THE AMERICAN BOOKS 
 
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 i AMERilCAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
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 .American literature. 
 
 3 1924 022 013 506 
 
A Cornell University 
 y Library 
 
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THE AMERICAN BOOKS 
 
 A LIBRARY OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP 
 
 "The American Books" are designed as a 
 series of authoritative manuals, discussing 
 problems of interest in America to-day. 
 
THE AMERICAN BOOKS 
 
 THE AMERICAK COLLEGE BY ISAAC SHARPLESS 
 
 THE INDIAN TO-DAY BY CHARLES A. EASTMAN 
 
 COST OF LIVING BY FABIAN FRANKLIN 
 
 THE AMERICAN NAVY BY REAR-ADMIRAL FRENCH 
 
 E. CHADWICK, U. S. N. 
 
 MUNICIPAL FREEDOM BY OSWALD RYAN 
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE BY LEON KELLNER 
 
 (translated from THB GERMAN BY JULIA FRANKLIN) 
 
 SOCIALISM IN AMERICA BY JOHN MACY 
 
 AMERICAN IDEALS BY CLAYTON S. COOPER 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT BY IRA REMSEN 
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOOL BY V^ALTER S. HINCHMAN 
 
 THE FEDERAL RESERVE BY H. PARKER Vl^ILLIS 
 
 {For more extended notice of the series, see the last pages 
 of this book.) 
 
The American Books 
 
 AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 LEON KELLNER 
 
 Professor in the University of Czernowitz 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 
 BY 
 
 JULIA FRANKLIN 
 
 WITH A PREFACE 
 
 BV 
 
 GUSTAV POLLAK 
 
 GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 191S 
 
 O 
 
/\.'^A 
 
 9, nil 
 
 Copyright, igis, by 
 DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 
 
 All rights reserved, including that oj 
 
 translation into foreign languages, 
 
 including the Scandinavian 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In his "Geschichte der Nordamerikanischen 
 Literatur," published at Leipzig a year ago. 
 Professor Leon Kellner undertook to acquaint 
 Germans, in brief outline, with the characteristic 
 features of the literature of our country. The 
 verdict pronounced on the two little volumes by 
 the press was so favorable that an English trans- 
 lation, for the benefit of American readers, has 
 seemed justifiable. The author's knowledge of 
 his subject, his broad outlook, and his incisive 
 and independent judgments will, it is hoped, 
 commend themselves to audiences able to com- 
 pare his methods with literary canons generally 
 accepted in this country and in England. 
 
 It had been intended to submit the English 
 version to Professor Kellner's scrutiny, but the 
 exigencies of the European war have made this 
 impossible. The University of Czernowitz, in 
 the Austrian crown land of Bukowina, where 
 Doctor Kellner has filled the chair of English 
 philology and literature since 1904, is closed, the 
 
vi Preface 
 
 town itself during the last few months having 
 been alternately occupied by the Russians and 
 Austrians. I have attempted to learn the 
 whereabouts of Professor Kellner, but have so 
 far been unsuccessful. When I met him last 
 summer In Vienna, shortly before the outbreak 
 of the war, he spoke, with all the warmth of his 
 enthusiastic nature, of his hope of visiting our 
 country. Since then the fates have interfered 
 with all his plans. 
 
 In accordance with Professor Kellner's gen- 
 eral views on the subject, as gathered in my talks 
 with him, I have permitted myself to suggest to 
 the publishers of the present work the advis- 
 abiUty of omitting the concluding portion of the 
 book, which consisted in the main of a rapid 
 survey of writers not elsewhere treated by the 
 author, and was supposed to bring out the char- 
 acteristics of the various states. In doing so, 
 I have felt that I was but carrying out Doctor 
 Kellner's intentions, since he expressed to me 
 his earnest wish to make any changes in proof 
 which were in the direction of greater accuracy 
 in detail, and also requested me to indicate what, 
 in my opinion, had better be omitted. It may 
 likewise be proper to mention that Kellner's 
 vivid characterizations of New England life have 
 
Preface vii 
 
 been left untouched, even where the reader must 
 make allowance for the fact that the conditions 
 upon which the author comments are rather those 
 of a bygone time than of the present day. 
 
 It will be seen that Professor Kellner's vol- 
 ume is not a history of American literature in 
 any exhaustive sense. This he could not have 
 written within the limits which he set himself, 
 but he has succeeded in doing what no German 
 writer before him has ever attempted — that is to 
 say, in tracing briefly the main currents of our 
 literature, in placing before the reader vivid 
 sketches of our great literary figures outlined 
 against an ample historical and philosophical 
 background, and in introducing a mass of minor 
 writers the characterization of whom, if only in 
 a few rapid strokes, gives color and animation 
 to the whole picture. American letters have 
 hitherto received but scant justice at the hands 
 of German scholars. Only a very few literary 
 historians, such as Brunnemann, Knortz, and 
 Engel, have aimed at giving a survey of the 
 general aspects of the subject, while scholars 
 like Hermann Grimm and Anton Schonbach 
 have contented themselves with describing to 
 their countrymen some one outstanding literary 
 figure, such as Emerson and Hawthorne. 
 
viii Preface 
 
 Narrow as is the compass of Professor Kell- 
 ner's work, we find in his pages characteriza- 
 tions of our hterary celebrities whose substantial 
 accuracy will not be questioned. They dis- 
 close remarkable familiarity not only with our 
 literature but with our historic past. In ac- 
 cordance with what seems to be a wise plan, 
 Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, above all Holmes, 
 among the New England writers; Cooper, Bret 
 Harte, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry 
 James, among different surroundings, are singled 
 out for full, adequate, and picturesque treat- 
 ment; the foreign note here and there ob- 
 servable but emphasizes the writer's individual 
 point of view. Lesser authors appear in be- 
 coming perspective, though by no means in 
 shadowy outlines. Even where his judgment is at 
 Variance with current criticism there is a refresh- 
 ing outspokenness, as in his plea for greater 
 justice to the literary ability of Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe than is commonly accorded to it. 
 Throughout, we have the feeling that the author 
 must be ranked with those writers who, as 
 Lessing says, "write not merely to show their 
 wit and scholarship, but who have in mind the 
 best and most enHghtened of their time and their 
 country, and consider only that worthy of being 
 
Preface ix 
 
 put down which pleases and appeals to them." 
 The German reader for whom Professor Kellner 
 indited his appreciations of our great writers has 
 through him learned to know in Holmes and 
 Emerson true classics — those who, in Sainte- 
 Beuve's phrase, have enriched the human mind 
 and really added to its treasures. 
 
 The attention which Professor Kellner be- 
 stowed on these writers is the outgrowth of a 
 deeply rooted interest in New England life. He 
 understands every intellectual and emotional 
 phase of the New England character, widely as 
 his temperament differs from that of the Puritan. 
 In a letter now before me he says: "The strongest 
 impression of my youth was an almost ascetic 
 simplicity of life practised by my parents and 
 all my relatives. And this way of living was 
 not forced upon us by necessity, but was the 
 result of conviction. From childhood I had 
 acquired, through precept and example, puri- 
 tanic habits of thought and puritanic conduct. 
 You may perhaps learn, from my little book 
 on North American literature, how deeply I 
 sympathize with the Scottish and New England 
 nature." 
 
 A few data concerning Professor Kellner's past 
 will not be out of place here. Born of Jewish 
 
X Preface 
 
 parents at Tarnow, Galicia, in 1859, he was early 
 initiated into Hebraic studies, and he has re- 
 tained his interest in Jewish history and the 
 critical interpretation of the Bible throughout 
 life. After attending lectures on the classics 
 in the University of Vienna, he devoted himself 
 to the comparative study of languages, taking 
 courses in Gothic and Old-High German under 
 Richard Heinzel, and in Anglo-Saxon under 
 Schipper and Brandl. These preparatory steps 
 led to a journey, in 1888, to England, where he 
 spent a year in arduous and fruitful work. He 
 published for the Early English Text Society 
 Caxton's "Blanchardyn and Eglantine," with 
 an introduction on the syntactic peculiarities 
 of the text which attracted the attention of 
 scholars. In 1890 he became Privat-Dozent in 
 English philology in the University of Vienna, a 
 position which he subsequently exchanged for 
 the full professorship at Czernowitz. Asked 
 by the firm of Macmillan to furnish a history 
 of English syntax, Kellner produced his "His- 
 torical OutUnes of English Syntax" (1892), 
 which has passed through many editions, and is 
 still used as a textbook in English and American 
 universities. In 1905 Doctor Kellner edited, 
 together with Henry Bradley, the standard 
 
Preface 
 
 XI 
 
 "Historical Outlines of English Accidence" of 
 the late Richard Morris. While in England 
 he came into contact with the members of the 
 Fabian Society, more particularly with William 
 Archer and Graham Wallas, and his interest in 
 English literature assumed a new direction 
 through acquaintance with the social currents 
 and the tendencies of English Hfe. 
 
 Doctor Kellner revisited England regularly 
 during the following years, widening the circle 
 of his British friends and laying the foundation 
 of his work on English literature, which was pub- 
 lished in 1909 at Leipzig, under the title of "Die 
 Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Konigin 
 Viktoria." It is a study of great value, and 
 particularly happy in its descriptions of the 
 principal intellectual movements that gave the 
 Victorian age its peculiar significance. The 
 chapters on John Stuart Mill and the Utilita- 
 rians, on John Henry Newman and the Oxford 
 Movement, on George Eliot, Ruskin, and Car- 
 lyle, written in a style of great animation, as 
 well as his account of the hundreds of minor 
 writers mentioned, if only by slight touches, 
 bear testimony to the writer's intimate knowl- 
 edge of his subject. It was easy to discern in 
 the occasional references to Emerson, Holmes, 
 
xii Preface 
 
 Poe, etc., that interest in American literature of 
 which the present volume is the result. 
 
 Within the last few years Professor Kellner 
 has returned to a favorite subject of his early 
 years — the textual study of Shakespeare in 
 both the quartos and folios. By his close scru- 
 tiny of Elizabethan manuscripts in the London 
 Record office and in the British Museum he 
 has acquired a rare palaeographic knowledge of 
 Shakespeare's time, and it may be confidently 
 expected that his emendations and conjectures 
 concerning the poet's text, to be published under 
 the auspices of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, 
 will prove an unusually valuable addition to 
 Shakespeare literature. 
 
 GUSTAV POLLAK. 
 
 New York, April /j, igiS- 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface ... v 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Character OF American Literature 3 
 
 1 American History and American Liter- 
 
 ature 
 
 2 Relation of American to English Liter- 
 
 ature 
 
 3 The Two Periods of American Literature 
 
 4 The Subject-Matter of American Liter- 
 
 ature 
 
 IL The First Prose Writers 25 
 
 1 Benjamin Franklin 
 
 2 Washington Irving 
 
 3 James Fenimore Cooper 
 
 in. American Poetry 40 
 
 1 The Nature of American Puritanism 
 
 2 SomeCharacteristicsof Puritan Poetry 
 
 3 American Poetry Before Bryant 
 
 4 William CuUen Bryant 
 
 5 Whittier 
 
 6 Minor Poets 
 
 7 The Poetry of the South 
 
 IV. The Subjective Writers 80 
 
 A The Transcendentalists 
 
 1 Character of Transcendentalism 
 
 2 Emerson 
 
xiv Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGB 
 
 B The Primitives 
 
 1 The Starting- Point 
 
 2 Thoreau 
 
 3 Whitman 
 
 4 Melville 
 
 V. The Harvard Intellectuals . . . ii8 
 
 1 Common Characteristics 
 
 2 Longfellow 
 
 3 Holmes 
 
 4 Lowell 
 
 5 Kindred Spirits 
 
 VL The Psychological Tale . . . . 157 
 
 1 Historical Connections 
 
 2 Poe 
 
 3 Hawthorne 
 
 4 James and Howells 
 
 Vn. The Humorists 185 
 
 1 General 
 
 2 Refined Humor 
 
 3 The Humor of Exaggeration 
 
 4 The Humor of Pun and Slang 
 
 VHL Tales of the Soil 217 
 
 1 Origin and Development 
 
 2 North and South 
 
 3 Harriet Beecher Stowe 
 
 4 Joel Chandler Harris 
 
 Index of Authors ........ 251 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 1, AMERICAN HISTORY AND AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 The contrast between word and deed, between 
 experience and representation, is borne in 
 upon us with striking force in comparing the 
 history of the United States with its Hterature. 
 No people on earth cherished higher aspirations 
 than the band of seekers for freedom who, in the 
 early part of the seventeenth century, embark- 
 ing in a tiny vessel, bade a tearful adieu to their 
 English home; and what has been accomplished, 
 even though it bear no comparison with what 
 was hoped for, is that marvelous achievement, 
 the American Republic, with its gigantic power 
 and an industrial development unexampled in 
 history. The Mayflower, which put to sea in the 
 fall of 1620, counted a hundred souls; forty-one 
 men landed in December on the rocky coast of 
 
 3 
 
4 American Literature 
 
 Plymouth. After the first pitiless winter on the 
 inhospitable soil of the New World, the little 
 company was almost swept away by disease; of 
 the forty-one Argonauts only seven were able 
 to continue the struggle against the elements; 
 and the descendants of this little band have in 
 the space of 250 years exterminated the natives, 
 assimilated the French and Dutch, driven back 
 the Spaniards, and — most difficult of all their 
 Herculean tasks — thrown off the yoke of the 
 mother country. 
 
 When has human will accomplished anything 
 so great in so brief a space? Do not all 
 heroic acts of ancient and medieval history 
 shrink into insignificance by the side of this 
 miracle ? 
 
 We seek in vain, however, for an epic that 
 glorifies those great deeds; for a historical pro- 
 duction that does justice to those conquerors 
 and pathfinders of heroic proportions. The 
 first settlers, who subjugated the land with 
 musket and plow, were fully conscious of the 
 greatness of their work, and efforts were not 
 lacking to commemorate the extraordinary 
 happenings in written recitals. William Brad- 
 ford, one of the patriarchs of the Mayflower and 
 member of the first Puritan settlement, wrote a 
 
The Character of American Literature 5 
 
 "History of the Plymouth Plantation";* the 
 enterprising Captain John Smith, to whom 
 Virginia and all the other Southern States owe 
 their origin, depicted, in a sustained style ap- 
 propriate to the circumstances, his own adven- 
 tures,! nor did the astonishment aroused by the 
 unprecedented happenings on the soil of the 
 new Colchis fail to be voiced in verse. But the 
 forefathers did not go beyond dry, faltering re- 
 ports, and their descendants have even to this 
 day found no literary expression for the heroic. 
 Neither the verse of Longfellow nor the prose 
 of Hawthorne rises to the height of the subject. 
 
 And the Americans were destined to have yet 
 another heroic age: the more peaceful conquest 
 of the territory beyond the Ohio, toward the 
 middle of the nineteenth century; then the con- 
 flict for the emancipation of the blacks, of 
 1861-1865. 
 
 All Americans who took part in the great 
 migration to the West or participated in the 
 Civil War were deeply stirred by their experi- 
 ences and feel that they belong to a heroic 
 
 ♦William Bradford, "Journal, The History of Plymouth Plan- 
 tation, 1630-1649," in facsimile, with introduction by J. A. Doyle, 
 London, 1896. 
 
 tJohn Smith, "New England's Trials," London, 1622., 
 Rochester, N. Y., and London (American and Colonial Tracts), 
 1897. 
 
6 American Literature 
 
 age. But how tame does their language sound 
 when they attempt to give their feelings poetic 
 expression! Joaquin Miller, really Cincinnatus 
 Hiner Miller (born in 1841), who created a great 
 sensation with his "Songs of the Sierras," de- 
 picts in more than one poem, with temperament 
 and poetic swing, the progress of the tens of 
 thousands to the West; but how petty, how 
 inadequate, are these productions, measured by 
 the immensity of the phenomenon! And just 
 as little have the hundreds of ballads of North- 
 ern and Southern poets succeeded in worthily 
 perpetuating the Civil War in the memory of 
 their countrymen. 
 
 It is evident that American literature lags 
 infinitely far behind American history. 
 
 Various causes may be assigned for this dis- 
 parity; it has not as yet been quite adequately 
 explained. The generations that preceded 
 Cooper and Irving, it is often said, had their 
 hands too full, were too overburdened with their 
 daily tasks, to turn their thoughts to the luxury 
 of Hterary presentation or creation. But that 
 is far from the truth. In periods of the 
 greatest stress, under the most adverse cir- 
 cumstances, pools of ink were wasted upon 
 theological hairsplitting; the poorest farmers 
 
The Character of American Literature 7 
 
 found leisure enough to read the confused mass 
 of sermons and polemical treatises, which would 
 not be stomached to-day, that originated in the 
 colonies. 
 
 It is said that the youthful settlements were 
 dependent in literary matters and drew upon 
 the mother country exclusively for their poetic 
 needs. This statement is not apposite either. 
 When has the craving for artistic expression 
 ever been daunted by the fear of recognized 
 models? Anna Bradstreet, the wife of a farmer 
 and the mother of eight children, found time 
 and strength amid the overwhelming daily 
 duties of her hard life to fill four hundred octavo 
 pages with her verse! All these hewers of wood 
 and drawers of water, so grudgingly dealt with 
 by Fate, were ready with speech and pen; many 
 of them had an ear attuned to harmony and 
 loved rhythm and rhyme. 
 
 One explanation alone holds good: absorp- 
 tion in God seems incompatible with the pres- 
 entation of mankind. The God of the Puritans 
 was in this respect, too, a jealous God who 
 brooked no sort of creative rivalry. The in- 
 spired moments of the loftiest souls were filled 
 with the thought of God and his designs; spir- 
 itual Hfe was wholly dominated by solicitude re- 
 
8 American Literature 
 
 garding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how could 
 such petty concerns as personal experiences of a 
 lyric nature, the transports or the pangs of love, 
 find utterance? What did a lyric occurrence 
 like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so 
 welcome, or the first sight of the snowdrop, 
 signify compared with the last Sunday's sermon 
 and the new interpretation of the old riddle of 
 evil in the world ? And apart from the fact that 
 everything of a personal nature must have ap- 
 peared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric 
 poetry were offensive and impious to Puritan 
 theology. For everything that was natural, 
 that smacked of the creature, stood in the way 
 of sanctification, of elevating one's self to God. 
 
 Representation of mankind in an epic or, still 
 worse, in a dramatic form, totally violated the 
 Puritanic spirit, which was saturated with the 
 Old Testament abhorrence of the imitation of 
 anything in the heavens or on the earth, in the 
 air or on the waters. 
 
