the Tiger? and In 
 the Tennessee Mountains, each one of them a literary sensation 
 that advertised the form tremendously. No book since Harte's 
 The Luck of Roaring Camp had been launched with such im- 
 petus as the latter of these. For six years the name of Charles 
 Egbert Craddock had been appealing more and more to the 
 national imagination because of a series in the Atlantic of 
 strongly impressionistic studies of life in the Tennessee moun- 
 tains. Now suddenly it came to light that the author was a 
 woman, Miss Mary N. Murfree. The sensation in the Atlantic 
 office spread everywhere and gave tremendous vogue not only 
 to the book but to the type of short story that it represented. 
 No one had gone quite so far before: the dialect was pressed 
 to an extreme that made it almost unintelligible; grotesque 
 localisms in manners and point of view were made central; 
 and all was displayed before a curtain of mountains splashed 
 with broad colours. The year was notable too because it 
 produced Brander Matthews's The Philosophy of the Short- 
 story, a magazine article later expanded into a volume, the 
 first scientific handling of the art of the form since Poe's review 
 of Hawthorne. 
 
 Realism, or more exactly, perhaps, naturalism, ruled the 
 decade. From all sections of the country came now a tide 
 of short fiction the chief characteristic of which was its fidel- 
 
The Short Story 333 
 
 ity to local conditions. The Century published Page's Marse 
 Chan, a story entirely in negro dialect. Joel Chandler Harris' 
 contributed his inimitable Uncle Remus studies of negro folk- 
 lore and added to them short stories of the mountain "crackers." 
 Mingo and Other Sketches, which appeared the same year as 
 In the Tennessee Mountains, deals with the Craddock region 
 and people but with surer hand. Harris was himself a native 
 of Georgia HUs, though he was by no means a "cracker," 
 and he spoke with the sympathy and the knowledge of a 
 native, not as an outside spectator and an exhibitor like Miss 
 Murfree. The same may be said of Richard Malcolm John- 
 ston (1822-98), whose Dukesborough Tales, dealing with rural 
 life in the Georgia of his youth, first were given to Northern 
 readers in 1883. 
 
 The evolution of Johnston's art is an interesting study. 
 He was inspired not by Irving or by any of the North- 
 erners, but by Longstreet, whose brutally realistic Georgia 
 Scenes had appeared as early as 1835. In 1857 Johnston 
 had written The Goose Pond School and had followed it with 
 other realistic studies for The Southern Magazine. Later 
 they were gathered for a Southern edition entitled Georgia 
 Sketches, and still later, in 1871, he had reissued them in Balti- 
 more as Dukesborough Tales. He, therefore, must be reckoned 
 with Harte as a pioneer, though his work had few readers and 
 no influence until it was again reissued by the Harpers in 1883. 
 Even then, and afterwards when he had added new and more 
 artistically handled material, he was not a highly significant 
 figure. Studies of provincial Georgia life he could make, 
 some of them bitingly true, but his range was small and his 
 soundings, even within his narrow area, were not deep. He 
 must be classified with the makers of sketches like Longstreet 
 rather than with the short story writers of the period in which 
 he first became known. 
 
 So completely was local colour the vogue of the eighties that 
 the novelist was regarded as a kind of specialist who moved 
 in a narrow field of his own and who was to be reprimanded 
 if he stepped beyond its limits. The movement had three 
 phases: first, the Irvingesque school that romanticized its 
 material and threw over it a softened light, — ^Harte, Miss 
 
 ' See also Chap. viii. 
 
334 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Jewett, Cable, Page; second, the exhibitors of strange mate- 
 rial objectively presented, — Charies Egbert Craddock, Octave 
 Thanet, and the dialect recorders of the eighties ; and third, 
 the veritists of the nineties who told what they considered to 
 be the miidealized truth concerning the life they knew, — 
 Garland, Miss Wmdns, Frank Norris, and the rest. This third 
 group approached its task scientifically, stated its doctrines 
 with clearness, — as for example in Hamlin Garland's Crumbling 
 Idols, — and then proceeded to work out its careftd pictures 
 with deliberate art. Garland's Main-Travelled Roads, stories 
 of the settlement period of the Middle Border, have no 
 golden light upon them. They teU the truth with brutal 
 directness and they teU it with an art that convinces. They 
 are not mere stories; they are living documents in the history 
 of the West. So with the Maupassant-like pictures of later 
 New England conditions by Mary E. WiUdns Freeman, in A 
 Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891). 
 If the florid, sentimental school of the mid-century went to 
 one extreme, she went to the other. Nowhere in English 
 may one find more of repression, more pitiless studies of re- 
 pressed lives, more bare searchings into the soul of a decadent 
 social system. She wrote with conviction and a full heart of 
 the life from which she herself had sprung, yet she held herself 
 so firmly in control that her pictiures are as sharp and cold as 
 engravings on steel. Her fault is that she repeated a few 
 formulas too frequently. 
 
 With the nineties came the full perfection of short story 
 art. Within their limited field A New England Nun,and Main- 
 Travelled Roads may not be surpassed. In another area of the 
 short story James Lane Allen's Flute and Violin stands by 
 itself, and in still another such work as Margaretta Wade 
 Deland's Old Chester Tales, Grace King's Monsieur Motte, 
 and Alice Brown's Meadow Grass. No more exquisite work, 
 however, may be found in the whole range of the local colour 
 school than that in Kate Chopin's (1851-1904) Bayou Folks 
 (1894). She was of Celtic blood. and spontaneously a story- 
 teller. She wrote with abandon, yet always it was with the 
 restrained art that we have got into the habit of calling French. 
 Such stories as DSsirSe's Baby, the final sentence of which 
 grips one by the throat like a sudden hand out of the dark, and 
 
The Short Story 335 
 
 Madame Cilestin's Divorce, with its delicious humour and its 
 glimpse into the feminine heart, are among the few unquestioned 
 masterpieces of American short story art. 
 
 The local colour vogue during the period undoubtedly was 
 an element toward the making of the American fictional unit 
 short. He who would deal with the social r6gime of a provin- 
 cial neighbotirhood must of necessity be brief. There was 
 no background of established manners in the comers of 
 America, or in the centres, for that matter, sufficient to 
 afford material for a Richardson or a Thackeray. Harte and 
 Charles Egbert Craddock and most of the others attempted 
 novels and failed. One may make a moving drama of 
 the culminating moment in Mother Shipton's or Tennessee's 
 life, but a complete novel written about either of them would 
 be only a succession of picaresque adventures. The short 
 story was peculiarly the vehicle for recording American life, 
 so squalid, yet so glorious and moving, during the era when the 
 country had no manners but only the rudiments of what 
 were to become manners. 
 
 Beginning about 1898 with the early work of O. Henry 
 and Jack London, there has come what may be called the last 
 period in the history of the short story — ^the work of the present 
 day. It is the period of magazines devoted wholly to short 
 stories, of syndicates which handle little else, of text books and 
 college courses on the art of the short story, and even of cor- 
 respondence courses in which the art of making marketable 
 stories may be learned through the mails. In America the 
 short story seems to have become an obsession and in some 
 respects a delusion. 
 
 The demand of the decade has been for "stories with a 
 punch." The material must be out of the ordinary; it must 
 not only breathe the breath of unfamiliar regions but it must 
 give the impression that it is a bit of autobiography, or at 
 least a section of life that has passed under the author's own 
 eyes. The short story work of F. Hopkinson Smith (1838- 
 191 5) may be taken as an illustration. There is in it the 
 breath of foreign parts, the sense of cosmopolitanism, breezy 
 knowledge of the world. Everywhere alertness, wide-awake- 
 ness, efficiency, in an easy colloquial style of narrative that has 
 about it a businesslike ring. His brilliant narratives in such 
 
336 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 a collection as At Close Range are the work of one who would 
 have made a most efficient special reporter for a city daily. 
 Here are modem instances in all parts of the world, engagingly 
 told. He has been everyTvhere, he has seen everything, he 
 has learned all the world's rituals and all its secrets. There 
 is no leisurely approach, no sentimental colourings, no literary 
 effects; they are life seen in flashes, a vivid fragment snipped 
 from the moving film of human life. 
 
 It may be illustrated also by Jack London's (1876-1916) 
 headlong art: strangeness, always, — ^Alaska of the gold rush, 
 the ultimate South Seas, the unknown recesses of the prize 
 ring, the no-man's land of the hobo, — ^impressionistic studies 
 'in sensation. He was writing for money and for little 
 ielse, and he studied his market like a broker. Earlier liter- 
 ature was aristocratic, — ^it was written for the refined few; the 
 latest literature is democratic, — ^it is written for the mass, 
 and the mass is tmcritical and tmrefined. Its demands are 
 gross: sensation, movement, physical thrill. London gave the 
 mass what it demanded, every sensation which the brutal un- 
 derworld he knew had afforded him, and he sold his work 
 well. Of the graces demanded in the earlier periods, finish, 
 elegance of style, melody, elevation in tone, he knew nothing. 
 He had immediacy — ^he told vivid stories of physical prowess 
 in the world of the present moment ; he had the note of author- 
 ity — ^he wrote only of wild epic things of which he had himself 
 been a large part; he had sensation — the appeal of crude physi- 
 cal horror, the strange and the unheard-of in hitherto unknown 
 regions; and he had a barbaric style — a lurid wealth of adjec- 
 tives, a melodramatic intensity, and a headlong rush of incident 
 that sweeps the reader along as in a stampede. Force un- 
 doubtedly he had and freshness of material, but, lacking poise 
 and moral background and beauty of style, he must be passed 
 as an ephemeral sensation as regards all but a handful of his 
 stories. 
 
 Prom the multitude of the later short story writers Richard 
 Harding Davis (1864-1916), whose literary life, from the ap- 
 pearance of Gallegher in 1891 to his death, coincided almost 
 exactly with the modern period in American literature, may 
 be chosen as the typical figure. Reared in a literary home, — 
 his mother was the author of Life in the Iron Mills, — educated 
 
The Short Story 337 
 
 at Lehigh University, trained in a city newspaper office until 
 he became one of the most successful special correspondents 
 of his generation, he was admirably fitted to give to the reading 
 public — enormous now because of the universality of the public 
 school and the newspaper and the popular magazine — ^what it 
 most wanted. He had what Jack London lacked utterly, liter- 
 ary traditions, poise, a certain patrician touch, and an innate 
 love of the romantic. What he might have become in an earUer 
 and more literary era it is not hard to conjecttire; what he did 
 become was the result of the spirit of the age, for he became 
 a journalist, a recorder of the ephemeral moment for the 
 ephemeral moment, a reporter with pen marvellously facile 
 and ready, a literary craftsman who mastered every detail 
 of his craft. 
 
 That Davis satisfied his generation goes without saying. 
 A good newspaper man, he gave it what it desired, up-to- 
 dateness, swift action, strangeness of setting presented with 
 the authority of an eye-witness, and, moreover, a sprinkling 
 of sentiment and mystery and romance. All of his work is 
 brilliant, and there are parts that have the touch of distinction, 
 but nowhere does it satisfy the supreme tests. He attempted 
 too much, he skimmed over too much ground, he observed 
 too much of the superficial and not enough of the real under- 
 lying heart of life. He was a facile sketcher of surfaces, a ver- 
 satile entertainer, a craftsman rather than a critic of human 
 life, an artist enamoured with his art rather than a creator 
 who worked with the deeper materials of the human tragedy 
 and comedy. 
 
 The period closes with the work of William Sydney Porter, 
 better known as O. Henry (1862-1910), whose sudden rise and 
 enormous popularity are one of the romances of the history of 
 the short story. Only the bare facts of his biography need 
 detain us: his Southern origin, his limited education, his sixteen 
 years in Texas, his unfortunate experience as a bank clerk, 
 his flight to South America, his return after a few months to 
 serve a sentence in the Ohio State prison, and finally his last 
 years in New York City — ^as picturesque a life as may be found 
 in the annals of literature. 
 
 His short story career began almost by accident, the result 
 of his enforced leisure in prison. His first story, Whistling 
 
338 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Dick's Christmas Stocking, redolent of Bret Harte, was pub- 
 lished in McClure's Magazine in 1899. Following it irregularly, 
 came a series of Western and South American tales, and then 
 finally a most remarkable output of stories dealing with the 
 human comedy and tragedy of New York City. 
 
 Nowhere is there anything just like them. In his best 
 work — ^and his tales of the great metropolis are his best — he is 
 unique. The soul of his art is unexpectedness. Humour at 
 every turn there is, and sentiment and philosophy and surprise. 
 One never may be sure of himself. The end is always a sensa- 
 tion. No foresight may predict it, and the sensation always 
 is genuine. Whatever else O. Henry was, he was an artist, a 
 master of plot and diction, a genuine humorist, and a philoso- 
 pher. His weakness lay in the very nature of his art. He was 
 an entertainer bent only on amusing and surprising his reader. 
 Everjrwhere brilliancy, but too often is it joined to cheapness ; 
 art, yet art merging swiftly into caricature. Like Harte, he 
 cannot be trusted. Both writers on the whole may be said to 
 have lowered the standards of American literature, since both 
 worked in the surface of Kfe with theatric intent and always 
 without moral background. O. Henry moves, but he never 
 lifts. AH is fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back and 
 laughs loudly as if he were in a bar-room. His characters, 
 with few exceptions, are extremes, caricatures. Even his 
 shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his best work, are 
 not really individuals; rather are they tjrpes, symbols. His 
 work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and 
 yet vaudeville. 
 
 On the whole the short story episode in .American literary 
 history has been a symptom not of strength but of weakness. 
 " Short story writing is a young man's game, " says H. G. Wells, 
 and it may be added that it is also the natural device of the 
 young nation just emerging from its adolescent period. To 
 see life in true perspective, to know the truth in its breadth 
 and depth, demands that we fix our attention not on frag- 
 ments of life, on snatches of experience, on glimpses, swift 
 impressions, but on wholes. America has not had the time to 
 look steadily and long at any phase of the human play. All 
 it has wanted has been momentary inipressions artistically 
 given, surface and sensations. It has been satisfied with clever- 
 
The Short Story 339 
 
 ness rather thaji mastery, entertainment rather than instruc- 
 tion, with journalism rather than Uterature. What the coming 
 period is to be it is not within the province of the historian 
 to seek . 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 Historians and Scholars 
 
 I. Prescott 
 
 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT (i^ge-^iS^ had 
 all that a young Bostonian of a century ago~^uld 
 wish for, except health. He was handsome, with 
 good and sound inheritance, cultivated surroundings, sym- 
 pathetic and congenial parents and well-to-do family circum- 
 stances, and he was as well equipped for intellectual life as 
 Harvard could make him. But ill-health and partial blindness, 
 caused by an accident at college, barred the way to active life. 
 
 Thus it was, in 1821, seven years after graduation from 
 college, that he decided to take up his pen as an occupation. 
 First making a systematic study of rhetoric and diction, he 
 read widely in English, French, and Italian literature, and 
 then, through George Ticknor's interest in things Spanish, 
 turned to that language. Once embarked, he sailed on in 
 Spanish interests until his death. "What new and interest- 
 ing topics may be admitted — not forced into — the reign of 
 Ferdinand and Isabella?" he noted in 1825. 
 
 The whole sweep of events taking place on the Peninsula 
 seems to have flashed before his vision: the constitutions of 
 Castile and of Aragon, of the Moorish dynasties, the causes 
 of their decay and dissolution, the Inquisition, the conquest 
 of Granada, the discoveries in the unknown West, monarchical 
 power versus aristocracy; and he saw their relation to the whole 
 world. With his scene firmly set, he began a systematic course 
 of international and legal history, in addition to a general sur- 
 vey of Spain, geographical, economical, ecclesiastical, and civil, 
 
 340 
 
Prescott 341 
 
 especially with reference to fifteenth-century conditions. This 
 necessitated the consultation of several hundred volumes in 
 working days of- about four hours each, with actual reading 
 power of an hour a day at best, a few minutes or nothing, at 
 worst. For a while he lingered at the threshold before plunging 
 into Spanish details. He recurred to Montesquieu's Esprit des 
 lois, to Voltaire, and to other philosophical considerations of 
 history and human conditions; he heard governmental, theo- 
 logical, and chivalric works, many biographies and the classics, 
 the last now in translation that they might be read aloud. By 
 this time he had acquired a capacity of holding firmly in his 
 mind the portions he saw he could use, while putting aside the 
 non-essential. 
 
 The actual composition of Ferdinand and Isabella began in 
 1829, after eight years of preliminary reading. When it came 
 to the form of his narrative, Prescott followed Mably as a 
 guide, having read his Etvde de Vhistoire ten times. He would 
 think out a chapter on the same structural plan as for a romance 
 or a drama, letting the events develop towards some obvious 
 point or conclusion. Everything pertinent to his subject, and 
 accessible at that time, that could be taken out of Spain, was 
 imported in original or in transcript and digested very slowly. 
 Prescott worked his direct quotations into his text, as a rule, 
 instead of giving excerpts thrown or jerked into the narrative. 
 At the same time, his references are precise and accurate. 
 When the book was finally done and submitted to the criticism 
 of various friends, it excited only delighted approval and 
 stimulating comments, encouraging the author to have 1250 
 copies printed at his own expense (1836-37). Such a success 
 America had never before seen or heard of. The edition was 
 exhausted in five weeks. Prescott was received at once into 
 the international circle of authoritative scholarship. Hallam, 
 Guizot, Milman, Sismondi, Thierry, were among those to give 
 Prescott not condescending but cordial welcome as one of their 
 own rank. Such an authority as C. P. Gooch states in 1913 
 that the work published in 1837 has not been superseded to 
 this day. 
 
 Stimulated by the prompt recognition accorded to him, 
 Prescott turned to his next venture. The Conquest 0} Mexico 
 
342 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 (1844). It is characteristic of his methods that his first step 
 towards beginning the narration in which one figure, Hernando 
 Cortes, was to hold the centre of the stage, was the examination 
 of certain celebrated biographical records of exploits — Vol- 
 taire's Charles XII, Livy's Hannibal, Irving's Columbus. The 
 interest in the Mexico flags at the end. Where the glow of 
 achievement is ahead of his hero, the narrative marches and 
 carries the reader on. Or is it that Bernal Diaz carries the 
 story triumphantly up to the Aztec city? That veteran sol- 
 dier, unskilled in letters, moved to set down his recollections 
 of the great events in which he had participated half a century 
 back, because Gomara's official history gave Cortes undue, and 
 his comrades insufficient, credit for the Conquest, was a de- 
 lightful guide to follow. His untaught phrases are alive and 
 Prescott makes them more so. While later judgment dis- 
 counts some of the conquistadore's statements, it cannot deny 
 the fact that it was these glowing descriptions that affected 
 the European Imagination of the sixteenth century. For the 
 ultimate rating of the veracity of the complaisant adventurer 
 archaeology has brought its later contribution, and of that 
 science Prescott was ignorant, as was the rest of the world when 
 he wrote. Both The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of 
 Peru (1847), which followed in regular course with much the 
 same qualities as the Mexico, were important works in the 
 development of American literature and the American attitude 
 towards knowledge. Neither the reputation nor the libraries 
 of New England could have spared them. Count d'Hausson- 
 ville ranks the incomplete Philip II (1855), to which Prescott 
 next turned, as his best work. That is a dictum hard to accept. 
 The author's attitude towards his central figure may be called 
 just, but there is a certain meagreness in the treatment. 
 
 Prescott has been called a great amateur in the historical 
 field, and in one sense the term applies. Born only a year 
 after Leopold Ranke, he missed the influence spread abroad, 
 eventually far beyond German university circles, by the great 
 German scholar. The very vocabulary now used had not come 
 into being. Prescott made his own standards. Nor did he 
 have the incidental training that has been the strength of many 
 an historian. Not trained in the methods of the Ecole des 
 
Prescott 343 
 
 Chartes, nor in the precise legal knowledge of jurisprudence, 
 like Maitland, nor in active political service for his own state, 
 nor in a school of philosophy, still less in the academic methods 
 of research, Prescott simply assimilated language first and then 
 events, and painted pictures of the past by a skilful union of 
 the two. His style is a fine instrument of expression. His 
 language plays him no tricks. He holds it in his own control, 
 firmly, like a well-wrought, highly-tempered tool. His own 
 temperament manifests itself very little in his writings. Nor is 
 there any echo of contemporary politics in his treatment of 
 the past. He was a Bostonian who hated strife and felt that 
 agitation was disagreeable. Perhaps had Prescott survived 
 the outbreak of the Civil War his sentiments wovild have changed. 
 As it was, he passed from the scene before the outbreak, and 
 thus is crystallized as a figure detached from strife, a non- 
 partisan, hard-working yet leisurely historian, sheltered from 
 the hard things of life, almost untouched by his generation, en- 
 dowed with the best New England could give to a few of her 
 sons, and with the type of New England conscience that led him 
 to use the talents he had but which also permitted him to hold 
 aloof from daily troubles. 
 
2. Motley 
 
 JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY (1814-77) was like Prescott in 
 being a son of Massachusetts and bom with a silver spoon 
 of pure Boston metal in his mouth. But whereas Prescott 
 was a prisoner within his own Ubrary, Motley had the stimulus 
 of world contact, of hearing statesmen's voices, of activities 
 of which Prescott was wholly ignorant. Motley's Harvard 
 career was begun at the age of thirteen and completed at seven- 
 teen — an age young even for the time. His class work did not g^ve 
 him high rank — indeed, he was rusticated for negligence — ^but 
 his personality was charming and his kind of ctiltivated human 
 interest convincing. His facility in grasping the gist of a book 
 was marvellous, but as it did not presage minute and accurate 
 research, there was natural astonishment among his con- 
 temporaries over the industry evinced by his later work. 
 Harvard was followed by two years of study at Gottingen and 
 Berlin and of foreign travel. Perhaps the most interesting 
 contribution to his training given by the Gottingen episode 
 was his acquaintance and intimate association with Count 
 Bismarck, the foundations of a life-long friendship. Later, 
 Motley had the still rarer chance of glimpses at the inside hap- 
 penings or intentions of Prussian politics. He saw a master 
 mind in the making and in the doing. He worked hard, indeed, 
 at law in both universities, but it was the glimpses of Europe 
 and the human side of its life, both past and present, that were 
 the really vital part of the educational results for the yoiuig 
 American. Intellectual Germany was still palpitating with 
 the influence of Goethe. Motley met scholars and learned 
 what minute research could be. At the same time he retained 
 an impressionistic attitude towards history. He always saw 
 the past instinct with life. 
 
 344 
 
Motley 345 
 
 When the wanderer returned to Boston he continued his 
 preparation for law, but it never became his serious profession. 
 Between the production of two novels, Morton's Hope (1839) 
 and Merry Mount (1849), he had fresh experiences in the world 
 of affairs. In 1841 he was appointed secretary to the legation 
 at St. Petersburg and spent some months in the Russian capital. 
 He served in the Massachusetts legislature for one term (1849). 
 But now he began to show himself in another light than that 
 of romancer or legislator. Before the publication of his half- 
 historical Merry Mount he had selected the theme of the contest 
 between the Netherlands and Spain for an extensive work, had 
 been checked momentarily by the news of Prescott's projected 
 Philip II, had been spvtrred on by the kindly words of the elder 
 American, and had then devoted himself to going to the founda- 
 tions of the story of the events. For nearly ten years he 
 plodded on, at first in Boston and then in archives abroad, in 
 Berlin, Dresden, The Hague, and Brussels. He bathed in 
 local colour. In 1855 he had his three volumes ready for the 
 printer. Like Prescott, Motley was obliged to take his own 
 risks, and The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855) was published 
 at the author's expense. The sale of fifteen thousand copies 
 in two years proved the fallibility of human judgment. The 
 reviews were not as uniformly favourable as in Prescott's case. 
 J. A. Froude, however, did full justice to the imknown Amer- 
 ican writer, though dissatisfied with Motley's estimate of Queen 
 Elizabeth. All the eminent authorities on the period treated 
 do just what Froude does. They like the way Motley has 
 navigated the whole sea of difficulties but think he has lost his 
 way on their private pools. In Holland and Belgium scholars 
 received the book with pleasure as well as with profound sur- 
 prise that any foreigner had cast his plummet down their deeps 
 with so much assiduity. Motley could not complain of lack 
 of appreciation in the Netherlands, and had reason to flatter 
 himself that his work was a spur to the Netherlanders to look 
 to their own dykes and consider carefully what was true among 
 their writers of the sixteenth Centviry and what needed to be 
 winnowed. 
 
 Scarcely taking breath after the pubUcation of this first 
 great effort, the author plunged into the sequel and brought 
 
346 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 out two volumes otJDieJUnited^J>}^therkm(h-4iLJlB£iQ^ _This 
 time neither publisher nor public was shy. The English 
 reviews were very favourable, on the whole; the American 
 reviews had no reservations in their praise of both works. In 
 Holland the second book received the same greeting as did the 
 first, a greeting marked by pride and pleasure that a stranger 
 had devoted so much of his life to their affairs, tempered by 
 some careful and discriminating criticism. Fruin once more 
 criticized Motley's failure to differentiate the values of his au- 
 thorities and considered him often tempted to expand a phase 
 simply because he had a rich store of material bearing upon it, 
 but without due regard to the need of that phase in the narra- 
 tive. That Motley's vivid imagination inspired him with 
 interlinear visions, hardly substantiated by a strict construc- 
 tion of the text, was gently intimated by Fruin with one or two 
 striking examples. Undoubtedly this is the same imagination 
 that led the tourist to people the Rome before his eye with 
 actors once within her walls. 
 
 The spring of l86i, momentous in the history of the United 
 States, found Motley in London when news came of the out- 
 break of the Civil War. The Lrondon Times gave much space 
 to comments on the terrible anachronism of war in general, and 
 on the horror of seeing thirty million Anglo-Saxons slaying 
 each other like the Indians whom they had displaced. After 
 a little it declared that the spirit of George III had passed into 
 Seward and that his reluctance to let the South go its own way 
 was couched in language quite as tyrannical as that of the 
 British monarch to his colonies when they desired "secession." 
 Under the stimulus of these daily reiterations. Motley wrote 
 two long letters on The Causes of the Civil War, to which the 
 Times gave prominent space, and which were reprinted in New 
 York within a few weeks. Theyjwere a.pleafqrj:he sacredness 
 of the Union as an prganiCr^italized whole. The tariS,~as an 
 irritating cause of division, was discussed, while slavery was 
 touched on very lightly. The Queen's Proclamation of Neu- 
 trality had already checked the press, and Motley's words were 
 allowed to be worth noting, as coming from one already recog- 
 nized as an historian of European reputation. 
 
 Shortly after this incident, Motley returned home, regretted 
 
Motley 347 
 
 that his forty-seven years disqualified him from enlisting with- 
 out previous training, but was stirred to the depths of his being 
 by the emotion of the summer months of 1861 . Summoned to 
 do other work for the republic, he accepted the mission to 
 Austria, where, it was felt, the sentiment he had shown in his 
 London letters might be serviceable. His office was no sine- 
 cure. In addition to the complications arising from the war, 
 there were others connected with Maximilian's expedition to 
 Mexico, in which he showed good judgment. But after the 
 unexpected elevation of Andrew Johnson to the presidency in 
 1865, Motley took offence at an unjust accusation brought 
 against him and resigned his post. The secretary of state 
 would have taken no notice of a resignation offered under a 
 momentary smart, but when Johnson said "Let him go," 
 Seward did not try to stay his hand. The result was that 
 Motley left Vienna with a very sharp wound to his self-respect. 
 Luckily for the ex-diplomat, the seventeenth century was 
 waiting till he should be released from the claims of the nine- 
 teenth, and he plunged at once into the next period of his 
 Netherland story. The History of the United Netherlands was 
 concluded by two more volumes issued in 1868. A continuation 
 centred about John of Barneveld was finally published in 1874. 
 Motley returned from Vienna to Boston and was settled there 
 at the time of Grant's first campaign, into which he entered with 
 much interest. At the suggestion of Sumner, he was honoured 
 by Grant with the appointmentjtathejCourtjDfSLL James, the 
 highest diplomatic post in his gift. That was pleasant after 
 the Vienna incident. Unfortunately, Grant identified Motley 
 with Sumner, and when a breach came between the president 
 and the senator from Massachusetts, the former found a pre- 
 text to recall Motley, and again a secretary of state failed to 
 protect the minister. The incident ended with added dis- 
 comfiture for Motley. It is curious to note how his unpleasant 
 experience colours the story of the relations between Maurice 
 of Nassau and John of Barneveld. The inability of the soldier, 
 acting as statesman, to understand the diplomat is dwelt on in 
 a fashion to show that General Grant was in the historian's 
 thoughts when he wrote of Count Maurice. Indeed, John of 
 Barneveld is a reflection of autobiography almost as much as 
 
348 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Morton's Hope. Every point having to do with the ambitions 
 of the individual province and the needs of the United Nether- 
 lands is coloured by the crisis through which the United States 
 had just passed. In the Netherlands the book, having treated 
 a period marked by the bitterest kind of theological disputes, 
 brought down upon Motley's head a flood of pained criticism 
 from the heirs to both sides of the controversy. At the same 
 time, Dutch scholars paid warm tributes to the American's 
 conscientious use of sources, though they might not accept his 
 interpretation. In 1871 the Queen of the Netherlands offered 
 him a house in the Dutch capital, where he spent part of the 
 years when he was working at John of Barneveld. 
 