 This explanation is pertinent as far as the 
 North is concerned^ — from Maine to Delaware. 
 But the Southern States — ^Virginia, Maryland, 
 Carolina? We are confronted here by an open 
 question. 
 
 But one thing is an established fact : up to the 
 
The Character of American Literature 9 
 
 close of the eighteenth century America had no 
 belletristic Uterature. 
 
 And what followed is at first a great dis- 
 appointment: the first narrators, male and 
 female, give imitations of European fashions! 
 A few women, like Susanna Haswell Rowson 
 and Hannah W. Forster, sing of love, seduction, 
 and broken hearts, in the style of Richardson; 
 some men, like Royal Tyler and Hugh Henry 
 Brackenbridge, follow in the path of Smollett. 
 And even a writer so highly gifted as Charles 
 Brockden Brown was satisfied with transplant- 
 ing to American soil the blood-and-thunder 
 style of tale which had been domesticated in 
 England by Walpole ("The Castle of Otranto"), 
 Lewis ("The Monk"), Anne RadcliflFe ("The 
 Mysteries of Udolpho")- 
 
 The faculty of poetic portrayal of one's im- 
 mediate surroundings is, as literary history 
 teaches us, the last to be acquired by individuals 
 and nations; the Americans did not develop it 
 until the nineteenth century. 
 
 The American nation did not become conscious 
 of the distinctive character of its literature 
 until long after it had gained its indepen- 
 dence. And the outside world, which, as a rule, 
 confirms our own estimate of ourselves, could 
 
lo American Literature 
 
 not for a long time make up its mind to believe 
 in a distinctive American literature. 
 
 It is only the historians of the nineteenth 
 century that reflect the greatness of the events 
 from which modern America sprang. If glowing 
 enthusiasm and unswerving faith alone could 
 invest a prose creation with the immortality of 
 poesy, George Bancroft's "History of the United 
 States" would be the epic of the North American 
 Republic. And the efforts of the later his- 
 torians, such as Francis Parkman's "The Oregon 
 Trail," his most personal book, and "France 
 and England in America," his life work, or John 
 Fiske's "Beginnings of New England" and 
 "The American Revolution," are imbued with 
 the same spirit that animated Bancroft.* 
 
 2. RELATION OF AMERICAN TO ENGLISH 
 LITERATURE 
 
 The relation of American to English liter- 
 ature was represented on the part of the Eng- 
 lish, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, 
 in a way to make it appear as if all the poetic 
 
 *When one surveys the imposing series of historians — Bancroft, 
 Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Henry Adams, Justin Winsor, 
 Edward Channing, John Fiske, McMaster, Woodrow Wilson, 
 James Ford Rhodes — one would think that American historical 
 writing had absorbed all the epic genius of America. 
 
The Character of American Literature 1 1 
 
 and prose writings produced in America were 
 merely imitations of English models; owing to 
 indignation at such depreciation and to a nat- 
 ural enough spirit of opposition, the Americans 
 were somewhat inclined to deny that their 
 literature was in any way dependent upon Eng- 
 land. In reality, to an unprejudiced eye the 
 matter is perfectly plain. Until the revolt of 
 the colonies from the mother country, all Ameri- 
 can literary efforts were simply offshoots of the 
 English stem, as were the colonies themselves. 
 Just as the colonists wear English cloth, eat 
 off English plates, build their houses with Eng- 
 lish bricks,* so do their theologians, their states- 
 men, their publicists, their poets, write in the 
 language of the old home, adhere to the forms 
 and rhythms, the traditions and tacit under- 
 standings, of the old literature. Every author 
 is intent upon approaching the English models 
 as closely as possible, upon committing no of- 
 fence against the purity of the language, above 
 all is he careful not to allow any Americanism 
 to escape him. Benjamin Franklin wrote to 
 Hume: "I hope, with you, that we shall always 
 in America make the best English of this Island 
 our standard," and to the lexicographer, Noah 
 *G. R. Carpenter, "Whittier," p. 7. 
 
12 American Literature 
 
 Webster: "I cannot but applaud your zeal for 
 preserving the purity of our language."* 
 
 At the close of the eighteenth century, polit- 
 ical independence having been achieved, there 
 is a natural stirring of pride among writers, 
 and a craving for self-reliance makes itself 
 distinctly felt. But it does not materialize 
 into action. On the contrary, stress is laid 
 upon showing the world that now, as ever, the 
 new land keeps pace in purity of speech and 
 in elegance of style with the mother country. 
 Such is — to name only the chief representatives 
 — evidently the aim and the trend of thought 
 of Washington Irving and Longfellow. Both 
 are proud of introducing American matter into 
 literature, of applying American local color in 
 abundant measure; but as to form, they adhere 
 strictly to tradition. 
 
 Many years after the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence it was still the highest praise that 
 
 *C. Alphonso Smith, "Die Amerikanische Literatur," Berlin, 
 1912, p. 4. Charles Whibley lauds the purity of the present 
 American literary language also: "American slang knocks in vain 
 for admission into American literature. ... It has no part 
 in the fabric of the gravely written language. Men of letters 
 have disdained its use with a scrupulousness worthy of our own 
 eighteenth century. The best of them have written an English as 
 pure as a devout respect for tradition can make it ... If 
 you contrast the English literature of to-day with the American, 
 you will find differences of accent and expression so slight that you 
 may neglect them." Ibid., p. 98. 
 
The Character of American Literature 13 
 
 could be accorded an American author that he 
 emulated his English model so successfully that 
 one might exclaim: "It could be taken for the 
 work of an Englishman." 
 
 When Bryant's "Thanatopsis" appeared, 
 people were carried away by the poem — because 
 they were reminded of Wordsworth, Keats, and 
 Shelley. In fact, the Greek word itself — an 
 arbitrary coinage of Bryant's, as Epipsychidion 
 was a coinage of Shelley's — indicates an English 
 model, and the rhythm of EngHsh blank verse 
 was ringing in the ears of the American.* 
 
 The fame of Washington Irving was based 
 upon his being a reminder of Addison, and it 
 was said of Cooper — with great injustice and 
 greatly to his annoyance — that he was the 
 American Scott. 
 
 Lowell may be regarded as the first American 
 literary man of culture, taste, esprit, and creative 
 force, who rebelled against this self-imposed 
 servitude and asserted the right of Americans 
 to their own individuality in language and style. 
 "A Fable for Critics," which appeared in the 
 
 ♦American histories of literature point to Wordsworth as Bry- 
 ant's teacher. That is not to be disputed; but "Thanatopsis" 
 reminds one of Keats, not of Wordsworth. If one compares the 
 first verses of the American with the opening lines of " Endymion," 
 he will be surprised at the resemblance of the melody. 
 
14 American Literature 
 
 revolutionary year 1848, embodies a veritable 
 declaration of independence of American litera- 
 ture. 
 
 And how did the world outside of America 
 and England feel toward American authorship ? 
 The first American writer to become famous 
 throughout Europe was Benjamin Franklin; 
 the first to be read by all Europe was James 
 Fenimore Cooper; the first that convinced all 
 Europe of the existence of an American litera- 
 ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Franklin owed 
 his fame to a successful political mission and to 
 the invention of the lightning-rod; otherwise his 
 homely, Philistine wisdom would hardly have 
 found an audience beyond the narrow limits of 
 his native land. In Cooper's Leatherstocking 
 Tales what told was the new subject-matter, 
 the strange world of primeval forest and prairie. 
 It was in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet 
 Letter" that the work of a master of narrative 
 on American soil was first recognized; the year 
 1850 is the natal year of the American novel, in 
 the highest significance of that term, as meas- 
 ured by European standards. Hawthorne's 
 work has its place by the side of "Pere Goriot" 
 and "The Newcomes," by the side of "Adam 
 Bede" and "Anna Karenina." 
 
The Character of American Literature 15 
 
 Thenceforth the relation to England becomes 
 wholly different — friendlier, more intimate. 
 There is no longer any hatred of EngUsh litera- 
 ture, because there is no longer the fear of the 
 schoolmaster's rod; from the day that England 
 renounces her untenable right of guardianship, 
 both nations, English and American, become 
 aware of the true historic relation between 
 American and English literature: it is the rela- 
 tion between branch and tree. 
 
 3. THE TWO PERIODS OF AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 The history of American literature in the 
 nineteenth century — it is substantially only 
 this that we have to take into account as belong- 
 ing to the domain of belles-lettres — is divided 
 into two unequal parts, of fundamentally dif- 
 ferent nature. The first extends to the close 
 of the Civil War (1865), and is in the main the 
 history of authorship as it was pursued in the 
 northeastern section, particularly in the New 
 England States; it is only in the second period, 
 dating from the middle of the sixties, that we 
 are concerned with the literature of the rest of 
 the states, with American literature in general. 
 During the first period intellectual America 
 
1 6 American Literature 
 
 has its centre of gravity in New England, or, 
 to be more exact, in Massachusetts; Boston is 
 the hub of the literary world.* 
 
 For all American idealists Boston was a sort 
 of celestial city, somewhat as Jerusalem is for 
 believers the world over. 
 
 "I want you to remember, my dear child," 
 says an enthusiastic Pennsylvania doctor to 
 his niece, "that in Boston you are not only in 
 the birthplace of American Hberty, but the yet 
 holier scene of its resurrection. There every- 
 thing that is noble and grand and liberal and 
 enlightened in the national hfe has originated."t 
 
 In the forties there was gathered in Massa- 
 chusetts that group of high-souled men, who, 
 under the name of Transcendentalists, became 
 world-renowned — Alcott, Emerson, Channing, 
 Thoreau. And when the glory of the saints of 
 Concord was eclipsed, there beamed the splendor 
 of the poets, scholars, and humorists of Cam- 
 bridge — ^Agassiz, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, 
 Motley. That in itself suffices to explain why 
 Massachusetts so long retained the leadership 
 
 *" Boston State House is the hub of the solar system," says 
 OUver Wendell Holmes in jest; this is often incorrectly quoted. 
 "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," p. 125 (0. W. Holmes, 
 Writings, 13 vols.. Riverside Press). 
 
 tHowells, "A Chance Acquaintance," p. 21 (Boston, 1874). 
 
The Character of American Literature 17 
 
 in literary matters. ^ The Civil War of 1861- 
 1865 paved the way for the end of this hegem- 
 ony. The victory achieved by New England 
 over the South and West, politically and eco- 
 nomically, was a defeat as regards the intellectual 
 sphere: the year 1865 signifies the advent of the 
 South and West into American literature. And 
 such a wealth of talent appears upon the scene 
 that New England resigns its former leadership 
 without striking a blow, and is satisfied to main- 
 tain a modest place alongside the Southern and 
 Western States. Thenceforth there is no hegem- 
 ony in American authorship. 
 
 Whether it be an advantage or a drawback is 
 a matter for inquiry, but the fact is indisputable 
 that since Boston forfeited its privileges as the 
 spiritual capital, press and literature in the 
 United States lack a centre, guidance, models. 
 Neither Washington nor New York occupies 
 the place held by London and Paris in the Eng- 
 Hsh and French literary world. The press of 
 Washington is provincial and that of New York 
 does not play a genuinely metropolitan role 
 for the nation.* The same is true, and in a far 
 higher degree, of imaginative writing. 
 
 *See J. F. Muirhead, "The Land of Contrasts," p. 145, London, 
 1899. 
 
1 8 American Literature 
 
 Four characteristics mark the literature of 
 the second period: desc ription of environment; 
 realistic depiction of details; the most copious 
 use ofjdialect; and still a fourth thing that dis- 
 tinguishes the poetry and prose of this epoch 
 from its predecessors — a great, if not the great- 
 est, part of the imaginative literature is contrib- 
 uted by journaHsts to some newspaper or 
 periodical. Not only do humorists like Alden, 
 Anderson, Austin, Bailey, Barlow, Barr, etc., 
 make their way from the editorial rooms, but 
 poets of the rank of a Eugene Field, story-writers 
 with the force of an Ambrose Bierce, the charm 
 of an R. H. Davis, place their talents at the 
 service of local journalism. This produces sur- 
 prising effects in content, tone, form. Every- 
 thing is of a sparkling lightness, a crisp freshness 
 and gripping reality. Brevity is a prime req- 
 uisite, brevity at any cost. And thus an art 
 is developed which in a few stanzas exhausts 
 the theme of an epic, which packs the substance 
 of a novel within the limits of a feuilleton. As 
 the highly developed social life of the fourteenth 
 century favored the story, but at the same time 
 prescribed for it certain limits conditioned by 
 the receptive power of the auditors, and created 
 that masterpiece of narrative art, the Italian 
 
The Character of American Literature 19 
 
 tale, so we find here, springing from altogether 
 different conditions, essentially the same result. 
 The imaginative talent of the Americans al- 
 lowed itself to be harnessed to the car of journal<- 
 ism. To. this circumstance we are indebted for 
 the richness and the variety of the American 
 short story. 
 
 4. THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 The contrast between the greatness of Ameri- 
 can history and the mediocrity of American 
 literature becomes in a measure comprehensible 
 if one compares the stuff of American imagina- 
 tive writing with that of older literatures. In 
 the face of an overpowering experience we are 
 struck dumb, and psychologists have long been 
 familiar with the phenomenon that it is not 
 the totality of an event but some detached 
 incident, some insignificant detail, that causes 
 an outburst of tears or laughter, joy or lamenta- 
 tion. What things that robbed one of breath 
 and speech confronted the European settlers 
 in America! From a region deforested, culti- 
 vated, tame, long since cleared of beasts of 
 prey, the emigrants were suddenly thrown into 
 the midst of the wildness of the American prime- 
 
20 American Literature 
 
 val world. All the terrors of a night in the 
 forest, which an Englishman had only thought 
 of in an atavistic dream at Hallowe'en, assailed 
 him here in colossal proportions; the remorseless, 
 elemental cruelty of the conflict between living 
 beings, which on English soil had been known 
 only in a dim, almost prehistoric, past, was in the 
 new environment a daily experience. And the 
 clash of races, the volcanic, ever-threatening 
 proximity of conquerors and conquered, the 
 inhuman relation between masters and slaves — 
 all this was too gigantic to be absorbed by the 
 eyes of a poet, too stupendous to be molded by 
 the imagination. Two hundred years and 
 more had to elapse before the poets were ca- 
 pable of absorbing the nature around them and 
 of grasping the countless problems arising 
 from the medley of races, temperaments, and 
 creeds. 
 
 The idea of making Indians the subject of 
 imaginative creation was first conceived by 
 foreigners, not by Americans. This accords 
 with the thoughts just expressed: Voltaire and 
 Chateaubriand were sufficiently distant from 
 the aborigines not to allow themselves to be 
 overpowered by the unprecedentedness of the 
 phenomenon. But the Indians of those writers 
 
The Character of American Literature 21 
 
 are not drawn from life, and the interest aroused 
 by them was due primarily not to the art of the 
 portrayal, but to their philosophico-sociological 
 aspect; the Indians were idealized in order to 
 verify the doctrine of the innate goodness of 
 human nature. "We savages are better people 
 after all!" The American writer, Sarah Went- 
 worth Morton, frankly expressed this in the 
 double title of her Indian romance: "Quabi; or 
 the Virtues of Nature." Cooper was the first 
 to be stirred by the artistic impulse in depicting 
 the Indians, and — as Indian research has shown 
 — his work was based upon thorough knowledge. 
 After the unexpected success of the Leather- 
 stocking Tales many treated the inviting sub- 
 ject-matter, but none with Cooper's freshness 
 and temperament. 
 
 The romance "Ramona," by Helen Hunt 
 Jackson (i 831-1885), is marked by a strong 
 philanthropic flavor. While the cruelties against 
 the negroes aroused the indignation and com- 
 passion of the entire world, the wrongs perpe- 
 trated against the Indians were wholly disre- 
 garded. The blacks were deprived of their 
 freedom; the redskins of their soil and con- 
 sequently of the means of existence. But the 
 ill-treatment of the negroes was a thing of daily 
 
22 American Literature 
 
 observation in the midst of Christian civiliza- 
 tion; the robbing of the Indians was carried on 
 silently, at a distance from the great centres of 
 population and the highways of commerce. 
 
 All the more laudable was the zealous advo- 
 cacy of the woman who had the courage to inter- 
 cede for the "savages," directly in the work "A 
 Century of Dishonor" (1881) and indirectly in 
 the romance "Ramona" (1884). 
 
 When Longfellow wrote "Hiawatha," he 
 was by no means intent upon artistic observa- 
 tion and portrayal; his chief object was to fix 
 the spirit, the real essence of the vanishing race. 
 As accorded best with his purpose, he took his 
 raw material from erudite literature, namely, 
 Henry R. Schoolcraft's work, "Algic Re- 
 searches." 
 
 The negroes had already been depicted by 
 W. G. Sims in 1835, as well as by E. A. Poe in a 
 number of sketches; but their real discovery for 
 literature was the work of Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe in 1852. Had "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 
 never been written, who knows whether Joel 
 Chandler Harris would have made such a loving 
 study of the negroes ? 
 
 A genuinely American subject is the psychol- 
 ogy of the Demos, the problem of how its in- 
 
The Character of American Literature 23 
 
 dividual members are constituted and how they 
 go about the task of making the democratic 
 machine serviceable to their interests. The 
 novel "Democracy," dating from 1880, of which 
 Henry Adams, the historian, is the author; Paul 
 Leicester Ford's "The Honorable Peter Ster- 
 Hngand What People Thought of Him" (1894); 
 and Winston Churchill's more recent novel, 
 "Mr. Crewe's Career," are excellent models of 
 their kind. 
 
 Financial speculation, which in America 
 transcends anything that has gone before, has 
 frequently formed the theme of representation, 
 but even Frank Norris (i 870-1902) did not 
 measure up to his theme. That highly gifted 
 story-teller, whose early death was such a great 
 loss to America and to the Anglo-Saxon world 
 in general, had no political or moralizing pur- 
 poses in view; it was art pure and simple that 
 floated before his mental vision, art, it may be, 
 of the Parisian formula of that time, but never- 
 theless art. He saw the endless wheatfields 
 bounded only by the encircling sky, those veri- 
 table, inexhaustible gold mines, the last to be 
 discovered in the Far West; he took a deep 
 interest in the sowing and reaping; the immortal 
 spirit of Mother Earth seized him like a revela- 
 
24 American Literature 
 
 tion, and he wrote "The Epic of the Wheat."* 
 Feudal service, compulsory labor, negro slavery 
 itself, were not so dreadful as the struggle de- 
 scribed by Norris of the wheat-growers against 
 the unescapable, crushing, octopus-arms of cor- 
 ruption. 
 