 What is the judgment of posterity upon the work into which 
 Motley poured so much vigorous painstaking effort? This 
 much can be said : he was first a brilliant searchlight, sweeping 
 over an unknown field, and then an able draughtsman in 
 describing the scene. Every new generation claims to have a 
 light in its own hand which enables it to judge the past with 
 greater accuracy than its predecessors. Scholars of today 
 in Holland, Blok, Japikse, Colenbrander, all consider that the 
 American failed to treat Netherland history on scientific lines. 
 He did not understand Europe at large, he did not understand 
 the Church. In his hands Philip II was treated too severely, 
 as was Maurice in his conflict with Barneveld. There was a 
 lack of perspective in his every estimate. Not only that, but 
 in making one period so dominant, he dislocated the perspective 
 of the whole history of the Netherlands. For the last thirty 
 years scholars in Belgium as well as Holland have been working 
 over the ground, bringing small dark places into sober light, 
 shading down other points too highly illuminated. A fair 
 result will be reached at last. But the great light was a 
 pleasant and valuable thing. 
 
3- Parkman 
 
 FRANCIS PARKMAN (1823-93) touched Prescott and 
 Motley on one side by his interest in romantic themes, 
 and on another side touched the more recent school of 
 American historiography by his habits of elaborate research 
 and his use of all accessible manuscript documents as well as of 
 secondary material ; but he was first of all an artist in expression, 
 working in the field of history with such results as he could 
 obtain, and yet working much as he might have done had he 
 been a romancer of a very superior conscience. 
 
 Like Prescott, Parkman had the best of Boston's inherit- 
 ance except health, and against the effects of that handicap 
 he interposed a resolute spirit which enabled him to devote to 
 his books the few hours he could snatch from a constant state 
 of pain. From early life he had the desire to write the history 
 of the New England border wars. During his college vacations 
 he visited the scenes of these conflicts, and he read always 
 widely in the books on that subject. In 1842 illness drove 
 him to Italy to regain his health, and he there spent some 
 time in a Passionist monastery, believing that he thus got 
 some insight into the motives and spiritual processes of a 
 type of mind which played a large part in the French civili- 
 zation of the New World, though so alien to the English 
 modes of religion among explorers and colonists. When Park- 
 man graduated at Harvard in 1844 he knew the New England 
 Indians thoroughly. Much of the next two years was spent in 
 visiting the historic spots on the Pennsylvania border and 
 in the region beyond. In 1846 he made a journey to the 
 land of the Sioux, where he spent some weeks in the camps of 
 a native tribe, studying the Indian in the savage state. His 
 
 349 
 
350 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 experiences were described in a series of letters in The Knicker- 
 bocker Magazine and republished in his first book, The Cali- 
 fornia and Oregon Trail (1849), still considered one of our best 
 descriptions of Indian life. 
 
 Now prepared for his main task, Parkman took a striking 
 incident of Indian history and wrote on it his Conspiracy of 
 Pontiac (1851). In this book he placed much introductory 
 matter on the Indians, together with a comprehensive review 
 of the history of the French settlements before 1761, when the 
 conspiracy of Pontiac began. From this large use of prelimi- 
 nary materials it would seem that he had not yet determined to 
 undertake the series of volumes in which he later treated the 
 same period. The Pontiac was well received and it was a good 
 book from a young author. But it lacked conciseness and was 
 overdrawn. 
 
 For several years after its publication Parkman suffered 
 great physical pain, and he seemed about to lose the use of his 
 eyes and limbs. But he never gave up his ambition or ceased 
 to collect information about the Indians. In this interval he 
 wrote Vassall Morton (1856), a novel which did not succeed. 
 Turning back to history he revised his entire plan and outlined 
 his France and England in North America. The series was 
 limited to the period before the Pontiac war. It embraced 
 the whole story of French colonization in North America from 
 the Huguenot colonies of the sixteenth century to the fall of 
 Quebec. The various parts appeared as follows : The Pioneers 
 of France in the New World (1865) ; The Jesuits in North America 
 (1867) ; La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) ; The 
 Old Regime in Canada (-1874) ; Count Frontenac and New France 
 under Louis XIV (1877); Montcalm and Wolfe (2 vols., 1884); 
 and A Half Century of Conflict (2 vols. , 1 892) . He described the 
 series as including "the whole course of the American conflict 
 between France and England, or in other words, the history of 
 the American forest; for this was the light in which I regarded 
 it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilder- 
 ness images day and night." Parkman's purposes were wholly 
 American. He loved the vast recesses of murmuring pines, 
 with their tragedies, adventures, and earnest striving. Pres- 
 cott and Motley might paint the gorgeous scenes of royal courts 
 
Parkman 35 1 
 
 and Bancroft might interrupt his labours in writing the pane- 
 gyric of democracy to play a complacent r61e as minister at 
 Beriin, but Parkman never ceased to find his chief interest in 
 the American forest and its denizens. 
 
 His avowed method of writing was "while scrupulously and 
 rigorously adhering to the truth of facts, to animate them with 
 the life of the past, and, so far as might be, clothe the skeleton 
 with flesh. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far 
 more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into 
 special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with 
 the life and spirit of the time. ' ' Few writers have achieved their 
 ideal of expression as well as he. What Cooper did in the realm 
 of fiction Parkman did with even better fidelity to nature in the 
 realm of histbry. He never studied in the seminar school, 
 but he understood its lessons instinctively and made them his 
 own without loss of the best things in the old school — ^vigour, 
 harmony, and colour. ' ' With all its manifold instructiveness, ' ' 
 says John Fiske, "his book is a narrative as entertaining as 
 those of Macaulay or Froude. In judicial impartiality Park- 
 man may be compared with Gardiner, and for accuracy of 
 learning with Stubbs." In American literature he holds a 
 singularly enviable place. Although he may be said to have 
 created his own particular province of history, that concerned 
 with the French in America, and though the field has since been 
 often invaded by admirers and imitators, he still stands 
 supreme in his department, the truest and most delightful of 
 all who have touched those engaging matters. 
 
4- Henry Adams 
 
 OF the three sons of Charles Francis Adams, grandsons of 
 John Quincy Adams, who became historians, two of 
 them, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Henry Adams 
 (1838-1918X present a particularly interesting contrast. Both 
 of them had the Puritan mind, so strong in their ancestry, as 
 well as that independent Adams spirit which put the family, 
 from John Adams to Henry, out of touch with the dominant 
 thought of Boston. Turning to history, both of them became 
 able critics of conventional views and won high respect from 
 an age turning towards cosmopolitan ideals. The elder of 
 the two, however, did not go all the way in revolt. New 
 Englander he remained to the last. He loved Boston, although 
 he rapped its knuckles at times, and he sought to reform its 
 intellectual life. The younger clung to Boston for many years, 
 giving himself to a phase of our history in which the town had a 
 deep interest; but finally, having reached a stage of disillusion- 
 ment, as he considered it, he broke local ties, turned toward 
 the unanchored spaces of the remote past, and became a master 
 in the realm of detached thinking. 
 
 The historical career of Henry Adams falls into two periods. 
 One of them began with his return from London in 1868, where 
 he had been private secretary to his father, then minister to 
 Great Britain, and continued until 1892, when he turned his 
 back on all he had been doing and began again what he termed 
 his "education." The second extended from that change of 
 purpose to his death. The editorship of The North American 
 Review (1869-76) and an assistant-professorship in history at 
 Harvard (1870-77) ushered in the first period. Teaching did 
 not suit him and he resigned because he felt that his efiEorts were 
 failures. His mind was too original to go through life in the 
 
 352 
 
Henry Adams 353 
 
 routine of college instruction. He now turned to American 
 history, producing by much industry in fourteen years the, 
 following hooks: Documents Relating to New England Federalism 
 (1877), Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), Writings of Albert Gallatin 
 (1879), John Randolph (1882), History of the United States 
 during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 vols., 
 1889-91), and Historical Essays (1891). The best scholarship 
 and excellent literary form characterize all these books. No 
 better historical work has been done in this country. Yet 
 the books were little read and the author became discouraged. 
 He concluded that what he had been doing was without value to 
 the world, since it was not noticed by the world. Of the two 
 novels which he wrote during this period, the anonymous 
 Democra cy (1880) aroused much discussion by its mordant 
 pictures of political corruption at Washington, hnt Esther 
 (1884), which Adams persisted in publishing under a 
 pseudonym and refused to allow to be advertised, fell upon a 
 perfectly heedless world, though its discussion of current 
 theological problems has genuine interest. 
 
 Then began the second period of his literary life. Settling 
 down to a quiet life of study, and following his taste, he delved 
 long and patiently in the Middle Ages. The restdt appeared in 
 Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904, 1913), probably the best' 
 expression of the spirit of the Middle Ages yet published in the 
 English language. It was followed by Essays in Anglo-Saxon 
 Law (1905), The Education of Henry Adams (1906, 1918), A 
 Letter to American Teachers of History (1910), and Life of 
 George Cabot (19J1). Two of these books, the Mont Saint 
 Michel and the Education, deserve to rank among the best 
 American books that have yet been written. The first is a 
 model of literary construction and a fine illustration of how a 
 skilled writer may use the history of a small piece of activity 
 as a means of interpreting a great phase of human life. Through 
 the Education runs a note of futility, not entirely counter- 
 balanced by the brilliant character-sketching and wise observa- 
 tions upon the times. But the Mont Saint Michel redeems this 
 fault. It shows us Henry Adams at his best, and under its 
 charm we are prepared to overlook the aloofness which limited 
 his interests while it depressed his spirits 
 
 23 
 
354 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 In the Education Henry Adams defined history in these 
 words: "To historians the single interest is the law of reaction 
 between force and force — between mind and nature — the law 
 of progress." He thus announced in his maturity his alle- 
 giance to the most modern concept of history. In his early his- 
 torical writings he dealt with the relations of men with men, 
 as Parkman, Lea, Mahan, and many others dealt. In his 
 revised opinions he conceived that the story of man's progress 
 as affected by natural forces was the true task of the historian. 
 It is a concept to which the best modern thinkers have been 
 slowly moving. Adams grasped it with the greatest boldness 
 and in the Mont Saint Michel gave future historians an example 
 of how to realize it in actual literature. 
 
5- Ticknor 
 
 GEORGE TICKNOR was born in Boston in 1791, Having 
 graduated from Dartmouth in 1807, he read Greek and 
 Latin authors for three years with the rector of Trinity- 
 Church, Boston, a pupil of Samuel Parr. From 18 10 Ticknor 
 read law and in 18 13 was admitted to the bar, but he gave up 
 practice in a year. The country, he thought, "would never be 
 without good lawyers," but would urgently need "scholars, 
 teachers, and men of letters." From Madame de Stael's De 
 VAllemagne (1813) Ticknor had got an intimation of the intel- 
 lectual mastery of the Germans; he elected therefore to study in 
 Germany, and particularly at Gottingen. 
 
 Before going abroad, though, he must make the American 
 grand tour to Washington and Virginia. During the winter 
 of 1814-15 he travelled by slow stages and sometimes under 
 difficulties as far as Richmond, everywhere supplied with in- 
 troductions to and from eminent persons such as John Adams, 
 President Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. He met, among 
 others, Eli Whitney, Robert Lenox, John Randolph, and Charles 
 Carroll of CarroUton; attended the Hartford Convention; saw 
 the ruins of Washington, then recently burned by the [British; 
 and at Monticello got the news of their defeat at New Orleans. 
 Already he was exhibiting the social gifts which later distin- 
 guished him — a power of holding substantial conversation 
 when that was in order; a tact that kept him wisely and quizzi- 
 cally silent during an outburst of bad temper on the part of 
 Adams, and in the presence of Jefferson's philosophical oddi- 
 ties; together with a cool sub-acid judgment in estimating and 
 reporting such phenomena as these and the ways of men in 
 general. He made an especially favourable impression upon 
 
 355 
 
356 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 Jefferson, who twice — in 1818 and again in 1820 — invited him 
 to a chair at the University of Virginia. 
 
 In April, 1815, Ticknor sailed for Liverpool with Edward 
 Everett and several other friends. At Liverpool and on the 
 way to London he paid his respects to Roscoe and to Dr. Parr. 
 In London he met Hallam, and various lesser scholars. At 
 Gottingen Ticknor settled down to a monastic regimen of study, 
 specializing in Greek. He met the Homeric Wolf, "coryphaeus 
 of German philologists," then on a visit to Gottingen; and, 
 during an eight weeks' holiday trip across Germany, Gesenius 
 and Goethe. For a full year he continued his classical studies 
 without any notion that his field was to lie elsewhere. From 
 Byron in London he had got hints for a tour in Greece, and he 
 was preparing to make it, when late in 18 16 Harvard offered 
 him the College Professorship of the Belles Lettres and the 
 Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages 
 and Literatures, then just established upon the death of its 
 founder Abiel Smith. Accordingly Ticknor gave up his Greek 
 tour, and after a few months in Gottingen began in the spring of 
 1817 an extensive course of travel and study in the Latin coun- 
 tries. In Paris he worked with great diligence at French and 
 Italian. In Rome by November he studied Italian and arch- 
 seology. Leaving Rome late in March of 18 18, he made 
 his way slowly to Spain via Italy and southern France. In 
 Madrid he at once settled into his habitual studious ways. 
 During the summer and autumn of 1818 he made several 
 excursions and a considerable journey in Spain and Portugal; 
 whence in November he went via England to Paris again. Here 
 he privately studied Spanish literature, Portuguese, and Pro- 
 vengal. In London in January, 18 19, he dropped study for 
 awhile, and was taken up by the great Whigs — Lord Holland, 
 Sir James Mackintosh, Richard Heber, Hookham Frere, Lord 
 John Russell, and Sydney Smith. He visited the Marquis 
 of Salisbury at Hatfield House and the Duke of Bedford 
 at Woburn Abbey; again touched classical studies in a so- 
 journ at Cambridge; and before February reached Edinburgh. 
 Picking out, as was usual with him, a specialist to help him in his 
 studies, he read Scotch poetry. Here he frequented the Tory 
 circle of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, and made the acquaintance of 
 
Ticknor 357 
 
 Scott, whom he visited at Abbotsford for a few days; proceed- 
 ing thence to Southey at Keswick and to Wordsworth at Rydal 
 Mount. At Hatton he saw old Dr. Parr once more, who con- 
 demned everything contemporary but gave Ticknor his blessing. 
 
 In London again, early in April, Ticknor went with Irving 
 to the "damning of a play " and afterwards to the Lord Mayor's 
 ball, which he also damns in a series of contemptuous remarks 
 about the "City crowd." Though he had already disparaged 
 Godwin as the "notorious William Godwin," he dined at his 
 house; and then proceeded to disparage him further, together 
 with the company he met there, including Hazlitt, Hunt, and 
 Lamb. Ticknor was as much at home with the "big Whigs" 
 as with the grand Tories, especially the great Tory of Abbots- 
 ford; Whig Toriusve mihi nulla discrimine agetur, he might have 
 said; but he could not abide a Philistine or a Bohemian. 
 
 At the end of April, 1 8 19, after a brief visit to Roscoe in 
 Liverpool, he sailed for home, and reached Boston early in June, 
 with an equipment far beyond that of any previous American 
 student. His teaching at Harvard began in the same year and 
 continued until he resiggied in 1835. Like Everett's, itwassofar 
 in advance of his time and of the training his students brought 
 to it that he founded no school of research and made no disciples 
 in advanced scholarship. But he greatly improved elementary 
 instruction in the modern languages, and could find sometimes (as 
 in 183 1) a class that would read Dante with him; he established 
 for his own subjects a departmental system, with considerable 
 freedom of election, and with promotion and grouping according 
 toproficiency ; andhewent as far as the college authorities would 
 allow in establishing an elective system within his own jurisdic- 
 tion. These reforms being opposed, actively by some other mem- 
 bers of the faculty, passively by President Kirkland, Ticknor 
 felt, after sixteen years of service, that he had done all the mis- 
 sionary work that could reasonably be expected of him. He 
 resigned his professorship, and made a second sojourn in Europe 
 (1835-38), Longfellow having been chosen to be his successor. 
 
 This second residence in Europe Ticknor undertook not 
 primarily as a student but as a ripe scholar ; and although he had 
 as yet produced no great work, he was everywhere received 
 as one whose standing was assured. The acquaintances he 
 
358 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 formed or renewed are too numerous to be even catalogued in 
 full. In England he saw a good deal of the scientific men. At 
 Dresden he examined Ludwig Tieck's collection of Spanish 
 books, and he joined the scholarly circle of Prince John of Saxony. 
 In Berlin in the spring of 1836 Ticknor visited the church his- 
 torian Neander, and saw Alexander von Humboldt frequently. 
 In Vienna, in June, he examined the old Spanish books in the 
 Imperial Library. After a summer in Switzerland and south- 
 ern Germany, he moved towards Rome, which he reached in 
 December, and in which he remained until May of 1837. Hewent 
 north for the summer again, to Venice, Innsbruck, and Heidel- 
 berg, and to Paris for the winter, where he looked over the Spanish 
 library of Temaux-Compans and frequented the study of Augus- 
 tin Thierry. By March, 1838, Ticknor was in England again, 
 having long talks with Hallam. He once more visited Southey 
 and Wordsworth at Keswick; was disappointed in the Spanish 
 collection at the Bodleian; met at breakfast "a Mr. Rusldn," 
 who had a most beautiful collection "of sketches, made by him- 
 self, from nature, on the Continent " ; and heard Carlyle lecture. 
 Arriving at home in June, 1838, Ticknor settled down to 
 research, to extensive correspondence with many friends, both 
 European and American, to the collecting of Spanish books, and 
 to the writing of h is History_ of, Spanish Literature, which was 
 published j^n„x849-and was at once recognized as a work of 
 ifitSiiational standing. He found time also to work hard for 
 the Boston Public Library, of which he was a trustee; doing for 
 it what his friends Buckminster and Cogswell had done re- 
 spectively for the Athenffium and the Astor. Upon the third 
 and last of his European tours, undertaken in 1856-57 for 
 the sake of the library, he had little time for his own studies, 
 but he was lionized — ^being now the author of a famous book — 
 as never before, and moved in the most brilliant society. At 
 home again from September, 1857, Ticknor took up once more 
 his life of study and business, serving the library until 1866, 
 revising the History of Spanish Literature for its third and its 
 fourth editions, maintaining a voluminous correspondence, and, 
 after the death of Prescott in 1859, writing his Life (1864). At 
 this time, too, Ticknor resumed his active interest in Harvard. 
 He died in 187 1. 
 
Ticknor 359 
 
 Ticknor's life, as recorded in hia^U^^ Letters and Journals, 
 is that of a great man of business, a great social talent, almost 
 a grand seigneur, who stood before kings, or rather sat dowij 
 with them, — and who was incidentally a scholar. It is neces- 
 sary, in an account of his works, to distribute the emphasis in 
 this way, partly because the Life, considered as one of them, 
 depends decisively upon his social powers, which elicited 
 characteristic attitudes and utterances from the persons he met, 
 and partly because these powers gave a characteristic turn 
 even to the History of Spanish Literature. The Life, a treasury 
 of anecdote and portraiture, which it costs an effort not to 
 quote, would, if well annotated, be found to be also a compen- 
 dium of European history in its social and literary aspects dur- 
 ing the first half of the nineteenth century. The English great 
 houses, the Paris salons, the German courts and scholars, the 
 international social complex at Rome and Florence — Ticknor 
 saw more of these than any other American, and than any but a 
 few of the most highly placed Europeans. His Life is, emphati- 
 cally, good reading, and can only increase in interest with time. 
 
 His History of Spanish Literature has so irnpressed critics 
 by its great reputation and by its great conception, scope, and 
 bulk, that they have given it rather praise than appraisal. The 
 claim made by the editors, in their preface to the fourth edi- 
 tion, represents the current opinion of its merits. "So far as 
 the past is concerned, the history of Spanish literature need 
 not be written anew, and the scholars who may hereafter labour 
 in this field of letters will have little else to do than to continue 
 the structure which Mr. Ticknor has reared." Now it is true 
 that Ticknor is strong in his sense of fact, in his feeling for evi- 
 dence, and in the sanity of his opinions. Very few indeed of 
 his attributions need revision in the light even of the acutest 
 later scholarship. His very comprehensive bibliography, uni- 
 versally praised by his critics, is a second consequence of his 
 strength. He had probably handled and read more Spanish 
 books than had anybody else in his time. His thoroughness 
 extends also to a pretty full use of existing authorities, Spanish, 
 German, French, and English. His combination of their re- 
 sults with those of his own bibliographical research constitutes 
 his title to be considered a pioneer. Still, pioneer work is one 
 
36o Chapters of American Literature 
 
 thing; definitive work is another. In many fields of Spanish 
 literature it was Ticknor's task actually to find and identify the 
 works he describes. For such work — the primary dealings with 
 raw material — ^his mind was well fitted. But the later regroup- 
 ings and higher generalizations of the inductive process, the 
 perception of broad differences, resemblances, connections, and 
 tendencies, the framing of comprehensive concepts, and, in 
 general, the freedom of movement in the conceptual world — 
 these things require a mind set free from the pedestrian tasks 
 to which Ticknor willingly committed himself, and another 
 strength than the one he had. There were temperamental 
 reasons, too, why Ticknor could never have made such a higher 
 synthesis. He belongs essentially to the hard-headed group 
 of American writers who, like Andrews Norton, stopped short 
 of transcendentalism. Ticknor's German training had taught 
 him what much of the British scholarship of his time sorely 
 needed to learn — the need of the broadest possible basis in 
 facts; from that point onward, however, his scholarship re- 
 mained essentially British in its distrust of ideas. The His- 
 tory of Spanish Literature is much more like Warton's History 
 of English Poetry and Hallam's Middle Ages than it is like any- 
 thing German. More serious temperamental defects are still 
 to be mentioned. The plain fact is that Ticknor did not pos- 
 sess certain of the indispensable organs of literary scholarship. 
 He lacked ordonnance; he was blind to the French literature of 
 the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance ; and he wanted ear — 
 especially for verse. His lack of the sense for sequence, ar- 
 rangement, and emphatic or conspicuous position appears even 
 in the unworkmanlike construction of many of his sentences, 
 and in the misplacement of matter (especially in footnotes) 
 just at the point where random association happened to make 
 him think of it. In his references to French literature, which in 
 the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was so closely connected 
 with Spanish, he disparages Ronsard and misassigns him with 
 the decadents; he has not a word p,bout Du Bellay ; and, almost 
 incredibly, he seems not even to have known of the Chanson 
 de Roland. His want of ear and want of the sense of arrange- 
 ment make his history difficult reading. Only occasionally does 
 it attain anything worthy of the name of style. 
 
6. Whitney 
 
 THE greatest-English-speaking student of general lingui«- 
 tics_,and..x>f -the science of language, Wi]]iaii3.~Dwigli-t 
 WhjirL^.(iS27-i894)., was bom at Nortliampton to a fine 
 local and family tradition of manners, character, and scholarship. 
 Having graduated in 1845 at Williams College, he later became 
 an assistant to his brother Josiah, who in 1849 was conducting 
 the United States survey of the Lake Superior region; and he 
 wrote for the report of the expedition the chapter on botany. 
 Meanwhile he had become interested in Sanskrit; he studied 
 it in his leisure time during the survey, and immediately after- 
 ward went to Yale for graduate study in the Department of 
 Philosophy and the Arts, which Professor Salisbury had been 
 active in organizing (1846-48), and which was the first graduate 
 school of genuine university rank in the United States. 
 
 From 1850 to 1853 Whitney studied in Berlin under Weber, 
 Bopp, and Lepsius, and at Tubingen vmder Roth. Returning 
 to the United States in 1853, he was next year appointed Salis- 
 bury's successor in the chair of Sanskrit, his duties including 
 instruction in the modern languages. He was not released 
 from undergraduate teaching until 1869, when Salisbury in- 
 creased the endowment of Whitney's Yale professorship, 
 and Whitney became "the only 'univergity professor' . . . 
 in the whole country." He was now enabled to organize fiilly 
 a graduate school of philology, which very soon attracted able 
 students, among them Charles R. Lanman, Irving Manatt, 
 Bernadotte Perrin, A. H. Edgren, and William Rainey Harper, 
 who well represent the variety of interest arising from the 
 studies which Whitney directed. From 1850 Whitney had 
 been a member of the American Oriental Society, and he 
 
 361 
 
362 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 became successively its corresponding' secretary, its librarian, 
 and its president. From 1857 ^o 1885 more than half of the 
 Society's Journal came from his busy pen. He was also one 
 of the founders and was the first president of the American 
 Philological Association. 
 
 Whitney produced a large volume of work, and left his mark 
 upon many different departments of scholarship. His im- 
 portant achievements in his particular field of Indology can be 
 truly evaluated only by Indologists. His first large work in 
 Indian scholarship was his edition, with Roth, of the Atharva- 
 Veda-Sanhita (1855-56), and his very last was the translation 
 of the same Veda, edited after his death by Charles R. Lanman 
 ( 1 905) . Whitney edited in 1 862 the A tharva- Veda-Prdtigakhya 
 with a translation and notes, and in 1871 the Taittirlya Prdti- 
 gdkhya. "The Pratigakhyas are the phonetico-grammatical 
 treatises upon the texts of the Vedas, and are of prime impor- 
 tance for the establishment of the text. Their distinguishing 
 feattu-e is minutiae of marvellous exactness, but presented in 
 such a form that no one with aught less than a tropical Oriental 
 contempt for the value of time can make anything out of them 
 as they stand. Whitney not only out-Hindus the Hindu for 
 minutiae, but also, such is his command of form, actually re- 
 casts the whole so that it becomes a book of easy reference."' 
 These intensive studies of the Hindu grammarians and of the 
 Sanskrit texts gave Whitney the material for his great Sanskrit 
 Grammar (1879), with its supplement, The Roots, Verb-forms, 
 and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language (1885), which 
 together form "the crowning achievement" of his work as a 
 Sanskrit scholar. Whitney's book goes behind the Hindu 
 grammarians and rests upon direct induction from the texts. 
 Beginning thus with the phenomena, Whitney might not be too 
 severely condemned if, like Ticknor in the Spanish Literature, 
 he had failed to rise much above their merely factual level. 
 But his induction is complete ; there are none of those confused 
 categories or obscure arrangements that betoken failure to reach 
 illuminating concepts. Whitney has thus left for the use of 
 students in Indo-European linguistics an organon that is not 
 likely to be soon discarded. 
 
 ' C. R. Lanman: Memorial Address, in Whitney Memorial Volume. 
 
Whitney 363 
 
 Whitney's works upon the general science of language — 
 Language and the Study of Language (1867), The Life and Growth 
 of Language (1875), etc., might perhaps never have been written 
 if he "had not been driven to it by . . . the necessity of 
 counteracting as far as possible the influence" of Max MuUer's 
 views. Against the idealism, transcendentalism, and logical 
 fallacies of Miiller, Whitney takes a distinctly common-sense 
 and almost pragmatic view. Language is for him a human 
 institution, an instrument made by man to meet human needs, 
 and at no time beyond human control. It has to be acquired 
 afresh by every speaker, for it is not a self -subsisting entity that 
 can be transmitted through the body or the mind of race or 
 individual. Whitney thus decisively ranges himself against 
 all absolutist and determinist theories of the nature of language. 
 Upon the origins of language, though he declined to commit 
 himself, as feeling that the evidence warranted no positive 
 assertion, he yet felt equally certain that the evidence did not 
 warrant Muller's assertion of a multiple origin — ^languages 
 springing up here, there, and everywhere upon the surface of the 
 earth. The trend of Whitney's opinion, though he asserts noth- 
 ing positively, is towards a single primal language. 
 
 As in Indology, so in general linguistics, Whitney left a 
 school, represented in Germany by the so-called Jung-Gram- 
 matiker, who include Osthoff, Brugmann, Leskien, Fick, and 
 Paul, and in the United States by Professor Hanns Oertel and 
 other disciples. They emphasize the importance of analogy 
 and of phonetic economy, as chief among the psychic factors 
 that must be added to the physical in order to account ftdly for 
 linguistic change. All Whitney's modes of thinking tended 
 away from those integrations which take the investigator back 
 towards undifferentiated origins, and worked forward among 
 the differentiations that account for linguistic progress towards 
 the present and the future. Whitney is much more interested 
 in the processes of linguistic change than in the evidences of 
 linguistic unity. 
 
 The forward look is equally characteristic of his work in 
 orthography and lexicography, which assumed that neither in 
 meaning nor in form is language to be dominated by its past. 
 He consistently and lucidly favoured a reformed spelling, but 
 
364 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 here too his common sense and regard for present actualities 
 controlled his doctrine, and he never made among the lay pub- 
 lic any propaganda looking to the adoption of a phonetic sys- 
 tem. In the same way, when he came to the making of The 
 Century Dictionary, he conceived it as bound to offer, not a 
 standard of "correctness" derived from classical periods in the 
 jpast, but a compendium of the actual use and movement of the 
 yword throughout its history. Together with this kinetic con- 
 ception both of the vocabulary and of the semantics of his 
 Dictionary, Whitney gave the most minute attention to his 
 etymologies and definitions. Aniong_th£_edi±ors-of-^Webst€E^ 
 Dictionary in 1864. Whitney and^ Daniel Cpit Oilman had had 
 special- charge- of the revision of the^iefinitions ; for the Century 
 Whitney obtained the assistance of his brother Josiah in de- 
 fining the technological words, and the assistance of other ex- 
 perts in their special fields. The result was an extensive vocabu- 
 lary intensively defined. The etymologies are brought up to 
 the state of knowledge in 1891. The quotations (undated) 
 illustrate rather than fully set forth the semantic history of the 
 word; the Century in this respect is surpassed by the Oxford 
 Dictionary, to which alone among English dictionaries it is in 
 any respect second. 
 
 Whitney's own writing is a model of lucid exposition. It 
 neither has nor needs adventitious ornament ; it does not even 
 need the play of humour to make his most technical essays 
 readable. There are to be sure, flashes of a polemic wit, but 
 what keeps the text alive and at work is the reader's sense that 
 he is in powerful hands that bear him surely along. Whitney 
 seems to divine that particular analysis of his material which 
 will carry the reader cleanly through it. The ultimate impres- 
 sion left by his writings is that of a powerful intellect controlling 
 enormous masses of fact and moving among them as their mas- 
 ter. To be interesting, such power needs no play other than 
 its own. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Preachers and Philosophers 
 
 I I. Beecher 
 
 HENRY WARD BEECHER was born in the orthodox 
 uplands of Litchfield, and of a strictly Calvinistic sire. 
 Lyman Beecher had studied theology under Timothy 
 Dwight at Yale; had occupied, after 1798, first the Presby- 
 terian pulpit at Easthampton, Long Island, next the Con- 
 gregational pulpit at Litchfield, and lastly that of the Hanover 
 Street Church in Boston; until in 1832 he became President 
 of the newly established Lane Theological Seminary in Cin- 
 cinnati. He is best known, perhaps, for, hi^-^ixSemions on 
 Intemperance, but he was a dogmatist as well as a moralist, 
 sfauncHy*supporting the Calvinism of his native tradition. 
 
 His son Henry, graduating at Amherst in 1834 i^^ no 
 doubt as to his vocation, at once entered the Lane Theological 
 Seminary, and studied under his father and under Calvin 
 Stowe, an Oriental scholar of real attainment, who in 1836 
 married Beecher's sister Harriet. Beecher served his appren- 
 ticeship in the pulpit at Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis, whence 
 in 1847 he was called to the new Brookljm congregation of 
 Plymouth Church. The liberal movement of his thought paral- 
 leled his geographical wanderings from the region of orthodoxy, 
 through the region of culture, to the practical West, and back 
 to the metropolitan East. He had had his fill of dogmatic 
 theology in youth, and never took much further interest in it. 
 He became more and more a minister, looking rather to the 
 needs of humanity than to the theory of divinity. In the West, 
 under the stress of primitive conditions, he soon threw over- 
 
 365 
 
366 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 board a system of doctrines in which, he found, plain people 
 were not interested; so that by the time he took the Brooklyn 
 ptilpit, which soon became a national platform, he was preach- 
 ing straight at human nature, and touching it with a more and 
 more liberating hand as he advanced in years. 
 
 From his Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844) to his Evolu- 
 tion and Religion (i 885) he came a long way. The Lectures are 
 addressed apparently not to young men in general, but to young 
 employees — clerks, mechanics, salesmen, and apprentices. 
 Hence their flavour of Poor Richard and the Industrious 
 Apprentice. Guided to his audience by Franklin and Hogarth, 
 Beecher combines allegory with vivid eighteenth-century 
 realism; bigoted invective against the theatre and novels, with 
 "characters": the Sluggard, the Busybody, the Dandy, the 
 Pleasure-Loving Business Man, the Cynic, the Libertine. 
 This antique literary material explains the excessively old- 
 fashioned fiavotu- of the book. Though Beecher grew im- 
 measurably away from it, he seems never to have disavowed or 
 changed it, and for fifty years it remained perhaps his most 
 popular work. 
 
 To Beecher's Western period also belong short pieces which 
 first appeared in an Indiana agricultural paper and were later 
 (1859) reprinted as Plain and Pleasant Talk about Fruit, 
 Flowers and Farming. Of no intrinsic literary importance, 
 they are of interest as showing the sources of much of Beecher's 
 imagery. He was always close to the soil, and he drew from 
 natural phenomena some of his most effective "illustrations." 
 The Star Papers (1855 and 1859) and the Eyes and Ears (1862), 
 collections of short essays, are good reading even now. With 
 naivete and self-depreciation, Beecher records his impressions 
 of his first tour in Europe, tells of holiday outings among the 
 Connecticut hills and trout streams, and gives plainly and 
 modestly his very sensible opinions upon such subjects as 
 sudden conversion, mischievous self-examination, and total 
 depravity. The latter doctrine he rejects, accepting the doc- 
 trine of men's sinfulness and the necessity of their atonement 
 not because Adam fell but because sin is actual and present. 
 With regard to conversion, he takes the empiricist view that 
 only in rare cases does the inner clock strike twelve when men 
 
Beecher 367 
 
 have found grace; they may have it, yet not have infallible 
 evidence. Hence he deprecates excessive introspection and 
 hesitation, and says "Go ahead." His reminiscences, too, of 
 old Litchfield at a time when that lucky town held Miss 
 Pierce's Female Seminary and the celebrated Law School of 
 Judge Gould and Judge Tapping Reeve, are discursive essays 
 of .permanent interest. His story of how, having as a boy of 
 thirteen visited the Charleston Navy Yard, he stole a cannon 
 ball and went away with it in his hat, is as enjoyable as Frank- 
 lin's apologues of The Axe to Grind and of Paying too Dear jar 
 One's Whistle. The Essay on Apple Pie is not toto ccelo re- 
 moved from the Dissertation upon Roast Pig. Home Revisited, 
 the record of a few days in Indianapolis, recalls the first of his 
 sermons which he considered a success because it was aimed at 
 his hearers; and tells by the way of his awe of Jonathan 
 Edwards. "I never could read . . . Sinners in the Hands of 
 an Angry God ... at one sitting. I think a person of moral 
 sensibilities, alone at midnight, reading that awful dis- 
 course, would well nigh go crazy." Through many of these 
 pieces there breathes a frank sensuous enjoyment of physical 
 beauty, which passes easily into religious exaltation. Beecher 
 revels in the form and colour of great painting, and in the 
 sounds, sights, and coloiirs of landscape; the pictures in the 
 Louvre and the glories of a sunset are to him literally revela- 
 tions. These volumes testify once more to the richness of his 
 mental imagery, and to its decided growth in range and in 
 culture after his removal to the East. 
 
 Meanwhile, during all the years from his first pulpit to the 
 beginning of the Civil War, his opposition to slavery had been 
 deepening. He never joined the Abolitionists, but untiringly 
 opposed the extension of slavery, and during the decade from 
 1850 to i860, in lectures and in contributions to periodicals, 
 denoimced the various compromises and outrages that led up 
 to the conflict. Freedom and War (1863), a volume of spirited 
 sermons and addresses from the Brooklyn pulpit, exhibits the 
 growth of his opinions up to the moment when he began to 
 advocate immediate abolition — a moment just before the 
 Emancipation Proclamation itself. 
 
 In educating public opinion upon slavery, Beecher had been 
 
368 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 unconsciously preparing his own armament for uses which he 
 could not have guessed. While upon a vacation in England 
 in the autumn of 1863 he was asked to speak on the 
 war, and in the course of eleven days delivered almost im- 
 promptu, at Manchester, Glasglow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and 
 London, the series of addresses which gave him perhaps his 
 greatest celebrity. Some of his audiences, notably those at 
 Liverpool and Glasglow, were most tumultuous, and had 
 actually to be conquered by the speaker. He conquered them, 
 and won over the English middle class to sympathy with the 
 Union cause. The determination of the British government to 
 maintain strict neutrality is said to have been largely due 
 to Beecher's effect upon public opinion. As literature, the 
 addresses in England, though of course they bear the marks 
 of their hasty composition and contested delivery, yet reveal 
 the easy mastery of his material which Beecher had been storing 
 up in his years of preparatory Writing and speaking. Their 
 lucidity and humour are still delightful; they stiU throw off 
 visibly the live sparks that were struck out in the original clash 
 between the speaker and his hearers ; they reproduce the time 
 in its very form and pressure; and in their way, too, they are 
 classics of argumentation, for Beecher realizes the essential 
 Aristotelian form of rhetoric — the orator's persuasion of an 
 audience confronting him. The history of slavery and of 
 secession could hardly be read in a more interesting form. 
 
 In Norwood, or Village Life in New England (1868), ad- 
 vertised as "Mr. Beecher's only novel," Beecher attempted an 
 excursion into imaginative literature, but failed for want of 
 breath. He had no power of construction and very little power 
 of characterization. The personages are lay figures moving 
 through an action prescribed for them by the author, and 
 speaking his language, not their own. The general woodenness 
 of the book, and several delightful absurdities, lay it open to 
 easy parody. So much allowed, Norwood, if taken not as a 
 novel but as a series of sketches of New England types, de- 
 scriptions of New England scenery, and discussions not too 
 profound of topics in religion, politics, and aesthetics, has 
 distinct merit. This is much the same merit that is exhibited, 
 under much the same limitations, by Beecher's essays and 
 
Beecher 369 
 
 sermons: though he had imagination, he had no architectonic. 
 
 Beneath the routine activities of the next twenty years — 
 his regular sermons, the public addresses for which he was more 
 and more in request, and his sentimental Life of Jesus the Christ 
 (1871), Beecher was quietly conducting an earnest study of the 
 evolutionary philosophy. From the very beginning of his 
 acquaintance with the new way of thinking, he seems to have 
 felt that it wovild be his latest and his last instrument for 
 enfranchising the soul; and when he had accomplished his 
 task of educating public opinion at home and abroad toward 
 the abolition of slavery, he turned to this other task of spiritual 
 emancipation. "If I had preached thirty years ago," he says 
 in one of the sermons of his Evolution and Religion (1885), 
 "what I preach now, it woiild have been a great mischief to 
 you; but for thirty years I have been cautious, and have fed 
 you as you could bear it." 
 
 Beecher did not, it would seem, understand the full power 
 of the instrument he was employing, and as he was a man of 
 images and not of ideas he never brought his own self-contra- 
 dictions to a clear issue. In his prevailing mood he makes 
 the asstunption, which comes down to him from Platonism, 
 natural religion, and Transcendentalism, that nature is a 
 symbol of God and the moral order, is a continuing revelation 
 of God, is sympathetic with humanity, and is parallel, analo- 
 gous, and favourable to religion and morals. Often, however, 
 he realizes to some extent, and frankly declares as far as he 
 realizes it, the inevitable implication of the theory of natural 
 selection, that nature is alien to the moral strivings of man, and 
 is thoroughly unmoral if not immoral. When he is conscious of 
 his iSelf -contradiction at all, Beecher seems merely puzzled by 
 it as by one mystery among many. It would of course be fatal 
 to his work if that work were a philosophical system — ^which 
 it is not. 
 
 Despite his indecision upon this central problem, really the 
 problem of evil itself, Beecher succeeds in giving sight and free- 
 dom to souls weighed down and blinded by the old unhappy 
 dogma of depravity. Without denying man's sinfulness, he 
 reverses the whole prospect of humanity by simply declaring 
 that it is not true that men were created innocent but fell and 
 
370 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 incurred a debt which they could never hope to pay ; but rather 
 that the human race began low down, has not come up very 
 far, and has the opportunity for limitless development upward. 
 Beecher's close contact with his audience and the abun- 
 dance of his imagery are the sources of his peculiar power. 
 They keep his style homely and racy (Robert South he de- 
 clared to have been his chief model), and hold his thought and 
 feeling near to human needs. He deliberately cultivated both. 
 He carried pocketfuls of gems, which he loved to turn over and 
 examine; he haunted picture-galleries and jewellers' shops. 
 Like Whitman^ whom he is said to have influenced, he walked 
 the streets, spent whole days among the docks and ferry boats, 
 made himself familiar with all sorts of trades, and talked with 
 all sorts of people. These soturces of power were also at times 
 sources of weakness. Beecher came to depend upon hearers 
 rather than readers; his hand faltered when he felt himself out 
 of contact with an audience; and as he could not bring himself 
 to revise with any degree of care the reports of his oral dis- 
 course, the form in which much of it has come to us is dis- 
 tinctly sub-literary. His exuberance of imagery also upon 
 occasion betrayed him into incongruity and bathos. Yet his 
 writings as a whole produce a deepening impression of merit. 
 Here was a large personality, all of a piece, singularly free 
 from repressions, and with no closet for a skeleton to lurk in. 
 Beecher's openness of soul — exhibiting frankly his delight in 
 beautiful things and in human contacts — ^is perhaps his char-- 
 acteristic note, and together with the great historical interest 
 of his work will probably go far to render it permanent. 
 
2. Brooks 
 
 PHILLIPS BROOKS (1835-93)' was most fortunately 
 constituted and placed to be a great preacher. Just 
 about the time of his birth in Boston, his family gave 
 up its pew in the Unitarian meeting-house and, as a compromise 
 between its Unitarian and Congregational strands, took one in 
 St. Paul's Episcopal Church, its freedom and strength becoming 
 tinged with mystery and wrapped about indignified historicity. 
 And when Phillips Brooks, after an unsuccessful experiment in 
 teaching in the Boston Latin School, hesitatingly determined to 
 be a minister, his mind seemed to rest in the solidarity of hu- 
 manity, in the perpetual and abiding emotions, conceptions, 
 and satisfactions which underlie all change. The strong con- 
 servatism, so often noted in college students, seemed to remain 
 with him long after the undergraduate years and to be a 
 constitutive element of his character. 
 
 With the great controversies of his times he was not unac- 
 quainted. He took the gradually prevailing view with regard 
 to them all. He believed the great books of other religions 
 to be "younger brothers" of the Bible. He travelled with 
 sympathetic interest in India and Japan. "No mischief," 
 he thought, "can begin to equal the mischief which must come 
 from the obstinate dishonesty of men who refuse to recognize 
 any of the new light which has been thrown upon the Bible." 
 When Heber Newton was threatened with a trial for heresy 
 because of his belief in the methods and some of the more 
 radical conclusions of the higher criticism, Brooks invited 
 
 " The volume the writer of this chapter would recommend as an introduction 
 to Brooks's writings is the fourth series of his sermons, entitled Twenty Sermons, 
 published in 1886. The new edition (1910) is entitled Visions and Tasks. 
 
 371 
 
372 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 him to preach in his pulpit. He says remarkably little regard- 
 ing the Darwinian controversy. He had but a superficial 
 acquaintance with science. He finds his comfort in believing 
 that "the orderliness of nature must make more certain the 
 existence of an orderer," and suggests that "Christ's truth of 
 the Father Life of God has the most intimate connection with 
 Darwin's doctrine of development, which is simply the 
 continual indwelling and action of creative power." He 
 added, however, but little to the controversies. Save where, 
 as in the problem of comparative religion, they came into 
 close contact with his own gospel of the universal sonship of 
 man to God, he was not fundamentally interested in them. 
 His sympathetic sermon on Gamaliel, who left the upshot of 
 controversies to God, is characteristic. In the Theological 
 Seminary at Alexandria he wrote in his student's notebook: 
 
 Truth has laid her strong piers in the past Eternity and the 
 Eternity to come and now she is bridging the interval with this life 
 of ours. . . . Controversies grow tame and tiresome to the mind 
 which has looked on Truth. . . . We walk the bridge of life. 
 Can we not trust its safety on the two great resting-places of God's 
 wisdom? 
 
 Phillips Brooks was habitually more aware of the back- 
 ground than of the foreground. Occasionally, indeed, it was 
 otherwise. In his Philadelphia ministry he spoke out boldly, 
 at the conclusion of the War, for negro suffrage. In his later 
 life the radical in him showed itself more conspicuously. He 
 rose in his place in the Church Congress to plead for the use of 
 the Revised Version of the Bible in public worship, and in the 
 Convention of 1886 he protested vigorously against the pro- 
 posal to strike the words "Protestant Episcopal" from the 
 title of his Church. On his return from the Convention to 
 Boston, he even went so far as to declare from the pulpit that 
 if the name were changed, he did not see how any one could 
 remain in the Church who, like himself, disbelieved in the doc- 
 trine of Apostolic Succession. But in the main he lived above 
 controversy. He believed neither in "insisting on full require- 
 ments of doctrine nor on paring them down. . . . The duty 
 of such times as these is to go deeper into the spirituality of our 
 
Brooks 373 
 
 truths. . . . Jesus let the shell stand as he found it, until 
 the new life within could burst it for itself." His rare bio- 
 grapher, A. V. G. Allen, makes this significant comment upon 
 a Thanksgiving sermon of his : 
 
 He offers no solution of the conflict between religion and science. 
 But it means something that in the disorder of thought and feeling, 
 so many men are fleeing to the study of orderly nature. He urges 
 his hearers to make much of the experiences of life which are per- 
 petual, joy, sorrow, friendship, work, charity, relation with one's 
 brethren, for these are eternal. 
 
 For Brooks this was no evasion. It was digging below the 
 questions of the day to the eternal, unquestioned, proven 
 truths of human experience. It was losing one's self in hu- 
 manity. He occasionally looked forward, and increasingly, 
 but he loved best to look from the present backward and up- 
 ward. Just after his graduation from Harvard, we find this 
 in his notebook : 
 
 A spark of original thought . . . strengthens a man's feeling of 
 individuality, but weakens his sense of race. It is an inspiring, 
 ennobling, elevating, but not a social thing. But what a kindly 
 power, what a warm human family feeling clusters around the 
 thought which we find common to our mind and to some old mind 
 which was thinking away back in the twilight of time. ... So 
 when we recognize a common impulse or rule of life ... we must 
 feel humanity in its spirit, bearing witness with our spirits, that it 
 is the offspring of a common divinity. 
 
 His native conservatism lived through the awakening years 
 of the Seminary. We find these musings in his notebook: 
 
 Originality is a fine thing, but first have you the head to bear it ? 
 . . . Our best and strongest thoughts, like men's earliest and 
 ruder homes, are found or hollowed in the old primasval rock. . . . 
 Not till our pride rebels against the architecture of these first homes 
 and we go out and build more stately houses of theory and spectda- 
 tion and discovery and science, do we begin to feel the feebleness 
 that is in us. 
 
374 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 As this biographer keenly says: "Nowhere in these note- 
 books does Brooks regard himself as a pioneer in search of 
 new thought. . . . He does not test truth by individual ex- 
 periences but by the larger experiences of humanity." He 
 told the Yale theological students in his middle life that a 
 part of the Christian assurance lies in the fact that the Chris- 
 tian message is "the identical message which has come down 
 from the beginning." Part of his satisfaction in preaching 
 lay in his confidence that he was in his proper communion. 
 He rejoiced "in her strong historic spirit, her sense of union 
 with the ages which have passed out of sight." The insignia of 
 spiritual truth to him were largely antiquity and catholicity. 
 He had profound faith in the people. He believed in prophets 
 when they had been accepted by the people; that is, usually 
 some ages after they have lived and died. Few prominent men 
 have let their friends and the public decide in their crises more 
 than Brooks — and in nearly every case against his own original 
 instinct. He relied on the heart of humanity as the supreme 
 judge. Out of this primitive conviction of his grew his one 
 essential message, that every man who has ever lived is a son 
 of God. Consequently when a great doctrine came before him 
 which had the ages of experience behind it or upon it, the 
 question he asked was not "Is it true?" but "Why is it true?" 
 or "Wherein resides its truth?" So it was with the great 
 pivotal doctrine of the divinity of Christ, or, as he preferred to 
 call it, the Incarnation. He found its truth to reside in the 
 fact that Christ had lived out the secret yearnings and possi- 
 bilities of humanity; Christ was the prophecy of the Christ 
 that was everywhere to be. On the great question of the 
 miracles he was orthodox. He lived in a time when Biblical 
 criticism in this country was in its earlier stages. He could 
 honestly write to a German inquirer: "There is nothing 
 in the results of modern scholarship which conflicts with 
 the statements in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds concern- 
 ing the birth of Jesus." As Allen remarks, Brooks was 
 in the habit of "sheathing his critical faculties where the 
 people's faith was concerned." He used the Bible, therefore, 
 pretty much as he found it, or rather he used what he found 
 beneath it. 
 
Brooks 375 
 
 It was toward middle life, about the time that a fresh study 
 of the Gospels found expression in the Influence oj Jesus 
 (1880), that his emphasis seemed to shift from historic Chris- 
 tianity to the personal Christ. Over and over he insisted on 
 the centrality of Christ. "Not Christianity but Christ! Not 
 a doctrine but a person! Christianity only for Christ! . . . 
 Our religion is — Christ. To believe in Him is what? To 
 say a Creed? To join a church? No, but to have a great, 
 strong, divine Master, whom we perfectly love." And how 
 perfectly he loved him and how Christ responded to the em- 
 braces of this man's love, a letter on the eve of his consecration 
 to the bishopric shows : 
 
 These last years have a peace and fulness which there did not 
 use to be. I do not think it is the mere quietness of advancing age. 
 I am stire it is not indifference to anything which I used to care 
 for. I am sure that it is a deeper knowledge and truer love of 
 Christ. ... I cannot tell you how personal this grows to me. 
 He is here. He knows me and I know Him. It is no figure of 
 speech. It is the reallest thing in the world. And every day 
 makes it reaUer. And one wonders with delight what it will grow 
 to as the years go on. 
 
 And yet, notwithstanding his anchorage in the past, he 
 believed in a port ahead, for each individual primarily, but also 
 for the race. Even his ecstatic and unreserved loyalty to the 
 incarnate Christ did not serve as an iron door let down athwart 
 the highway of progress. He intimated that his teaching 
 regarding divorce was determined by temporary circum- 
 stances and that his scheme of punishments is not an essential 
 factor of his religion. It is true, naturally, with his strong belief 
 in immortality and in the individual's sonship to God, that he 
 held that society is here for the sake of the individual and not 
 the individual for the sake of society. But in the later years 
 we find almost a new note in his writings. ' ' Life may become too 
 strong for literature, ' ' he says. ' ' It may be the former methods 
 and standards are not sufficient for the expression of the grow- 
 ing life, its new activities, its unexpected energies, its feverish 
 problems. ... A man must believe in the future more than 
 he reverences the past. " In a speech before the Boston Chamber 
 
376 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 of Commerce he is reported as having said that "the world was 
 bound to press onward and find an escape from the things that 
 terrified it, not by retreat but by a perpetual progress into the 
 large cakn that lay beyond." In the sermon which gives the 
 title to his volume The Light oj the World (1890), — ^wherein 
 is succinctly set forth his gospel, "the essential possibility and 
 richness of humanity and its essential belonging to divinity, ' ' — 
 we have these majestic words: 
 
 It is so hard for us to believe in the mystery of man. "Behold 
 man is this," we say, shutting down some near gate which falls 
 only just beyond, quite in sight of, what human nature already has 
 attained. If man would go beyond that, he must be something else 
 than man. And just then something breaks the gate away, and, lo 
 far out beyond where we can see, stretches the mystery of man, 
 the beautiful, the awful mystery of man. To him, to man, all 
 lower lives have climbed, and, having come to him, have found a 
 field where evolution may go on for ever. 
 
 Such passages are rare in his writings, for usually his gaze 
 takes in the past with Christ resplendent in it and does not lose 
 itself in the future ; then gratitude gets the upper hand of strug- 
 gle. He rarely preaches an entirely "social" sermon. In The 
 Christian City, wherein he departs from his custom, he be- 
 seeches Londoners to take heart because the modem city is so 
 Christian, though unconsciously. The Giant with the Wounded 
 Heel is one of the finest and most characteristic of his sermons. 
 He believes the giant, man, is constantly crushing the serpent, 
 and he is content to see a pretty large wound in his heel. 
 
 This laEgeness-a,nd poise„of _yiew is the most distinctive 
 characteristic of Phillips Brooks. It stamps him with the 
 mark of intellect. Occasionally he seems to value the mind 
 for itself and to ascribe to it standards of its own. "The ink 
 of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyrs." 
 Once he admits, without catching himself, that the mind is 
 "the noblest part of us." In the sermon where this admission 
 is made, The Mind's Love of God, he declares: "You cannot 
 know that one idea is necessarily true because it seems to help 
 you, nor that another idea is false because it wounds and seems 
 to hinder you. Your mind is your faculty for judging what is 
 
Brooks 377 
 
 true." But these are isolated sayings. Ordinarily he refuses to 
 think of the intellect as a thing apart from the entire man, and 
 he finds truth, as did his Master, inherent in life, a personal 
 quaUty, discovered, determined, and determinable by personal 
 ends. When he first began to think, Socrates was almost the 
 ideal figure. But later, Socrates seemed thin in compari- 
 son with Christ. "Socrates brings an argument to meet an 
 objection. Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nature; a 
 whole being which the truth has filled with strength to meet 
 another whole being, which error has filled with feebleness." 
 In his sermon on the death of Lincoln he discloses his inner 
 thought: 
 
 A great many people have discussed very crudely whether 
 Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual man or not, as if intellect 
 were a thing, always of the same sort, which you could precipitate 
 from the other constituents of a man's nature and weigh by itself. 
 . . . The fact is that in all the simplest characters, the line between 
 the mental and moral nature is always vague and indistinct. They 
 run together, and in their best combination you are unable to dis- 
 criminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral 
 and how much is intellectual. 
 
 In his student days he confided to his notebook: "A fresh 
 thought may be spoiled by sheer admiration. It was given us 
 to work in and to live by. ... It will give its blessing to us 
 only on its knees. From this point of view, thought is as holy a 
 thing as prayer, for both are worship." The best description, 
 perhaps, of his own mind is to be found in his enumeration of 
 the "intellectual characteristics which Christ's disciples gath- 
 ered from their Master," namely: "A poetic conception of 
 the world we live in, a willing acceptance of mystery, an ex- 
 pectation of progress by development, an absence of fastidious- 
 ness that comes from a sense of the possibilities of all htunanity, 
 and a perpetual enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into 
 the essential." 
 
 These peculiar intellectual characteristics, rooted in their 
 passionate reverence for humanity, for its ideals and its achieve- 
 ments, determine the place of Brooks among the great preachers 
 of the world. He is at his best when he preaches by indirec- 
 
378 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 tion. Enlargement is his effect. A man sees his own time in 
 relation to all time, discovers his greatness by the greatness of 
 which he is a part. Brooks's mission was not to advance the 
 frontiers of knowledge, not even of spiritual knowledge, but 
 rather to annex the cleared areas to the old domains. His 
 abiding preoccupation — fatal to the scientist, detrimental to the 
 sociologist, fortunate for the fame and immediate influence 
 of the preacher — ^was to hold the present, changing into the 
 future, loyal to the past. He was not the stuff of which martyrs 
 are made, but his soul was of that vastness which kept the public 
 from making martyrs of the truthful. He seems to watch and 
 bless rather than to urge forward. His great service to his 
 age was that of a mediator. Standing himself as a trinitarian 
 and a supernaturalist, rejoicing in the greenness of the historic 
 pasttires, he discovered at the base of his doctrines the same 
 essential spiritual food which others sought on freer uplands 
 and less confined stretches. He ministered to orthodox and 
 unorthodox alike beneath their differences. He did much to 
 keep spiritual evolution free from the bitterness and contempt 
 of revolution. 
 