 *"The Octopus." — "The Pit." — The epic was conceived as a 
 trilogy, but the author did not live to finish the third volume. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FIRST PROSE WRITERS 
 
 1. The name of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), 
 who enjoyed universal fame in an exalted sphere, 
 has thus far stood the triple test of death, time, 
 and totally changed conditions. To his coun- 
 trymen he appears the most distinguished rep- 
 resentative of the eighteenth century, despite 
 such remarkable phenomena as Frederick II., 
 Emperor Joseph, Voltaire; to us outsiders he 
 seems the embodiment of sound common sense, 
 robust, middle-class morality, clear-sighted ex- 
 pediency, political efficiency, the spirit of the nat- 
 ural scientist — in brief, of all the qualities that 
 are generally looked upon as Yankee char- 
 acteristics. If not the greatest figure of the 
 age of enlightenment, he stands among the 
 greatest; and though his "Autobiography" does 
 not rank as a classic outside his own country, 
 though his popular wisdom does not enjoy the 
 esteem among us of Hebel's "Schatzkastlein," 
 for example, yet the pithiness, the indestructible 
 
 25 
 
26 American Literature 
 
 soundness of his prose, have sufficed to main- 
 tain for him, in Germany also, a high degree of 
 popularity. The good-natured masterfulness 
 in all his writings, which says quite clearly, 
 " Poor humanity, I know you, but I love you all 
 the same," constitutes the real salt of his humor, 
 and it is this that keeps him fresh to the pres- 
 ent day. Franklin, who by his incomparable 
 diplomatic successes demonstrated in practice 
 that he eminently understood how to deal with 
 men, has bequeathed to us in his letters, in his 
 "Poor Richard's Almanac," and in his proverbs, 
 a veritable treasury of wise maxims — if one but 
 knows how to read them. His oft-quoted letter 
 of recommendation might profitably be com- 
 mitted to memory by every man in public life : 
 
 Paris, 2 April, 1777. 
 Sir, 
 
 The bearer of this, who is going to America, 
 presses me to give him a letter of recommen- 
 dation, though I know nothing of him, not even 
 his name. This may seem extraordinary, but 
 I assure you it is not uncommon here. Some- 
 times, indeed, one unknown person brings an- 
 other equally unknown, to recommend him; and 
 sometimes they recommend one another! As 
 to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself 
 for his character and merits, with which he is 
 
The First Prose Writers 27 
 
 certainly better acquainted than I can possibly 
 be. I recommend him, however, to those 
 civilities which every stranger, of whom one 
 knows no harm, has a right to; and I request 
 you will do him all the good offices, and show 
 him all the favor, that, on further acquaintance, 
 you shall find him to deserve. 
 
 I have the honor to be, etc., 
 
 Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 Of his pithy sayings we cite a few examples: 
 
 He is ill clothed who is bare of virtue. 
 
 Beware of meat twice boiled, and an old foe 
 reconciled. 
 
 The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the 
 mouth of a wise man is in his heart. 
 
 He that is rich need not live sparingly, and 
 he that can live sparingly need not be rich. 
 
 He that waits upon fortune is never sure of 
 a dinner. 
 
 A house without woman or firelight is like 
 a body without soul or spirit. 
 
 Kings and bears often worry their keepers. 
 
 Light purse, heavy heart. 
 
 He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir. 
 
 Ne'er take a wife till thou hast a house (and 
 a fire) to put her in. 
 
 To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals. 
 
 He that drinks fast pays slow. 
 
28 American Literature 
 
 Franklin's short, popular pieces, which remind 
 one most vividly of Engel's "Der Philosoph 
 fiir die Welt" and of Peter Hebel's "Schatz- 
 kastlein," mentioned before, have been incorpo- 
 rated as bagatelles into the firm substance of 
 American philosophy; some have furnished the 
 English tongue with new expressions (" he has 
 an axe to grind"; "you have i5aid too dear for 
 your whistle"). With the parable of Jacques 
 Montresor, which is characteristic of Franklin's 
 attitude as a man of the world as well as of his 
 style, we shall conclude our brief sketch : 
 
 "An officer named Montresor, a worthy man, 
 was very ill. The curate of his parish, thinking 
 him likely to die, advised him to make his peace 
 with God, that he might be received into Para- 
 dise. 'I have not much uneasiness on the sub- 
 ject,' said Montresor, 'for I had a vision last 
 night which has perfectly tranquillized my 
 mind.' 'What vfsion have you had.?' said the 
 priest. 'I was,' replied Montresor, 'at the 
 gate of Paradise, with a crowd of people who 
 wished to enter, and St. Peter inquired of every 
 one to what religion he belonged. One an- 
 swered, " I am a Roman Catholic." " Well," said 
 St. Peter, "enter, and take your place there 
 among the Catholics." Another said he was of 
 
The Fitst Prose Writers 29 
 
 the Church of England. "Well," said the Saint, 
 "enter, and place yourself among the Anglicans." 
 A third said he was a Quaker. " Enter," said St. 
 Peter, "and take your place among the Quakers." 
 At length, my turn being come, he asked me of 
 what religion I was. "Alas!" said I, "poor 
 Jacques Montresor has none." " 'Tis pity," 
 said the Saint; "I know not where to place you; 
 but enter nevertheless, and place yourself where 
 you can."'" 
 
 2. Washington Irving (1783-1859) is famed 
 among Americans, particularly among New 
 Yorkers, as the author of "A History of New 
 York by Diedrich Knickerbocker" (1809), that 
 burlesque which in form is a reminder of the 
 pseudonymous publications of Chatterton's time, 
 while in substance it is not much more than the 
 merry conceit of an original humorist, a mixture 
 of harmless satire and effective caricature. 
 Irving ostensibly discovers the unpublished 
 writings of a Dutch investigator, Diedrich 
 Knickerbocker, who busied himself with the 
 history of the Dutch settlement of New Am- 
 sterdam, the New York of to-day, and he exer- 
 cises the pious duty of an editor upon these 
 literary remains. In the resulting book the 
 heroic feats of the settlers are depicted as though 
 
30 American Literature 
 
 in a comic epic. The Americans have doubtless 
 overrated this merry but not specially witty 
 performance; understanding of the local allu- 
 sions made it easier for them to seize all the 
 points intended to be made by the writer. But 
 the spirit of a great satirist hovers over the 
 work, the spirit to which we owe the creation 
 of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. 
 
 Among Europeans Irving is known chiefly 
 through his "Sketch Book," which appeared 
 ten years after the "History of New York." It 
 consists of chats, sketches, tales, experiences, 
 conceits, now fantastic, now sentimental, scarcely 
 ever of any importance, but always most care- 
 fully elaborated. 
 
 The contents are as varied as would be the 
 thoughts of a writer who travels leisurely from 
 place to place, sojourns where he finds it agree- 
 able, and sketches what strikes him. Most of 
 the graceful pages originated in England, where 
 Irving had a genial home with his brothers, and 
 where he spent many years after 1815. He 
 describes a visit to Roscoe, the historian, in 
 Liverpool, chats about rural life in England, 
 writes in elegiac tones about the royal poet of the 
 " King's Quair," dreams in the hallowed spaces 
 of Westminster Abbey, makes a detour to 
 
The First Prose Writers 31 
 
 Stratford-upon-Avon, tries in a number of 
 sketches to fix the English spirit of Christmas, 
 reflects upon the change of taste in literature, 
 relates the poignant story of the widow and her 
 son, jots down a characteristic of John Bull; and 
 in the midst of all these commonplaces, as a 
 side-issue as it were, he gives us those splendid 
 productions, which may perhaps be termed the 
 first examples of the American local tale — the 
 tale of the soil — "Rip van Winkle" and "The 
 Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The story of the 
 indolent dreamer Rip, who, in order to escape 
 from his Xantippe, wanders for days along the 
 Hudson in the lonely gorges of the Catskill 
 Mountains, and on his return to the village 
 is not recognized by anybody and does not 
 recognize any one himself, is familiar the world 
 over; Rip van Winkle is a winged name like 
 FalstafF or Tartuffe. 
 
 We can hardly understand to-day why the 
 "Sketch Book" was so specially admired by 
 Irving's contemporaries, why the rigorous critic 
 of the Edinburgh Review praised it to the skies, 
 why Byron learned it almost by heart; what is 
 certain is that no other writer did as much to 
 eradicate England's depreciation of everything 
 American, on the one hand, and American 
 
32 American Literature 
 
 animosities against the mother country on the 
 other. It is no exaggeration to say that his 
 sketch of Westminster Abbey and of Stratford 
 induced thousands of Americans to visit those 
 hallowed spots. 
 
 Irving's productions after those first-fruits of 
 his pen — "Bracebridge Hall," 1822; "Tales of 
 a Traveller," 1824; "Life and Voyages of Colum- 
 bus," 1828; "The Conquest of Granada," 1829; 
 "The Companions of Columbus," 1831; "The 
 Alhambra," 1832; "The Life of Oliver Gold- 
 smith," 1849; "Mahomet and His Successors," 
 1850; "The Life of George Washington," 1855- 
 1859 — were intended almost exclusively for 
 American readers. They were in part scholarly 
 efforts in the style of the Edinburgh Review; 
 they were certainly not European literature. 
 He revealed to those of his countrymen to whom 
 the fruits of research were not otherwise ac- 
 cessible the picturesque splendor of the Moham- 
 medan world — orientalists and poets had done 
 that for Europe many decades before. 
 
 3. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) is 
 appreciated among us to-day chiefly by boys 
 and girls, but about eighty years ago, and for a 
 long time after, he was the most widely read 
 author in the world. The inventor of the elec- 
 
The First Prose Writers 33 
 
 trie telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, said in the 
 year 1833: "In every city of Europe that I 
 visited, the works of Cooper were conspicuously 
 placed in the windows of every bookshop. They 
 are published, as soon as he produces them, in 
 thirty-four different places in Europe. They 
 have been seen by American travellers in the 
 languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constan- 
 tinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan."* 
 
 Cooper, who had passed his thirtieth year 
 before he began to write, bequeathed to poster- 
 ity a library of sixty-seven volumes; from the 
 merciless winnower. Time, only five have issued 
 as wheat,t the Leatherstocking Tales: "The 
 Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna," 
 1823; "The Last of the Mohicans," 1826; "The 
 Prairie, a Tale," 1827; "The Pathfinder, or the 
 Inland Sea," 1840; "The Deerslayer, or the 
 First War Path," 1841. 
 
 The chronology of these works demands the 
 sequence given above; we find thus that the hero 
 of the five novels, the hunter Natty Bumppo, 
 was first pictured by Cooper in the years of his 
 
 *Th. Stanton, "A Manual of American Literature,'' igog. 
 
 tBesides these the books that are read are "The Spy," 182 1, 
 and "The Pilot," 1823. The first-named novel has the War of 
 Independence as its background; the second, in which Cooper 
 turns to account his recollections of his service in the navy, por- 
 trays the adventures of John Paul Jones. 
 
34 American Literature 
 
 manhood and old age, until, through the insa- 
 tiability of his readers, the successful author 
 conceived the idea of adding a narrative of his 
 youth. If one wishes to enjoy the whole prose 
 poem, however, unconcernedly like a child, and 
 to follow the hero from his beginnings to the 
 close of his life, he must observe a different order 
 in reading them: (i) "The Deerslayer," (2) 
 "The Last of the Mohicans," (3) "The Path- 
 finder," (4) "The Pioneers," (5) "The Prairie." 
 It is not very difficult to understand the im- 
 mense popularity of the Leatherstocking Tales 
 and the fame of the writer in the first half of the 
 nineteenth century. First and foremost, the 
 longing for the dreamed-of golden age of primi- 
 tive life met him halfway. The civilized world 
 was not yet so far removed from the sentimental 
 visions of Rousseau; sensitive souls still wept 
 over Paul and Virginia; and even Chateau- 
 briand's imitations elicited boundless admira- 
 tion. For that generation, keyed to the glad 
 tidings of a return to primitiveness. Natty 
 Bumppo, a hunter living among the redskins, 
 averse to all polish but imbued with the noblest 
 humanity, was the embodiment of their ideal 
 of a man who owes all to nature, nothing to 
 civilization. Cooper, who was only moder- 
 
The First Prose Writers 35 
 
 ately gifted with the faculty of imaginative 
 reproduction, endowed the hero of the Leather- 
 stocking Tales very richly from the treasure- 
 house of his own spiritual life; it is owing to this 
 that of all Cooper's characters, Natty Bumppo 
 most strongly produces the illusion of reality. 
 
 Cooper himself, as a member of a family of 
 distinction, was deeply imbued with the prej- 
 udices of the modern social order. Observe, 
 for example, how he prepares the reader, how 
 he cajoles him, before he ventures to enlist his 
 sympathies for the children of nature. He in- 
 troduces the good-natured giant of the primeval 
 forest, Henry March, with the apology that 
 though, of course, not free from roughness such 
 as a conflict with savage nature naturally pro- 
 duces, the grandeur of so splendid a stature 
 prevented the man from appearing altogether 
 "common" — that is, the man of the people may 
 be forgiven his uncorrupted soul on account of 
 his physical perfection. 
 
 But in his inmost being Cooper was a child 
 of nature, an only half-tamed denizen of the 
 woods — a survival in the midst of the conven- 
 tions of a feeble time. His resistance to the 
 constraint of the prevailing manners manifested 
 itself even in his schooldays; and his innumer- 
 
36 American Literature 
 
 able feuds with the press and the public show 
 that he could never completely adapt himself 
 to the artificial social order — that is to say, he 
 could never quite suppress his strong individu- 
 ality for the sake of peace. 
 
 When a young fellow he was expelled from 
 college; later, at the height of his fame, he in- 
 curred the displeasure of young America and 
 then of the entire nation. And why? He had 
 travelled in Europe and by his fearless criticism 
 had attracted unfavorable attention. Upon 
 his return home he wrote a work in which he 
 held up the mirror to his countrymen. Where- 
 upon all the papers and politicians fell upon 
 him, and he endured ten years of the bitterest 
 obloquy. This could only happen to a man 
 who cannot accommodate himself to circum- 
 stances, who does not allow his convictions to be 
 circumscribed, who must live his life in his own 
 way. Hence his comprehension not only of 
 Natty Bumppo, but Ukewise of the Indians. 
 In comparison with the unquestioning self- 
 righteousness which so generally characterizes 
 the whites, Cooper's attitude toward the colored 
 races is that of an unprejudiced philosopher. 
 Leatherstocking, through whose lips Cooper ex- 
 presses his views on the race question, says: 
 
The First Prose Writers 37 
 
 "God made us all, white, black, and red; and, no 
 doubt, had his own wise intentions in coloring 
 us differently. Still, he made us in the main, 
 much the same in feelin's; though I'll not deny 
 that he gave each race its gifts. A white man's 
 gifts are Christianized, while a redskin's are more 
 for the wilderness. Thus, it would be a great 
 offence for a white man to scalp the dead; where- 
 as it's a signal vartue in an Indian. Then, ag'in, 
 a white man cannot amboosh women and chil- 
 dren in war, while a redskin may." 
 
 The humanitarian sentiment that we are all 
 descended from one father, in spite of all dif- 
 ferences of race and conditions of life, is Cooper's 
 profoundest conviction. And in sharing the 
 life of his two Indian friends, Chingachgook and 
 Uncas, Natty Bumppo does not show a trace 
 of the superiority which characterizes the atti- 
 tude of the white man toward the Indian. Just 
 the contrary. It is upon this that the charge of 
 idealizing the barbarous, inhuman Indians, so 
 long held up against him, rests. Cooper from 
 his childhood up was acquainted with a great 
 number of Indians, half tamed, who possessed 
 all the virtues which he depicts; and research 
 has shown that though they indulged in scalp- 
 ing and were merciless in pursuit of their ene- 
 
38 American Literature 
 
 mies, they possessed many virtues — above all, 
 hospitality and a spirit of self-sacrifice, not only 
 for wife and child, but for a strange friend. 
 
 Against the male characters in Cooper's novel, 
 "The Deerslayer," it might be objected that they 
 are sophisticated and rectilinear, that they follow 
 prescribed rules, as it were, in speech and action; 
 that they are always, under all circumstances, 
 the same. This does not apply to the women. 
 Judith Hutter is a maiden instinct with life, with 
 all the whims and capriciousness of a temperamen- 
 tal nature, consistent only in her inconsistency, a 
 Cleopatra of the American forest, if it be per- 
 missible to compare the small with the great. 
 Cooper has not a strong sense of humor, or he 
 could not have failed to see how much of the 
 comic he has involuntarily attached to the char- 
 acter of Hetty, otherwise so touching a figure. 
 The unselfish, lovable, sensitive, deeply pious be- 
 ing is regarded and treated by her rude associ- 
 ates as feeble-minded precisely on account of 
 those qualities. In reality, however, she is the 
 only one in the romance who acts wisely, and 
 the only one who displays any cleverness, in 
 short, the only normally sensible person in the 
 whole company. And this girl, pictured as such 
 a nai've creature, says of herself every time she 
 
The First Prose Writers 39 
 
 does anything unusually clever: " But you know 
 I am feeble-minded!"* 
 
 Was Cooper a poet ? 
 
 Creative genius, the impulse and ability to 
 portray people artistically, he possessed, as has 
 been mentioned, only in a minor measure. But 
 he possessed to a rare degree those attributes 
 which are common to all original imaginative 
 writers: a highly developed sensibility for all of 
 nature's phenomena; the most acute, even if un- 
 conscious, power of observation, which seizes 
 every detail; finally, the faculty of thinking in 
 images. These advantages were enjoyed by 
 Natty Bumppo, who obtained them from his 
 creator. Cooper. Natty's hearing is so marvel- 
 ous that he distinguishes the real cry of the 
 hawk from the Indian's imitation, a nuance 
 which often escapes the animals themselves. 
 His eye discovers a trail which a hundred chil- 
 dren of civilization have sought for hours in vain. 
 The changing moods of woods and wilds in the 
 Leatherstocking Tales are lyric masterpieces; 
 these alone would entitle Cooper to the name 
 of poet. 
 
 *See, for example, the eighteenth chapter. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 AMERICAN POETRY 
 
 The Puritan spirit which inspires the whole 
 body of American literature, not excluding the 
 humorists, is most clearly evidenced in the 
 verses of Whittier, in the novels of Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe; but Bryant also, and the host 
 of minor poets, are essentially of the same type. 
 A more penetrating insight into American im- 
 aginative writing, notably the productions of 
 the Northeast, is impossible without a knowl- 
 edge of what the Puritan spirit in America 
 signified, what it stimulated in daily Hfe, what 
 it repressed, what it created, what it ruthlessly 
 destroyed. 
 