3- Royce 
 
 UNLIKE most of America's distinguished philosophers, 
 Josiah Royce (i85S::xI9I^ was not brought up in New 
 England. He was born in a mining town in California 
 and received his philosophic education in the university of his 
 own state, at Johns Hopkins, and at Gottingen, where he 
 studied under Lotze. Many diverse elements stimulated his 
 subtle and acquisitive mind to philosophic reflection; the theis- 
 tic evolutionism of the geologist Le Conte, the fine literary 
 spirit of E. R. Sill, and his own reading of Mill and Spencer as 
 well as of the great German philosophers, Kant, Schelling, 
 Hegel, and Schopenhauer. 
 
 In 1882 he went to Harvard, where his prodigious learning, 
 his keen and catholic appreciation of poetry, and the biblical 
 eloquence with which he expressed a rich inner experience, at 
 once made a profound impression. His singularly pure and 
 loyal, though shy, spirit attracted a few strong friendships ; but 
 his life at Cambridge was in the main one of philosophic de- 
 tachment. As a citizen of the great intellectual world, however, 
 he closely followed its multitudinous events; and his successive 
 books only partly reflected his unusually active and varied 
 intellectual interests. In his earliest published papers he is 
 inclined to follow Kant in denying the possibility of ultimate 
 metaphysical solutions except by ethical postulates, but in his 
 first book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), he comes 
 out as a full-fledged metaphysical idealist. This brilliant book 
 at once made a profound impression, especially with the argu- 
 ments that thejveryLpQssibility of error cannot be formulated 
 excegt_ia:terms-oLan-absQlute.truth or rational totality which 
 requires j,n absolute J^SQwer. Like the parts of a sentence, all 
 
 379 
 
38o Chapters of American Literature 
 
 things find their condition and meaning in the final totality to 
 which they belong. The world must thus be either through 
 and through of the same nature as our mind, or else be utterly 
 unknowable. But to affirm the unknowable is to involve one's 
 self in contradictions. Royce delights in these sharp antitheses 
 and the reduction of opposing arguments to contradictions. 
 
 In his next book, an unusually eloquent one entitled The 
 Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), the element of will rather 
 than knowledge receives the greater emphasis. The Berkeleian 
 analysis of the world as composed of ideas is taken for granted, 
 and the emphasis is rather on the nature of the World Mind or 
 Logos. Following Schopenhauer, he points out that even in 
 the idealistic view of the world there is an irrational element, 
 namely, the brute existence of just this kind of world. The 
 great and tragic fact of experience is the fact of effort and 
 passionate toil which never finds complete satisfaction. This 
 eternal frustration of our ideals or will is an essential part of 
 spiritual life, and enriches it just as the shadows enrich the 
 picture or certain discords bring about richer harmony. The 
 Absolute himself suffers our daily crucifixion, but his triumph- 
 ant spiritual nature asserts itself in us through that very suffer- 
 ing. This profoundly consoling argument, which both elevates 
 us and sinks our individual sorrows in a great cosmic drama, is, 
 of course, an expression of the historical Christian wisdom of 
 the beatitude of suffering. But it offended the traditional 
 individualism which finds its theologic and metaphysical ex- 
 pression in the doctrine of free will. If each individual is a 
 part of the divine self, how can we censure the poor wretch who 
 fails to live up to the proper standard ? ' It is significant of the 
 unconventionality of Royce' s thought that he never attached 
 great importance to the question of blame or the free and inten- 
 tional natiure of sin. The evils uppermost in his mind are those 
 resulting from ignorance, from the clumsiness of inexperience 
 rather than from wilful misdeeds; and, unlike most American 
 philosophers, he rightly saw that the religious conscience of 
 mankind has always regarded sin as something which happens 
 to us even against our will. Against the complacent belief of 
 
 ' See Howison in The Conception of God, by Royce, Le Conte, Howison, and 
 Mezes. 
 
Royce 381 
 
 the comfortable that no one suffers or succeeds except through 
 his own sins or virtues, Royce opposes the view of St. Paul that 
 we are all members of each other's bodies and that "no man 
 amongst us is wholly free from the consequences or from the 
 degradation involved in the crimes of his less enlightened or 
 less devoted neighbours, that the solidarity of mankind links 
 the crimes of each to the sorrows of all." 
 
 For the elaboration of the social nature of our intellectual 
 as well as of our moral concepts, Royce was largely indebted 
 to suggestions from Peirce. In his earliest books we find no 
 direct reference to Peirce. We can only conjecture that he 
 owed to that man of genius the emphasis on the social nature 
 of truth and the formulation of the ethical imperative : Live in 
 the light of all possible consequences. But with the publica- 
 tion of the two volumes of The World and the Individual (1901), 
 Royce's indebtedness to Peirce becomes explicit and steadily 
 increases thereafter. 
 
 The main thesis of that book, the reconciliation of the exist- 
 ence of the Absolute Self with the genuine individuality of our 
 particular selves, is effected by means of illustrations from the 
 field of modern mathematics, especially by the use of the 
 modern mathematical concept of the infinite as a collection of 
 which a part may be similar to the whole. C. S. Peirce had 
 done this before him in a remarkable article entitled The Law of 
 Mind, in the second volume of The Monist. In generously ac- 
 knowledging his obligation to Peirce, Royce rightly felt his 
 fundamental idealistic position to be independent of that of 
 Peirce; but it is noticeable that all Royce's references to the 
 logic of mathematics are in full agreement with Peirce's view of 
 the reality of abstract logical and mathematical universals, 
 and it may well be questioned whether this can be harmonized 
 with the nominalist or Berkeleian elements of Royce's idealism. 
 
 His subsequent work falls into two distinct groups, the 
 mathematical-logical and the ethical-religious. Of the former 
 group, his essay on logic in The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophi- 
 cal Sciences is philosophically the most important. Logic is 
 there presented not as primarily concerned with the laws of 
 thought or even with methodology but after the manner of 
 Peirce as the most general science of objective order. In this 
 
382 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 as in other of his mathematical-logical papers Royce still pro- 
 fesses adherence to his idealism, but this adherence in no way 
 affects any of the arguments which proceed on a perfectly 
 realistic basis. In his religio-ethical works he follows Peirce 
 even more, and the Mind or Spirit of the Community replaces 
 the Absolute. In his last important book, The Problem oj 
 Christianity (19 13), all the concepts of Pauline Christianity 
 are interpreted in terms of a social psychology, the personality 
 of Christ being entirely left out except as an embodiment of 
 the spirit of the beloved community. 
 
 The-World and the Individual is still, as regards sustained 
 mastery of technical metaphysics, the nearest approach to a 
 philosophic classic that America has as yet produced. Its pub- 
 lication was the high-water mark of the idealistic tide. Royce's 
 previous monism had aroused the opposition of pluralistic ideal- 
 ists like George Howison and Thomas Davidson. But with the 
 beginning of the twentieth century idealism itself became 
 the object of organized attack by two movements known as 
 pragmatism and naif- or neo-realism. The former was due to 
 the work of William James and John Dewey ; the latter to the 
 spread of renewed and serious interest in scientific philosophy, 
 especially in the renaissance of mathematical philosophy best 
 represented by Bertrand Russell. It is, however, an historic 
 fact that Royce contributed very largely to the effective spread 
 of these new philosophies, to pragmatism by his ethical (as 
 opposed to intellectual) idealism and by his emphasis on the 
 practical aspect of ideas, and to neo-realism by his teaching 
 and writing on mathematical logic. His profound and loyal 
 devotion to the ethical interests of mankind did not prevent him 
 from regarding the question of human immortality as ','one for 
 reason in precisely the same sense in which the properties of 
 prime numbers and the kinetic theory of gases are matters for 
 exact investigation." In this way he continued to represent, 
 against the growing tide of anti-intellectualism, the old faith 
 in the dignity and potency of reason which is the corner-stone 
 of humanistic liberalism. 
 
4- William James 
 
 IN William James (i 842-1 910) we meet a personality of such 
 large proportions and of such powerful appeal to con- 
 temporaneous sentiment that we may well doubt whether 
 the time has yet come when his work can be adequately es- 
 timated. There are many who claim that he has transformed 
 the very substance of philosophy by bringing it down from the 
 cold, transcendental heights to men's business and bosoms. 
 But whether that be so or not, the width and depth of his 
 sympathies and the irresistible magic of his words have un- 
 doubtedly transformed the tone and manner of American 
 philosophic writing. Outside of America also his influence has 
 been impressive and is steadily increasing. 
 
 It is instructive to note at the outset the judgment of 
 orthodox philosophers, boldly expressed by George Howison: 
 
 Emerson and James were both great men of letters, great writers, 
 yes, great thinkers, if you will, but they do not belong in the strict 
 list of philosophers. Mastery in logic is the cardinal test of the true 
 philosopher, and neither Emerson nor James possessed it. Both, 
 on the contrary, did their best to discredit it.' 
 
 As a criticism this is hardly fair. James certainly elaborated 
 definite doctrines as to the nature of mind, truth, and reality. 
 In his Radical Empiricism and in The Meaning of Truth he even 
 showed considerable dialectic skill. Moreover, it may well be 
 maintained that he did not seek to discredit logic in general, 
 but only the logic of "\^cious intellectualism." Nevertheless, 
 Howison's opinion is significant in calling attention to the dis- 
 tinction between philosophy as technique and philosophy as 
 ' Philosophical Review, vol. xxv, p. 241, May, 1916. 
 
 383 
 
384 chapters of American Literature 
 
 vision. From the professional point of view it is not sufficient 
 that a man should beheve in free will, absolute chance, or the 
 survival of consciousness beyond death. To be worthy of being 
 called a philosopher, one must have a logically reasoned basis 
 for his belief. James was aware of the importance of technique, 
 and was, in fact, extraordinarily well informed as to the sub- 
 stance and main tendencies of all the diverse technical schools. 
 But he was wholly interested in philosophy as a religious vision 
 of life, and he had the cultivated gentleman's aversion for 
 pedantry. His thoughts ran in vivid pictures, and he could not 
 trust logical demonstration as much as his intuitive suggestions. 
 Hence his philosophic writings are extremely rich in the variety 
 of concrete factual insight, but not in effective answers to the 
 searching criticisms of men like Royce, Russell, and Bradley. 
 James was aware of this and asked that his philosophy be judged 
 generously in its large outlines ; the elaboration of details might 
 well be left to the future. 
 
 ' ' The originality of William James, ' ' says one of his European 
 admirers, "does not appear so much in his cardinal beliefs, 
 which he took from the general current of Christian thought, as 
 in the novel and audacious method by which he defended them 
 against the learned philosophies of his day." ' This, also, is not 
 true without qualification. James took almost nothing from 
 current Christian philosophy. Nor do any of the great historic 
 Christian doctrines of sin and atonement or salvation find any 
 echo in his thought. Orthodox Christianity would condemn 
 James as a confessed pantheist who denied the omnipotence of 
 God. But though James is far from Christian theology, he 
 gives vivid utterance to the ordinary popular Christianity which 
 believes, not in a God who expresses himself in universal laws, 
 but in a God to whom we can pray for help against our enemies, 
 whom we can please and even help by our faith in Him. This 
 is due to James's deep sympathy with common experience 
 rather than with the problems of the reflective-minded. But 
 the modem sophisticated intellect is certainly tickled by the 
 sight of a most learned savant espousing the cause of popular 
 as opposed to learned theology, and by the open confession of 
 belief in piecemeal supematuralism on the basis of spiritistic 
 
 ' Floumoy, William James, p. 16. 
 
William James 385 
 
 phenomena. James's antipathy to the Hegelian and Roycean 
 attempts to prove the existence of the Absolute certainly plays 
 a more prominent part in his writings than does his antipathy 
 to popular unbelief. But the method of the absolutist he re- 
 jected, not only because of its insufferable pretension to finality 
 of proof, but mainly because it is in the way of one who prefers 
 an anthropomorphic imiverse that is tingling with life through 
 and through and is constantly meeting with new adventures. 
 
 The union of religious mysticism with biologic and psycho- 
 logic empiricism is characteristic of James's work from the very 
 beginning. He grew up in a household characterized by liberal 
 culture and mystic Swedenborgian piety.' The teacher who 
 made the greatest impression upon him, Louis Agassiz, was a 
 pious opponent of Darwin but a rare master in the art of ob- 
 serving significant details. More than one American naturalist 
 caught the fire of his enthusiasm for fact. The companion- 
 ship of Chauncey Wright and the writings of Renouvier weaned 
 James from his father's religio-philosophical monism. The 
 empirical way of thought of Hume and Mill proved most con- 
 genial to one who was par excellence a naturaUst and delighted 
 in the observation of significant detail.^ 
 
 James began his career as a teacher of physiology and gradu- 
 ally drifted into psychology. ms^Principles of Psychology (2 
 vols., jSjgoXcontains the substance of his philosophy. Having, 
 despite the influence of Agassiz, become converted to Darwin- 
 ism, he was led to adopt as fundamental the view of Spencer 
 that thought is something developed in the, course of evolution 
 and must, therefore, have a biologiafunction. The great idealis- 
 tic argument against the old associationist psychology of Hume, 
 Mill, Bain, and Spencer was to the effect that the sensational 
 elem-ents can at most account for the qualities of things, but 
 not for their relations or connections; and when it was once 
 granted that the relations between things were of a non-sensa- 
 tional or non-empirical character, very little of the world was 
 
 ' His father, Henry James, Sr., was a Swedenborgian philosopher and a cul- 
 tivated gentleman of ample means, who united to genuine originality of thought a 
 remarkable insight into human character and a delightful freshness and pungency 
 of language. 
 
 " James studied art and was a proficient draftsman before he finally decided 
 to study medicine. 
 
 as 
 
386 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 left to the empiricist. James early became convinced of the 
 force of this argument and, following certain suggestions of 
 Peirce and possibly Hodgson, tried to save empiricism by mak- 
 ing it more radical, by giving the connecting relations themselves 
 a psychologic status on a par with the things they connect. 
 Thus he thought to restore the fluidity and connectedness 
 of our world without admitting the necessity for the idealist's 
 transcendental glue to keep together the discrete elements of 
 experience. Radical empiricism thus becomes a metaphysic 
 which holds the whole world to be composed of a single stuff 
 called pure experience. This sounds monistic enough, and 
 James's adherence to the view of Bergson re-enforces this im- 
 pression. Nevertheless, James insisted that the world as ex- 
 perienced does not possess the degree of unity claimed for it by 
 Royce and other monists, but that things are essentially many 
 and their connections often external and accidental. At times 
 James professes the dualistic realism of common sense. "I 
 start waih two things, the objective facts and the claims." But 
 ideas and things are both experiences taken in different con- 
 texts, so that his position has not inaptly been called neutral 
 monism, and thus assimilated to the philosophy of Ernst Mach. 
 
 It has been claimed that this view eliminates most of the 
 traditional problems of metaphysics, such as that of the rela- 
 tion of mind and body, and also eliminates the need of the 
 Spencerian unknowable and Royce's or Bradley's absolute. 
 But just exactly what experience is, James does not teU us, 
 except that it is something to be lived rather than to be defined. 
 
 The exigencies of controversy as well as James's generous 
 desire to give all possible credit to Peirce, have led the public to 
 regard pragmatism and James's philosophy as identical terms. 
 To James, however, pragmatism was but the method of philo- 
 sophic discussion, the vestibule to his radical empiricism. The 
 controversy, however, which arose about pragmatism enabled 
 James to elaborate from different approaches his account of the 
 nature of truth. The meaning of ideas is to be found in their 
 particular experimental consequences. Abstract ideas are not 
 copies of things but their substitutes or derivatives, evolved in 
 the process of evolution to enable us to deal more adequately 
 with the stream of immediate experience. An idea is, therefore, 
 
William James 387 
 
 true if it enables us to deal satisfactorily with the concrete 
 experiences at which it aims. An idea is said to work satis- 
 factorily if it leads us to expected facts, if it harmonizes with 
 other accepted ideas, if it releases our energies or satisfies emo- 
 tional craving for elegance, peace, economy, or any kind of 
 utility. 
 
 So anxious was James to overthrow the view that the truth 
 of an idea consists in its being an inert copy of reality, so anx- 
 ious to substitute for it the more activist view that an idea is 
 true if it works or leads to certain results, that he neglected to 
 indicate the relative importance of these results. This led to a 
 great deal of misunderstanding and caused considerable scandal. 
 Those brought up in the scientific tradition and trained to view 
 the emotionally satisfactory consequences of ideas as having 
 nothing to do with their scientific or theoretic value were scan- 
 dalized by James's doctrine of the will or right to believe any- 
 thing the acceptance of which made us more comfortable. This 
 was in part a tragic misunderstanding. Most of James's life 
 was a fight against accepting the monistic philosophy simply 
 because of its aesthetic nobility. He rejected it precisely because 
 it was "too buttoned up and white chockered, too clean-shaven 
 a thing to speak for the vast slow-breeding, unconscious cosmos 
 with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. ' ' It is true, how- 
 ever, that absorption in the psychologic factor, personal or 
 aesthetic, which actually does make some people prefer a 
 narrowly classic tmiverse and others a generously romantic 
 one, made him obscure the distinction between the causes of 
 belief and the evidence for the truth which we believe. We 
 may aU start with a biassed or emotional preface, but that is 
 neither evidence nor guaranty of otir arriving at scientific truth. 
 Like other violent opponents of inteUectuaUsm, James himself 
 falls into the intellectualistic assumption that we must either 
 wholly believe or wholly disbelieve, just as one must either go 
 to church or stay out. He ignores the scientific attitude of 
 suspended judgment and the fact that men may be compelled 
 to act without being constrained in judgment . We may vote for 
 X or Y and yet know that owing to the absence of adequate in- 
 formation ourchoice hasbeenlittle more than ablind guess. His 
 interest in vital preferences and his impatience with the emotion- 
 
388 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 ally thin air of purely logical argumentation led James, towards 
 the end of his life, to the acceptance of the extreme anti- 
 logical view of Bergson that our logical and mathematical 
 ideas are inherently incapable of revealing the real and chang- 
 ing world. 
 
 James's interest in philosophy was fundamentally restricted 
 to the psychological aspect of things. He therefore never 
 elaborated any systematic theory of morals, politics, or social 
 organization. His temperamental preference for the novel, the 
 unique, and the colourful re-enforced his traditional American 
 liberalism and made him an extreme individualist. He at- 
 tached scant value to the organized or fixed channels through 
 which the fitful tides of ordinary human emotion find perma- 
 nent expression. This shows itself best in his Varieties of Re- 
 ligious Experience (1902). He is interested only in the extreme 
 variations of religious experiences, in the geniuses or aristocrats 
 of the religious life. The religious experience of the great mass, 
 or even of intellectual men like Chief Justice Marshall, who go 
 to church without troubling much about matters of belief, seems 
 to James "second-hand" and does not solicit his attention. 
 Neither does the whole question of ritual or ceremony. He is 
 interested in the beliefs of extraordinary and picturesque in- 
 dividuals. Hence his book on religion tells us almost nothing to 
 explain the spread and vitality of the great historic religions. 
 Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. 
 This extreme individualism, however, is connected with an 
 extraordinary democratic openness and readiness to admit that 
 it is only the blindness in human nature that prevents us from 
 seeing the uniqueness of every individual. Unlike any other 
 philosopher, William James was entirely devoid of the pride 
 of the intellect. He was as willing as Jesus of Nazareth to 
 associate with the intellectual publicans and sinners and learn 
 from the denizens of the intellectual underworld. 
 
 James's position in the history of metaphysics is still a 
 matter of debate, but as a seer or prophet he may fitly be put 
 beside Emerson. J/tke Emerson, he preached and nobly_exem- 
 plified faith in one's intuition and the duty jof^Jceepiog^^e's 
 qracular,§oul open. In spite of a note of obscurantism in his atti- 
 tude to logic and "over beliefs," there is no doubt that the main 
 
William James 389 
 
 effect of his work was to raise the American standard of 
 intellectual honesty and courage: Let us stop this miserable 
 pretence of having at last logically proved the comforting cer- 
 tainties of our inherited religion. Let us admit that we have 
 no absolute assurance of the complete success of our ideals. 
 But the fight is on. We can all take our part. Shame on the 
 one who sulks and stays out. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 The English Language in America 
 
 ON 22 February, 191 7, the American Academy of Arts 
 and Letters sat to consider its duty toward the English 
 language in America. The published reports of the 
 session proclaim its "academic" character in that nothing re- 
 sembling a plan of action was proposed. It was less to be ex- 
 pected, perhaps, that no problem should be clearly formulated, 
 but this may be accounted for partly by reason of the fact that 
 much of the discussion turned not on the problem itself but 
 on the duty of the Academy in the face of a problem of which 
 everyone more or less definitely assumed the existence without 
 attempting to state it, and partly because the company con- 
 tained among many skilful users of the English language 
 hardly more than one qualified to speak from any extended 
 study of the problem, a lack which was expressly noted. It is 
 not so surprising that to the mind of an assembly of this sort 
 English as written was more constantly present than EngUsh 
 as spoken. But from so many men of accomplishment in 
 various forms of artistic expression there could hardly fail to 
 emerge various points of view, prejudices, agreements and dis- 
 agreements, which further discussion of the subject would do 
 well to begin by taking into account. 
 
 To the reader of these proceedings it is made aibundantly 
 plain, taking what was said with what was implied, that in the 
 minds of an overwhelming majority of the members, though not 
 of all, the English language in America is in a very bad way. 
 That this should have been their opinion might easily have been 
 predicted. English is the most bewept of the tongues. From 
 the days of Caxton its uncertain syntax, its perplexing variety 
 of forms, its exotic and luxuriant vocabulary have brought dis- 
 
 390 
 
The English Language in America 39 1 
 
 tress to most of those who have taken thought of it. Compunc- 
 tious visitings of an idealized Latinity have caused some to 
 strive to regulate an apparent chaos, but all, or nearly all, to 
 despair of stopping a heedless journey to destruction. His- 
 torically, the question turned first on matters of vocabulary, 
 later on points of form and meaning, and at present, though the 
 other questions are not forgotten, alarm is felt chiefly, as Henry 
 James puts it, on account of "those influences around us that 
 make for the imperfect disengagement of the human side of 
 vowel sound, that make for the confused, the ugly, the flat, the 
 thin, the mean, the helpless, that reduce articulation to an 
 ignoble minimum ... a mere helpless slobber of discon- 
 nected vowel noises." It is because of a growing slovenliness 
 in uttering the unstressed vowels that the British poet-laureate, 
 Robert Bridges, is inclined to believe that English pronuncia- 
 tion, even in Britain, is on the road to ruin. 
 
 It seems impossible for a student of language to refuse to 
 be stampeded by these alarms, to maintain a certain serenity 
 before so doleful a picture of things, pending some effort to 
 assure himself that the picture is drawn to scale, without being 
 accused in his turn of proclaiming with a sort of blatant cheer- 
 fulness that whatever is, linguistically, is right. SUch extremes 
 of optimism and pessimism are, of course, absurd. If they 
 seem to exist, it must be because people are talking from differ- 
 ent points of view about different sets of facts.- To attempt to 
 steer a rational middle course between these extremes, however, 
 demands for its success some rehearsal of the facts. And at 
 once, to show the existence of a middle ground, over against 
 centuries of forebodings may be placed the fact that since 
 Chaucer's day there has been continuously evolving, step by 
 step with the widening experience of men, an English in which 
 men of education everywhere in the far-flung English-speaking 
 world could write and converse together in a way highly agree- 
 able to any but a most inflexibly provincial taste. Amid much 
 confusing detail it is aS weU not to lose sight of this central 
 fact, that the thing we all are talking about exists. But where, 
 and in what form ? 
 
 Variety is of the essence of language. Uniformity and 
 consistency are inventions of philosophical grammarians whose 
 efforts are most successful when they deal with a language no 
 
392 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 longer used to satisfy elementary social needs. A living lan- 
 guage is one of the mores of a social group ; it is neither a bio- 
 logical growth unaffected by human intervention nor a work of 
 art given its form for all time by a single act of human creation. 
 Consequently it wiU vary within the group somewhat according 
 to the variation in other respects to be found in the individuals 
 comprising it, and between groups it will vary still more. Like 
 other mores it will be subject to modification by time. But 
 the necessity for mutual intelligibility within the group will 
 greatly restrict the play of individual whim; between groups 
 this force will operate somehow in proportion to the immediacy 
 of their contacts. In a cultured city like ancient Rome or 
 mediaeval Florence a group of people might raise and maintain 
 a literary standard arotmd which literary people of other 
 groups would rally. Or, again, a convenient dialect might be 
 somewhat arbitrarily chosen for a particular literary task, as 
 Luther chose the dialect of the Saxon chancellary for his trans- 
 lation of the Bible, and this dialect, with more or less conscious 
 modification from time to time, might remain the standard 
 literary language. In aU these cases the great mass of people, 
 not wholly uninfluenced by the literary language perhaps, 
 would go on speaking their own dialects, just as the Romans did 
 until their language of the street, of the camp, and of the pro- 
 vinces broke up into the larger groups, such as French, Spanish, 
 and the rest, each containing within itself many smaller groups; 
 or just as the Italians and the Germans have gone on speaking 
 their dialects to the present day, learning their literary language 
 as best they can besides. 
 
 The history of English is somewhat different from any of 
 these. In origin. Modem English, as it appears everywhere in 
 books and as it falls from the lips of the vast majority of speak- 
 ers, is the dialect of a city, London. But unlike the case of 
 Rome, there was at the outset presumably no great difference 
 between the language of literature and the language of every 
 day, and, unlike Florence, London was the chief city of a 
 steadily unifying country. With the changing language of 
 the city, its gradual loss of Southern, or Saxon, forms and its 
 gradual acquirement of Northern, or Anglian, forms, the lan- 
 guage of literature kept closely in touch. By the early six- 
 teenth century, though details are shifting, the outlines of 
 
The English Language in America 393 
 
 Modem English are fairly clear. Then came a period of great 
 expansion. The language was carried, farther than the Roman 
 legionaries carried theirs, into the remotest parts of the world; 
 it came to be spoken by more people than ever before in the 
 history of the world could hold comfortable converse together. 
 The really surprising thing is not that the result exhibits some 
 variety but that, when the lapse of time afforded opportunity 
 for, and indeed effected, so much change, when groups widely 
 scattered might so easily have completely lost contact when 
 there was so little external compulsion of any kind to keep 
 even the literary language true to itself, there should have 
 resulted a literary language that is almost uniform and a num- 
 ber of spoken dialects which never become unintelligible one 
 to aU the rest. In 1789 Noah Webster prophesied that there 
 would develop, " in a course of time, a language in North Amer- 
 ica, as different from the future language of England, as modem 
 Dutch, Danish, and Swedish are from German or from one 
 another." When it was made this was not a foolish guess; 
 all analogy supported it. That it has not come about, that 
 every passing day adds to the unlikelihood of its realization, 
 is one of the things that the observer of the ways of language 
 thinks about when he is invited to be very miserable. Clearly, 
 matters are not so bad as they quite easily might have been. 
 
 But this is speaking in the large. What of details ? Excel- 
 lence is largely a matter of details. A literary language "al- 
 most uniform" — why not entirely so? "A number of spoken 
 dialects" — why any dialects at all? Confronted with a de- 
 mand for perfect uniformity — one of our academicians very 
 expressly makes it and deplores the fact that Americans use 
 "back of" and "toward" and "spool of thread" instead of 
 British "behind" and "towards" and "reel of cotton" — what 
 can we say? Obviously, such a demand more nearly concerns 
 the literary English of books than the vernacular of daily in- 
 tercourse; no one seriously hopes to see us all regimented into 
 speaking exactly alike. But even in the former case it is proper 
 to ask not only how far uniformity may be possible, but also 
 how far an absolute uniformity, as opposed to something fairly 
 close to it, is really desirable. On what ground shall this 
 agreement be effected? Few would now feel, as some did in 
 
 " Dissertations, pp. 22-23. 
 
394 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 the early days of the Republic, that the dignity of the nation 
 requires that it should have a language entirely its own. More 
 would be ready to assent to the implication of one of our aca- 
 demicians that American usage conform itself as far as possible 
 to the practice of British writers. It is an old notion ; Franklin 
 and Webster both gave reverent expression to it, but neither, 
 it should be noted, made any special effort to live up to it, and 
 Webster at other times professed quite a different ideal. They 
 made no more effort, that is, than any educated man does who 
 allows his best reading to be reflected in his best writing. The 
 simple fact is that such differences as exist between English in 
 America and English in Britain are not mainly due to ignorance 
 or perversity. The days are long past when the British re- 
 viewer branded as an "Americanism" every word and every 
 construction which, during a period of enormous growth in the 
 demands made upon the language, he could not remember 
 having met with before. Such differences as there are, it is 
 now well recognized, are due to the historical evolution of the 
 language. It will be well to look at this for a moment before 
 casting up the losses and gains and before pointing out a possi- 
 ble, indeed a very real, danger involved in attempting to alter 
 too drastically the record with which history presents us. 
 
 The literary dialect of London never, as has been said, got 
 wholly out of touch with the other dialects of the island. 
 They continued to affect it in many ways; it was a "natural" 
 growth in that it was not consciously regulated by groups of 
 literary men in the way that German or French has been 
 regulated. In company with the British Constitution it 
 muddled along, obtaining surprisingly good results, all things 
 considered. Of the spoken language, apart from many rustic 
 dialects of a pedigree as honourable as it is ancient, there are at 
 least two recognized standards in England, a Northern British 
 and a Southern British, and, in addition, educated Scots and 
 Irishmen and Welshmen have ways of speaking that are quite 
 distinctly their own. The farther one travels from London the 
 less noticeable becomes the difference between British Enghsh 
 and American. If it be urged that the literary language is 
 largely uniform throughout the British Isles — leaving out 
 works that are frankly in dialect — this can in great part be 
 accounted for by the fact that political and literary life centre 
 
The English Language in America 395 
 
 in the great commercial city of London. But the varieties 
 that characterize spoken English today were probably even 
 greater — less subdued to a literary medium— in the seventeenth 
 century when the language was transplanted to America. And 
 American authors have seldom written with an eye to the 
 London book market. It is not, therefore, surprising that the 
 EngUsh in America, cut off from the British at home by an 
 estranging sea and feeling for them an affectionate regard in 
 about the same degree as it was accorded, should not have 
 followed precisely the same hnes of change. Some of the re- 
 sulting differences it will help matters to glance at. 
 
 The early colonists in America brought their English with 
 them. They were for the most part plain people and their 
 language must have had all the characteristics of the several 
 dialects which they spoke at home. How far their original 
 dialectical peculiarities are reflected in later American speech 
 it might be hard to determine; probably so far as the later 
 educated speech goes, not much. But the old New England 
 plural housen, clever =good, mad=angry, I be, you be, they be, 
 shet (shut), becase {because), sich (such), wrastle, mought {might), 
 ax {ask), ketch {catch), ^ guess = suppose, and many others more 
 certainly came over in the Mayflower than much else reputed 
 a part of that seemingly miraculous cargo. Some of these 
 forms are not often heard today, though guess has become a 
 sort of shibboleth. ^ If they were once more common, it should 
 be remembered that the situation in America was not wholly 
 unUke that of England after the Norman Conquest; with the 
 relaxation of literary standards, dialect forms, no longer re- , 
 pressed, gained recognition they could not have had in con- 
 flict with a strong literary tradition. 
 
 But it is not chiefly here that we are to look for the causes 
 of such differences as gradually separated American and 
 British speech. New conditions of life, to be sure, called for 
 new words: wigwam, tomahawk, sguaw, papoose, prairie, canyon, 
 
 ' Ketch, Spenser's form of the word, is, to many educated people, the only 
 natural pronunciation, and caich a purely literary afEectation. There is a certain 
 pleasant irony in the fact that in the strictly analogous word keg it is the pronun- 
 ciation kag that is regarded as a vulgarism. 
 
 ' The real objection to such expressions as guess and right away, as to quite so 
 and / mean to say, lies not in themselves but in their monotonous employment as 
 catch-words. 
 
396 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 and all the others that have become a part of the general stock 
 of English. Stores in the Western world (the usage is not con- 
 fined to the United States) really were stores and not shops. 
 Our most common corn was maize, and it naturally became 
 corn par excellence. Fall (autumn) and rare (underdone) are 
 "Americanisms" only in the sense that they have retained a 
 vitality here which even in England they have not wholly lost. 
 Political Hfe, sport, changed economic conditions, have all 
 furnished the language with new words, or old words in new 
 senses. The most striking differences, however, have come 
 about, not through the retention of dialect words or the intro- 
 duction of new words for new ideas, but because American 
 English, in its comparative isolation, has not followed step by 
 step the many changes that have occurred in British English 
 since the seventeenth century. American English is in some 
 respects archaic. It has never developed, for example, the 
 swooping diphthongs that, since the end of the eighteenth 
 century at least, have characterized the British pronunciation of 
 e, t, o, u, ' to represent which the British phoneticians write 
 say, be, boat, and do [sei], [bij], [bout], [duw]. The American 
 diphthongs, so far as they exist, are much less noticeable. The 
 characteristic American unrounding of [o] to [a], got, not [gat], 
 [nat], occurs in some of the British dialects and was an elegant 
 affectation in the days of Charles II. The palatal g and c still 
 sometimes heard in the Virginia pronunciation of garden and 
 card (written "gyarden, " "cyard") were held by many in 
 eighteenth-century England to be the height of refinement. 
 The old distinction between hoarse (vowel of no) and horse 
 (vowel of law) is still preserved by many Americans, especially 
 outside the Middle States. Elizabethan gotten and the old 
 preterite ate are heard oftener in America than in Britain. 
 Americans, indeed, look on a pronunciation "et" as vulgar. 
 They have either never lost or have, for the most part, suc- 
 cessfully recovered the ancient distinction between the voice- 
 less initial in which and the voiced in witch, where the South 
 Briton pronounces them both witch. 
 
 Finally, the so-called broad or Italian a, which began to be 
 fashionable in England near the close of the eighteenth century, 
 never established itself outside of New England and, to some 
 
 ' In phonetic notation vowels should be given their Continental sounds. 
 
The English Language in America 397 
 
 extent, in Virginia, except in father, before r {car, arm), and 
 somewhat uncertainly before Im {calm, psalm) . The American, 
 then, who pronounces pass, dance, aunt, with the vowel of 
 hand does only what all the authorities before the last quarter 
 of the eighteenth century told him to do, and what appar- 
 ently everybody in England did do who wished to avoid an 
 appearance of vulgarity. 
 
 Certain anomalous British forms, of comparatively recent 
 origin, have never become established in America. The pro- 
 nunciation of wrath as if wroth, and the occasional pronuncia- 
 tion of the latter with long o, are seldom (one dare not say 
 never) heard in America. Wrath (with the vowel of law) does 
 not seem to be older than the end of the eighteenth century, and 
 wroth (with the vowel of no) is a recent attempt to distinguish 
 anew between the words. Another anomaly is schedule, com- 
 monly pronounced by the British with sh. The earlier pronun- 
 ciation of this French word was sedyul, and it might have re- 
 tained this pronunciation in spite of its classical spelling, just 
 as schism has done. But the spelling suggests other classical 
 analogies like scholar and scheme, and this pronunciation fol- 
 lowed by American English seems to ofifer the only reasonable 
 alternative to sedyul. What analogy the British pronunciation 
 follows is not easy to see ; one hesitates now to urge afresh the 
 old suggestion that in this word, as in schist, the determining 
 influence is German. 
 
 The pronunciation of either, neither, with the diphthong of 
 eye, which is not recorded before the eighteenth century, has 
 met with better reception in America. It was Franklin's pro- 
 nimciation. But with many of the persons who use it it is a 
 conscious affectation. The Elizabethan pronunciations, it 
 may be noted, were "ayther," "nayther," just as the Irishman 
 still says it, and "ether," "nether," to rhyme with leather. 
 The ordinary American pronunciation is the representative of 
 the former type; the latter seems to have left no modem 
 descendants. 
 
 Besides being in some respects more conservative, American 
 English has in still other respects grown apart from British 
 English through following different analogies. The question 
 how an English word shall be pronounced breaks up at once into 
 a whole set of queries. Shall it be pronounced as a Latin word. 
 
398 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 a French word, or as a more or less domesticated form of either ? 
 What other word is it like? Shall the spelling be allowed full 
 weight ? In general, of two forms already in existence which 
 shaU be preferred ? To such questions it is only to be expected 
 that the two countries should in many instances make different 
 responses. 
 
 British EngHsh frequently makes more effort to imitate a 
 modem French pronunciation in trait, chamois, turquoise, 
 charade, imbecile, and vase, where Americans frankly accept 
 them as native words. It is, however, the French tradition 
 rather than the Latin which Americans follow in preferring [i] 
 to [ai] forms in the teTmma,tions-ide,-ine,-itis,-ique. 
 
 Dr. Johnson's spelling has undergone some simplification 
 in both countries : almanack, musick, errour, horrour, interiour, 
 successour, emperour, oratour, have everywhere dropped un- 
 necessary letters. The abandonment of the French -our for 
 Latin -or has gone a little further in the American printing- 
 houses; honour, humour, vigour, harbour, labour, neighbour, 
 valour, clamour,, clangour, saviour, and a few others have joined 
 the overwhelming majority of -or words. British men of letters 
 could be cited who have employed the same simplification. 
 Other French spellings like theatre and centre are less common 
 in America than in England. Parallel to the simplification of 
 almanac{k) are wag(g)on, travel(r)er. Of the British attempts 
 to distinguish by the spelling story, narrative (plural stories), 
 from storey, floor (pi. storeys), and curb (bit) from kerb (stone), 
 the first has some etymological argument in its favour, but 
 neither has commended itself to American usage. Britons 
 themselves are quite as likely to spell cider and pajamas in the 
 fashion always employed in America as they are to write cyder 
 and pyjamas. ^ 
 
 The spelling book has exerted a powerful influence in Amer- 
 ica, where so many speakers have learned their language in the 
 school and looked to it as a more compelling authority than 
 the sometimes uncertain tradition of the home. The notion 
 that all the letters of a word are entitled to a certain respect, 
 reinforced by the native slowness of utterance, has led to the 
 retention of unstressed vowels in tapestry, medicine, venison, and 
 
 ' The spelling used in this chapter, as of this history in general, conforms 
 ordinarily to British usage. 
 
The English Language in America 399 
 
 produced a secondary stress in such words as secretary, extra- 
 ordinary. The eighteenth-century refinement of ' ' dropping the 
 g" in going, seeing, which still persists as a "smart " pronuncia- 
 tion in England, almost all Americans, though they use it 
 oftener than they could be got to confess, would regard with 
 horror because it violates what seems to them the obvious 
 principle that all the letters should be pronounced. The same 
 state of mind leads to the retention of h in hotel, hostler, rein- 
 forces the distinction between w and wh, and induces many to 
 persist in pronouncing an r final and before consonants, in spite 
 of the frankly expressed disgust even of their own countrymen 
 of the East and South. Figure has lost its fine old pronuncia- 
 tion ("figger") for a spelling pronunciation "figyure. " As for 
 lieutenant, Coxe (1813, p. 36) notes that "lef-tenant prevails 
 most generally, but lew-tenant appears to be becoming more 
 popular ' ' ; spelling has now completely carried the day. Out of 
 deference to spelling Americans pronounce a g in physiognomy, 
 recognizance, and sometimes even in suggest. '■ 
 
 Enough has been offered in support and illustration of the 
 contention that the roots of American speech lie deep in history. 
 The same might be done for less literary speech. Lowell es- 
 tablished the antiquity of much in the Yankee dialect of his 
 Hosea Biglow, and it is to be presumed that research, of which 
 there has been far too little in this field, may establish the an- 
 tiquity, if nothing more, of many other dialectical peculiarities. 
 There is not an oddity in the "coarse, uncouth dialect" of the 
 Deerslayer and Hurry Harry (TheDeerslayer, 1841) that has not 
 its root deep in the soil of the eighteenth and preceding centu- 
 ries. ^ Cooper has Noah Webster's own creatur', ventur', ferce. 
 Sarpint, desarted, vartue, lamed, s'ile, app'inted, expl'ite can all 
 be found recommended in grammars of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. The Oxford Spelling Book (1726) says that sigh is pro- 
 nounced sithe "according to the common way of speaking," 
 just as Natty Bumppo pronounces it. His ven'son is still good 
 English. His consait {conceit) , ginerous, fri'nd, 'arth sound Irish, 
 but that is as much as to say that they belong to the old, 
 
 ' Spelling, of course, increasingly influences pronunciation in England. 
 
 'An interesting list of "vulgar errors" may be found in Elliot and John- 
 son's A Selected Pronouncing and Accented Dictionary, SufSeld [Conn.], 1800, 
 p. 16. 
 
400 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 authentic vernacular; they cannot be made to serve as illus- 
 trations of any wanton perversity on the part of Americans. 
 
 But cannot all these historical reasons for American English 
 being what it is be granted (and they pretty generally are) and 
 still leave us faqing a very desperate situation about which some- 
 thing should be done? History, after all, brings no solution to 
 the problem which it helps to define. It does not furnish a 
 standard, it can only show us the steps by which all present 
 English has gone very badly astray. But a standard is pre- 
 cisely what is wanted; lack of standard, our academy was quite 
 persuaded, is what ails American EngUsh. Enough has been 
 said already to suggest the hopelessness of finding such a stand- 
 ard in Uterary South British. Just what sort of folly that leads 
 to may be seen in the case of the academician who lamented that 
 Americans wrote toward when an Englishman, "following the 
 established usage of prose," wrote towards. Towards is not 
 the established usage of prose, and quite as many Englishmen 
 write toward as towards. All that the academician can mean is 
 that he personally prefers Urwards. No one could deny him the 
 privilege of choosing, but no one would attach the slightest 
 significance to his choice either way. Much the same can be 
 said of most of the differences of detail between literary English 
 in America and the same thing in England ; they are too trivial 
 to be worth much trouble in trying to remove them. 
 
 But even the attempt to remove these peculiarities of 
 American English in deference to some standard outside itself 
 may work harm vastly greater than it is proposed to help. If 
 English had remained the literary language of a small homo- 
 geneous group, who like the Athenians could consent instantly 
 in the pleasure of jeering a misplaced accent, the single and 
 precise kind of standard which some critics of English seem 
 to have in mind might have been successfully applied to it. 
 But English has become the common possession of many 
 scattered peoples. It is quite possible that this involves some 
 sacrifice with some gain. English can hardly become the 
 adequate expression of so varied a human experience, the 
 medium of so many diverse men, without losing something in 
 the direction of perfect uniformity as against its gains in range. 
 This expansion has its too evident dangers, but to try to correct 
 them by a single narrow standard is not only impossible; it is 
 
The English Language in America 401 
 
 harmful in its results just so far as it breeds in the mind of 
 speakers and writers an uneasy feeling that really good English 
 is something vaguely and beautifully beyond them, something 
 they can never hope to attain to, something so high and delicate 
 that they would not care to use it if they could get it, certainly 
 not for even the best moments of every day. 
 
 This brings us to the very centre of the problem. The 
 trouble with American English, it might reasonably be urged, 
 is that it has been so constantly disparaged in comparison with 
 a standard so vague, so remote, so "superior, " but of so little 
 practical guidance, that the fine sense of possession, the feeling 
 that the way one goes about one's mores is inevitably the right 
 way, has been in many cases completely lost. ' ' I say ' dawg, ' ' ' 
 said an American teacher of English, "but I know 'dahg' is 
 correct and I make my pupils say it. " We can be sure that her 
 pupils do not say "dahg" outside the classroom, and carry 
 away with them only a conviction that "good EngUsh" is 
 something with which they can and will have nothing to do. 
 
 "All this is very different in English English, " says another 
 of our academicians. "They beHeve in EngUsh and have the 
 ideal of good usage. " But the standard, it should be noted, is a 
 native standard ; it is fairly well defined ; it is not impossible of 
 attainment ; and it is not flagrantly at variance with the practice 
 of the, linguistic environment in which the fortunate yotmg 
 Britisher is being fitted by governesses, tutors, and public- 
 school masters to take his place. Conditions so favourable must 
 be somewhat limited in their occurrence even in England. In 
 America those who inherit a sound native tradition in their 
 homes are more than likely to spend large parts of their lives 
 in regions of quite other language habits. In school they will 
 encounter many who have been brought up in an environment 
 distinctly foreign, the teacher even may have an unsure con- 
 trol of the language, and he — or more generally she — is sure to 
 have some very extravagant and ill-informed notions of what 
 constitutes good English. In the university they may learn a 
 good deal about correctness in composition but will encounter 
 no very definite standards of speech, for both teachers and 
 students are usually drawn from aU parts of the country and 
 represent every sort of social opportunity. 
 
 All this sotmds much worse than it actually turns out to be. 
 26 
 
402 chapters of American Literature 
 
 For English is the authentic speech of free peoples and it is 
 endowed with an innate energy for getting along, going into 
 strange places on strange errands, but never quite losing its sense 
 of identity. It breeds surprisingly true, in the main, even amid 
 the most unpromising conditions. Franklin, the cosmopolitan, 
 said "air" for are; "hev" and "hez"; sounded the / in would 
 and calm, and in the latter used the vowel of hat; uttered new 
 with the vowel of too, and bosom as who should write ' ' buzzum. ' ' 
 Noah Webster, father of American lexicography, advocated 
 the pronunciations "creatur, " "natur, " "raptur"; awge/ with 
 the vowel of hat, chamber with that oi father; fierce and pierce 
 were to rhyme with verse, beard with third, and deaf with thief; 
 the present pronunciation of heard and wound he regarded as 
 new and objectionable. With such a start what might not 
 American English have become? Without any external com- 
 pulsion, without any very clearly expressed ideals, however, 
 American English has kept pace step by step in these particu- 
 lars with the development of British English. 
 
 The problem of American English resides, then, not in its 
 differences from British English, nor yet in its own infinite 
 variety — here history is both enlightening and consoling — but 
 in the attitude which it adopts toward itself. It is not as good 
 as it might bei — ^no language is so in its entirety, because people 
 are not so wise and well-bred, so sensitively in touch with the 
 best of literature and of life as they might be — but to make it- 
 self better it has no reasonable standards to look to. It has 
 held up to it silly ideals, impossible ideals, ignorant dogma- 
 tisms, and for the most part it wisely repudiates them all. 
 But in so doing it is left with a diminished self-respect. Ex- 
 cellence is not for it. Why bother about the impossible? 
 We shall get along. Not thus, however, is bred that subtle 
 atmosphere of linguistic authenticity, the inevitableness of the 
 thing rightly said, which is the peasant's by inheritance and to 
 which the man of letters attains by giving his toilsome nights 
 to much else beside Addison. The great mass of men lies 
 between, the many who write and are not great writers, the 
 many who talk not so well as they might; where in irritation 
 and bewilderment may they look? 
 
 "All this is very different in English English." Here, 
 quite possibly, is a hint of some value. One can hardly 
 
The English Language in America 403 
 
 suppose that there is any very determined efifort to make 
 Scottish boys and girls acquire what Arnold Bennett calls a 
 Kensingtonian accent. There is a distinct and well recognized 
 standard of North British, as well as South British. American 
 EngUsh has a history that entitles it to consideration. It has 
 certain peculiarities of vocabulary. Let them be kept; half 
 of them will be adopted by the rest of the EngUsh-speaking 
 world, the other half will be liked by them if the American who 
 uses them is otherwise likable, and above all if he uses them as 
 if they were authentically his. The well of English has never 
 mistaken increase for defilement. The American is tradition- 
 ally supposed to have a "nasal twang. " If any allow air to 
 leak through the nasal passage when it should be closed (a 
 characteristic of unrefined English outside of America) ; if any 
 speak with a certain constriction of the muscles of the nose 
 and upper lip, with a certain shrillness and thinness of voice 
 (and many do) , let them be taught not to do it. That is some- 
 thing worth making a fight for. But let them not give up the 
 cool, deliberate, level tone, with half a laugh in it, which shall 
 be the mark of the American in whatever part of the world 
 his destiny caUs him. Let his restrained speech keep to the 
 unemphatic forms of the verb to be which it has instinctively 
 preferred. Were ("wear") and been ("bean") are emphatic 
 forms that sort well with the highly energized speech of South 
 Britain, with its sudden changes of speed and pitch, its great 
 expenditure of breath. 
 
 American English is not uniform. But neither is British 
 English uniform. Only a dead language, or the language of a 
 highly centralized country, or a more or less artificial literary 
 language, can approach uniformity. But American English 
 falls into clearly recognizable groups that are not too many to 
 handle in the sensible way in which the British regard the several 
 types of English of their own islands. By aU means recognize 
 an English of New England, an English of the Middle States, 
 of the South, and of the West. To attempt to harmonize them 
 in an impossible unity is only to confirm them in their several 
 peculiarities. It would be wiser to direct the attack against 
 those peculiarities which are a little too peculiar. If the New 
 Englander shortens his long o's, if the New Yorker confuses 
 voice and verse in an absurd diphthong that both misleads and 
 
404 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 offends, if the Southerner loops and curls the diphthong of 
 cow, if the Westerner in pronouncing r retorts the tongue so 
 far back upon itself that no clear vowel can be made before it, 
 each can be told, with some hope of affecting both his behef and 
 his practice, that such extremes have no appropriateness, are 
 not indulged in, indeed, by the best speakers of his own region. 
 If many Americans tend to lengthen the vowel in frost and 
 long, that is something that can be effectively discouraged 
 without resorting to the equally objectionable extreme of say- 
 ing "frahst" and "lahng. " But it is just as useless to tell a 
 Westerner that he must not use an r as to teU a New Englander 
 that he must furnish himself with one. 
 
 It is, then, not a question of one standard that does not 
 exist against no standards at all; it is a question of sensibly 
 recognizing several standards that do exist and making the best 
 of them, criticizing the language of each main group according 
 to its own standard, and not on grounds of right and wrong 
 but on grounds of what may be regarded as appropriate. The 
 peasant and the pedant, though one talks like a man and the 
 other like a book, are alike in that each speaks his language in 
 only one way; the educated man knows and employs his lan- 
 guage in three or four ways. He has only an enlightened sense 
 of appropriateness to guide him. But it is enough. 
 
 How to get such a sense of appropriateness widely diffused 
 among people of widely various opportunities, is the problem 
 of American English. It is a serious problem. With Italian- 
 American, Yiddish-American, Scandinavian-American, Ger- 
 man-American yammering in our ears, it is not a time for 
 academicians to regret that we write toward and not towards, 
 or for teachers of "oral" English to endeavour to make broad 
 our a's. Such scribal pharisaism, if it were harmless, would be 
 amusing. But it is chiefly owing to such folly that sound and 
 reasonable standards for American English have never come 
 into recognition. What is needed is some knowledge of the 
 facts, a willingness to face them with a sympathetic and ra- 
 tional criticism, and above all a belief that life as lived in 
 America has a value and an atmosphere of its own. It is 
 distinctly to be desired that British authors should write whilst 
 and different to; we rejoice when the hero begins his dinner with 
 "an" oyster, talks about "coals," takes "in" the Times, says 
 
The English Language in America 405 
 
 "directly" and "expect,"* and knows exactly what he means 
 when he says "sick" and "bug," or rather knows exactly why 
 he does not say them. We should be "very disappointed" if 
 he did not do these things; it is all part of the British atmos- 
 phere; it goes with the very smell of the book. These things 
 are not good or bad, right or wrong, in themselves; they are 
 merely appropriate, or the reverse. And Americans will 
 generally speak well when they are taught to look for the best 
 in the speech of their neighbours, pruning the more luxuriant 
 growths of dialect and tempering their speech in the glowing 
 heat of the common literary tradition; no longer reluctant to 
 speak well because "good" English is unnatural and unattain- 
 able, but conscious that a really good English, such as the 
 world will value according to their worth as individuals and as 
 a nation, is their rightful heritage to enter upon and enjoy. 
 
 Great things have been expected of American English in 
 the past. A Frenchman, Roland de la Plati^re (1791), saw in 
 America, a land so fortunately situated, so happily governed, 
 with a people so constituted that they "fraternized with the 
 universe" and presumably to be trusted to benefit by associa- 
 tion with the primitive virtues of Indians and negroes, the 
 country which was most likely to develop its speech into a 
 universal language. Whitman, in the notes published as An 
 American Primer, dug deep in the recesses of language for a 
 word-hoard that should be distinctly American, and rolled the 
 aboriginal names — Monongahela — ^with venison richness upon 
 his palate. He saw an America cleared of all names that smack 
 of Europe, an American vocabulary enriched with many words 
 not in the print of dictionaries. 
 
 American writers are to show far more freedom in the use of 
 words. . . . Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, 
 or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be 
 used by American writers, with meaning and effect — words that 
 would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood — 
 words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is 
 so dear in literature. 
 
 No such drastic Americanization of the language as was 
 prophesied has come to pass, or is likely to come to pass. The 
 
 ' In the senses of as soon as and suppose, not unheard, indeed, in America. 
 
4o6 Chapters of American Literature 
 
 old dream of an America penitHs divisa was grievously troubled 
 at Manila Bay and ended for ever at Chateau Thierry. A liter- 
 ary America apart was never even a possibility. Hencefor- 
 ward there is less excuse — if there ever was any — for emphasiz- 
 ing differences merely as differences. The burden of this 
 chapter has been to crave a certain intelligent respect for what 
 exists. And it is directed mainly, perhaps, at the theorizings 
 of men of letters, of all amateur critics of language, and at the 
 practice of most school teachers, who so peculiarly hold the 
 destinies of American speech in their hands. American writers 
 have generally been bold enough. Emerson, Whitman, Mark 
 Twain — ^but that is the subject of this whole work and needs 
 no recapitulation in a final chapter. The wish to see things 
 afresh and for himself is indeed so characteristic of the Amer- 
 ican that neither in his speech nor his most considered writing 
 does he need any urging to seek out ways of his own. He 
 refuses to carry on his verbal traffic with the well-worn coun- 
 ters; he will always be new-minting them. He is on the look- 
 out for words that say something ; he has ' ' a sort of remorseless 
 and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets, " which the hy- 
 percritical authors of the "King's EngHsh" ascribe to Kipling, 
 who is ' ' americanizing us. ' ' The American's slang is not made 
 up of words that look like words, as is the case with much Bri- 
 tish slang, but words that are things, images; grotesque, pre- 
 posterous, perhaps, but bom of a quick fancy. He has an 
 Elizabethan love of exuberant language. The highfalutin' 
 spread-eagleism of the old-fashioned Fourth of July oration, the 
 epistolary style of Lorenzo Altisonant in his Letters of Squire 
 Pedant, who "merged his plumous implement of chirography 
 into the atramented fluid, " the sort of polysyllabic eloquence 
 of which Holmes and LoweU made such excellent fun, now 
 linger perhaps only in the columns of the rural weekly news- 
 paper and in a Congressional speech which is delivered to be 
 heard a long ,way off. 
 
 There is in this view of the American speech a good deal of 
 carefully cherished tradition. No American writer has per- 
 haps played with words as daringly as Meredith or expressed 
 himself as whimsically as Carlyle. There is in American speech 
 and writing a good deal of timidity, as well as audacity, quite 
 as much colourlessness as picturesqueness. A British critic 
 
The English Language in America 407 
 
 wrote somewhere the other day of the "whitey-brown" style 
 of American college professors. Such a charge is not directed 
 against too great linguistic daring. A lack of pith, of raciness, 
 an insecure hold on idiom in some of its more slippery turns 
 might very properly be remarked in not a Uttle American 
 writing; in short, an anxiety to play safe in a dangerous game. 
 There is nothing unnatural in an association of boldness and 
 timidity. Both, however, represent excess. The discovery of 
 the mean is the problem, and that will move toward a solu- 
 tion as the standards which express it are more zealously and 
 intelligently sought within the history and present practice of 
 American English itself. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 
 
 For extended bibliographies of all the writers discussed in this volume consult 
 The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21) issued in four volumes by 
 the publishers of this abridgment. In the following lists the name of the publisher 
 is given only when the book is still in print. 
 
 General Authorities 
 
 Anthologies: Library of Southern Literature, compiled by E. A. Alderman, C. W. 
 Kent, and others, 1908-13, 16 vols.; Anthology of Magazine Verse for igij 
 [1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921] and Yearbook of American 
 Poetry, edited by W. S. Braithwaite, 1913 — (Small, Maynard) ; American Ora- 
 tions, edited by A. Johnston and J. A. Woodbum, 4 vols. (Putnam) ; American 
 Familiar Verse, edited by B. Matthews, 1904 (Longmans, Green) ; The Oxford 
 Book of American Essays, edited by B. Matthews, 19 14 (Oxford); Represen- 
 tative Plays by American Dramatists, edited by M.J. Moses, 1917 — , 3 vols. 
 (Dutton) ; American Literary Criticism, edited by W. M. Payne, 1904 (Long- 
 mans, Green); Representative American P/ayi, edited by A. H. Quinn, 1917 
 (Century); An American Anthology 1787-igoo, edited by E. C. Stedman, 
 1900 (Houghton Mifflin) ; A Library of American Literature from the Earliest 
 Settlement to the Present Time, edited by E. C. Stedman and Ellen M. Hutchin- 
 son, 1889-1890, II vols.; Poems of American History, edited by B. E. Steven- 
 son, 1908 (Houghton Mifflin) ; Colonial Prose and Poetry, edited by W. P. 
 Trent and B. W. Wells, 1901, 3 vols. (Crowell); Southern Writers, edited by 
 W. P. Trent, 1905 (MacmiUan). 
 