 1. THE NATURE OF AMERICAN PURITANISM 
 
 Calvinism is the natural theology of the dis- 
 inherited; it never flourished, therefore, any- 
 where as it did in the barren hills of Scotland 
 and in the wilds of North America. The Cal- 
 vinist feels himself surrounded by naught but 
 40 
 
American Poetry 41 
 
 hostile powers; his hfe is a perpetual conflict 
 from his very birth. The farmer, who has to 
 keep up a constant struggle against untoward 
 phenomena, against the refractory soil, against 
 drought and frost, against caterpillars and a 
 host of other insect plagues; who constantly 
 sees his well-considered and most persistent 
 efforts thwarted by laws whose operations he 
 can never calculate in advance, and which give no 
 evidence of consideration for his good intentions 
 or compassion for his failures— he is naturally 
 inclined to the belief from the outset that God, 
 who created the world, is a well-meaning but 
 unquestionably a rigorous, cold being who rules 
 the world with some great purpose unknown to 
 the inhabitants of the earth. The weal and woe 
 of mankind may perhaps enter into the plan, 
 and they may not. God, who, to other be- 
 lievers in Christianity, is a loving Father, is to 
 the Calvinist a hostile Presence, threatening 
 doom — unless he should be found worthy of 
 grace. Who can know that he is so? And 
 should he find no grace, he is doomed to ever- 
 lasting perdition. 
 
 The famous Jonathan Edwards, the great- 
 est Calvinist luminary on the soil of the New 
 World, says in a sermon bearing the consoling . 
 
42 American Literature 
 
 title of Men Naturally God's Enemies: "A 
 natural man has a heart like the heart of a 
 devil. . . . The heart of a natural man 
 is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, 
 cold corpse is of vital heat." And in an- 
 other sermon upon Sinners in the Hands of an 
 Angry God: "The God that holds you over the 
 pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some 
 loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and 
 is dreadfully provoked . . . you are ten 
 thousand times as abominable in his eyes as 
 the most hateful and venomous serpent is in 
 ours. . . . You hang by a slender thread, 
 with the flames of divine wrath flashing about 
 it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you, he 
 will be so far from pitying you in your doleful 
 case . . . that he'll only tread you under- 
 foot; . . . he'll crush out your blood and 
 make it fly and it shall be sprinkled on his gar- 
 ments so as to stain all his raiment. . . ." 
 
 What an efi^ect this doctrine of terror had 
 upon sensitive natures is described by one of the 
 initiated, a minister's daughter. 
 
 "What have I not read and suffered at the 
 hands of theologians ? How many lonely hours, 
 day after day, have I bent the knee in fruitless 
 prayer that God would grant me this great. 
 
American Poetry 43 
 
 unknown grace, for without it how dreary is 
 life! 
 
 "We are in ourselves so utterly helpless — 
 life is so hard, so inexplicable, that we stand in 
 perishing need of some helping hand, some sen- 
 sible, appreciable connection with God. And 
 yet for years every cry of misery, every breath 
 of anguish, has been choked by the theological 
 proofs of theology — that God is my enemy, or 
 that I am his; that every effort I make toward 
 him but aggravates my offence; and that this 
 unknown gift, which no child of Adam ever 
 did compass of himself, is so completely in my 
 own power that I am every minute of my life 
 to blame for not possessing it." (Har- 
 riet Beecher Stowe, "Oldtown Folks," i, page 
 
 256.) 
 
 For the poor, for the stepchildren of Nature 
 and Fate, this creed was a most potent, because 
 personal, truth. An enemy, not a loving Father, 
 had given them their accursed existence, and 
 thus it was a consolation to know that the 
 favored, the lucky ones of this world, were ad- 
 vancing toward eternal damnation, while they, 
 who were languishing in this life, would be the 
 first in the life everlasting. The doctrine of 
 election by grace, of a divine aristocracy is, as 
 
44 American Literature 
 
 the historian Bancroft once observed, the most 
 exalted conceit of human pride. The needy 
 said to the privileged classes: "You point to 
 your fifteen ancestors ? We, the elect, were ap- 
 pointed by God the aristocracy of the world 
 from the beginning of creation. Whose nobility 
 is more ancient .'"' 
 
 The farmers of New England, like the Scotch 
 cotters of to-day, were extremely well versed in 
 theology. Farmer Marvyn, as Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe depicts him, tilled the soil with his own 
 hands, but in his leisure hours and on Sundays 
 he was an eager, thoughtful reader whose at- 
 tention scarcely any production worthy of 
 notice, in Biblical exegesis or theological lore 
 in general, would escape. He did not read un- 
 critically; his books were full of marginal notes 
 of a polemical character. The sons— and daugh- 
 ters — followed this model, and independence of 
 thought became thus the inalienable heritage 
 of every Puritan. 
 
 The Puritanic way of observing the Sabbath 
 made the Lord's day a torment instead of a rec- 
 reation. Two illustrations from Alice Morse 
 Earle's book, "The Sabbath in Puritan New 
 England," will suffice: 
 
 "Jonathan and Susannah Smith were fined 
 
American Poetry 45 
 
 5 s. for smiling during service." "Two lovers, 
 John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused 
 of and tried for sitting together on the Lord's 
 day under an apple tree." 
 
 Puritan New England, like Scotland in the 
 more modern history of the British poHty, con- 
 stituted the steely point of the nation's spear. 
 The hard, niggardly, refractory soil of the New 
 England States has contributed to the peculiar 
 mixture which is termed the American national 
 character the elements to which it preeminently 
 owes its qualities of endurance, of tenacity, of 
 conquering fbrce. Efficiency— " faculty" in the 
 language of New England — is synonymous there 
 with virtue; all the conceptions associated with 
 the Greek arete and the Latin virtus become 
 vivid to a Yankee of the old stamp on mention 
 of the word "efficiency." To efficiency every- 
 thing is possible, everything attainable; for 
 efficiency there are no insurmountable obstacles, 
 no impassable gulfs. And efficiency is "elected" 
 to rule the weak and helpless, to force them into 
 its service. Puritanic efficiency takes the lead 
 in the American States as the Doric "virtue" 
 vanquished the Ionic genius, as the barrenness 
 of the Judaic chalk-clifFs brought under sub- 
 jection the wealth and abundance of Samaria. 
 
46 American Literature 
 
 The ambition of all the gifted school-children 
 of New England, even the poorest, turned 
 toward a university education and literary re- 
 nown. Harvard College was the new Jerusa- 
 lem, the ideal of all aspiring youth. Benjamin 
 Franklin and J. G. Whittier longed for that 
 high aim without ever attaining it. 
 
 2. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF PURITAN POETRY 
 
 All that made the settlers in New England 
 irresistible — their intense religiosity, the un- 
 alterable conviction of their election, their mod- 
 est wants and along with this a constant care 
 for the morrow, their humbleness toward God 
 and their inflexible pride toward man, their 
 feeling for freedom and independence, their 
 strong sense of justice — were distinguishing 
 marks of these poets, genuine descendants of 
 those Puritan forefathers. This or that one 
 among them may on the surface have lifted 
 himself above this Calvinist heritage; but in the 
 blood, in marrow and muscle, the Puritan spirit, 
 ineradicable, lives on. One should like to re- 
 gard the freethinker, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
 and the naturalist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as 
 completely emancipated, but they themselves 
 confess that they are subject to the Puritan 
 
American Poetry 47 
 
 tradition.* What Bryant said of himself ap- 
 plies to the whole group: what they had seen 
 and heard as children at home clung to their 
 souls unto death. 
 
 That is the strongest side of their poetry. 
 When they sing of hberty and equality their 
 song is as irresistible as the sword of their 
 ancestors. Bryant's ode. The Antiquity of 
 Freedom, rises high above all the English odes 
 of older or more modern times. To these poets 
 the fight against the slavery of the Southern 
 States was a matter of sacred earnestness, its 
 most fundamental basis unselfish conviction; 
 that is why of the countless poems written on 
 behalf of the emancipation of the slaves those of 
 the Puritan group alone have poetic content, the 
 ring of genuine, personal feeling; such, for ex- 
 ample, are Bryant's Our Country's Call\ and 
 The Death of Slavery,X Expostulation,^ Massa- 
 chusetts to Virginia,'^ etc. And with this spirit 
 of independence they did not shrink from turn- 
 ing against their own forefathers. Puritan 
 
 ♦Nathaniel Hawthorne, " The Scarlet Letter." Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, "Over the Teacups." 
 tC. H. Page, "The Chief American Poets," p. 34. 
 JStedman, "An American Anthology," p. 66. 
 §Page, p. 262. 
 llPage, p. 270. 
 
48 American Literature 
 
 poets and prose writers are never more indig- 
 nant, never more powerful, than when they tell of 
 the spiritual pride and the rage of persecution 
 of the first settlers. This flaming wrath makes 
 Whittier's Cassandra Southwick* one of his most 
 gripping poems. 
 
 A leading characteristic of the Puritan group 
 of poets is the conviction of their election and 
 divine consecration: they have, like Caedmon, 
 the Saxon shepherd in Bede's legend, been in- 
 spired in order that they might announce what 
 is high and holy to mankind. The calling of 
 poet is to them, therefore, a high and holy call- 
 ing, an unsought, onerous office Hke that of the 
 prophets of old.f 
 
 Their love of freedom is intimately allied 
 with pride in their American home, the home 
 that their forefathers wrested from the wilder- 
 ness, that they themselves wrung from the op- 
 pressor's hand. That is why the patriotic 
 poetry of that circle flourished with such par- 
 ticular brilliance. Bryant's song of defiance. 
 Oh Mother of a Mighty Race,% is an excellent 
 example of this type of American lyric. 
 
 *Page, p. 267. 
 
 t "Bryant, The Poet," Page, p. 29. Emerson, Merlin, Page, 
 p. 81. 
 
 IStedman, p. 62. 
 
American Poetry 49 
 
 The energy and unrelaxing industry of the 
 New England Puritans, bred of the ceaseless 
 struggle with the most adverse conditions, and, 
 coupled with these, the iron purpose — clear, 
 triumphant — stamp their literature as well. 
 Trifling talk, for the sake of talking, is not a 
 thing for the Puritans; there is ever some pur- 
 pose in view. Instruction, edification, amuse- 
 ment, persuasion — some effect is always aimed 
 at. If a spirit as dreamy as Longfellow proclaims 
 the doctrine "In the beginning was the deed," 
 we may assuredly characterize this as a com- 
 mon trait of the Puritan group. The famous 
 village blacksmith with his daily "Something 
 attempted, something done" is the American 
 ideal. 
 
 The poets of New England occupy a distinc- 
 tive position in American literature, as does 
 their special section among the other divisions 
 of the United States. The states of Maine, 
 New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, 
 Rhode Island, and Connecticut were the real 
 starting-point of the North American Republic, 
 the chief seat of intellectual life, and the only 
 ones — ^Virginia stands by itself in every respect 
 — that can point to an old civilization and are 
 fully conscious of this aristocracy. There are 
 
50 American Literature 
 
 probably not many families in England that 
 have occupied the same house continuously 
 since the third decade of the seventeenth century 
 and can show an unbroken pedigree of three 
 hundred years. Such, however, is the case in 
 many farms of New England, for example in 
 the home of the poet Whittier. 
 
 In feeling these Puritan lyrists remind one 
 of the greatest writers of song*; Goethe's longing 
 for peace found no profounder expression than 
 is voiced in Longfellow's Hymn to the Night. 
 What the Americans lack is the divine harmony 
 which makes a poem a song. The music of 
 verse is vouchsafed to hardly a single one of 
 them. Bryant is the most melodious of the 
 entire group, Emerson the least gifted with the 
 sense of sound among them all. 
 
 That in English poetry less attention is paid 
 to the purity of rhyme than in other languages, 
 is a familiar fact; the so-called sight-rhymes like 
 love and move, are and care, are a license to 
 which even eminent talent resorts. But rarely 
 
 The deepest, most genuine feelings of the Puritan poets are 
 manifested in their lyrics. This is most clearly perceptible in the 
 minor poets. James Gates Percival (1795-1856) was, in his most 
 comprehensive and ambitious work, Prometheus (1820), an imita- 
 tor of Byron and Shelley; in his lyric poems, on the contrary, his 
 verse was of an independent. Puritanic character. His patriotic 
 New England would alone be evidence enough that he belongs to 
 that group. 
 
American Poetry 51 
 
 do they appear in such disturbing abundance 
 as with Emerson. The elegy on the death of his 
 son {Threnody), so fraught with feeling and 
 thought, is, therefore, to be read with the eye 
 alone; to the ear dissonances like mourn — 
 return, man — vain, are intolerable. 
 
 3. AMERICAN POETRY BEFORE BRYANT 
 
 William Cullen Bryant is designated by Eng- 
 lishmen as the first American poet, and the Amer- 
 icans are not disinclined to subscribe to that 
 judgment. And since the poem Thanatopsis, 
 upon which this judgment is based, appeared in 
 1 817, that year is straightway designated as the 
 natal year of American poetry. This sort of 
 criticism and literary history presupposes iron- 
 bound rulesof literary aesthetics. For the present 
 such do not exist for us. One cannot, therefore, 
 go so far as to annihilate at a stroke the whole 
 of the somewhat ample body of poetry before 
 Bryant. 
 
 Even from the wholly Puritan period, 
 shunned by the Muses and the Graces, there are 
 many verses worthy of being revived.* The 
 Puritan hymn, whose boldness and hard force 
 
 *W. B. Otis, "American Verse,'' 1625-1807, New York, 1909. 
 
52 American Literature 
 
 is a characteristic expression of American-Pur- 
 itan art, dates from that sterile time. 
 
 Let children hear the mighty deeds 
 Which God performed of old, 
 Which in our younger years we saw. 
 And which our fathers told. 
 
 He bids us make his glories known, 
 His works of power and grace; 
 And we'll convey his wonders down 
 Through every rising race. 
 
 Our lips shall tell them to our sons, 
 And they again to theirs; 
 That generations yet unborn 
 May teach them to their heirs. 
 
 Thus shall they learn, in God alone 
 Their hope securely stands; 
 That they may ne'er forget his works. 
 But practise his commands. 
 
 It is not to be wondered that the Puritan 
 spirit produced no worldly songs; for the joys 
 of the cup, vernal breezes, love's rapture and 
 pain, were tabooed as subjects for poetry. It 
 is, on the contrary, a cause for astonishment 
 that even the rigid discipline of New England 
 was unable to kill the love song. One such, 
 
American Poetry 53 
 
 gathered from the mouth of the people, has been 
 set down by Irving Bacheller in "Eben Holden." 
 Its rarity alone should justify its reproduction: 
 
 I was goin' t' Salem one bright summer day, 
 When I met a fair maiden a-goin' my way. 
 Oh, my fallow, faddeling fallow, faddel away. 
 
 An' many a time I had seen her before, 
 But I never dare tell 'er the love that I bore. 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 "Oh, where are you goin', my purty fair maid?" 
 "Oh, sir, I am goin' t' Salem," she said. 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 "Oh, why are you goin' so far in a day? 
 
 Very warm is the weather and long is the way." 
 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 "Oh, sir, I've forgotten, I hev, I declare. 
 
 But it's nothin' to eat an' it's nothin' to wear." 
 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 "Oho! then I hev it, ye purty young miss! 
 I'll bet it is only three words an' a kiss." 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 "Young woman, young woman, oh, how will it dew 
 If I go see yer lover 'n bring 'em t' you?" 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
54 American Literature 
 
 "*Sa very long journey," says she, "I am told, 
 An' before ye got back they would surely be cold." 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 " I hev 'em right with me, I vum an' I vow. 
 An' if you don't object I'll deliver 'em now." 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 She laid her fair head all on to my breast, 
 
 An' ye wouldn't know more if I tol' ye the rest. 
 
 Oh, my fallow, etc. 
 
 Philip Freneau (1752-1832) of New York, 
 whose ancestors emigrated from France at the 
 time of the Huguenot persecution and found 
 their way to America, was remarkably versatile 
 and prolific, but very uneven in temper and 
 inspiration. He wrote satires, polished oc- 
 casional poems in the style of Prior and the 
 Cavaliers, odes, fables, translations — every- 
 thing that has been prejudicial to his memory. 
 But who would hesitate, had the name of the 
 author remained unknown, to ascribe such 
 poems as The Wild Honeysuckle or On the Ruins 
 of a Country Inn* to one of the English poets of 
 note of the eighteenth century ? 
 
 The political satire, McFingal, by John 
 
 *Stedman, 3-8. 
 
American Poetry 55 
 
 Trumbull (1752-1831), can creditably stand the 
 test of comparison with its model, Butler's 
 Hudibras, and the epic of Timothy Dwight 
 (1752-1817), The Conquest of Canaan, was 
 praised by Cowper. 
 
 If there were no lyrics and no epics, measured 
 by the Greek standard, there was, at any rate, 
 poetry. And the further we advance from the 
 days of political nonage, the richer is the per- 
 centage of precious metals in the mass of dead 
 lode. To be sure, Alexander Wilson is frankly 
 prosaic, directly utilitarian. He sounds the 
 praises of the feathered songster not only be- 
 cause it heralds the spring, but because it 
 destroys the noxious canker-worm and cater- 
 pillar. George P. Norris sings of commonplace 
 feelings in schoolboy verses, Peabody writes 
 dull elegies. Prentice riots in a leaden plethora 
 of words, Lydia Sigourney, so highly lauded in 
 her time, is rhetorical, didactic, pompous. For 
 that matter, America is, indeed, inclined to 
 homely moralizing, as is evidenced by the long- 
 lived admiration for Tupper's Proverbial Philos- 
 ophy* The poem. Home, Sweet Home, which 
 has immortalized the mediocre J. H. Payne 
 
 *Cf. Leon Kellner, "Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der 
 Konigin Viktoria," Leipzig, 1909, p. 369. 
 
56 American Literature 
 
 (1791-1852), is an illustration of that common- 
 place verse which even after Bryant's advent 
 was regarded as poetry in America : 
 
 Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, 
 Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home; 
 A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there, 
 Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with 
 
 elsewhere. 
 Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
 There's no place like home! There's no place like 
 
 home! 
 
 An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain; 
 O give me my lowly thatched cottage again! 
 The birds singing gaily, that came at my call, — 
 Give me them, — and the peace of mind, dearer than 
 
 all! 
 Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
 There's no place like home, there's no place like 
 
 home! 
 
 How sweet 'tis to sit 'neath a fond father's smile, 
 And the cares of a mother to soothe and beguile! 
 Let others delight mid new pleasures to roam. 
 But give me, oh, give me, the pleasures of home! 
 
 Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
 There's no place like home! There's no place like 
 home! 
 
American Poetry 57 
 
 To thee I'll return, overburdened with care; 
 The heart's dearest solace will smile on me there; 
 No more from that cottage again will I roam; 
 Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home! 
 
 Home, home, sweet, sweet home! 
 There's no place like home, there's no place like home ! 
 
 And spirits of a higher strain follov^^ed slavishly 
 in the footsteps of the English poets, Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Southey, just then come into vogue; 
 somewhat later in those of Byron, Shelley, and 
 Keats; others take the German romanticists as 
 models. To mention only the most eminent 
 as examples: Washington Allston (i 779-1 843) 
 reminds one of Wordsworth by his contempla- 
 tive art tinged with spiritual feeling as well as by 
 his preference for the unheeded small things of 
 nature; the same applies to Richard Henry Dana, 
 the elder (1787-1879), and Charles Sprague 
 (1791-1875). Maria Gowen Brooks (1795-1845), 
 in her fanciful epic, Zophiel, is completely under 
 Southey's influence. Edward C. Pinkney ( 1 802- 
 1828) was a disciple of Thomas Moore. 
 
 Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), whose 
 poem, Marco Bozzaris, is to the present day re- 
 cited in American schools as a model of sus- 
 tained diction, reminds one of Byron and Wil- 
 helm Miiller in every stanza; James Abraham 
 
58 American Literature 
 
 Hillhouse (1789-1841) and James Gates Percival 
 (i 795-1 856) sought in vain to approach Shelley. 
 Two stanzas from Marco Bozzaris will con- 
 firm this characterization : 
 
 At midnight, in the forest shades, 
 
 Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band. 
 True as the steel of their tried blades, 
 
 Heroes in heart and hand. 
 There had the Persian thousands stood, 
 There had the glad earth drunk their blood 
 
 On old Plataea's day; 
 And now there breathed that haunted air 
 The sons of sires who conquered there, 
 With arm to strike and soul to dare. 
 
 As quick, as far as they. 
 
 An hour passed on — the Turk awoke; 
 
 That bright dream was his last; 
 He woke — to hear his sentries shriek, 
 "To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!" 
 He woke — to die midst flame, and smoke, 
 And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke. 
 
 And death-shots falling thick and fast 
 As lightnings from the mountain-cloud; 
 And heard, with voice as trumpet loud, 
 
 Bozzaris cheer his band: 
 "Strike — till the last armed foe expires; 
 Strike — for your altars and your fires; 
 Strike — for the green graves of your sires; 
 
 God — and your native land!" 
 
American Poetry 59 
 
 And if a poet did once have an hour of illu- 
 mination and succeed in giving adequate expres- 
 sion to his inspiration, he spoiled his work by 
 yielding to the hereditary Puritan craving for 
 commentary and didacticism. Thus, for ex- 
 ample, Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), 
 in his poem, Parrhasius* relates how the 
 Athenian painter, Parrhasius, observes a gray- 
 haired but athletic-looking slave who has been 
 exposed for sale all day and has borne every 
 sort of indignity with stoical self-control. Only 
 when the miserable man is alone and his muscles 
 relax does his unutterable anguish show itself 
 in his face. Then the artist is seized with the 
 creative longing, and he has the prisoner brought 
 to him that he may produce the master work 
 of his career — a Prometheus from life. The 
 painter has the old man chained, his scarcely 
 healed wounds torn open, and has him put to 
 the rack: the keener his suflFering, the more does 
 the artist rejoice, and when he succeeds in con- 
 juring the dimming eye of the dying man upon 
 the canvas, his heart exults at his triumph. f 
 
 But the design is spoiled at the close by the 
 
 *Stedman, p. 103. 
 
 fThe motif of the artist in whom the impulse of creation crushes 
 all human emotion is used by Chamisso in his poem, Das Kruzifix 
 (1830). 
 
6o American Literature 
 
 poet's wearisome sermon against boundless am- 
 bition! 
 
 And yet in spite of all that, in spite of crudity 
 and homeliness, in spite of moralizing and 
 imitation, it would be unfair to pass over all 
 the poetry prior to and during the time of Bry- 
 ant in disdainful silence. It contains isolated 
 grains of purest, golden poesy. Thomas Hast- 
 ings wrote a number of religious poems which 
 maintain an honorable place among the best 
 of that species; Samuel Woodworth (1785- 
 1842), in his melodious, heart-felt Old Oaken 
 Bucket, bequeathed to American literature a 
 touching remembrance of the paternal home, a 
 poem still unforgotten; George Tucker (1775- 
 1861) has by his one elegy. Days of My Youth, 
 earned the right to be placed beside George 
 Herbert or Ludwig Heinrich Holty. 
 
 And Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), who 
 died at such an early age, and who in his am- 
 bitious poem. The Culprit Fay, shows himself 
 an imitator of Coleridge, produced in the patri- 
 otic lyric. The American Flag, a poem which, 
 with its spontaneous, vigorous diction, has suc- 
 cessfully defied all adverse criticism and still 
 lives on to-day. The fame achieved by this 
 poem is, it is true, shared by Joseph Hopkin- 
 
American Poetry 6i 
 
 son's inferior, Hail, Columbia; the Star-Spangled 
 Banner, by Francis Scott Key; and the unpre- 
 tending America, by the clergyman, Samuel 
 Francis Smith. These four poems and Yankee 
 Doodle are known the world over. 
 
 4. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
 WilHam Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was 
 the son of a physician. He received the good 
 education customary in Massachusetts, and 
 was to devote himself to law; but he was ir- 
 resistibly drawn to literature. He had already 
 aroused attention as a lad of fourteen by a 
 satirical poem on Jefferson; his elegy, Thana- 
 topsis (18 1 7), made him famous at one stroke. 
 Unfortunately, he soon after became a journal- 
 ist in New York, and the hours he could devote 
 to art were numbered. Bryant's first serious 
 poem is a reminder in form and content, in 
 melody and temper, of the long series of ele- 
 gists who, in the eighteenth century, gave the 
 keynote to contemplative lyric poetry and 
 obtained for it a European appreciation. 
 Edward Young's Night Thoughts, Thomas 
 Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, hov- 
 ered before the youthful Bryant when he 
 
62 American Literature 
 
 wrote Thanatopsis; the pliantly soft blank verse 
 he learned, to be sure, rather from Keats and 
 Shelley. The unobtrusive, contemplative di- 
 dacticism of a Cowper and Wordsworth — a 
 didacticism which in Pope had taken the severe 
 form of exposition and argument — combined 
 with the melodious, variegated softness of the 
 verse characteristic of Keats and Shelley, gives 
 Bryant his distinctive place in American lyric 
 poetry: 
 
 To him who in the love of nature holds 
 Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
 A various language; for his gayer hours 
 She has a voice of gladness, and a smile 
 And eloquence of beauty, and she glides 
 Into his darker musings, with a mild 
 And healing sympathy, that steals away 
 Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts 
 Of the last bitter hour come like a blight 
 Over thy spirit, and sad images 
 Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall. 
 And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, 
 Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart; — 
 Go forth, under the open sky, and list 
 To Nature's teachings, while from all around — 
 Earth and her waters, and the depths of air — 
 Comes a still voice — Yet a few days, and thee 
 The all-beholding sun shall see no more 
 
American Poetry 63 
 
 In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, 
 Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, 
 Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist 
 Thy image. 
 
 An illustration of how Bryant gives spon- 
 taneous, purpose-free expression to a phenom- 
 enon of nature, but, under the influence of 
 didactic tradition, provides it with an instruc- 
 tive close, is the short poem. To a Waterfowl, 
 which Hartley Coleridge exaggeratedly pro- 
 nounced the best short poem in the English 
 language, a judgment to which Matthew Arnold 
 subscribed. The poet sees the waterfowl cleave 
 the pathless air, and glorifies the mysterious 
 Power that guides the bird so unerringly to its 
 unseen goal. The poem concludes thus : 
 
 He who, from zone to zone. 
 
 Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight. 
 
 In the long way that I must tread alone 
 
 Will lead my steps aright. 
 
 It is not at all the purpose of these remarks to 
 set Bryant down as an imitator or an epigone; 
 only to point out his historical connections and 
 spiritual relationships. A poem like The Even- 
 ing Wind or Robert of Lincoln at once calls up 
 
64 American Literature 
 
 Shelley; another, To the Fringed Gentian, arouses 
 memories of Wordsworth. But every word of 
 these lyric portrayals of moods bears the im- 
 press of personal experience; the reader has this 
 conviction irrespective of the fact that Bryant 
 sings only of native birds and flowers. That 
 we absorbed Wordsworth and Shelley before we 
 did Bryant is not his fault. 
 
 What is there, in the authorship of all the 
 world, that is absolutely new ? 
 
 The art of the genuine poet to make every 
 idea, though it has been thought a thousand 
 times before, appear as new as if it had flashed 
 across a human brain for the first time, is char- 
 acteristic of Bryant in a high degree; and the 
 secret of this incommunicable magic is, in his 
 case, that he apprehends the most ordinary 
 phenomena with the deepest, the strongest 
 feelings. What an endless array of things have 
 been sung and said of the concept of the past! 
 Its irrevocableness, unapproachableness, relent- 
 lessness, but also its generative force and 
 imperishableness — poets and thinkers have told 
 us all that. But on reading Bryant's poem. 
 The Past, one is thrilled by every stanza 
 as if no one had ever said anything of the 
 kind. 
 
Americnn Poetry 65 
 
 Bryant wus fully conscious v->f his mastery 
 of blank Yorso; that save him the ci>uragc to 
 translate Homer into Knsilish. to enter the lists, 
 therefore, with n\en like Chapman and Pope — 
 not to speak of mou^ modern translators — 
 and not without success. 
 
 5. WHITTIKR 
 
 Closest to the thou^tht and feeHng of the j-xw 
 ple» nay, part and parcel of them, is the farmer's 
 son, John Greenleaf Whittier (iSo^-iSgj), who, 
 nvore than any other writer, reflects the Sunday 
 spirit of Piuitan New Ens;land. For with the 
 fanners and wix^dcutters of this region s<.> scantily 
 favored by natvire, with the anisans and fisher- 
 men, shopkeepers and teamsters, as in the case 
 of all ^.'alvinist-hred per>ples — for example, the 
 Sci^tch -we must distin|^ish two kinds of souls : 
 iMi we^knclaYS the New £n§lander is hard, 
 sober, filled with the care of making a li\nng, a 
 passion f\>r gain, and an aut\^matic impulse to 
 hold on to what he has; he is completely bound 
 up in business. 1.V Sundays he is a different 
 being: open tx-* all nc^le incit«m«nts, a loving 
 nei^bor, a self-sacrificin|t citiien» filled with a 
 sancere desire to show himsdf wwrthy of the 
 |:race ^vf the elect. From this Sunday nx>od <rf 
 
66 American Literature 
 
 the plain man of the people did all the creations 
 of Whittier spring; that is why no other poet of 
 New England has been so well understood and 
 so widely read. 
 
 By his family history as well as by his own 
 course of life Whittier is held up to youth as a 
 model of vigorous manhood, of that wondrous 
 Puritan stock that subjugated America. An 
 ancestor of the family was among the first 
 settlers of New England. He had ten children, 
 of whom five were sons, each six feet high and of 
 powerful frame. The youngest of these giants 
 had nine children. Of these the youngest had 
 eleven children. The youngest of these was the 
 father of our poet. John did not take after his 
 kind. He had too Httle physique and too much 
 spirit for a husbandman. He went to the 
 city, therefore, and became a journalist, but of 
 a peculiar sort, for his pen was devoted almost 
 exclusively to the cause of negro emanci- 
 pation. 
 
 What brings Whittier still closer to his 
 readers of to-day is the circumstance that he 
 sprang from Quaker stock and was bred in the 
 principles of that sect. The democratic idea 
 in Puritanism, the equality of all men before 
 God, was carried, in theory, by the Quakers to 
 
American Poetry 67 
 
 its extreme; more than the general use of "thee" 
 they could not, of course, actually put into 
 practice. Of far greater significance is it that 
 they deemed it possible for every individual, 
 quite independently of position, descent, edu- 
 cation, course of life, to receive the "inner light" 
 through the Holy Spirit. This was the strong- 
 est, most consistent denial of authority; in this 
 sense the Quakers were the most extreme Puri- 
 tans. 
 
 But this confidence granted to the individual 
 signified an entirely new side to religion: rigidity 
 of creed, intolerant orthodoxy, was superseded 
 by a mild latitude. Every one was answerable, 
 in his own way, for his soul's salvation — not by 
 an unchallengeable confession of faith, but by 
 his mode of life, by deeds of love and justice. 
 Along this road the Quakers sped centuries 
 ahead of the Puritans, so closely related to them 
 in creed; and, starting from premises wholly 
 different from those of the age of enlighten- 
 ment, they arrived at the same result — humani- 
 tarianism. 
 
 Whittier is the poet of this humanitarianism, 
 and it is this that gives him his distinctive 
 place in American literature. The concluding 
 stanzas of the poem, Jn Autograph, in which he 
 
68 American Literature 
 
 writes his own epitaph, happily express the posi- 
 tion he occupies : 
 
 And while my words are read, 
 Let this at least be said: 
 "Whate'er his life's defeatures. 
 He loved his fellow-creatures. 
 
 " If, of the Law's stone table. 
 To hold he scarce was able 
 The first great precept fast, 
 He kept for man the last. 
 
 "Through mortal lapse and dulness 
 What lacks the Eternal Fulness, 
 If still our weakness can 
 Love Him in loving man ? 
 
 "Age brought him no despairing 
 Of the world's future faring; 
 In human nature still 
 He found more good than ill. 
 
 "To all who dumbly suffered. 
 His tongue and pen he offered; 
 His life was not his own, 
 Nor lived for self alone. 
 
 "Hater of din and riot 
 He lived in days unquiet; 
 And, lover of all beauty. 
 Trod the hard ways of duty. 
 
American Poetry 69 
 
 "He meant no wrong to any, 
 He sought the good of many, 
 Yet knew both sin and folly, — 
 May God forgive him wholly!" 
 
 \\'hittier's Proem in the first collection of his 
 poems* very modestly indicates the character 
 of his poetry. He has saturated himself with 
 the English poetry of the sixteenth, seventeenth, 
 and eighteenth centuries; yet he feels that the 
 melody of a Milton, the spirit of a Marvel, 
 the deeply penetrative feeling for nature of a 
 Cowper or a Wordsworth, the psychology of a 
 Shakespeare, are unattainable by him. But he 
 has a heart for the suffering of humanity, a 
 vivid sense for liberty and justice: that will be 
 found in his verses. 
 
 And in reality he promises rather too little 
 thaiT too much. His songs of freedom and 
 brotherhood have an Isaiah-like ring, as have 
 those of Swinburne; only the American shares 
 with the Old Testament prophet his immovable 
 faith in God. 
 
 Whittier has command of the entire vocabu- 
 lary of English literature from Shakespeare to 
 Tennyson, but he prefers to use only the noblest 
 expressions; just as he closes his eyes to what 
 
 *Stcdmjii, p. 128. 
 
JO American Literature 
 
 is mean, in spite of being endowed with the 
 keenest observation. He knows all sides of 
 human nature, but prefers to glorify the brighter 
 ones. His poem. Prophetess* shows him as 
 a student and delineator of human nature of 
 unusual insight. 
 
 The ballad is almost a characteristic of Whit- 
 tier and Longfellow — only Longfellow takes 
 his matter preferably from a distance in time and 
 space, while Whittier, on the contrary, draws 
 from his immediate surroundings, as in Maud 
 Muller or Parson Avery. 
 
 Whittier in his Songs of Labor, which do not 
 confine themselves to the glorification of labor 
 in general — as do, for example, the poems of 
 the English Socialists, Mackay and William 
 Morrisf — but sing of the honorable work of the 
 cobbler — with all the prosaic details of footwear: 
 heel, sole, upper|— sails close to the common- 
 place; that he happily escapes that danger he 
 owes to his high native qualities and, above all, 
 to his lofty pathos impregnated with the teach- 
 ings of the Bible. 
 
 *Stedman, p. 138. 
 
 fLeon Kellner, " Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Koni- 
 gin Viktoria," pp. 159 and 525. 
 {Page, p, 273. 
 
American Poetry 71 
 
 Whittier's Centennial Hymn* with its re- 
 sounding organ-tone — 
 
 Our father's God! from out whose hand 
 The centuries fall like grains of sand — 
 
 may have floated before Kipling's mind when, 
 in 1897, after the noise of the Jubilee, he com- 
 posed his famous Recessional. 
 
 6. MINOR POETS 
 
 The clergyman John Pierpont (1785-1866) 
 is still remembered on account of his songs 
 against slavery. The Fugitive Slave's Apos- 
 trophe to the North Storf rivals the masterpieces 
 of the entire class, the slave-songs of Bryant, 
 Whittier, and Longfellow. 
 
 Puritanical — that is, not appealing to the 
 senses — restrained, but full of temperament, are 
 certain poems of Emily Judson (1817-1854) — 
 known through her volume of prose sketches, 
 Alderhrook — ^who, as the wife of the missionary, 
 Adoniram Judson, spent a number of years in 
 Bengal. There, at the sick-bed of her husband, 
 she wrote the splendid poem, her own experi- 
 
 *Stedman, p. 140. 
 fStedman, p. 128. 
 
72 American Literature 
 
 ence, Watching, which will outlive her fame as a 
 narrator. 
 
 Much good will but slight capacity was 
 brought to the poet's calling by Thomas Will- 
 iam Parsons (1819-1892), the translator of 
 Dante. Parsons has neither deep emotion, nor 
 thought, nor melody, nor taste. The poem. 
 Dirge, For One Who Fell in Battle, is character- 
 istic of his commonplace style: 
 
 Room for a soldier! lay him in the clover; 
 
 He loved the fields, and they shall be his cover; 
 
 Make his mound with her who called him once her 
 
 lover: 
 Where the rain may rain upon it. 
 Where the sun may shine upon it. 
 Where the lamb hath lain upon it, 
 And the bee will dine upon it. 
 