 History and Criticism: A Dictionary of American Authors, by O. F. Adams, 5th 
 edition, 1905 (Houghton Mifflin) ; A Critical Dictionary of English Literature 
 and British and American Authors, by S. A. Allibone, 1857-71, 3 vols., and 
 Supplement, by J. F. Kirk, 1891, 2 vols. (5 vols., Lippincott) ; American Prose 
 Masters, by W. C. Brownell, 1909 (Scribner); Cyclopedia of American Litera- 
 ture, by E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, 1855, 2 vols.. Supplement 1866, revised 
 edition of entire work by M. L. Simons, 1875, 2 vols.; Leading American 
 Novelists, by J. Erskine, 1910 (Holt) ; A History of the Theatre in America, by 
 A. Homblow, 1919, 2 vols. (Lippincott); The Spirit of American Literature, 
 by J. Macy, 191 1 (Boni and Liveright); American Lands and Letters, by 
 D. G. Mitchell, 1897-99, 2 vols. (Scribner); A History of American Literature 
 Since 1870, by P. L. Pattee, 1915 (Century); American Literature 1607- 
 i88s, by C. F. Richardson, 1887-89, 2 vols. (Putnam) ; American Thought from 
 Puritanism to Pragmatism, by W. Riley, 1915 (Holt) ; A Manual of American 
 Literature, edited by T. Stanton, 1909 (Putnam) ; Poeii of America, by E. C. 
 Stedman, 1885 (Houghton Mifflin); A History of American Literature 1607- 
 1865, by W. P. Trent, 1903 (Appleton) ; Great American Writers, by W. P. 
 
410 Bibliographical Notes 
 
 Trent and J. Erskine, 1912 (Holt); A History of American Literature during 
 the Colonial Period 1607-1765, by M. C. Tyler, 1878, 2 vols. (Putnam) ; The 
 Literary History of the American Revolution 1763-1783, by M. C. Tyler, 1897, 
 2 vols. (Putnam) ; two preceding works also in 2 vols. (Putnam) ; The 
 American Novel, by C. Van Doren, 192 1 (Macmillan); A Literary History 
 of America, by B. Wendell, 1900 (Scribner); Chronological Outlines of 
 American Literature, by S. L. Whitcomb, 1894 (MacmiUan); America in 
 Literature, by G. E. Woodberry, 1903 (Harper) ; also various histories for the 
 use of schools and colleges, notable among them being those by Katherine 
 Lee Bates (Macmillan, 1897), P. H. Boynton (Ginn, 1919), W. C. Bronson 
 (Heath, revised edition, 1919), W. B. Cairns (Oxford, 1912), W. J. Long 
 (Ginn, 1913), B. Matthews (American Book, 1896), F. L. Pattee (Silver, 
 Burdett, 1909), B. Wendell and C. N. Greenough (Scribner, 1904). 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Edwards: Works, edited by S. Austin, Worcester, 1808, in 8 vols., and frequently 
 reprinted; Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards: Selections from Their 
 Writings, edited by Carl Van Doren, 1920 (Scribner) ; Jonathan Edwards, by 
 A. V. G. Allen, 1889 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Franklin: Works, edited by A. H. Smyth, 1905, 1907, 10 vols. (Macmillan); 
 numerous editions of the Autobiography, the best of them being that edited by 
 John Bigelow in 1874 (Lippincott) and regularly reprinted; Benjamin Frank- 
 lin and Jonathan Edwards: Selections from TheirWritings (see under Edwards) ; 
 Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed, by William Cabell Bruce, 1917, 2 vols. 
 (Putnam); The True Benjamin Franklin, by S. G. Fisher, 1899 (Lippincott); 
 Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters, by J. B. McMaster, 1887 (Houghton 
 Mifflin); Benjamin Franklin, by J. T. Morse, Jr., 1889 (Houghton Mifflin); 
 Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, by James Parton, 1864, 2 vols. (Hough- 
 ton Mifflin). 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Irving: Works, published complete in various editions by Putnam; also various 
 separate works in many editions by various publishers ; The Life and Letters of 
 Washington Irving, by P. M. Irving, 1862-64, 4 vols. (Putnam); Washington 
 Irving, by C. D. Warner, 1881 (Houghton MifHin). 
 
 Bryant: Life and Works, 1884-89, 6 vols.; Poems, Roslyn Edition, 1903, 1910 
 (Appleton); William Cullen Bryant, by John Bigelow, 1890 (Houghton 
 Mifflin); William Cullen Bryant, by W. A. Bradley, 1905 (Macmillan); 
 Bryant and His Friends, by J. G. Wilson, 1886. 
 
 Cooper: Works, 32 vols, with introductions by Susan Fenimore Cooper (Hough- 
 ton Mifflin) ; Works, 33 vols. (Putnam) ; various editions of separate novels by 
 various publishers ; James Fenimore Cooper by T. R. Lounsbury, 1 883 (Hough- 
 ton Mifflin); James Fenimore Cooper, by Mary E. Phillips, 1913 (Lane). 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Poe: Works, edited by E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, 1914, 10 vols. 
 (Scribner); Works, edited by J. A. Harrison, 1902, 17 vols. (Crowell) ; Poemi, 
 edited by J. H. Whitty, 1911, 1917 (Houghton Mifflin); Poems, edited by 
 Killis Campbell, 191 7 (Ginn) ; tales in various editions by various publishers; 
 
Bibliographical Notes 4" 
 
 Selections from the Critical Writings, edited by F. C. Prescott, 1909 (Holt); 
 Life and Letters of Poe, by J. A. Harrison, 1903, 2 vols. (Crowell — actually 
 revision of vols, i and 17 of Works edited by Harrison); Edgar Allan Poe: 
 How to Know Him, by C. Alphonso Smith, 1921 (Bobbs-Merrill) ; Edgar Allan 
 Poe, by G. E. Woodberry, 1885 (Houghton Mifflin); The Life of Edgar Allan 
 Poe, by G. E. Woodberry, 1909, 2 vols. (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Emerson: Works, 12 vols. (Houghton MifiSin); Journals, 1909-14, 10 vols. (Hough- 
 ton Mifflin); various editions of separate works by various publishers; A 
 Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by J. E. Cabot, 1887, 2 vols. (Houghton 
 Mifflin); Ralph Waldo Emerson: How to Know Him, by S. M. Crothers, 1921 
 (Bobbs-Merrill); Ralph Waldo Emerson, by O. W. Firkins, 1915 (Houghton 
 Mifflin); The Teachers of Emerson, by J. S. Harrison, 1910; Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson, by O. W. Holmes, 1885 (Houghton Mifflin) ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
 by G. E. Woodberry, 1907 (Macmillan). 
 
 Hawthorne: Works, 13 vols. (Houghton Mifflin) ; various editions of separate 
 works by various publishers; Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
 by Horatio Bridge, 1893; Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by M. D. Conway, 
 1890 (Walter Scott); Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, by Julian Haw- 
 thorne, 1885, 2 vols. (Houghton Mifflin) ; Hawthorne and His Circle, by JuUan 
 Hawthorne (l903);"ffoa'rtoyne, by Henry James, 1879 (Macmillan); Memories 
 of Hawthorne, by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, 1897; Nathaniel Hawthorne, by 
 G. E. Wpodberry, 1902 (Houghton Mifflin) ; Nathaniel Hawthorne: How to 
 Know Him, by G. E. Woodberry, 19 18 (Bobbs-Merrill). 
 
 Thoreau: Works, 11 vols. (Houghton Mifflin); Works, including Journals, 20 vols. 
 (Houghton Mifflin); various editions of separate works by various publishers; 
 Thoreau the Poet- Naturalist, by W. E. Channing, 1873, 1902; The Life of Henry 
 David Thoreau, by F. B. Sanborn, 1917 (Houghton Mifflin); Henry David 
 Thoreau: A Critical Study, by Mark Van Doren, 1916 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Longfellow: Works, 11 vols. (Houghton Mifflin); Poetical Works, Cambridge 
 Edition (Houghton Mifflin); various incomplete editions and editions of 
 separate works by various publishers; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by G. R. 
 Carpenter, 1901 (Small, Maynard) ; Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by 
 S. Longfellow, 1891, 3 vols. (Houghton Mifflin) ; Henry Wadsworth Longfdlow, 
 by T. W. Higginson, 1902 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Whittier: Works, 7 vols. (Houghton Miffim); Poetical Works, Cambridge Edition 
 (Houghton Mifflin); various incomplete editions and editions of separate 
 works by various publishers; John Greenleaf Whittier, by G. R. Carpenter, 
 1903 (Houghton Mifflin) ; John Greenleaf Whittier, by T. W. Higginson, 1902 
 (Macmillan) ; The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier,- by S. T. Pick- 
 ard, 1894, 1907, 2 vols. (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Holmes: Works, 14 vols. (Houghton Mifflin); various editions of separate works by 
 various publishers; Poetical Works, Cambridge Edition (Houghton Mifflin) ; 
 Dr. Holmes's Boston, edited by Caroline Ticknor (Houghton Mifflin) ; Life and 
 Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by J. T. Morse, Jr., 1897, 2 vols. (Houghton 
 Mifflin). 
 
 Lowell: Works, 11 vols. (Houghton Mifflin); Poetical Works, Cambridge Edition 
 
412 Bibliographical Notes 
 
 (Houghton Mifflin); various incomplete editions and editions of separate 
 works by various publishers; James Russell Lowell, by P. Greenslet, 1905 
 (Houghton Mifflin); James Russell Lowell, by H. E. Scudder, 1901, 2 vols. 
 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Melville: Works, 4 vols. (Dana, Estes); various editions of Typee, Omoo, Moby 
 Dick by various pubUshers; Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, by Ray- 
 mond Weaver, 192 1 (Doran). 
 
 Mrs. Stowe: Works, 15 vols. (Houghton Mifflin) ; various editions of Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin, by various pubKshers ; Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe by 
 Annie Fields, 1897 (Houghton Mifflin); Harriet Beecher Stowe, by C. E. and 
 L. B. Stowe, 191 1 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Lincoln: Works, edited by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1894, 2 vols. (Century); 
 Works, Gettysburg Edition, 12 vols. (Tandy-Thomas); various collected 
 editions; Lincoln-Douglas Debates, edited by E. E. Sparks, 1908 (IlUnois His- 
 torical Society) ; various editions by various publishers; Speeches and Letters, 
 edited by James Bryce, 1907 (Dutton); various volumes of selections; Un- 
 collected Letters, edited by G. A. Tracy, 1917 (Houghton Mifflin); Six Months 
 at the White House with Abraham Lincoln, by F. B. Carpenter, i866; Abraham 
 Lincoln, by Lord Chamwood, 1916 (Holt); Herndon's Lincoln, by W. H. 
 Hemdon and J. W. Weik, 1889, 3 vols.; suppressed and later issued as Abra- 
 ham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Appleton) ; Abraham Lincoln, by J. T. Morse, Jr., 1893, 
 2 vols. (Houghton Mifflin); Abraham Lincoln: A History, by J. G. Nicolay 
 and John Hay, 1890, 10 vols. (Century); Abraham Lincoln, by Carl Schurz, 
 1891 (Houghton Mifflin) ; Abraham Lincoln and the Union, by N. W. Stephen- 
 son, 1918 (Yale); Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Ida M. Tarbell, 1900, 2 vols. 
 (Doubleday, Page); Abraham Lincoln, hy Brand Whitlock, 1909, 1916 (Small, 
 Maynard). 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Whitman: Complete Writings, 1902, 10 vols.; Leaves of Grass, 1917, 3 vols, in i 
 (Doubleday, Page); Complete Prose Works (Doubleday, Page); various 
 volumes of selections from prose and verse by various publishers; The Un- 
 collected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, edited by Emory HoUoway, 2 
 vols., 1921 (Doubleday, Page); Walt Whitman, by Leon Bazalgette, 1920 
 (Doubleday, Page); Whitman: A Study, by John Burroughs, 1867, 1896 
 (Houghton Mifflin); Walt Whitman, by G. R. Carpenter, 1909 (Macmillan); 
 Walt Whitman: A Critical Study, by Basil de Selincourt, 18 14 (London: 
 Seeker); Walt Whitman: His Life and Work, by Bliss Perry, 1906, 1908 
 (Houghton Mifflin); Walt Whitman: A Study, by J. A. Symonds, 1893 (Dut- 
 ton); With Walt Whitman in Camden, by H. L. Traubel, 1906-14, 3 vols. 
 (Doubleday, Page) ; In Re Walt Whitman, edited by H. L. Traubel, R. M. 
 Bucke, and T. B. Harned, 1893. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Mark Twain: Works, 18 vols., 25 vols. (Harper); The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by 
 Van Wyck Brooks, 1920 (Dutton) ; My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells, 1910 
 (Harper); Mark Twain: A Biography, by A. B. Paine, 1912, 3 vols. (Harper). 
 
Bibliographical Notes 4^3 
 
 Howells: Works, never collected but published for the most part by Houghton 
 Mifflin and Scribner; William Dean Howells, by A. Harvey, 1917 (Huebsch). 
 
 Henry James: Works, New York Edition, 1907-17, 26 vols. (Scribner); 35 vols., 
 1921 — (London: Macmillan); Letters, 1920, 2 vols. (Scribner); The Method 
 of Henry James, by J. W. Beach, 1918 (Yale) ; Henry James, by Rebecca West, 
 1916 (Holt). 
 
 Lanier: Works not collected but chiefly published by Scribner; Poems, edited by 
 Mrs. Lanier (Scribner) ; Sidney Lanier, by E. Mims, 1905 (Houghton MifiBin). 
 
 Harris: Works not collected but chiefly pubUshed by Houghton MifHin; Life and 
 Letters, by Julia CoUier Harris, 1918 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Short Story: The Short Story in English, by H. S. Canby, 1909 (Holt); The 
 Philosophy of the Short Story, by B. Matthews, 1901 (Longmans, Green); The 
 American Short Story, by C. A. Smith, 1912 (Ginn); Our Short Story Writers, 
 by Blanche Colton Williams, 1920 (Moffat, Yard) ; Representative American 
 Short Stories, by A. Jessup (an anthology of over seventy stories to be pub- 
 lished by Allyn and Bacon during 1922); The Best Short Stories of igig 
 [1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1921] and The Year-book of the Ameri- 
 can Short Story, edited by E. J. O'Brien, 1916 — (Small, Maynard) ; Century 
 Readings for a Course in American Literature [contains over thirty short 
 stories], edited by F. L. Pattee, 1919 (Century). 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Prescott: Works, 16 vols. (Lippincott) ; various editions of separate works by 
 various publishers; William Hickling Prescott, by R. Ogden, 1905 (Hough- 
 ton Mifflin) ; William Hickling Prescott, by H. T. Peck, 1905 (MacmiUan) ; 
 Life of William Hickling Prescott, by G. Ticknor, 1864 (Lippincott). 
 
 Motley: Works, 17 vols. (Harper); various editions of separate works by various 
 publishers; Correspondence, 1889, 2 vols. (Harper); John Lothrop Motley: A 
 Memoir, by O. W. Holmes, 1879 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Parkman: Works, 12 vols. (Little, Brown) ; A Life of Francis Parkman, by C. H. 
 Famham, 1900 (Little, Brown) ; Francis Parkman, by H. D. Sedgwick, 1904 
 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Henry Adams: Works not collected, but chiefly published by Houghton Mifflin 
 and Scribner; The Education of Henry Adams, 1907, 1918 (Houghton Mifflin) ; 
 letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres, 1920 (Houghton Mifflin) ; 
 A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861-1863, by Charles Francis Adams, Charles 
 Francis Adams, Jr., and Henry Adams, 1920, 2 vols. (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Ticknor: History of Spanish Literature, 3 vols. (Houghton Mifflin); Life, Letters, 
 and Journals, 2 vols. (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Whitney: Works never collected and for the most part highly technical mono- 
 graphs and articles; Language and the Study of Language, 1867 (Scribner); 
 The Life and Growth of Language (Appleton). 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Beecher: Works never collected; Lectures and Orations, edited by N. D. Hillis, 
 
 1913 (Revell); Henry Ward Beecher, by L. Abbott, 1903 (Houghton Mifflin). 
 
 Brooks: Works never collected; Twenty Sermons (also called Visions and Tasks 
 
414 Bibliographical Notes 
 
 (Button); Life and Letters, by A. V. G. Allen, 1900, 3 vols.; Phillips Brooks, 
 by A. V. G. Allen, 1907. 
 
 Royce: Works never collected but published chiefly by Houghton MiflBin and 
 MacmUlan; The World and the Individual, 1900-02, 2 vols. (Macmillan); 
 Character & Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William 
 James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America, by G. Santayana, 1920 
 (Scribner). 
 
 William James: Works never collected but chiefly published by Holt and Long- 
 mans, Green; Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Holt) ; TheVarieties of Religious 
 Experience (Longmans, Green) ; Selected Papers on Philosophy, Everyman 
 series (Button); Letters, 1920, 2 vols. (Atlantic Monthly); William James, 
 by E. Boutroux, 191 1 (Longmans, Green) ; William James and Henri Bergson, 
 by H. M. Kallen, 1914 (University of Chicago); William James and Other 
 Essays, by J. Royce, 191 1 (Macmillan); see Santayana, under Royce. 
 
 CHAPTER XH 
 
 The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, by G. P. Krapp, 1918 (Oxford),- 
 Americanisms and Briticisms, by B. Matthews, 1892; The American Language, 
 H. L. Mencken, 1919, revised 1921 (Knopf) ; An American Glossary, by R. 
 H. Thornton, 1912, 2 vols. (Lippincott). 
 
INDEX 
 
 About, 328 
 
 Accotmt of the New Invented Penn- 
 
 sylvanian Fire Places, An, 22 
 Across the Continent, 323 
 Adams, Charles Francis, 352 
 
 Charles Francis, Jr., 352 
 
 Henry, 352-354 
 
 John, 17, 352, 355 
 
 John Quincy, 352 
 
 Adam's Diary, 261 
 
 Addison, 20, 35, 46, 120, 178, 286, 302, 
 
 ^ 303. 312, 402 
 Ad Vatem, 166 
 Adventures of Htickleberry Finn, The, 
 
 257, 261 
 Adventures of Three Worthies, The, 
 
 332 
 Advice to such as would remove to 
 
 America, 27 
 ^chylus, 132, 226 
 Afloat and Ashore, 80, 83 
 Aftermath, 152 
 Agassiz, 187 
 Agassiz, Louis, 187, 385 
 Ages, The, 54 
 Akenside, 55 
 Al Aaraaf, 87, 96, 98 
 Alcott, B., 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 
 
 . 234 
 
 Aldrich, T. B., 248, 320, 321, 325, 328, 
 
 ^ 329. 330 
 Alhamhra, 49 
 AUan, John, 86, 87 
 
 Mrs. John, 87 
 
 Allen, A. V. G., 373 
 Allen, James Lane, 332, 334 
 AUa-California, The, 246 
 Altar of the Dead, The, 280 
 Altisonant, Lorenzo, 406 
 Amaranth, The, 313 
 Ambassadors, The, 273, 282 
 Amber Gods, The, 317, 329 
 American Claimant, The, 255 
 American Democrat, The, 80 
 American Literary Criticism, 93 n. 
 American Primer, An, 405 
 American Scholar, The, 54, 118, 232 
 American, The, 273, 275 
 Among My Books, 187 
 Among My Books, Second Series, 187 
 Among the Trees, 57, 59 
 
 Amy Wentworth, 161 
 
 Anacreon, 132, 138 
 
 Analeclic, The, 40 
 
 Angels of Buena Vista, The, 161 
 
 Annabel Lee, 90, 96, 97 
 
 Annals of America, 169 
 
 Appleton, Frances Elizabeth, 149 
 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 58 
 
 Arabian Nights, 227 
 
 Argonaut, The, 331 
 
 Aristotle, 249 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 53, 65, 68, 109, 185, 
 
 ^ 193 
 
 Art of Thinking, 19 
 Aspern Papers, The, 320 
 As You Like It, 141 
 At Close Range, 335 
 Atharva-Veda-Pratiqakhya, 362 
 Atharva-Veda-Sawhita, 362 
 Atlanta Constitution, The, 303 
 Atlantic Monthly, The, 160, 172, 187, 
 
 246, 264, 266, 267, 279, 315, 316, 
 
 317, 318, 322, 323, 332 
 At Sundown, 159, 172 
 At the Sign of the Ship, 307 
 Austen, Jane, 247, 271 
 Austin, Wm., 313 
 Autobiography (Franklin), 17, 20 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table 169, 
 
 172, 178 
 Awkward Age, The, 282 
 Axe to Grind, The, 367 
 
 Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, 
 
 ^239 
 
 Bacon, 36, 178, 180 
 
 Delia, 87 n. 
 
 Bain, Alexander, 385 
 Balaam and His Master, 332 
 Ballad of Reading Gaol, The, 56 
 Ballad of Trees and the Master, 298 
 Ballads (Longfellow), 93 
 Ballads and Other Poems, 149 
 Balzac, 116, 177, 262, 274 
 Bancroft, 351 
 Banks, Joseph, 17 
 Barbara Frietchie, 164 
 Barclay of Ury, 161 
 Barefoot Boy, The, 163 
 Barlow, Joel, 53 
 Barnaby Rudge, 93 
 
 415 
 
4i6 
 
 Index 
 
 Bayou Folks, 334 
 
 Bazalgette, Leon, 230 n. 
 
 Bedford, Duke of, 356 
 
 Bee, The, 312 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward, 365-370 
 
 Beecher, Lyman, 202, 365 
 
 Before the Curfew, 172 
 
 Beldonald Holbein, The, 280 
 
 Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems, The, 
 
 150 
 Bellamy, Edward, 268 
 Bells, The, 90, 95 
 Benjamin, Wm. E., 231 n. 
 Bennett, Arnold, 403 
 Bentley, Richard, 44, 47 
 Bergson, 386, 388 
 Berkeley, i, 2, 11, 58 
 Between the Dark and the Daylight, 270 
 Betz, L. P., 99 n. 
 Bible, The, 4, 210, 247, 303, 371, 372, 
 
 392 
 Bierce, Ambrose, 330, 331 
 Bigelow Papers, The, 186, 191 
 Bill and Joe, 183 
 Binns, H. B., 230 «. 
 Bismarck, 344 
 Bixby, Horace, 243 
 Blair, 55, 63 
 Blake, H. G. O., 137 
 Blake, Wm., 109, 233 
 Blanc, Madame, 238 
 Blithedale Romance, The, 116, 119, 
 
 127 
 Blok, P. J., 348 
 Blood-Money, 233 
 Bohn, Henry, 44 
 Book of Ruth, The, 311 
 Book of Sonnets, .4, 153 
 Bopp, 361 
 Borderers, The, 151 
 Borough, The, 163 
 Borrow, George, 199 
 Bose, 59 
 
 Boston Advertiser, 170 
 Boston Courier, The, 186 
 Boston Gazette, The, 19 
 Bostonians, The, 274, 280 
 BosweU, 14 
 
 Boy's Town, A, 267, 269 
 Bracebridge Hall, 41, 48 
 Braddock, General, 22 
 Bradford, William (printer), 21 
 Bradley, F. H., 384, 386 
 Bradstreet, Simon, 169 
 Bransby, John, 85 
 Bravo, The, 79 
 Brenton, James J., 228 
 Bridge, Horatio, 117, 119 
 Bridge, The, 154 
 Bridges, Robert, 391 
 Briggs, C. P., 91, 189, 190, 191 
 Brillon, Mme.. 26 
 Bristed, John, 71 
 Broadway Journal, The, 89, 91 
 Brooklyn Daily Times, 234 
 
 Brooklyn Eagle, The, 229 »., 230, 237 
 Brooklyn Freeman, The, 231 
 Brooklyniana, 236 
 Brooklyn Standard, 236 
 Brooklyn Union, The, 237 
 Brooks, Phillips, 371-378 
 Broomstick Train, The, 181 
 Brown, Alice, 334 
 
 Charles Brockden, 73, 74 
 
 John, 135 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 30, 200, 303 
 Browning, E. B., 192 
 
 Robert, 53, 56, 58, 60, 66, 185, 
 
 212 
 Brugmami, 363 
 Bryant, William CuUen, 52-70, 95, 
 
 153. 233. 235 
 Buchanan, Robt., 238 
 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 239 
 Buckminster, J. S., 358 
 Buflfon, 17 
 
 Building of the Ship, The, 152 
 Bulkeley, Peter, 100 
 Burnier, H. C, 320, 329, 330, 332 
 Bunyan, 19, 35, 116, 247 
 Burgoyne, 26 
 Burke, 17, 69 
 
 Bums, 157, 158, 163, 202, 209 
 Burr, Aaron, 39 
 
 Rev. Aaron, 9 
 
 Burroughs, John, 63, 180, 229».,238 
 
 Burton, 19, 89 
 
 Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, 89, 93 
 
 Butler, 66 
 
 Byron, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60, 63, 68, 96, 
 
 132, 146, 158, 202, 209, 250, 272, 
 
 356 
 Lady, 205 
 
 Cable, G. W., 246, 253, 258, 275, 309, 
 
 323. 324. 327. 328, 329, 334 
 Caesar, 207 
 Calamus, 235, 238 
 
 California and Oregon Trail, The, 350 
 Californian, The, 245 
 Calvin, 10, 11, 15 
 Carlyle, loi, 105, 108, 112, 133, 187, 
 
 189, 194, 200, 247, 284, 358, 406 
 Carpenter, Edward, 230 n. 
 
 G. R., 166 
 
 Carroll, Charles, 355 
 
 Cask of Amontillado, The, 98 
 
 Cass, Lewis, 215, 216, 217 
 
 Cassandra Southwick, 161 
 
 Castle by the Sea, The, 153 
 
 Castle Nowhere, 325 
 
 Castles in the Air, 65 
 
 Cathedral, The, 187 
 
 Causes of the Civil War, The, 346 
 
 Caxton, 390 
 
 Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras 
 
 County, and Other Sketches, The, 
 
 246 
 Cellini, 247 
 Centennial Hymn, 164 
 
Index 
 
 417 
 
 Century Magazine, The, 333, 364 
 Certain Delightful English Towns, 269 
 Cervantes, 242, 263 
 Chainbearer, The, 83 
 Chambered Nautilus, The, 181 
 Chance Acquaintance, A, 264 
 Chaaning, W. E., 132, 136, 139 
 Chanson de Roland, 360 
 Chariessa, or a Pattern for the Sex, 
 
 312 
 Charles XII., 342 
 Chatham, 17 
 Chdtiments, 164 
 
 Chaucer, 57, 66, 194, 263, 310, 391 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 28, 36 
 ChUd, F. J., 193 
 Childe Harold, 57 
 Children of Adam, 240 
 Child's Champion, The, 229 n. 
 Chopin, 168 
 
 Kate, 334 
 
 Christian City, The, 376 
 
 Christian Morals, 30 
 
 Christus: A Mystery, 151, 152, 153 
 
 Cicero, 29, 68, 131 
 
 Circles, 115, 122, 123, 124, 129 
 
 City in the Sea, The, 95 
 
 Cli-ke, James Freeman, io6, 170 
 
 Joseph H., 86 
 
 Clarkson, Thos., 158 
 
 Clay, Henry, 78, 163 
 
 Clemens, Orion, 243, 244, 255 
 
 — —Samuel Langhome, 242-261, 323, 
 
 406 
 Clemm, Virginia, 88 
 Cobb, Palmer, 99 «. 
 Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 331 
 CoflSn, Joshua, 157 
 Cogswell, J. G., 358 
 Colenbrander, H. T., 348 
 Coleridge, 58, 64, 96 
 Collins, 19, 28 
 ColUnson, Peter, 22, 23 
 Columbiad, The, 53 
 Columbian Magazine, The, 312 
 Columbus, 49 
 Columbus, 43, 48, 50, 342 
 Commemoration Ode, 62, 192, 196 
 Commonplace Book, 1 
 Companions of Columbus, 41 
 Compensation, 103 
 Conception of God, The, 380 n. 
 Condorcet, 17 
 Conduct of Life, The, 1 10 
 Confessions (St. Aug^tine), 3 
 Confidence Man, The, 201 
 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's 
 
 Court, A, 258, 259, 260, 261 
 Conqueror Worm, The, 95, 97 
 Conquest of Granada, The, 27, 41, 48, 
 
 ^49 
 
 Conquest of Mexico, The, 341, 342 
 Conquest of Peru, The, 342 
 Conspiracy of Ponttac, The, 350 
 Contentment, 183 
 
 Contos do Brazil, 307 
 
 Contrat Social, 28 
 
 Conversations on Some of the Old 
 
 Ports, 186, 192 
 Conway, Moncure, 234 
 Cooke, P. P., 98 n. 
 Rose Terry, 316, 325, 326, 
 
 332 
 Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of 
 
 our Public Affairs, 23, 24 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 68, 71-84, 
 
 99 n., 200, 247, 262, 271, 306, 351, 
 
 399 
 
 William, 71 
 
 Copeland, C. T., 332 
 
 Coplas de Manrique, 153 
 
 Corn, 291, 297 
 
 Cotter's Saturday Night, The, 163 
 
 Count Frontenac and New France under 
 
 Louis XIV., 350 
 Countryman, The, 302, 303 
 Courtship of Miles Standish and Other 
 
 Poems, The, 151, 152 
 Cowper, 55, 65, 68, 153, 182 
 Coxe, Richard, 399 
 Crabbe, 163 
 Craddock, Charles Egbert, 323, 327, 
 
 332, 333. 334. 335 
 Crashaw, 297 
 Crater, The, 80 
 Critic, The, 230 n. 
 Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, 
 
 93 n. 
 Criticism and Fictioif, 269 
 Cromwell, 220 
 Cross of Snow, The, 153 
 Crumbling Idols, 334 
 Crystal, The, 298 
 Culver, Judge, 234 
 Curtis, George William, 269 
 
 Daily Crescent, The, 230 
 
 Daisy Miller, 275, 279 
 
 D'Alembert, 17 
 
 Damrosch, i)r. Leopold, 291 
 
 Dana, Richard Henry, 54, 61, 68, 169, 
 
 199 
 Danger of Sporting with Innocent 
 
 Credulity, The, 312 
 Daniel, John M., 91 
 Dante, 56, 153, 187, 194, 226, 263, 
 
 357 
 Darwin, 142, 168, 372, 385 
 
 Daudet, 329 
 David Swan, 120 
 Davidson, Thomas, 382 
 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 316 
 
 Richard Harding, 332, 336, 337 
 
 Day is Done, The, 154 
 
 Days, no 
 
 Deacon's Week, The, 317 
 
 Death, 55 
 
 Death in the School Room, 229 n. 
 
 Death of Schiller, The, 62 
 
 Death of Slavery, The, 61 
 
4i8 
 
 Index 
 
 Death of Wind-Foot, The, 229 n. 
 Deerslayer, The, 81, 82, 399 
 Defoe, 17, 19, 35, 36, 98, 318 
 
 d'Haussonville, Count, 342 
 
 De rAUemagne, 355 
 
 De Lancey, Susan A., 72 
 
 Deland, Margaret, 334 
 
 de la Plati^re, Roland, 405 
 
 Democracy, 353 
 
 Democracy and Other Addresses, 187 
 
 Democratic Vistas, 237 
 
 De Quincey, 98 
 
 Descent into the Maelstrom, The, 97 
 
 De S^lincourt, Basil, 230 n 
 
 DSsiree's Baby, 334 
 
 de Stael, Madame, 355 
 
 Devil in Manuscript, The, 117 
 
 Dewey, John, 382 
 
 Dial, The, 118 
 
 Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout, 
 The, 27 
 
 Dialogue between Philocles and Ho- 
 ratio concerning Virtue and Pleasure, 
 21 
 
 Dialogue Concerning the Present State of 
 Affairs in Pennsylvania, 32 
 
 Dialogue on Free Will arid Providence, 
 12 
 
 Diamond Lens, The, 317 
 
 Dickens, 93, 176, 203, 247, 263, 276, 
 315. 328 
 
 Dionysus, 212 
 
 Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue, 
 
 Dtssertatwn upon Roast Ptg, A , 367 
 Dissertations, 393 n. 
 Divine Comedy, The, 58, 153 
 Divine Tragedy, The, 152 
 Divinity School Address, 118 
 Documents Relating to New England 
 
 Federalism, 353 
 Dolph Heyliger, 48 
 Don Juan, 57 
 Don Quixote, 247, 259 
 Dorothy Q., 183 
 Dostoevaky, 267 
 
 Douglas, Stephen A., 216, 217, 218 
 Dowden, Edward, 69, 238 
 Doyle, Pete, 238 
 Drake, 54 
 
 Dream (Byron), 209 
 Dream-Land, 96 
 Dred; a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 
 
 204 
 Drum-Taps, 236, 237 
 Dryden, 134 
 Du Bellay, 360 
 Dubourg, Miss, 85 
 Dudley, Anne, 169 
 — —Thomas, 169 
 Dukesborough Tales, 333 
 Dulham Ladies, The, 327 
 Du Maurier, 219 
 Dunlap, Frances, 186 
 Dwight, Timothy, 365 
 
 Echo, The, 53 
 
 Edgren, A. H., 361 
 
 Edict by the King of Prussia, An, 24, 28 
 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 16 
 
 Education of Henry Adams, The, 353, 
 
 354 
 
 Edward Fane's Rosebud, 121 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 1-15, 30, 106, 107, 
 108, 367 
 
 Eggleston, Edward, 323, 327 
 
 Eldorado, 90 
 
 Eleonora, 98 
 
 "Eliot, George," 247, 273, 275, 281, 
 282, 315, 316, 319 
 
 Elsie Venner, 132, 168, 172, 176, 177 
 
 Elsket, and Other Stories, 332 
 
 Embargo, The, 53, 54 
 
 Embarkment for Cythera, 36 
 
 Emerson, Mary Moody, 100 
 
 Ralph Waldo, 4, 29, 54, 60, 63, 
 
 64, 68, 100-113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 
 121, 122, 123, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 
 140, 144, 163, 170, 174, 185, 189, 194, 
 227, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 253, 
 275. 298, 303, 383, 388, 406 
 
 Wm., 100 
 
 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical 
 Sciences, The, 381 
 
 Endicott and the Red Cross, 119, 121, 
 124 
 
 Enfans d'Adam, 235 
 
 English, Thomas Dunn, 90 
 
 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
 
 57 
 
 English Novel, The, 291, 294 
 
 English Traits, 103 
 
 Ephemera, The, 27, 36 
 
 Epictetus, 231 
 
 Esprit de lots, 341 
 
 Essay Concerning Human Understand- 
 ing, 19 , 
 
 Essay on Apple Pie, 367 
 
 Essay on the Freedom of Will in God and 
 the Creature, 14 n. 
 
 Essay upon Projects, 19 
 
 Essays (Emerson), 103 
 
 Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, 353 
 
 Essays to do Good, 19 
 
 Esther, 353 
 
 Estray, The, 148 
 
 Eternal Goodness, The, 165 
 
 Eureka, 90 
 
 Europeans, The, 274 
 
 Evangeline, 150, 151 
 
 Evening Mirror, The, 89 
 
 Evening Post, The, 53 
 
 Everett, Alexander, 41 
 
 Everett, Edward, 41, 356, 357 
 
 Eve's Diary, 261 
 
 Evolution and Religion, 366, 369 
 
 Ewing, William, 85 
 
 Excelsior, 149 
 
 Experiments and Observations in Elec- 
 tricity, 22 
 
 Eyes and Ears, 366 
 
Index 
 
 419 
 
 Fable for Critics, The, 186, 190 
 
 Fall of the House of Usher, The, 98 
 
 Familiar Spanish Travels, 269 
 
 Fanshawe, 117 
 
 Farewell Sermon (Edwards), 8 
 
 Fearful Responsibility, A., 265 
 
 Federal Gazette, The, 28 
 
 Federalist, The, 46 
 
 Femmes Savantes, Les, 178 
 
 Fenimore, Susan, 71 
 
 Ferdinand and Isabella, 341 
 
 Ferdinand, King of Spain, 49 
 
 Fichte, 108 
 
 Pick, 363 
 
 Fielding, 294 
 
 Fields, James T., 162 
 
 Fifty Years, 63 
 
 Firlons, O. W., 112 «. 
 
 Fiske, John, 351 
 
 Flaubert, 262, 281 
 
 Flood of Years, The, 57, 63 
 
 Florida Sunday, A, 298 
 
 Floumoy, 384 ». 
 
 Flower-de-Luce, 152 
 
 Flute and VioUn, 332, 334 
 
 Folger, Peter, 35 
 
 Following the Equator, 253 
 
 Footsteps of Angels, 148 
 
 For Annie, 90, 96 
 
 Foregone Conclusion, A, 265 
 
 Forest Hymn, A, 57 
 
 Fortnightly Review, The, 278 
 
 Fortunes of a Country Boy, 229 n. 
 
 Fourteen to One, 332 
 
 Fox, George, 155 
 
 France and England in North America, 
 
 350 
 France, Anatole, 181 
 Francis, St., 30 
 Franklin, Abiah Folger, 18 
 Benjamin, i, 16-36, 79, 259, 366, 
 
 394. 397, 402 
 
 James, 19, 20 
 
 Josiah, 18 
 
 Franklin Evans, 229 
 
 Free Press, The, 157 
 
 Freedom and War, 367 
 
 Freedom, of the Will, 9 
 
 Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with 
 
 Providence, 317 
 Freiligrath, 238 
 French Revolution, 247 
 Freneau, 53 
 Frere, Hookham, 356 
 Froissart, 286, 293 
 Front Yard, The, 326 
 Frost, Barzillai, 134 
 Proude, J. A., 345, 351 
 Pruin, Prof., 346 
 Puller, Margaret, 150 
 
 Gabriel Conroy, 324, 331 
 
 Galaxy, The, 279 
 
 Gald6s, 267 
 
 Gailegher, and Other Stories, 332, 336 
 
 Gardiner, 351 
 
 Garland, Hamlin, 262, 332, 334 
 
 Garrison, Wm. Lloyd, 157, 163 
 
 Garrison of Cape Ann, The, 161 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 203 
 
 Gates, General, 51 
 
 Gavami, 276 
 
 General Magazine and Historical 
 
 Chronicle for all the British Colonies in 
 
 America, The, 21 
 Gentlemen's Magazine, The, 24 
 George, Henry, 268 
 Georgia Scenes, 333 
 Georgia Sketches, 333 
 Gesenius, 356 
 
 Gettysburg Address, 182, 196 
 Giant with the Wounded Heel, The, 376 
 Gifford, William, 41 
 Gilchrist, Anne, 238, 239, 240 
 Gil-Bias, 247 
 
 Gilded Age, The, 247, 255, 260 
 Giles Cory of the Salem Farms, 152 
 Gilman, Daniel Coit, 363 
 Gladstone, 168 
 God's Acre, 149 
 Godey, Louis A., 90 
 Godey's Lady's Book, 90, 315 
 Godkin, E. L., 277 
 Godwin, Parke, 52 «., 54 «., 58 n., 61 »., 
 
 64 n., 68, 6q, 69 n. 
 
 Wm.,35'7 
 
 Goethe, 60, 356 
 
 Gold Bug, The, 89, 98, 315 
 
 Golden Bowl, The, 282 
 
 Golden Era, The, 245 
 
 Golden Legend, The, 150, 151, 152 
 
 Goldoni, 263 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 46, 169, 178, 263,312 
 
 Gooch, C. P., 341 
 
 Good Gray Poet, The, 237 
 
 Goose Pond School, The, 333 
 
 Gosse, Edmxmd, 99 n. 
 
 Gower, 132 
 
 Grady, Henry Woodfin, 300 
 
 Graham, George R., 91 
 
 Graham's Magazine, 89, 93, 315, 316 
 
 Grammar of Sanscrit, 362 
 
 Grandfather's Chair, 119 
 
 Grandissimes, The, 309 
 
 Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill 
 
 Battle, 169, 181 
 Grant, Mrs. (of Laggan), 356 
 
 U. S., 244, 347 
 
 Grave, 55, 63 
 
 Gray, 68 
 
 Gray Champion, The, 123 
 
 Great Men, 133 
 
 Great South, The, 323 
 
 Greeley, Horace, 68, 91 
 
 Griswold, Rufus, 91 »., 92, 92 «., 94 
 
 Guardian Angel, The, 172, 177 
 
 Guizot, 341 
 
 Hale, Edward Everett, 317, 329 
 Half Century of Conflict, A, 350 
 
420 
 
 Index 
 
 Hall, David, 22 
 
 Hallam, Henry, 42, 341, 356, 358, 
 
 360 
 Halleck, Benjamin Buel, 227 
 
 Fitz-Greene, 54, 68 
 
 Hamerik, Asger, 290 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 51 
 
 Governor, 42 
 
 Hamlet, 57 
 
 Handaside, Seth, 39 
 
 Hannibal, 342 
 
 Hannibal Journal, The, 243 
 
 Harlan, James, 237 
 
 Hamed, Thomas B., 232 n., 233 n., 239, 
 
 239 n. 
 Harper, William Rainey, 361 
 Harper's Magazine, 245, 246, 266, 267, 
 
 ^ 317,325 
 
 Harris, Joel Chandler, 253, 301-310, 
 
 ^^323.332,333 
 Harrison, 95 n. 
 
 Harte, Bret, 54, 245, 248, 262, 275, 321, 
 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 328, 329, 
 
 ^ 331, 332, 333, 335, 338, 339 
 
 Hartley, 58 
 
 Haunted Palace, The, 95, 96, 97 
 
 Haverhill Gazette, 158 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 60, 65, 93, 94, 
 106, 1 14-129, 146, 176, 189, 198, 
 201, 247, 271, 274, 275, 313 n., 314, 
 315- 317, 321, 327, 328, 331 
 
 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 289, 290, 
 296 
 
 Hazard of New Fortunes, A', 267, 
 268 
 
 Hazlitt, 225, 357 
 
 Headsman, The, 79 
 
 Heartsease and Rue, 187 
 
 Heber, Richard, 356 
 
 Hegel, 379, 385 
 
 Heine, 263 
 
 Heidenmauer, The, 79 
 
 Helvetius, Mme., 26 
 
 "Henry, O," 329, 335, 337, 338 
 
 Heroines of Fiction, 269 
 
 Hewson, Mrs., 27 
 
 Hiawatha, 151, 152 
 
 Hibbard, George A., 332 
 
 Higginbotham's Catastrophe, 121 
 
 Higginson, T. W., 162 
 
 Hildreth, Richard, 204 
 
 Historical Collections, 19 
 
 Historical Essays, 353 
 
 Historical Review of the Constitution 
 and Government of Pennsylvania, An, 
 
 23 
 
 History of Civilization, 247 
 History of English Poetry, 360 
 History of New York, 39, 46 
 History of Spanish Literature, 358, 359, 
 
 360, 362 
 History of the Navy of the United States 
 
 of America, 80 
 History of the United Netherlands, The, 
 
 347 
 
 History of the United States during the 
 Administrations of Jefferson and 
 Madison, 353 
 
 Hodgson, 386 
 
 Hoffman, E. T. A., 99 
 
 Josiah Ogden, 38 
 
 Matilda, 39 
 
 Hogarth, 366 
 
 Holland, Lord, 356 
 
 Holmes, Rev. Abiel, 169 
 
 Oliver Wendell, 53, 163, 168-184, 
 
 189, 198, 406 
 
 Home as Found, 80 
 
 Home Revisited, 367 
 
 Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions, 
 171 
 
 Homer, 60, 65, 68, 76, 132, 226 
 
 Homer (Pope), 181 
 
 Homesick in Heaven, 181 
 
 Homeward Bound, 80 
 
 Honey, James A., 307 re. 
 
 Hood, Thomas, 209, 331 
 
 Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, 327 
 
 Horace, 178 
 
 Houghton, Lord, 235, 273 
 
 House of Seven Gables, The, 126 
 
 How to Tell a Story, 248 
 
 Howard, John, 158 
 
 Howe, E. W., 262 
 
 Lord, 17 
 
 Howells, WiUiam Dean, 173, 181, 248, 
 255, 256, 261-271, 272, 321, 327 
 
 Howe's Masquerade, 123 
 
 Howison, George, 380 «., 382, 383 
 
 Huckleberries, 317 
 
 Huckleberries Gathered from New Eng- 
 land Hills, 332 
 
 Hueffer, P. M., 281 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 61, 164, 328 
 
 Human Wheel, its Spokes and Felloes, 
 The, 173 
 
 Humble Romance, A, 334 
 
 Hume, 17, 23, 385 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 357 
 
 William Morris, 277 
 
 Hunter, William, 22 
 
 Hutchinson, Governor, 25 
 
 Hylas and Philonous, 2 
 
 Hymn of the Sea, A , 69 
 
 Hyperion, 147 
 
 Ichabod, 164 
 
 Iduna, and Other Stories, 332 
 
 Imperative Duty, An, 270 
 
 In a Cellar, 317 
 
 In Defense 0/ Harriet Shelley, 261 
 
 Indian Fairy Tales, 307 n. 
 
 Indian Summer, 267 
 
 Individuality, 298 
 
 Industrious Apprentice, The, 366 
 
 Influence of Jesus, 375 
 
 IngersoU, Robt., 259 
 
 Ingram, John H., 92 «. 
 
 Inland Voyage, An, 135, 138 
 
 Innocents Abroad,The,2i\.(>,2^<),2$l, 261 
 
Index 
 
 421 
 
 Institutes (Calvin), 15 
 
 Interest of Great Britain Considered with 
 Regard to Her Colonies, The, 23 
 
 In the Harbor, 153, 172 
 
 In the Midst of Life, 331 
 
 I» the Tennessee Mountains, 332, 333 
 
 Irene, 151 
 
 Irving, Ebenezer, 40, 43 
 
 John Treat, 43 
 
 Peter, 40 
 
 Pierre, 51 
 
 Washington, 37-51, 64, 68, 120, 
 
 139. 145, 146, 148. 227, 263, 312, 313, 
 321. 325. 327. 328, 333. 342, 357 
 
 William, 38, 39 
 
 Isabella, Queen of Spain, 49 
 
 Isle of La Belle Riviere, 233 n. 
 
 Israel Potter, 201 
 
 Israfel, 97 
 
 Italian Journeys, 264 
 
 Jack Tier, 80 
 
 Jackson, Amelia Lee, 171 
 
 H.H.,327 
 
 Dr. James, 170 
 
 '— — Richard, 23 
 
 Jacobs, Joseph, 307 n. 
 
 James, Henry, 116, 265, 272-284, 318, 
 
 319. 320, 321, 324. 328, 331 
 
 Henry (Senior), 276, 385 n. 
 
 William, 277, 319, 382, 383-389 
 
 William (grandfather of H. J. & 
 
 W. J.), 276 
 Janvier, Thos. A., 332 
 Japikse, N., 348 
 Jay, John, 17, 72 
 Jeanetle, 325 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 259, 355, 356 
 Jeffrey, Lord, 40 
 
 Jesuits in North America, The, 350 
 Jesus, 60, 104, 374, 375, 377 
 Jewett, Sarah Ome, 326, 334 
 Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, 245 
 Joan of Arc, 260, 261 
 John Endicott, 152 
 John of Barneveld, 347, 348 
 John of Saxony, Prince, 358 
 John Randolph, 353 
 Johnson, Andrew, 347 
 Dr. Samuel, 2, 14, 151, 178, 311, 
 
 398 
 
 Judge Samuel E., 231 
 
 Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 323, 333 
 Journal of American Folk-Lore, 307 n. 
 Journal of an African Cruiser, 119 
 Journal of a Solitary Man, The, 117 
 Journals (Emerson), 102, 106, 108 
 Jtidas MaccabtBUs, 150, 152 
 Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, 323 
 Junto Club, 21 
 Justice and Expediency, 165 
 
 Kames, Lord, 17, 23 
 Kansas Emigrants, The, 164 
 Kant, 108, 379 
 
 Kavanagh: A Tale, 131 
 
 Keats, John, 52, 54, 56, 57, 131, 187, 
 
 189, 293 
 Keimer, Samuel, 20, 21 
 Keith, Governor, 20 
 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 88,. 92 
 Kentons, The, 270 
 Keramos and Other Poems, 153 
 Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, A, 204 
 King, Edw., 327 
 — ;— Grace, 334 
 Kingsley, Chas., 203 
 Kipling, 251, 253, 406 
 Kirkland, Pres., 357 
 Knickerbocker, 43 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 350 
 
 Lady of the Aroostook, The, 265 
 
 Lady or the Tiger ?, The, 329, 332 
 
 Lafayette, 17, 75, 227 
 
 Lain (Brooklyn Directory), 236 n. 
 
 Lamar, L. Q. C, 300 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 187, 227, 327, 357 
 
 Landlord at Lion's Head, The, 270 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 258, 307 n. 
 
 Language and the Study of Language^ 
 
 363 
 Lanier, Sidney, 285-300 
 Lanman, Charles R., 361, 362, 362 n. 
 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, 17 
 La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 
 
 West, 350 
 Last Leaf, The, 171, 181, 183, 198 
 Last of the Mohicans, The, 75, 76, 77 
 Late Mrs. Null, The, 330 
 Laus Deo, 163 
 Lavoisier, 17 
 Law of Mind, The, 381 
 Lea, Henry Charles, 354 
 Leatherwood God, The, 270 
 Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal 
 
 in the Province of Mass. Bay, 165 
 Leaves of Grass, 225, 231 n., 232, 233, 
 
 234. 237, 238 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 247 
 Le Conte, 379, 380 n. 
 Lectures and Biographies, 100 
 Lee, Charles, 51 
 Legend of Monte del Diablo, 322 
 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 48 
 Legends of New England, in Prose and 
 
 Verse, 158 
 Legends of the Alhambra, 41 
 Legends of the Thirteen Republics, 75 
 Leibnitz, 12 
 Lenore, 97 
 Lenox, Robert, 355 
 Lepsius, 361 
 Le Sage, 242 
 Leskien, 363 
 
 Letters and Social, Aims, 103 
 Letters of Chas. Eliot Norton, 106 
 Letters of Squire Pedant, 406 
 Letter to American Teachers of History, 
 
 ^-353 
 
422 
 
 Index 
 
 Letter to B- 
 
 -.93 
 
 Letter to hts Countrymen, 79 n., 80 
 Lewis, Mrs., 96 
 Liberty, 54 ». 
 
 Library of Poetry and Song, 68 
 Liberty, 63 
 
 £i/e arei Growth of Language, 363 
 ii/e w the Iron Mills, 336 
 L»/e, Letters, and Journals (Ticknor), 
 
 359 
 Life of Albert Gallatin, 353 
 Life of Columbus, 43, 48, 50, 342 
 Life of George Cabot, 353 
 Life of Jesus the Christ, 369 
 Life of lAncoln, 210 
 Life of Mahomet, 49 
 Life of Prescott, 359 
 Life of Washington, 44, 45, 50 
 Ltfe on the Mississippi, 252, 261 
 Lifetime, A, 63 
 Light of Stars, The, 148 
 Light of the World, The, 376 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 70, 168, 181, 192, 
 
 197, 207-224, 234, 237, 242, 244 
 Lionel Lincoln, 75, 77 
 Lionizing, 97 
 
 Lippincott's Magazine, 291 
 Literature and Life, 269 
 Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 263, 
 
 269 
 Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 
 
 Literati, 90 
 
 Little Jane, 229 n. 
 
 Little Lord Fauntleroy, 257 
 
 Littlepage Manuscripts, 82 
 
 Little People of the Snow, The, 65 
 
 Lives of Distinguished American Naval 
 
 Officers, 80 
 Lives of the Casars, 247 
 Livingston, Brockholst, 38 
 Livy, 342 
 
 Locke, John, i, 2, 14 n., 19 
 Locker- Lampson, 183 
 Lockhart, 83, 272 
 Locksley Hail, 143 
 London Films, 269 
 London Fun, 331 
 London, Jack, 335, 336, 337 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 53, 
 
 54. 65, 93, 94, 117, 145-154. 163. 
 
 172, 186, 189, 263, 325, 357 
 Long Island Democrat, 228 
 Land Islander, The, 228 
 Longman's Magazine, 307 n. 
 Longstreet, 333 
 Lotze, 379 
 Lowell, James Russell, 41, 53, 54, 60, 
 
 62, 68, 91, 93, 94, 132, 134, 138, 
 
 143. 144. 149. 152. 163, 170. 172, 
 
 182, 185-197, 205, 226, 303, 399, 
 
 406 
 Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 321, 322, 
 
 323, 324. 325. 328, 332 
 Lucretius, 61 
 
 Lycidas, 66 
 Lydgate, 132 
 Lyra Elegantiarum, 183 
 Lyrical Ballads, 54 
 
 Mabel Martin, 161 
 
 Mably, G. Bonnot de, 341 
 
 Macaulay, 263, 351 
 
 Mach, Ernst, 386 
 
 Mackintosh, Sir James, 356 
 
 Madame CSlestin's Divorce, 335 
 
 Madame Delphine, 328, 329 
 
 Madison, James, 355 
 
 Maeterlinck, 120 
 
 Magnolia, 205 
 
 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 354 
 
 Maidenhood, 149 
 
 Main Street, 120 
 
 Main-Travelled Roads, 332, 334 
 
 Maitland, F. W., 343 
 
 Malebranche, 2 
 
 Malory, Sir Thos., 247, 258, 259 
 
 Manatt, Irving, 361 
 
 Mandeville, 17 
 
 Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, The, 
 
 , 255 
 
 Man Without a Country, The, 318 
 
 Marais du Cygne, Le, 164 
 
 Marble Faun, The, 1 19, 128 
 
 Marchen und Sagen der afrikanischen 
 
 Neger, 307 n. 
 Mardi, 199, 200 
 Marjorie Daw, 329 
 Marks of a Work of the True Spirit, 
 
 6 
 Marmion, 53 
 Marse Chan, 333 
 Marshall, John, 388 
 Marshes of Glynn, 299 
 Masque of Pandora, and Other Poems, 
 ^The, 153 
 
 Masque of the Red Death, The, 98 
 Masters, Edgar Lee, 262 
 Mather, Cotton, 17, 19, 205 
 Mathews, Brander, 248, 258, 332 
 Maud Muller, i6i 
 Maum Guinea, 204 
 Maurice, Count of Nassau, 347 
 Maximilian, 347 
 
 Maypole of Merry Mount, The, 121 
 Mayflower, The, 202 
 McClure's Magazine, 338 
 McLane, Louis, 42 
 Mead, Elinor G., 263 
 Meadow Grass, 334 
 Meanes of disposing the Enemies I0 
 
 Peace, Of the, 23 
 Meaning of Truth, The, 383 
 Meditation on a Quart Mug, A, 21 
 Mellonta Tauta, 97 
 Melville, Herman, 198-201 
 Memoirs of Casanova, 247 
 Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 246 
 Memorabilia, 19 
 Mendelssohn, 168 
 
Index 
 
 423 
 
 Mercedes of Castile, 80 
 
 Meredith, George, 61, 68 116,406 
 
 Meredith, Hugh, 2i 
 
 M^rim^e, Prosper, 328 
 
 Merry Christmas, A, 325 
 
 Merry Mount, 345 
 
 Mezes, 380 ». 
 
 Michael Angela, 150 
 
 Middle Ages, The, 360 
 
 Middle Years, The, 272, 278, 284 
 
 MiU, J. S., 379. 385 
 
 Milman, Dean, 341 
 
 Milton, 31, 66, 93, 132, 194 
 
 Mind's Love of God, The, 376 
 
 Mingo and Other Sketches, 333 
 
 Minister's Charge, The, 267 
 
 Minister's Wooing, The, 205 
 
 Mirabeau, 17 
 
 Miss Bellard's Inspiration, 270 
 
 Miss Lucinda, 317 
 
 Miss Tempy's Watchers, 327 
 
 Mr. Rabbit at Home, 304 
 
 Moby Dick, 200, 201 ' 
 
 Modern Instance A, 265 
 
 Modest Inquiry into the Nature and 
 
 Necessity of Paper Currency, 21 
 Mogg Megone, 159 
 Moli&re, 178 
 Manikins, The, 80 
 Monist, The, 381 
 Monsieur Motte, 334 
 Montaigne, 35, 173, 178, 180, 225 
 Montcalm and Wolfe, 350 
 Montesquieu, 341 
 Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 353, 
 
 354 
 Moore, Thomas, 40, 47, 96, 174, 
 
 272 
 Morals of Chess, The, 27 
 More, Hannah, 311 
 
 Henry, 14 n. 
 
 Morituri Salutamus, 153 
 Morning Call, The, 245 
 Morris, G. D., 99 n. 
 