 Far higher in the scale stands Jones Very 
 (1813-1880). He has a spark of the spirit of 
 Transcendentalism, strong Puritanic faith — 
 even if not in the old Puritanic God — and not a 
 little sense for rhythm, which Parsons lacked. 
 His German translator, Albert Ritter, accords 
 him exaggerated appreciation {Jones Very, der 
 Dichter des Christentums, Linz, 1903). 
 
 WilHam Wetmore Story (1819-1895), who at 
 
American Poetry 73 
 
 first pursued la\y, not without success, then 
 abandoned it, and as a sculptor attained a 
 prominent place, chose by preference, as poet, 
 antique subjects, such as Praxiteles and Phryne 
 and Cleopatra, but never achieved with those 
 more than a feeble rhetoricism. Only where 
 the Puritan blood asserts itself does he find 
 the strong word for the strong feeling. The 
 poem, lo Fictis, a hymn to those who have fallen 
 by the wayside, deserves a place among the best 
 verses of American literature. 
 
 Julia Ward Howe, who would otherwise be 
 classed among the minor poets, had the one 
 great inspiration of her life when, concentrating 
 all the force of emotion, she wrote the Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic. Nothing stronger has 
 flowed from the pen of Whittier himself. 
 
 Nowhere else, perhaps, do we find so many 
 versifiers who have not received "the call" as in 
 the more modern American literature. Frank- 
 lin, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne knew their 
 limitations, and were careful not to exceed them. 
 Not so in the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Almost every writer of that period es- 
 sayed poetic flights. This arouses the suspicion 
 in advance that the Americans of that period 
 have not a very exalted conception of the nature 
 
74 American Literature 
 
 of poetry. The prolific Richard Henry Stod- 
 dard (1825-1903), whom the American critic 
 Stedman pronounced the most eminent of 
 living American poets, is a typical example of 
 those rhymers who with playful ease translate 
 every occasion, every event, into verse, who are 
 endowed with everything — except spirit and 
 genius. Two thirds of those classed in America 
 as poets belong to this category. 
 
 Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was regarded in 
 his lifetime as a great poet, and not in his own 
 country alone; to-day he is as good as forgotten. 
 This discordance between the judgment of his 
 contemporaries and that of posterity finds 
 adequate explanation in Taylor's personality. 
 He was a marvel of temperament and intellectual 
 elasticity: in his versatility, restlessness, and 
 spirit of enterprise, a perfect type of the Yankee. 
 Born on a Pennsylvania farm, and reared to 
 become a farmer, he found means, as a youth 
 of sixteen, to leave his native village and, after 
 all sorts of intermediate ventures, to start on a 
 rambling tour through Europe (1844), busily 
 writing as he travelled. He learned to know 
 England, stayed for a time in Germany, where 
 he mastered the German language, made an 
 excursion to Italy, and wrote — ^wrote continu- 
 
American Poetry 75 
 
 ally. His travel-sketches found favor; hence 
 he published them in book form: "Views Afoot; 
 or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff." Six 
 editions of the book appeared in a single year. 
 This success secured him recognition by the 
 Tribune, a New York journal of high repute, 
 which he fully justified. When the newly dis- 
 covered gold fields aroused the attention of the 
 world, Taylor was sent there by this paper, and 
 the result was a volume of widely read descrip- 
 tions, "El Dorado" (1850). The same year he 
 journeyed to the Orient to distract his mind 
 from thoughts of his wife, torn from him by 
 death; and with the little volume, "Poems of 
 the Orient," he became the Bodenstedt of 
 America. 
 
 Then he was again drawn to the West. In 
 Germany he made the acquaintance of Marie 
 Hansen, daughter of the astronomer, and mar- 
 ried her. He devoted himself now with the 
 greatest earnestness to novel writing and met 
 with success here as he had in other literary 
 fields. "HannahThurston" (1863), "John God- 
 frey's Fortunes" (1864), "The Story of Kennett" 
 (1866), are brilHantly written, but otherwise fall 
 below the average of American narrative art. 
 Taylor's most ambitious work is "The Picture 
 
76 American Literature 
 
 of St. John" (1867), an autobiographic poem 
 which ehcited great admiration. About 1870 
 his health began to fail; pecuniary cares were 
 an added burden. The evening of a life so rich 
 in fruitful labor passed gloomily in every sense. 
 His appointment as Minister to Germany 
 (1878) seemed to open a brighter prospect; but 
 he was overtaken by death. 
 
 To-day, three or four decades after his death, 
 his verses sound forced, borrowed, and common- 
 place. One work alone keeps his name fresh 
 — the translation of Faust; the best, according 
 to many competent judges, in the English lan- 
 guage. 
 
 From the choirs of the last decades a number 
 of women's voices strike the ear with force and 
 charm: Emily Dickinson, Ellen Louise Chandler 
 (-Moulton), Louise Imogen Guiney, Josephine 
 Preston Peabody (-Marks).* 
 
 7. THE POETRY OF THE SOUTH 
 
 It is an observation often made by people ac- 
 quainted with the country, that the Southern 
 section of the United States is not one iota less 
 
 *The singling out of these names does not mean to signify the 
 exclusion of others; it is but too easy to miss hearing even eminent 
 singers. 
 
American Poetry T] 
 
 godly and strong in faith than the North, only 
 not so Spartan in temper. The slaveholders 
 who in 1861 took up arms in the Civil War were 
 no less deeply convinced of the justice of their 
 cause than the Puritans of the North. This 
 confidence in the good cause finds most poignant 
 expression in the poetry of the South, notably in 
 Henry Timrod (1829-1867), who, by at least 
 one poem. The Cotton Boll, establishes his rank 
 as peer of the great ones of the North. 
 
 But while the poetry of the North, animated 
 by a youthful consciousness of strength, looks 
 jubilantly forward, in robust health and perfect 
 confidence, toward certain victory all along the 
 line, the creations of the South betray almost 
 universally a sickly foreboding of death. It 
 is perhaps not without significance that the 
 greatest singers of the Southern States died 
 young — Henry Timrod lived to the age of 
 thirty-eight, Sidney Lanier thirty-nine, Edgar 
 Allen Poe forty, Paul Hamilton Hayne, who at- 
 tained the highest age among them, lived to be 
 fifty-six. 
 
 Aside from Poe, who in reality belongs to no 
 country and cannot, therefore, be claimed by 
 the Southern States as their own, none of 
 those mentioned has a strong, individual 
 
78 American Literature 
 
 nature; they merely call up great models to our 
 minds. 
 
 With special pride the South accounts Sidney 
 Lanier (1842-1881), whowas a native of Georgia 
 and fought for the Lost Cause, its greatest poet. 
 For a foreigner, Lanier is a lovably touching 
 figure, something like Chenier, but hardly a 
 strong creative individuality. He was descended 
 from an old musical family which plumed 
 itself upon having found recognition already at 
 the court of Queen Elizabeth. Sidney himself 
 was a master of the flute, which accompanied 
 him in all the paths of his life; he clung to it even 
 in war. Extremely poor, and bearing the seeds 
 of death from the fields of battle, he devoted 
 himself to English philology with such success 
 that he obtained an appointment, poorly paid, 
 at the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, 
 a position which he held until his early death. 
 
 Lanier was one of those poetical natures that 
 harbor a project for years and decades without 
 giving it expression. Of such plans for more 
 elaborate creations we have beautiful fragments, 
 as, for example, for the epic The Jacquerie, 
 which has for its theme the insurrection of the 
 French peasantry in the fourteenth century. 
 The statement that Lanier did not complete 
 
American Poetry 79 
 
 the work on account of illness and poverty can 
 hardly be accepted as conclusive; his poetic 
 endowment was not equal to such an ambi- 
 tiously planned production, for his was a lyric- 
 didactic nature, prone to description. Critics 
 have long since established his spiritual kinship 
 with Bryant. In reality his fame rests upon 
 three poems of an essentially contemplative and 
 descriptive character: Corn, The Symphony, The 
 Marshes of Glynn. Lanier is, however, more 
 modern than Bryant; full of social-revolution- 
 ary thoughts, in opposition to the Moloch capi- 
 talism, a disciple of Carlyle and Ruskin, a 
 follower of Emerson and Whitman in his feel- 
 ing of being one with all nature. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE SUBJECTIVE WRITERS 
 
 A. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 
 
 1. Character of Transcendentalism. — It is 
 customary to designate as Transcendentalists 
 a group of authors who met in Concord, a small 
 town near Boston, in the years 1835 to 1845, 
 and who for a time possessed an organ of their 
 own. The Dial, for the spread of their ideas. 
 The following are regarded as the most eminent 
 of that company: WilHam Ellery Channing 
 (1780-1842), Amos Bronson Alcott (1799- 
 1888),* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), 
 Theodore Parker (1810-1860), Margaret Fuller 
 (1810-1850), Jones Very (1813-1880), and 
 Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). As is in- 
 variably the case in such groups, drawn to- 
 gether by chance, there are in this company 
 
 *Outside of America the father is not known at all, while his 
 daughter, Louisa May Alcott, on the contrary, enjoys a wide repu- 
 tation. The stories, "Little Women" (1868-69), "Little Men" 
 (1871), "Joe's Boys" (1886), are ardently admired by German 
 girls conversant with English. 
 
 80 
 
The Subjective Writers 8i 
 
 persons who, connected by little more than a 
 casual acquaintance, suddenly find themselves 
 in the same boat, at least as viewed from the 
 standpoint of literary history. Wordsworth 
 had little inner relationship with Southey, and 
 yet both have been handed down to posterity 
 under the term "Lake Poets"; Emerson is miles 
 removed from Alcott and Channing, and yet 
 they are classed together as "Transcendental- 
 ists. 
 
 On the other hand, many who by virtue of 
 their spiritual kinship belong to that circle are 
 never mentioned in that connection, such as 
 Herman Melville, the author of the sea tale, 
 "Moby Dick," and Walt Whitman, with whom 
 literary history has thus far hardly known how 
 to deal. At all events, an admiration of Ger- 
 man philosophy, such as had dominated the 
 choicest spirits since the appearance of Kant's 
 "Critique of Pure Reason," was common to the 
 whole group. 
 
 As early as 1829 Carlyle concluded a diatribe 
 against the materiaHsm of his day with the 
 prophecy that metaphysics, contemned at the 
 time, would come into its own again; and Emer- 
 son, in a lecture delivered at Cambridge (Mas- 
 sachusetts) in 1837, expressed the confident hope 
 
82 American Literature 
 
 that America would soon supply the world with 
 something besides grain and machinery. These 
 prophecies were fulfilled in the Transcendental- 
 ists. They raised metaphysical study in Amer- 
 ica to a position of honor, and that with such 
 success that the aphorisms of Emerson, the 
 foremost Transcendentalist, are to-day cur- 
 rent in German translations, while the great 
 Transcendental systems of the Fichtes, Schel- 
 lings, and Kegels, to whom Emerson is indebted 
 for his fundamental views, slumber in the dust 
 of the Hbraries, disregarded by the great public. 
 
 2. Emerson was, perhaps, the only one in the 
 entire group who had a clear conception of what 
 constituted the Transcendental creed: 
 
 "What is popularly called Transcendentalism 
 among us is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 
 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided 
 into two sects. Materialists and Idealists, the 
 first class founding on experience, the second on 
 consciousness; the first class beginning to think 
 from the data of the senses, the second class 
 perceive that the senses are not final, and say 
 the senses give us representations of things, but 
 what are the things themselves they cannot tell. 
 The materialist insists on facts, on history, on 
 the force of circumstances and the animal wants 
 
The Subjective Writers 83 
 
 of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and 
 Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual 
 culture. 
 
 "In the order of thought, the materialist 
 takes his departure from the external world, and 
 esteems a man as one product of that. The 
 idealist takes his departure from his conscious- 
 ness, and reckons the world an appearance."* 
 
 This ideahstic view of life was inculcated by 
 Emerson in hundreds of aphorisms. 
 
 Disciples of Emerson will protest against 
 speaking of "aphorisms" of the master; they will 
 ask where Emerson ever published such frag- 
 ments. True, indeed, the excellent collected 
 edition of Emerson's worksf contains nothing 
 under such a head; but we must not be led astray 
 by names and superscriptions. All of Emerson's 
 essays, addresses, and lectures are essentially, 
 and by their origin, aphorisms. "Here I sit and 
 read and write, with very little system and, as 
 far as regards composition, with the most frag- 
 mentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each 
 
 *Centenary Edition, "Nature. Addresses and Lectures," 
 P-33I- 
 
 t" Emerson's Collected Works," 6 vols. With introduction 
 by John Motley. Macmillan & Co., London. More complete is 
 the Century edition in 12 vols., with portraits and copious notes 
 by Edward Waldo Emerson. Houghton Mifflin Co. 
 
^4 American Literature 
 
 sentence an infinitely repellent particle." (Let- 
 ter to Carlyle in the year 1838.) This is not 
 by any means intended as a disparagement but 
 as a characterization. Emerson's style is the 
 harmonious expression of that thinker. The 
 fragmentary, the instantaneous, the tempera- 
 mental, in his writings should, therefore, be 
 emphasized at the very outset. 
 
 Emerson's life may be told in few words. 
 From both sides he had Puritan blood in his 
 veins. The family on his father's side emigrated 
 to America in the seventeenth century, and an 
 ancestress, Rebekka Waldo, had fled to Boston, 
 with other Waldensian families, from the blood- 
 iest persecutors. Emerson lost his father at a 
 very early age, and was educated by a quiet, 
 musical, capable mother and a Calvinistically 
 austere aunt. Following the family tradition, 
 he became a minister and practised that calling 
 for a number of years in a Boston Unitarian 
 congregation. But even the simple ritual of 
 the Unitarians grew in time intolerable to 
 Emerson, he having, indeed, it appears, cut 
 loose at an early date from all dogma and tradi- 
 tion. He resigned his charge, and from 1832 
 he lived on a little estate in Concord, upon a 
 small fortune and the proceeds of his lectures. 
 
The Subjective Writers 85 
 
 In 1833 he made a trip to Europe in quest of 
 relaxation and to recruit his strength; while 
 there, he made the acquaintance of literary 
 celebrities, and sought out a man who was as 
 yet far from being famous, Thomas Carlyle. 
 Vehement of speech, this son of a mason 
 groaned in his Scotch village isolation, tor- 
 mented by petty cares, racked by impotent 
 rage against a blind and deaf world so persist- 
 ently insensible to his worth. Emerson, who 
 shared Carlyle's idealist outlook upon life and 
 his opposition to the ever-growing power of in- 
 dustrialism, did not shun the long journey; and 
 his visit proved extremely welcome to Carlyle 
 and his wife in their disconsolate state. On 
 Emerson's second sojourn in England, the 
 distinctive characteristics of the two men came 
 out in sharp relief in their intercourse, and 
 their friendship suffered a temporary cloud- 
 ing. Carlyle, who as a son of the people es- 
 poused the Chartist cause heart and soul, even 
 if, naturally, he did not dream of actually 
 joining the promiscuous company that promoted 
 a good cause with such evil means, could not 
 comprehend Emerson's equable spirit in face of 
 the social misery; and he doubtless expressed 
 with far greater harshness in personal inter- 
 
86 American Literature 
 
 course the reproach which he addressed to Emer- 
 son in his letters with Hterary restraint — ^namely, 
 his remoteness and indifference to earthly con- 
 cerns. Carlyle had already written in 1844: 
 
 "For the rest, I have to object still (what you 
 will call objecting against the Law of Nature) 
 that we find you a speaker indeed, but as it were 
 a Soliloquizer on the eternal mountain-tops only, 
 in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie 
 all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only 
 the man and the stars and the earth are visible — 
 whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could per- 
 petually punch into, and say, 'Why won't you 
 come and help us then? We have terrible need 
 of one man like you down among us! It is cold 
 and vacant up there; nothing paintable but 
 rainbows and emotions; come down and you 
 shall do life-pictures, passions, facts. . . .'"* 
 
 Carlyle knew perfectly well that the attempt 
 to influence a writer's works by remonstrances 
 is a hopeless task, and he did not indulge in il- 
 lusions as regards Emerson, either; but the chasm 
 was there, and nothing could bridge it over. The 
 year 1847, the date of Emerson's second sojourn 
 in London, marks, therefore, a sort of crisis in 
 
 *Charles Eliot Norton, "The Correspondence of T. Carlyle and 
 R. W. Emerson," II, p. 8i. 
 
The Subjective Writers 87 
 
 tiie relations of the two men. The estrange- 
 ment abated, however, when the sea rolled be- 
 tween them; the correspondence was resumed, 
 and discontinued only on the threshold of old 
 age. 
 
 Emerson made still a third visit to Europe, in 
 the year 1872, and this time he had difficulty 
 in warding off the homage of enthusiastic dis- 
 ciples. These journeys are the only events in 
 the quiet life of the thinker. Calmly and evenly 
 his days flowed on with his family, among his 
 books and trees. His mother and his wife stood 
 lovingly between him and the restless world; his 
 son, Edward Waldo, grew to be a fine physician.* 
 The innate gentleness of his nature increased 
 with advancing age from year to year; toward 
 the close of his life he lost all memory for every- 
 day concerns, and lived only in the world of the 
 past and of imperishable interests. 
 
 For the uninitiated who wish to become ac- 
 quainted with Emerson, it would be advisable 
 to leave the poems, essays, and lectures aside 
 and begin with an apparently very little known 
 and greatly underrated work, "English Traits" 
 (Vol. 4 of John Morley's edition). It would 
 
 *It is to this son we are indebted for the publication of Emer- 
 son's "Journals" (1820 to 1855), in 8 vols. Houghton Miflflin Co. 
 
88 American Literature 
 
 be difficult to find a book fron;i which one can 
 gather such varied, profound, definitive infor- 
 mation concerning England and the English as 
 is given in these sketches, and one may safely 
 venture the heresy that in none of his writings 
 does Emerson appear so simple, so natural, so 
 lovable and clear-sighted. All the excellences 
 of Emerson the thinker and writer shine forth in 
 this little work; the defects which mar his other 
 writings are almost completely absent. It 
 shows us the man in the zenith of his creative 
 power. The gift of poetic vision, the exquisite 
 similes, the divining of the profoundest rela- 
 tions, the wealth of eloquence — all that capti- 
 vates us in Emerson is found here; what is 
 lacking is only what we should gladly dispense 
 with elsewhere — the tone of the prophet, the 
 air of importance which presents a banality 
 as a revelation, the elaboration and repetition, 
 the arbitrariness. 
 