 William, 53, 185, 194 
 
 Morse, S. F. B., 79 
 
 Mortal Antipathy, A, 172, 177 
 
 Marte d' Arthur, 258 
 
 Morton's Hope, 345, 348 
 
 Masses from an Old Manse, 118 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop, 344-348, 349, 
 
 350 
 MiiUer, Max, 363 
 Murfree, Mary N., 332, see Craddock, 
 
 C. E. 
 Murray, John, 41, 47, 199 
 My Double and how he Undid Me, 
 
 318 
 My Friend Bingham, 319 
 M^ Literary Passions, 263, 269 
 My Mark Twain, 269 
 My Springs, 299 
 My Study Windows, 187 
 Mysterious Stranger, The, 261 
 Mystery of Marie RogSt, The, 99 
 
 Napoleon, 213 
 
 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The, 
 
 88 
 Narrative of Surprising Conversions, 
 
 5 
 Natton, The, 264, 278 
 National Era, The, 160, 203 
 Native of Winby, A, 327 
 Nativity, 57 
 Nature, 103, log, 118 
 Neander, 358 
 Ned Myers, 80 
 Negative Gravity, 330 
 Nelson, Lord, 38 
 New England Courant, The, 20 
 New England Magazine, The, 117 
 New England Nun, A, 334 
 New England Review, The, 158 
 New England Tragedies, The, 150, 
 
 152 
 New Essays towards a Critical Method, 
 
 93 n. 
 New Orleans Picayune, The, 244 
 Newton, Heber, 371 
 New Year's Day, 1848, 233 n. 
 New York Herald, 239 
 New York Review, The, 88 
 New York Saturday Press, The, 245 
 New York Sun, The, 307 n. 
 New York Times, The, 307 n. 
 New York Tribune, The, 233 «., 246 
 Nietzsche, 120 
 Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and 
 
 Legends of the Old Plantation, 304, 
 
 305 n., 309 
 Nina Gordon, 204 n. 
 Noel, Roden, 238 
 No Love Lost, 265 
 Norris, Frank, 334 
 
 John, 14 n. 
 
 North American Review, The, 146, 187, 
 
 246, 278, 352 
 Norton, Andrews, 360 
 
 Chas. Eliot, 105, 107, 152, 187 
 
 Norwood, or Village Life in New Eng- 
 land, 368 
 Notes of a Son and Brother, 278 
 Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and 
 
 Person, 229 n. 
 Notions of the Americans, 79 
 November Boughs, 238 
 
 Oak-Openings, The, 82 
 O'Brien, Fitz-James, 317, 318 
 Observations Concerning the Increase of 
 Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., 
 
 23 
 O'Connor, Wm. Douglas, 237, 332 
 October Idyl, An, 325 
 Odd Miss Todd, 317 
 Oertel, Hanns, 363 
 Old Chester Tales, 334 
 Old Creole Days, 328 
 Old Ironsides, 170, 181 
 Old RSgime in Canada, The, 350 
 
424 
 
 Index 
 
 Oldtown Folks, 205, 206 
 Omoo, 199 
 
 On a Certain Condescension in Foreign- 
 ers, 195 
 Once I Passed Through a Populous City, 
 
 225 n. 
 
 One-Hoss Shay, The, 9, 181 
 
 On Lending a Punch Bowl, 183 
 
 On Liberty and Necessity, 20 
 
 On the Human Understanding, I 
 
 Osgood, Mrs. F. S., 90, 96 
 
 Ossian, 233 
 
 Osthoff, 363 
 
 Otto the Knight, 332 
 
 Our Hundred Days in Europe, 172 
 
 Our Old Home, 119 
 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat, The, 324 
 
 Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, 
 
 234 
 Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd, 
 
 226 n. 
 
 Outre-Mer: a Pilgrimage beyond the 
 
 Sea, 147 
 Overland Monthly, 322, 325, 330 
 Over-Soul, The, 103 
 Over the Teacups, 172, 177, 178 
 Ovid, 132 
 Oxford Spelling Book, The, 399 
 
 Page, C. H., 99 n. 
 
 Page, Thomas Nelson, 302, 323, 324, 
 
 332, 333. 334 
 Paine, Albert Bigelow, 242 
 
 Thomas, 17, 25, 28, 259 
 
 Pamela, 8 
 
 Paradise Lost, 57, 66 
 
 Par6, Ambroise, 173 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 140, 349-351, 354 
 
 Parnassus, 68 
 
 Parr, Sam'l, 355, 356, 357 
 
 Passionate Pilgrim, The, 279 
 
 Past, The, 62 
 
 Pater, Walter, 217, 283 
 
 Pathfinder, The, 81 
 
 Paul, 363 
 
 Paulding, James K., 39, 54 
 
 Paul Revere' s Ride, 152 
 
 Paying too Dear for One's Whistle, 367 
 
 Payne, Wm. Morton, 93 n. 
 
 Peabody, Eliz., 118 
 
 Sophia, 118 
 
 Peabodys, The, 117, 118 
 
 Peacock, Gibson, 296 
 
 Pearl of Orr's Island, The, 205 
 
 Peaslee, Mary, 155 
 
 Peirce, C. S., 381, 382, 386 
 
 Penn, Thomas and Richard, 24 
 
 Pennsylvania Gazette, The, 21 
 
 Pension Beaurepas, The, 275 
 
 Pentucket, 161 
 
 Percival, 54 
 
 Perrin, (Bemadotte, 361 
 
 Perry, Bliss, 230 n. 
 
 Peter Rugg, The Missing Man, 313 
 
 Pheedrus, 103 
 
 Phelps, Eliz. Stuart, 332 
 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, The, 
 
 291 
 Philanthropist, The, 158 
 Philip II., 342, 345 
 Philosophical Review, 383 
 Philosophy of History, The, 133 
 Philosophy of the Short-Story, The, 
 
 332 
 
 Physiology of Verse, The, 173 
 
 Piazza Tales, The, 201 
 
 Pierce, Franklin, 117, 119 
 
 Pierre, 201 
 
 Pierrepont, Sarah, 2 
 
 Pilot, The, 75, 78 
 
 Pindar, 131, 132, 182 
 
 Pioneers of France in the New World, 
 
 The, 350 
 Pioneers, The, 74, 76, 77 
 Pioneer, The, 186 
 Pirate, The, 75 
 Plain and Pleasant Talk about Fruit, 
 
 Flowers, and Farming, 366 
 Planting of the Apple Tree, The, 
 
 63 
 Plato, 103, III 
 Plebeian, The, 231 n. 
 Plotinus, 58, III 
 Plutarch, 19 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 53, 54, 58, 65, 67, 
 
 85-99. 150. 169. 185. 189. 274, 309, 
 
 313. 314. 315. 317. 318, 322, 324, 327, 
 
 328,331, 332 
 Poems by Two Brothers, 157 
 Poems by Victor and Cazire, 157 
 Poems by Walt Whitman, 238 
 Poems of Adrian, The, 158 
 Poems of Places, 148 
 Poems on Slavery, 149 
 Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, 172, 
 
 178 
 Poet, The, 61 
 Poetic Principle, The, 93 
 Poets and Poetry of Europe, 148 
 Poganuc People, 205 
 Politian, 87, 96, 99 
 Poor Richard's Almanac, 21, 30, 366 
 Pope, 28, 35, 55, 93, 169, 178, 181, 
 
 263 
 Porter, William Sydney, see O. 
 
 Henry 
 Porteus, 55 
 Portrait of a Lady, The, 274, 277, 280, 
 
 282 
 Port Royal, 19 
 Potter, Mary Storer, 147 
 Praed, 183 
 Prairie, The, 75, 77 
 Precaution, 72 
 Precieuses Ridicules, 178 
 Preface to the Speech of Joseph Gallo- 
 way, 24 
 Prescott, F. C, 93 n. 
 Prescott, William Hickling, 189, 340- 
 
 343. 344. 345. 349. 350, 358 
 
Index 
 
 425 
 
 Price, 17, 23, 28 
 
 Priestley, 17, 23, 25, 28 
 
 Prince and the Page, The, 257 
 
 Prince and the Pauper, The, 256, 257, 
 
 261 
 Princess Casamassima, The, 274, 280 
 Principles of Psychology, 385 
 Private History of a Campaign that 
 
 Failed, 244 
 Problem of Christianity, The, 382 
 Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, 
 
 172, 178 
 Prometheus, 150 
 Prometheus Vinctus, 131 
 Prophetic Pictures, The, 122 
 PscUm of Life, The, 148 
 Psalm of the West, The, 292 
 Puck, 330 
 
 Pudd'nhead Wilson, 259, 260 
 Pupil, The, 280 
 Putnam, George P., 37, 43, 44, 51 
 
 Israel, 51 
 
 Putnam's Magazine, 315, 316, 317 
 Putnam's Monthly, 187 
 
 Quality of Mercy, The, 270 
 Quarks, 132 
 
 Quarterly Review, The, 41 
 Queen's Twin, The, 327 
 Quesnay, 17 
 Questionable Shapes, 270 
 
 Radical Empiricism, 383 
 
 Rain-Dream, A, 63 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, 112 n. 
 
 Rambler, The, 311 
 
 Ramona, 327 
 
 Randolph, John, 355 
 
 Ranke, Leopold, 342 
 
 Rappaccini's Daughter, 122 
 
 Raven, The, 89, 95, 96, 97 
 
 Reade, 315 
 
 jReo/ Thing, The, 280 
 
 Reaper and the Flowers, The, 148 
 
 Records of a School, 118 
 
 Redburn, 199 
 
 i?«(i Rover, The, 78 
 
 Redskins, The, 83 
 
 Religion of Nature, 20 
 
 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, The, 
 
 379 
 Relations de Jesuits, 132 
 ReUgues (Percy's), 132 
 Remarkable Wreck of the "Thomas 
 
 Hyke," The, 330 
 Remarks Concerning the Savages of 
 
 North America, 27 
 Renan, 283 
 Renouvier, 385 
 Representative Men, 104 
 Resignation, 152 
 Reynolds, J. N., 200 n. 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 254 
 Richardson, 281, 294 
 Rill from the Town Pump, A, 120 
 
 Rip Van Winkle, 48, 51, 312 
 Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 266 
 Rise of the Dutch Republic, The, 345 
 River, The, 63 
 Robert of Lincoln, 64 
 Robertson, J. M., 93 n. 
 
 Wm., 17, 23 
 
 Robespierre, 17, 220 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, 80, 141, 258 
 
 Roderick Hudson, 274, 279, 319 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 47, 57, 272 
 
 Romance of Certain Old Clothes, 319 
 
 Roman Holidays, 269 
 
 Rome, T. H., 231 n. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet, 57 
 
 Romero, 307 n. 
 
 Ronsard, 360 
 
 Roots, Verb-forms, and Primary 
 
 Derivatives of the Sanscrit Language, 
 
 The, 362 
 Roscoe, Wm., 47, 356, 357 
 Rosemary, 55 
 Ross, Clinton, 332 
 Rossetti, Wm. Michael, 233, 238 
 Roth, 361, 362 
 Roughing It, 251, 252 
 Rousseau, 28 
 Royce, Josiah, 379-382, 384, 385, 
 
 386 
 Royster, Sarah Elmira, 86, 90 
 Rudder Grangers Abroad, 332 
 Rules by which a Great Empire may be 
 
 Reduced to a Small One, 24, 25 
 Rush, Benjamin, 17 
 Ruskin, 185, 194, 293, 294, 358 
 Russell, Bertrand, 382, 384 
 
 Lord John, 356 
 
 Rutledge, Aim, 211 
 
 Sacramento Union, The, 245 
 
 Sacred Fount, The, 274, 282 
 
 Saga of King Olaf, 152 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 181 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi, 299 
 
 Salesman, The, 231 n. 
 
 Salisbury, E. E., 361 
 
 Salmagundi, 39, 312 
 
 Sand, George, 274 
 
 Sappho, 299 
 
 Sartor Resartus, 133, 187 
 
 Satanstoe, 83 
 
 Saturday Courier, 87 
 
 Saturday Museum, The, 89 
 
 Saturday Press, The, 234 
 
 Saturday Visiter, 87, 88, 90 
 
 Saxe Holm's Stones, 321 
 
 Scarlet Letter, The, 116, 118, 124, 125,, 
 
 128 
 Schelling, 108, 379 
 Schiller, 62 
 
 Schmidt, Rudolph, 238 
 Schopenhauer, 379 
 Schuyler, Philip, 51 
 Science of English Verse, The, 292, 
 
 294 
 
426 
 
 Index 
 
 Scott, 40, 47, 53, 75, 78, 83, 84, 194, 
 
 202, 247, 253, 272, 275, 286, 357 
 Scribner's Monthly, 327, 328 
 Scudder, Horace, 191 
 Sea, The, 62 
 Sea Lions, The, 80 
 Seaside and the Fireside, The, 152 
 Selected Pronouncing and Accented 
 
 Dictionary, A, 399 
 Self -Reliance, 103 
 Sella, 55 n., 65 
 "Selwyn, George," 230 n. 
 Sense of the Past, The, 279 
 Seven English Cities, 269 
 Seven Lectures to Young Men, 366 
 Seward, Wm. H., 222, 223, 347 
 Shadow, 98 
 
 Shadow of a Dream, The, 270 
 Shaftesbury, 19, 28, 35 
 Shakespeare, 57, 93, 132, 179, 187, 193, 
 
 209, 226, 231, 233, 247, 263, 286, 
 
 295. 303 
 Shakespeare and his Forerunners, 294 
 Shelbume, Lord, 17 
 Shelley, 53, 60, 66, 96, 293 
 Shelton, Mrs., 90 
 Sheridan, 174, 272 
 Shew, Mrs., 90, 96 
 Shipley, Bishop, 17 
 Shirley, Gov., 32 
 Sidney, Algernon, 31 
 'Sieur George, 328 
 Sights from a Steeple, 120 
 Sigurd the Volsung, 53 
 SUas Marner, 294 
 Silence, 98 
 Sill, E. R., 379 
 Simms, W. G., 309 
 Simonides, no, 132 
 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 
 
 4.367 
 Sismondi, 341 
 Sisters, The, 161 
 
 Six Sermons on Intemperance, 365 
 Skeleton in Armor, The, 149 
 Sketch Book, The, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 
 
 120, 139, 145, 312, 313, 322 
 Skipper Ireson's Ride, 161 
 Slamm, Levi D., 231 n. 
 Slave, The, 204 
 Sleeper, The, 95 
 Small Boy and Others, A, 276 
 Smith, Abiel, 356 
 Smith, Adam, 17, 23 
 
 F. Hopkinson, 335 
 
 S. F., 170 
 
 Sydney, 356 
 
 Smyth, Albert Henry, 20 
 Snow-Bound, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 
 
 163 
 Snow Image, The, 118 
 Socrates, 377 
 Solomon, 325 
 
 Son of Royal Langbrith, The, 270 
 Songs of Labor and Other Poems, 159 
 
 Song of Myself, 231 
 
 Song of the Bell, 62 
 
 Song of the Sower, The, 62 
 
 Sonnets (Milton), 66 
 
 Soundings from the Atlantic, 172 
 
 South Africa Folk-Lore Journal, 307 n. 
 
 South, Robert, 370 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 88, 93, 
 
 98 n. 
 Southern Magazine, The, 333 
 Southey, 40, 41, 47, 55, 357, 358 
 Spanish Student, The, 150, 151 
 Special Pleading, 297 
 Specimen Days, 237 
 Specimen Days and Collect, 239 
 Specimens of the American Poets, 57 
 Spectator, The, 19, 41, 120, 178, 302, 
 
 312 
 Speed, Joshua F., 211 
 Spencer, Herbert, 379, 385 
 Spenser, 132, 187, 194, 395 n. 
 Sphinx, The, 97 
 Spinoza, 58 
 
 Spirit of Modern Philosophy, The, 380 
 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 317 
 Spoils of Poynton, The, 279, 2Pi 
 Spooner, Aldin, 227 
 Springfield Republican, 231 
 Spy, The, 73, 74, 75 
 Star, The, 227 
 Star Papers, 366 
 Stedman, E. C., 97 n., 160, 166, 181, 
 
 184 
 Steele, 178, 302, 303, 312 
 Stendhal, 281 
 Stephen, Leslie, 176 
 Stevenson, 135, 138, 139, 144, 180, 
 
 293 
 Stiles, Ezra, 17, 29 
 Stockton, Frank R., 318, 329, 330, 
 
 332 
 Stoddard, Solomon, 1, 5 
 Stories Revived, 331 
 Stowe, Calvin E., 203, 365 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 202-206, 244, 
 
 326, 365 
 Strahan, William, 25 
 Stranger in Lowell, The, 165 
 Stubbs, 351 
 Suburban Sketches, 265 
 Suetonius, 247 
 Summer Wind, 64 
 Sumner, Charles, 347 
 Sunrise, 297 
 Supernaturalism of New England, The, 
 
 165 
 Swedenborg, 385 
 Swift, 17, 134, 164, 185, 238, 272, 
 
 283 
 Symonds, John Addington, 230 n., 
 
 238 
 Symphony, The, 291, 297, 299 
 
 Tabb, John Bannister, 287, 296, 297, 
 299 
 
Index 
 
 427 
 
 Taittiriya PrStifSkhya, 362 
 
 Tak of Cloudland, A, 65 
 
 Tales of a Traveller, 38, 48 
 
 Tales of a Wayside Inn, 152, 162 
 
 Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 331 
 
 Talisman, The, 313 
 
 Tamerlane, 96, 98 
 
 Tamerlane and Other Poems, 87 
 
 Tar-Baby Story and Other Rhymes of 
 
 Uncle Remus, 304 
 Taylor, Bayard, 162, 291 
 
 Zachary, 215 
 
 Temperance, 158 
 Temple, Mary, 277 
 Tennessee's Partner, 324, 329 
 Tennyson, 53, 55, 56, 61, 63, 132, 134, 
 
 152, 165, 187, 194, 238, 263 
 Tent on the Beach, The, 159, 162 
 Thackeray, 176, 262, 263, 275, 315, 
 
 328, 335 
 Thanatopsis, 54, 55, 57, 59 
 Thanet, Octave (Alice Frenph), 323, 
 
 332. 334 
 Thayer and Eldndge, 235 
 Their Wedding Journey, 264, 268 
 Thierry, 341 
 
 $30,000 Bequest, The, 255 
 Thomson, Charles, 24 
 
 James, 54 »., 55, 63 
 
 Thoreau, David Henry, 63, 118, 130- 
 
 144, 185, 234 
 
 John, 138 
 
 Those Extraordinary Twins, 259 
 Thoughts on the Revival of Religion, 
 
 6 
 Thousand and One Nights, The, 311 
 Three Books of Song, 152 
 Three Tales, 332 
 
 Through the Eye of the Needle, 269 
 Ticknor, George, 147, 340, 355-36C, 
 
 362 
 Tieck, Ludwig, 358 
 Tiger Lilies, 287, 288 
 Tillotson, 35 
 Time, 55, 62, 63 
 Titian, 272 
 To an Insect, 183, 184 
 To a Waterfowl, 58 
 Todd, Mary, 211 
 To Helen, 85 
 Token, The, 117, 313 
 Told by Uncle Remus, 304 
 Tolstoy, 262, 267, 269 
 Tompkins, Governor, 40 
 Tom Sawyer, 256, 257, 261 
 Tom Sawyer Abroad, 256 
 Tom Sawyer, Detective, 256 
 To My Mother, 97 
 Tour on the Prairies, A , 42 
 Town and Country Mouse, The, 317 
 Tragic Muse, The, 279 
 Tramp Abroad, A, 251 
 Transferred Ghost, The, 330 
 Traubel, Horace, 230 »., 239 
 Traveller from Altruria, A, 269 
 
 Tuckerman, H. T., 88 n. 
 
 Turgenev, 262, 267, 281 
 
 Turgot, 17, 32 
 
 Turner, Joseph Addison, 302 
 
 Turn of the Screw, The, 280, 319 
 
 "Twain, Mark," see Clemens, S. L. 
 
 Twenty Sermons, 371 n. 
 
 Twice-Told Tales, 93, 94, 114, 117, 
 
 118 
 . Two Admirals, The, 80 
 Two Rivulets, The, 232 
 Two Years Before the Mast, 169, 199 
 Tyler, John, 42 
 Typee, 199 
 
 Uhland, 153 
 Ulalume, 96 
 Uncle of An Angel, 332 
 Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, 304 
 Uncle Remus and His Friends, 304 
 Uncle Remus and the Little Boy, 304 
 Uncle Remus: His Songs and his Say- 
 ings, 301, 303, 305 »., 307 n. 
 Uncle Remus' s Magazine, 304 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the 
 
 Lowly, 160, 203 
 Uncollected, Poetry and Prose of Wait 
 
 Whitman, 232 n. 
 Under the Willows, 187 
 Undiscovered Country, An, 265 
 United Netherlands, The, 346 
 Unknown Way, The, 63 
 Upside Down, 83 
 
 Valdfe, 267 
 
 Valera, 267 
 
 VaUa, Laurentius, 12 
 
 Van Buren, Martin, 42 
 
 Van Doren, C, 54 n. 
 
 Varieties of Religious Experience, 388 
 
 Vassall Morton, 350 
 
 Venetian Life, 264 
 
 Verga, 267 
 
 Vergennes, 17 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 303 
 
 Victor, Mrs. M. V., 204 
 
 Village Blacksmith, The, 149 
 
 Village, The, 163 
 
 Virgil, 131, 132 
 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 191 
 
 Visions and Tasks, 371 w. 
 
 Voices of Freedom, 159 
 
 Voices of the Night, 147 
 
 Voltaire, 17, 36, 174, 341, 342 
 
 Vondel, 169 
 
 Von Held, Toni, 307 n. 
 
 von Humboldt, Alexander, 358 
 
 Waif, The, 148 
 
 Wakefield, 122 
 
 Walden, 141, 143 
 
 War, 158 
 
 Ward, Artemus, 215, 245 
 
 Ware, Henry, loi 
 
 Warner, Charles Dudley, 246, 255 
 
428 
 
 Index 
 
 Warton, 360 
 
 Washington, 17, 33, 37 
 
 Washington Square, 274 
 
 Wasp, The, 331 
 
 Water-Witch, The, 78 
 
 Watson, Bishop, 17 
 
 Watteau, 36 
 
 Watts, Isaac, 14 v. 
 
 Ways of the Hour, The, 83 
 
 Weber, 361 
 
 Webster, Daniel, 42, 105, 163, 277, 
 
 394 
 
 Noah, 17, 393, 399, 402 
 
 Webster's Dictionary, 364 
 Wedderbum, Attorney-General, 25 
 Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
 
 Rivers, A, 133, 134, 138, 141 
 Wells, H. G., 338 
 Wendell, Evart Jansen, 169 
 Wept of Wash-ton-Wish, The, 78 
 West, Benjamin, 17 
 
 Rebecca, 275 
 
 What is Man 7, 261 
 
 What Maisie Knew, 282 
 
 What Was It? 317, 318 
 
 When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard 
 
 Bloomed, 62 
 Whistle, The, 27 
 Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking, 
 
 337, 338 
 Whitefield, George, 17, 29 
 White Heron, A, 327 
 White- Jacket, 199 
 White, Kirke, 55, 62, 63 
 
 Maria, 186 
 
 Richard Grant, 193 
 
 Whitman, George, 236, 238 
 
 -Jefif., 230 
 
 Mrs., 90 
 
 Walt, 53, 54, 58, 60, 62, 63, 185, 
 
 225-241, 242, 248, 370, 405, 405 
 
 Walter, 226 
 
 Whitney, Eli, 355 
 
 Josiah, 361, 364 
 
 William Dwight, 361-364 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 53, 54, 155- 
 
 167, 172, 174, 185, 189 
 Joseph, 155 
 
 Whittier, Thomas, 155 
 
 Whymper, Edward, 252 
 
 Wilberforce, Wm., 158 
 
 Wilkins, Mary E., 326, 334 
 
 William James, 384 n. 
 
 William Wilson, 98 
 
 WilHs, N. P., 54, 91, 93 »■ 
 
 Winds, The, 63 
 
 Wing-and-Wing, 80 
 
 Wings of the Dove, The, 274, 277 
 
 Winter Piece, 65 
 
 Witch Trial at Mount Holly, A, 21 
 
 Within the Rim, 278 
 
 With My Friends, 332 
 
 Wolf, F. A., 356 
 
 WoUaston, 20 
 
 Wonderful "One-Hoss Shay," The, 
 
 181 
 Wondersmith, The, 317, 318 
 Woodberry, G. E., 99 n. 
 Woodrow, James, 287, 295 
 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 325 
 Wordsworth, 54, 55, 56, 60, 142, 151, 
 
 187, 357- 358 
 World and the Individual, The, 381, 
 
 382 
 Wound-Dresser, The, 237 
 Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 149 
 Wright, Chauncey, 385 
 Writings of Albert Gallatin, 353 
 Wyandotte, 82 
 
 Xenophon, 19 
 X-ing a Paragrab, 97 
 
 Yale Review, The, 230 n. 
 Yankee in Canada, ^4, 139 
 Years of My Youth, 269 
 Year's Life, A, 186 
 Yellow Violet, The, 64 
 Yonge, Charlotte M., 257 
 Young, 55 
 
 Brigham, 251 
 
 Young Ladies' Repository, 316 
 
 Zadoc Pine, and Other Stories, 332 
 Zola, 262 
 
The Cambridge History 
 
 of 
 
 American Literature 
 
 Edited by 
 W. p. Trent 
 
 Professor of Eoglish in Columbia University 
 
 John Erskine 
 
 Professor of Englisti in Columbia University 
 
 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Professor of English in the University of Illinois 
 
 Carl Van Doren 
 
 Head Master of The Brearley School, Associate in English in Columbia University 
 Novo complete in four tolames. Royal 8°. ejf about 500 pages each 
 
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Table of Contents 
 
 VOLUME I. 
 
 Travellers and Explorers, 1583-1763. 
 
 George Parker Winship. 
 The Historians, 1607-1783. John S. 
 
 Bassett. 
 The Puritan Divines, 1620-1720. V. L. 
 
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 Edwards. Paul Elmer More. 
 Philosophers and Divines, 1 720-1 789. 
 
 Woodbridge Riley. 
 Franklin. Stuart P. Sherman. 
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 American Political Writing, 1760-1789. 
 
 William MacDonald. 
 The Beginnings of Verse, 1610-1808. 
 
 S. M. Tucker. 
 Travellers and Observers, 1763-1846. 
 
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 Fiction II. Contemporaries of Cooper. 
 
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 Transcendentalism. H. C. Goddard. 
 Emerson. Paul Elmer More. 
 
 VOLUME II. 
 
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 Hawthorne. John Erskine. 
 
 Longfellow. W. P. Trent. 
 
 Whittier. William Morton Payne. 
 
 Poe. Killis Campbell. 
 
 Publicists and Orators, 1789-1850. 
 
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 Webster. Henry Cabot Lodge. 
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 Bassett. 
 Prescott, Motley. Ruth Putnam. 
 Early Humorists. Will D. Howe. 
 Magazines and Annuals. William B. 
 
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 Dialect Writers. C. Alphonso Smith. 
 The Short Story. Fred Lewis Pattee. 
 Books for Children. Algernon Tassin. 
 
 VOLUME III. 
 
 Mark Twain. Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Minor Humorists. George Frisbee Whicher. 
 
 Later Poets. Norman Foerster. 
 
 The Later Novel: Howells. Carl Van 
 
 Doren. 
 Henry James. Joseph Warren Beach. 
 Later Essayists. George S. Hellman. 
 Travellers and Explorers, 1846-1900. 
 
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 Later Historians. John Spencer Bassett. 
 Later Theology. Ambrose White Vernon. 
 Later Philosophy. Morris R. Cohen. 
 The Drama, 1860-1918. Montrose J- 
 
 Moses. 
 Later Magazines. William B. Cairns. 
 Newspapers Since i860. Frank W. Scott. 
 Political Writing Since 1850. William 
 
 Kenneth Boyd. 
 Lincoln. Nathaniel Wright Stephenson. 
 Education. Paul Monroe. 
 
 VOLUME IV. 
 
 Economists. Edwin R. A. Seligman. 
 Scholars. Samuel Lee Wolff. 
 Patriotic Songs and Hynms. Percy H. 
 
 Boynton. 
 Oral Literature. Louise Pound. 
 Popular Bibles. Lyman P. Powell. 
 Book Publishers and Publishing. Earl L. 
 
 Bradsher. 
 The English Language in America. Harry 
 
 Morgan Ayres. 
 Non English Writings: 
 
 German. Albert Bernhardt Faust 
 
 French. Edward J. Fortier. 
 
 Yiddish. Nathaniel Buchwald. 
 Non English Writings: 
 
 Aboriginal. Mary Austin. 
 
The Cambridge History of American Literature 
 
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