 How greatly the "English Traits" differs in 
 style from the other works of Emerson is best 
 shown by those chapters which touch most 
 closely the subjects treated in the Essays; as, 
 for example, the sections relating to religion and 
 literature. To quote only a saying here and 
 there: 
 
The Subjective Writers 89 
 
 "It is with religion [of the England of to-day] 
 as with marriage. A youth marries in haste; 
 afterward, when his mind is opened to the reason 
 of the conduct of Hfe, he is asked what he thinks 
 of the institution of marriage and of the right 
 relations of the sexes. 'I should have much to 
 say,' he might reply, 'if the question were open, 
 but I have a wife and children, and all question 
 is closed for me.' In the barbarous days of a 
 nation, some cultus is formed or imported; altars 
 are built, tithes are paid, priests ordained. The 
 education and expenditure of the country take 
 that direction, and when wealth, refinement, 
 great men, and ties to the world supervene, its 
 prudent men say. Why fight against Fate, or 
 lift these absurdities which are now mountain- 
 ous? Better find some niche or crevice in this 
 mountain of stone which religious ages have 
 quarried and carved, wherein to bestow your- 
 self, than attempt anything ridiculously and 
 dangerously above your strength, like renioving 
 it." 
 
 "In York minster, on the day of the enthron- 
 ization of the new archbishop, I heard the 
 service of evening prayer read and chanted in 
 the choir. It was strange to hear the pretty 
 pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, 
 
90 American Literature 
 
 in the morning of the world, read with circum- 
 stantiaUty inYork Minster, on the 13th January, 
 1848, to the decorous EngUsh audiencej just 
 fresh from the Times newspaper and their wine 
 and listening with all the devotion of national 
 pride. . . . Here in England every day 
 a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the 
 I imes. 
 
 "Their reHgion is a quotation; their church 
 is a doll; and any examination is interdicted with 
 screams of terror. In good company you expect 
 them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar; 
 but they do not; they are the vulgar." 
 
 "The later English want the faculty of Plato 
 and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes 
 by an insight of general laws, so deep that the 
 rule is deduced with equal precision from few 
 subjects, or from one, as from multitudes of 
 lives. Shakespeare is supreme in that, as in all 
 the great mental energies. The Germans gen- 
 erahze: the English cannot interpret the German 
 mind. German science comprehends the Eng- 
 lish. The absence of the faculty in England is 
 shown by the timidity which accumulates moun- 
 tains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of 
 men and miles of redoubts to compensate the 
 inspirations of courage and conduct." 
 
The Subjective Writers 91 
 
 The last remark might have been taken from 
 one of the Essays, so strongly marked is the 
 metaphysical bias, so overconfidently does Emer- 
 son here make use of the standard which he 
 obtains, after all, only from a much-disputed 
 philosophical tenet. One could hardly blame a 
 chorizont if he expressed the opinion that it is 
 impossible for the "English Traits" to have been 
 written by the author of the Essays; and the 
 strongest support of his hypothesis would be the 
 circumstance that the "English Traits," with 
 all its depth, all its earnestness, manifests a 
 delicious humor which is totally lacking in 
 Emerson's other productions. 
 
 After the beginner has studied "English 
 Traits," he may venture upon the essay. Poetry 
 and Imagination, which forms the transition, as 
 it were, from the lucid to the obscure, from the 
 seeing to the dreaming, from the descriptive to the 
 phantom-pursuing Emerson; from coherent, sys- 
 tematic trains of thought to a desultory succes- 
 sion of stray reflections. But take care ! The 
 reader must not lose patience on the first page, 
 else he will commit the error of regarding as 
 superficiality what is really a pardonable aban- 
 don, which on closer acquaintance is found to be 
 charming and inspires our confidence. This 
 
92 American Literature 
 
 essay is perhaps the only connected and inten- 
 tionally elementary presentation of the idealist 
 view of life which permeates all the currents of 
 Emerson's thoughts; and it has, beyond this, the 
 great advantage that it brings out sharply and 
 clearly what one is elsewhere required to infer 
 from oracular sayings. 
 
 Emerson is a metaphysician, to be sure, as 
 was Plato; but his monism is at bottom the 
 evolution theory. On the threshold of the 
 essay Poetry and Imagination, we are met 
 by such trusty guides as St. Hilaire, Oken, 
 Goethe, Agassiz, Owen, and Darwin (Vol. VI, 
 p. 4). The whole universe, from the downright- 
 perceptible to the supersensual-incomprehen- 
 sible, is one, but is pursuing a constant course 
 of upward development: the metamorphosis of 
 the plant is an image of the world in miniature. 
 One animal, one plant, one substance, one force; 
 the laws of light and heat explain each other; 
 likewise, the laws of color and sound; just as 
 galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are only 
 different manifestations of the same force. 
 
 Thus far we follow Emerson readily, even if 
 somewhat impatiently; we have, indeed, heard 
 all that before. But this is only the elementary 
 presumption, the little multiplication table from 
 
The Subjective Writers 93 
 
 which the mathematician develops the Abelian 
 functions. The entire visible universe, hill and 
 dale, stream and wood, the seasons, iron, stone, 
 steam — everything is a symbol of the spiritual 
 world; all natural laws are but parallels to what 
 obtains in the moral world. The Philistine, 
 the rationalist, the narrow-minded materialist, 
 sees only the symbol; Plato and Swedenborg 
 saw the real universe behind the symbol. It 
 is from this standpoint that Emerson interprets 
 everything that enters into the world of 
 phenomena — creation and extinction, history 
 and politics, genius and politics, genius and 
 talent, intellect and heart, heroism, character, 
 love, friendship, wisdom and folly, art and liter- 
 ature. 
 
 It may readily be imagined how difficult it 
 must have been for Emerson to bring his inter- 
 pretation of the riddle of the universe into har- 
 mony with all these observations upon life. 
 Fortunately, he never even attempted to build 
 up a system. As I remarked at the outset: each 
 essay is really a pearl-strand of aphorisms, the 
 discovery of whose connection Emerson leaves, 
 in the main, to the acuteness of the reader. We 
 constantly come across the most beautiful and 
 most profound utterances where we least ex- 
 
94 American Literature 
 
 pact them. It is, of course, not impossible to 
 arrange these fragmentary thoughts in an or- 
 derly way under certain heads, nor would it be 
 a task without merit to collect luminous rays, 
 as it were, from Emerson's works, for German 
 readers, as has long since been done by Ameri- 
 cans; but is this in accord with the author's 
 spirit? He would presumably have decidedly 
 opposed such a falsification. "I am myself!" 
 would probably have been his polite but irrev- 
 ocable answer. 
 
 B. THE PRIMITIVES 
 1. THE STARTING-POINT OF THE PRIMITIVES 
 
 This brings us to what is most profound, 
 most characteristic, most fruitful in Emerson's 
 nature and influence, to that way of viewing 
 things which connects him with the subjectives, 
 with Thoreau and Whitman. 
 
 The right to one's own individuality was first 
 insisted upon with distinct positiveness and em- 
 phasis by Emerson, among all the revolutionary 
 thinkers of the world. Thoreau and Whitman 
 carried the doctrine into action, into practical 
 life. "Wherever a man comes," says Emerson 
 in his famous Divinity School Address, "there 
 comes revolution. The old is for slaves. . . . 
 
The Subjective Writers 95 
 
 Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to 
 refuse the good models, even those which are 
 sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to 
 love God without mediator or veil." And in 
 another place: "We have been born out of the 
 eternal silence; and now will we live — live for 
 ourselves — and not as the pall-bearers of a 
 funeral, but as the upholders and creators of our 
 age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the three 
 Unities of Aristotle, nor the three kings of 
 Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor 
 the Edinburgh Review is to command any 
 longer. Now that we are here we will put our 
 own interpretation on things, and own things for 
 interpretation. Please himself with complai- 
 sance who will — for me, things must take my 
 scale, not I theirs." 
 
 This Emersonian doctrine of self-dependence, 
 this exhortation to begin life anew, to be one's 
 own ancestor, Thoreau and Whitman followed 
 to its extreme conclusions. 
 
 2. THOREAU. — Henry Thoreau was the grand- 
 son of a Frenchman who emigrated to Massa- 
 chusetts from the island of Jersey in the 
 eighteenth century and married a Scotch- 
 woman. Henry's father, who was a lead-pencil 
 manufacturer in Concord, had a struggle to 
 
96 American Literature 
 
 make a living for his family, but he was con- 
 tented with himself and the world, lovable, 
 obliging, a good, honest fellow. Henry grew 
 up like all the poor youth in the villages and 
 small towns of New England: living a great deal 
 in the fine, open air, granted little in the way of 
 indulgences. He drove his father's cattle to 
 pasture barefoot when a child of six, studied the 
 catechism, reading, and writing in the elementary 
 school. Like all talented New England lads, he, 
 too, longed to enter a university; he went to 
 Harvard and learned enough to obtain an 
 academic degree and become a teacher in his 
 native place. But he did not please his fellow- 
 citizens, ostensibly because he did not whip the 
 children. Thenceforth he was, in reality, with- 
 out a calling; he attempted a versification of 
 Prometheus, translated various things from 
 Pindar, was something of a surveyor, then was 
 for two years a guest in Emerson's house, where 
 he made himself useful in every way. In his 
 twenty-eighth year he suddenly withdrew from 
 the circle of poets and thinkers that had gathered 
 around Emerson into the isolation of Walden 
 Pond. He began to build his log hut in the 
 early spring of 1845 — enduring his solitary 
 existence there until September, 1847. How 
 
The Subjective Writers ' 97 
 
 did he live and on what? He has himself told 
 us in his unique work, "Walden."* 
 
 He rose early and took a bath in the pond; 
 then he tilled his bit of ground, where he raised 
 potatoes, beans, and beets. Before and after 
 noon he generally took a walk of several hours. 
 "I think I cannot preserve my health and 
 spirits," he remarks in the essay on walking,! 
 "unless I spend four hours a day at least . . . 
 sauntering through the woods and fields, ab- 
 solutely free from all engagements." 
 
 As the produce of his acres did not sustain 
 him, he fished in the pond and worked occasion- 
 ally as surveyor, carpenter, and day laborer in 
 his immediate vicinity. And he felt, as he 
 says, as happy as the first creature in Paradise. 
 Nevertheless, he returned after the lapse of two 
 and a half years to the much-reviled civilization 
 of the town, worked again as gardener in Emer- 
 son's household, then as a pencil-maker. Before 
 he had reached his fortieth year it became evi- 
 dent that his lungswere affected. He had always 
 had the seeds of pulmonary consumption, and 
 his distaste for indoor confinement and urban 
 occupation may, in the last analysis, be due to 
 
 *Thoreau, "Walden," London, W. Scott, p. 39, et seq. 
 f'Thoreau's Essays," London, W. Scott, p. 3. 
 
98 American Literature 
 
 that cause. In his forty-eighth year his powers 
 of resistance against the deadly disease were 
 exhausted. He was buried on the shores of 
 Walden Pond; a pyramid of pebbles, steadily 
 increasing in height, is his tombstone. 
 
 Thoreau's flight from the world is entirely 
 of a mundane nature and bears little relation 
 to his Transcendental views. He, too, often 
 speaks of the soul as the essential thing as com- 
 pared to that accident, our body; but what de- 
 termined him to forsake the overcrowded abodes 
 of his fellowmen was not the craving for undis- 
 turbed spiritual culture, but the atavistic long- 
 ing for an untrammelled life, for breathing-space 
 and freedom, for color and fragrance. Thoreau, 
 the author, labors under a double burden, an 
 inherited and a voluntarily assumed one. The 
 Puritan tradition of didacticism, which was in- 
 herent in every native of New England, was 
 greatly strengthened in him by his admiration 
 of the example set by Carlyle. Every e^cperi- 
 ence is made an occasion for more or less ex- 
 tended instruction; the consciousness of having 
 a teacher's mission on earth does not leave him 
 for an instant. This didacticism spoils the 
 book, " Walden," upon which Thoreau's fame 
 really rests. 
 
The Subjective Writers 99 
 
 Thoreau is known to German readers ex- 
 clusively as a prose writer, and probably even 
 American readers rarely come across his poems. 
 And yet he has left us verses of the greatest 
 solemnity and the finest polish, as, for example, 
 the few stanzas, full of thought, in Inspiration. 
 The following lines from that poem have re- 
 mained indelibly fixed in my mind: 
 
 I hearing get, who had but ears, 
 
 And sight, who had but eyes before; 
 
 I moments live, who lived but years, 
 
 And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore. 
 
 3. WHITMAN. — Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt 
 Whitman, who by virtue of their entire endow- 
 ment, their life, and their mission as writers 
 belong together, should not be separated in the 
 history of literature. 
 
 All three are nonconformists, not only in re- 
 lation to the ruHng church, but in relation to 
 the ruling customs. 
 
 Every respectable person in New England has 
 a definite calling, even if he does not need it for 
 his maintenance; Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt 
 Whitman never allowed themselves to be placed 
 under the yoke of any of the usual occupations, 
 in spite of needing it for their maintenance. 
 
lOO American Literature 
 
 In close social contact custom compels even 
 the most callous to observe a certain measure of 
 regard for the prejudices and feelings of their 
 fellowmen. Our three nonconformists, though 
 they had the most delicate appreciation of the 
 spiritual life of others, offended against conven- 
 tional sensibilities without the slightest com- 
 punction. It was Walt Whitman, in particular, 
 who, with the freedom of primitive man, re- 
 jected every sort of fig leaf and impressed the 
 whole world, consequently, as shameless. And 
 as in their daily life, so in their thought, speech, 
 writing. They ignored the traditional laws of 
 composition, paid no heed to prescribed forms, 
 to the versification and diction of their prede- 
 cessors, but sought, as did aforetime Herder 
 and the other storm-and-stress writers, a new 
 vessel for the new wine. 
 
 Of the three primitives Walt Whitman car- 
 ried this revolt against tradition the furthest; 
 he has, therefore, been exposed to the greatest 
 misunderstandings. 
 
 Like Thoreau, Whittier, and so many other of 
 the great spiritual lights of America, Walt 
 Whitman was a descendant of farmers and 
 small tradespeople. His paternal ancestors 
 emigrated to America from England in the 
 
The Subjective Writers loi 
 
 seventeenth century; those on his mother's side 
 came from Holland. Walt was born in the 
 year 1819 at West Hills, Long Island; from 1824 
 the Whitmans resided in Brooklyn, where the 
 father practised his trade as carpenter. Walt 
 attended the elementary public schools, but it 
 devolved upon him at an early age to contribute 
 to the support of the family — first as an errand 
 boy in a lawyer's ojffice, then in that of a physi- 
 cian. In order to escape from this menial posi- 
 tion, he learned typesetting and tried work as 
 a printer. He did not endure this labor long, 
 for he was irresistibly impelled to wander afield 
 in the open air. Thus he became a country 
 school teacher and roamed from village to vil- 
 lage. In every New Englander, a good judge 
 of America once remarked, there is the making 
 of a more or less talented journaHst. Walt 
 Whitman, too, soon found his way to the news- 
 paper. At the age of twenty he founded, in his 
 home town on Long Island, a short-lived 
 weekly; he returned to New York the following 
 year and maintained himself as printer and 
 journalist. The life and stir of the metropolis 
 appealed to him; he was a frequent visitor of 
 the theatre, particularly the opera, and was a 
 passionate admirer of Booth, whom he saw in 
 
I02 American Literature 
 
 all his Shakespearian impersonations. He made 
 the acquaintance, at the same time, of Poe and 
 Cooper. In 1842 he published the problem 
 novel, "Franklin Evans, the Inebriate." In 
 1846 and 1847 he edited the Brooklyn Eagle, 
 but once more the roving passion seized him 
 and drove him from the town. In the com- 
 pany of his brother, a congenial spirit, he wan- 
 dered southward and reached New Orleans on 
 foot. There he made his living as collaborator 
 on a local paper, and remained as long as the 
 novel life of the South had something to impart 
 to him. After he had seen, or believed he had 
 seen, everything of consequence, he returned to 
 New York. He had by now had enough of 
 newspaper writing, and suddenly discovered 
 in himself an interest in practical life. He 
 entered, accordingly, into the business of his 
 father, who, from a modest carpenter, had be- 
 come a big building contractor. Here Walt 
 held out for several years. Then he realized 
 that one earned too much money in that busi- 
 ness, and withdrew from it affrighted. As if in 
 expiation, he devoted himself entirely to the 
 elaboration of his first poems. 
 
 In 1855 the little book "Leaves of Grass" first 
 saw the light of day — a veritable event in Amet- 
 
The Subjective Writers 103 
 
 ican literature — at first, of course, a disre- 
 garded event. Very few copies of the now 
 valuable work were sold. Emerson alone rec- 
 ognized the merit of the poems and congrat- 
 ulated Whitman on his work in a long and 
 enthusiastic letter. 
 
 In 1862 Walt's brother, George, was wounded 
 in the battle of Fredericksburg. He hastened 
 to his side and remained in the hospital long 
 after his recovery — ^the good genius of the 
 wounded, whom he tended, comforted, cheered, 
 with inexhaustible kindness. Whitman had, 
 as we know from Thoreau, a fascinating person- 
 ality, and he put it unreservedly into the service 
 of the sick soldiers. He naturally contracted 
 the so-called hospital fever in this Samaritan 
 activity, a malady which clung to him the rest 
 of his life. 
 
 After the close of the Civil War he obtained 
 a government office through the intercession of 
 influential friends, but soon lost it when it was 
 learned in high quarters that he had written 
 the "indecent book," "Leaves of Grass." 
 
 This incident had as its consequence William 
 Douglas O'Connor's brilliant controversial trea- 
 tise. The Good Gray Poet, with the practical 
 result that Whitman received another position 
 
I04 American Literature 
 
 almost immediately, this time in the attorney- 
 general's department. This post he occupied 
 until 1873, when he suffered a stroke of apo- 
 plexy. But his robust nature conquered, and 
 he recovered sufficiently to enable him to pub- 
 lish an enlarged edition of the "Leaves of Grass" 
 and to deliver the famous address on the death 
 of Lincoln. In 1882 he published a collection 
 containing his youthful poems, a number of 
 tales, and the address upon Lincoln's death. 
 In 1882 he suffered another apoplectic stroke, 
 but his courage and his optimism were un- 
 quenchable. He died in 1892 — to the last 
 moment undaunted in spirit, patient and 
 cheerful. 
 
 A phenomenon like that of Walt Whitman 
 strikes students of literature and aesthetics with 
 an elemental bewilderment and shows indis- 
 putably that the old views, means, and methods 
 no longer suffice, that the prevailing concep- 
 tions are in need of a fundamental reexamina- 
 tion. The perplexed critic, confronting the 
 unprecedented, the unknown, in any unusual 
 specimen, is thrown back upon aesthetics and 
 literary research alone. The botanist who be- 
 holds a new plant obtained from a region just 
 discovered, having a peculiar soil and atmos- 
 
The Subjective Writers 105 
 
 pheric conditions, is always able to determine 
 without any difficulty to what species it belongs, 
 wherein it resembles the known plants related 
 to it, wherein it differs from them. The critic 
 stands helpless before a Walt Whitman. Nei- 
 ther the current classification nor the prevailing 
 estimate can be made to fit the isolated in- 
 dividual; in vain does the literary connoisseur 
 cudgel his brains to discover a related species, 
 an analogy. Now, the objection should not be 
 raised that life is inexhaustible in its combina- 
 tions and that, consequently, all systematism 
 is bound to fall short. That is not true. Na- 
 ture has created countless living beings with 
 immeasurable gradations and transitions; but 
 the biologist can classify plant and animal with- 
 out excessive effort — ^the systematism of the 
 botanist and zoologist has never yet failed al- 
 together. The student of literature alone must 
 start from the beginning when confronting an 
 author of distinctive character, just as though 
 he had not already classified thousands of ex- 
 amples of aesthetic endowment. 
 
 Whitman has but one thing in common with 
 the artists in words thus far known to us — that 
 he thinks and speaks in words; that is all that 
 can be asserted of him as far as classification is 
 
io6 American Literature 
 
 concerned. Is he a poet? It is difficult to say. 
 The words are not poetical, for they are taken 
 from the lips of the common man, the artisan, 
 and the farmer, from the language of text- 
 books and dissertations. The rhythm is oc- 
 casionally musical, but as a rule it is not to be 
 distinguished from prose.* Traditional em- 
 bellishments, such as rhyme and strophic di- 
 vision, are lacking entirely. Even thevisualizing 
 of the subjects of thought, images and similes, 
 is disdained by Walt Whitman. The ear- 
 marks, accordingly, of what has hitherto been 
 considered poetry are absent. And the sub- 
 stance? The subject-matter? Yes, he has 
 this in common with the poets — he sings of love 
 as the beginning and end of all poetry. But 
 what reader will recognize the poems which he 
 calls "Children of Adam" as love songs? 
 
 From pent-up aching rivers, 
 
 From that of myself without which I were nothing, 
 
 From what I am determined to make illustrious, 
 
 even if I stand sole among men, 
 From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus, 
 Singing the song of procreation, 
 
 *It has been asserted that his rhythm is essentially hexametric; 
 this view is controverted by Basil de Selincourt ("Walt Whit- 
 man," London, 1914), and with justice. 
 
The Subjective Writers 107 
 
 Singing the need of superb children and therein 
 
 superb grown people, 
 Singing the muscular urge and the blending, 
 Singing the bedfellow's song (O resistless yearning! 
 O for any and each the body correlative attracting!). 
 
 Another theme of poets, too, love of country, 
 is to be found in Walt Whitman, but how far 
 removed from ours are his conceptions of father- 
 land, his feeHngs for one's native soil! 
 
 Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, 
 
 aware of mighty Niagara, 
 Aware of the bufl^alo herds grazing the plains, the 
 
 hirsute and strong-breasted bull. 
 Of earth, rocks. Fifth-month flowers experienced, 
 
 stars, rain, snow, my amaze. 
 Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the 
 
 flight of the mountain-hawk, 
 And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit 
 
 thrush from the swamp-cedars. 
 Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New 
 
 World. 
 
 With firm and regular step they wend, they never 
 
 stop. 
 Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, 
 One generation playing its part and passing on, 
 Another generation playing its part and passing on 
 
 in its turn. 
 
io8 American Literature 
 
 With faces tum'd sideways or backward toward me 
 
 to listen, 
 With eyes retrospective toward me. 
 
 Americanos! conquerors! Marches humanitarian! 
 
 Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses! 
 
 For you a programme of chants. 
 
 Chants of the prairies, 
 
 Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down 
 
 to the Mexican sea. 
 Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and 
 
 Minnesota, 
 Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, 
 
 and thence equidistant 
 Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all. 
 
 Walt Whitman's strongest, most striking 
 trait, the one most repellent to the Philistines, 
 is his self-absorption, his egotism as the English 
 term it. This psychical disposition is by no 
 means to be confounded with egoism. Walt 
 Whitman was the most unselfish, humane, 
 noblest "egotist." The whole universe — not 
 only in theoretical cognition — exists primarily 
 through him and for him; he is, as he candidly 
 confesses, the most important fact to himself, 
 the most interesting cosmic phenomenon. The 
 "Leaves of Grass" is, as he declared,* his carte 
 
 *"Backward Glance o'er Travelled Roads." 
 
The Subjective Writers 109 
 
 de visite, and the first poem of that collection is, 
 characteristically, the Song of Myself, the open- 
 ing verse being a challenge to caricature : 
 
 I celebrate myself, and sing myself. 
 
 Not, however, that he regarded himself as 
 something special, something extraordinary. 
 On the contrary, he wants to be only the aver- 
 age man, in whom the whole nation, the entire 
 American democracy, nay, the entire world, 
 will recognize itself; what he is, that every other 
 man is as well; only he has the courage to be 
 himself. He does not reckon upon being com- 
 prehended by his contemporaries; his work is 
 dedicated to future generations, when all men, 
 united as comrades and loving brethren, will 
 feel as he does. 
 
 The other trait in Walt Whitman, one which 
 aroused the indignation not of Puritan America 
 alone but of the whole world, is his fanatical 
 enthusiasm for truth, which, conscious of its 
 own innocence and of the purest intentions, 
 aims to call things by their right names. This 
 zeal has been wrongly interpreted as immorality. 
 Only thus is the nakedness of language in The 
 Song of Myself and in the collection " Children 
 
no American Literature 
 
 of Adam" (notably in the poems / Sing the 
 Body Electric, A Woman Waits for Me, Ages 
 and Ages Returning at Intervals, I Am He That 
 Aches with Love) to be understood. 
 
 While Walt Whitman's self-absorption ex- 
 cited ridicule, and his alleged sensuality of- 
 fended the Puritanic spirits, a third feature 
 of his disposition called forth the stormy op- 
 position of the world of criticism. Walt Whit- 
 man has no aesthetic checks, no self criticism, 
 no faculty of distinguishing between poetical 
 essentials and poetical side-matters, between 
 what is appropriate, from the point of view of 
 effect, and what runs counter to that object. 
 He tells everything that passes through his 
 mind, he names everything that he sees — ^with- 
 out selection, without gradation. That is why 
 his enthusiastic rhapsodies produce the impres- 
 sion of an auctioneer's catalogue, or, more cor- 
 rectly, of a systematic vocabulary. 
 
 How did Walt Whitman arrive at this sort of 
 lyric emphasis, produced by enumeration and 
 repetition? All his tracks lead back to the 
 Psalms.* Needless to remark that in every 
 Puritan household the Psalter had for hun- 
 dreds of years been almost fused with everyday 
 
 *Cf. particularly Psalms Ii6, 119, 136. 
 
The Subjective Writers 1 1 1 
 
 life, had passed into the flesh and blood of every 
 individual. 
 
 And still a fourth peculiarity explains his iso- 
 lated place in nature. He has the gift of aston- 
 ishment, which no poet or thinker ever lacked, 
 in a higher degree than any poet ever had be- 
 fore him. While to us dull Philistines the spec- 
 tacle of the sun and moon, of rain and snow, 
 have become unregarded, everyday things, Walt 
 Whitman sees ever again in the pettiest phenom- 
 enon of nature a new miracle: 
 
 Why, who makes much of a miracle ? 
 
 As to me I know of nothing else but miracles. 
 
 Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, 
 
 Or dart my sight over roofs of houses toward the sky. 
 
 Or wade with naked feet along the beach just on the 
 
 edge of the water. . . . 
 To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 
 Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, 
 Every cubic yard of the surface of the earth is spread 
 
 with the same. 
 Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. 
 To me the sea is a continual miracle. 
 The fishes that swim, the rocks, the motion of the 
 
 waves, the ships with men in them, 
 What stranger miracles are there ? 
 
 Wholly unpuritanic is Walt Whitman's op- 
 timism. In perfect accord with Rousseau, he 
 
112 American Literature 
 
 does not look upon the earth as a vale of tears, 
 but as a paradise; he does not see the world as a 
 chaos of accidents, but as a cosmos, a work of 
 art, complete as a whole and in every minutest 
 detail. 
 
 From imperfection's murkiest cloud 
 
 Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, 
 
 One flash of heaven's glory. 
 
 To fashion's custom's discord, 
 
 To the mad Babel din, the deafening orgies. 
 
 Soothing each hill a strain is heard, just heard, 
 
 From some far shore the final chorus sounding. 
 
 O the blest eyes, the happy hearts. 
 
 That see, that know the guiding thread so fine. 
 
 Along the mighty labyrinth. 
 
 The pantheistic view of life Walt Whitman 
 shares with Emerson and Thoreau, and he has, 
 moreover, following Emerson's example, clothed 
 his presentiments in mystical language. In 
 comparing Emerson's Wood-notes, and the brief 
 poem Brahma, with Whitman's Eidolons and 
 other metaphysical eflFusions such as Of the Ter- 
 rible Doubt of Appearances, Song of the Answerer, 
 Rolling Earth, Mystic Trumpeter, it will be found 
 that Emerson has already expressed with ters- 
 est brevity, as befits an oracular utterance, all 
 the thoughts that Whitman voices in long- 
 
The Subjective Writers 113 
 
 winded rhapsodies accompanied by explanatory 
 comments, as it were. 
 
 The idea of evolution, the uninterrupted chain 
 of generation and destruction and new creation. 
 Whitman never tires of repeating in ever new lan- 
 guage {Song of Myself, Children of Adam, etc.). 
 
 His belief in the progress of mankind and in 
 the Platonic future state rests upon the un- 
 bounded capacity for development of the human 
 character. This faith he has in common with 
 John Stuart Mill and all utilitarians.* 
 
 As to Walt Whitman's diction, its most char- 
 acteristic traits are repetition, the rhetorical 
 question, ejaculation. His predilection for rep- 
 etition exhibits itself, not only in the heaping up 
 of words of allied meaning, he likes to use the 
 same initial words and does not hesitate to em- 
 ploy the same three or more verses in different 
 parts of the same poem, as in the Salutau Monde. 
 
 How far he carries this mode of repetition is 
 shown in such verses as 
 
 Their Throbbings Throbbed 
 or 
 
 I dream in a dream all the dreams of the 
 other dreamers. 
 
 *KeUner, "Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Konigin 
 Viktoria," p. 79. 
 
114 American Literature 
 
 American admirers of Whitman like to claim 
 that he is the most American of all poets, that 
 he, as no other, gives expression in his poems to 
 the greatness of America. One of the editors 
 of the "Complete Writings," Dr. Oscar Lovell 
 Triggs, finds that "it is a picture of America in 
 the nineteenth century. All America is in it. 
 Nothing is lacking. We are presented, not se- 
 riatim, but in a consecutive arrangement of in- 
 termittent and, as it were, casual flashes, with 
 the original wilderness of North America and its 
 first colonization from the Old World — its abo- 
 rigines, explorers, trappers, pioneers, settlers, 
 farmers, planters, miners, slave and free ne- 
 groes." And the writer gives a long list of all 
 that is found in Whitman — "lakes, rivers, la- 
 goons, mountains, coasts, bays, ports, cities, 
 and boundaries; its deserts, swamps, its pastoral 
 plains; its innumerable farms with all their prod- 
 ucts — ^wheat, cotton, maize, rye, sugar, rice, 
 cattle, wood, maple, fir, poplar, cedar, live-oak, 
 cypress ..." And in this catalogue and 
 price-list style evidence is adduced that Whit- 
 man mirrors in poetic form all of America of the 
 last three hundred years. This assertion is, 
 to put it mildly, a petitio principii, for the world 
 must first give its assent to the proposition that 
 
The Subjective Writers 115 
 
 two elements which it has hitherto regarded as 
 essential characteristics of all poetry — namely, 
 rhythm in the form, and selection in the sub- 
 stance—should be thrown overboard or shoved 
 into a corner as of no consequence whatever. 
 The world must decide whether it prefers the 
 first chance word because it sprang ready and 
 unsought to the poet's mind, or one that he em- 
 ployed because in the whole range of his vocab- 
 ulary no other could be used in its place. The 
 world must furthermore decide whether the old 
 element in the effect of a poem, the joy in sheer 
 ability, shall be entirely eliminated. Only when 
 this referendum shall in the course of time have 
 been applied and have resulted in favor of art- 
 less poetry, only then shall we be willing to bow 
 to the judgment which declares Walt Whitman 
 to be the poet of America. Walt Whitman's 
 influence upon modern poetry is, I beheve, over- 
 estimated. Reversion to the ego and to primi- 
 tiveness spring, as we have seen, from Emerson. 
 But what is wholly new in Whitman and 
 peculiar to himself alone, his style, has found 
 few imitators. In Germany, Johannes Schlaf 
 and Paul Remer have exalted Walt Whit- 
 man as the starting-point of a new form and 
 of a new melody, but the noise of the cory- 
 
ii6 American Literature 
 
 bants has died away; it has waked no echo 
 anjrwhere. 
 
 4. MELVILLE. — ^This group of writers had a 
 most original compeer in Herman Melville, the 
 author — almost unknown in Germany — of the 
 sea tale "Typee" (a journey to the Marquesas 
 Islands), 1846; "Omoo" (descriptions of the 
 South Sea), 1847; "Mardi," 1848; "White 
 Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War," 1850; 
 "The White Whale, or Moby Dick," 1851, etc. 
 
 These tales are characterized by a realism 
 which anticipates the Zolas and Goncourts, but 
 surpasses them in verity, inasmuch as every par- 
 ticular was seen and experienced. In "Moby 
 Dick," his most widely read work, the writer nar- 
 rates in the first person how a certain Ishmael 
 enlists on a whaler as a common sailor, and gives 
 all his experiences until the foundering of the ves- 
 sel. That Ishmael was Melville himself. What 
 Kipling admired so greatly in Frank T. BuUen's 
 "Cruise of the Cachalot" was accomplished by 
 the American nearly fifty years earlier, and 
 that with a considerable measure of wordly wise 
 humor. Unfortunately, Melville fell at an early 
 day under the influence of Carlyle and the spirit- 
 ualists; that proved very detrimental to his de- 
 
The Subjective Writers 117 
 
 lineation, and particularly to his style. He rep- 
 resents his hero. Captain Ahab, a whaler, as a 
 mysterious fire-eating figure of colossal propor- 
 tions who outdoes himself in high-sounding 
 phrases and indulges in a quantity of exclama- 
 tory words. And at the same time, behind pal- 
 pable events of the most commonplace sort, the 
 cosmic soul of things is constantly sought. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE HARVARD INTELLECTUALS 
 
 I. Common characteristics. — Of the poets 
 that are brought together here under the common 
 roof of Harvard University, each had a sharply 
 marked individuality. One cannot detect in 
 any poem of Longfellow a kinship of soul with 
 Holmes, in any line of Lowell's political satire 
 an answering chord to the poesy of the singer of 
 Hiawatha. And yet there is one essential trait 
 that they have in common, which makes them 
 recognizable in the midst of the great mass of 
 contemporary poets and prose writers — aca- 
 demic culture, the finest urbanity, and with all 
 their Americanism a cosmopolitan breadth of 
 view. The genius of Harvard College, the 
 historic guardian of cultural tradition and of 
 spiritual cohesion with the mother country, is 
 personified in these three men who occupied, 
 not in vain, chairs at the famous Alma Mater. 
 
 These academic men of Harvard are the last 
 examples of the thinkers of former days who 
 ii8 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 119 
 
 still possessed the privilege, Hke the philosophers 
 of antiquity, of indulging to their heart's con- 
 tent in free-hand literary production outside 
 their special calling and occasionally even with- 
 in it. Lowell was a most conscientious and thor- 
 ough student of literary history, and could 
 make it very unpleasant for a dabbler, as his 
 sharp attack upon incompetent editors* shows. 
 But that did not prevent him from chatting, 
 joking, pamphleteering, in prose and verse- 
 Holmes was a professional man of the first or- 
 der; but he was also the Autocrat of the Break- 
 fast-table. To-day, these men, in order to be 
 taken seriously by their colleagues, would hide 
 their lighter effusions in the most secret drawers 
 of their desks. 
 
 The spiritual kinship of these men is appar- 
 ent in all their works; Lowell not only reminds 
 one constantly of Holmes by his extensive read- 
 ing, but the two humorists are often struck by 
 the same conceit, often even clothe a thought in 
 a like form. 
 
 It may appear paradoxical, and yet it is an 
 absolute fact, that American literature is in- 
 debted to one of these highly learned Brahmins 
 for the utilization of dialect, and to another for 
 
 *Library of Old Authors. Literary Essays, I, 262 et seq. 
 
I20 American Literature 
 
 the literary possibilities of table talk. All the 
 literatures of Europe may envy America for 
 these achievements. Lowell's "Biglov? Papers" 
 and the breakfast-table conceits of the "Auto- 
 crat" are unique of their kind. 
 
 2. LONGFELLOW. — Henry Wadsworth Long- 
 fellow (i 807-1 882) was ordained by Providence 
 to be the poet of optimism. A temperament 
 calm despite his warmth, a clear intellect, a sus- 
 ceptible, soft, loving heart, were nature's en- 
 dowments; his parents provided him with an 
 unclouded youth amid the most beautiful sur- 
 roundings and in a happy home circle; and his 
 country granted him the possibility of devoting 
 his life, free from care, to learning and poetry. 
 As a very young man he was offered the position 
 of professor of modern languages at Bowdoin 
 College, and sent to Europe to fit himself for it. 
 The nineteen-year-old scholar travels through 
 France and becomes acquainted with the seduc- 
 tive Lutetia without allowing himself to be cap- 
 tivated too long by her charms; in Spain and 
 Italy he makes a long sojourn and penetrates 
 into the spirit of the Romance languages and lit- 
 eratures. He sees Vienna, too, learns German 
 in Dresden and Gottingen, and finally, after a 
 three years' absence, returns home. 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 121 
 
 At the age of twenty-two he is actually made 
 professor, with a salary of a thousand dollars; 
 at twenty-four he leads a cultured and beautiful 
 girl to the altar. Under the genial rays of 
 domestic happiness, Longfellow's poetic and 
 scholarly activities develop rapidly. His fame 
 soon penetrated beyond the limits of his home, 
 and in 1835 he received a call to Harvard, the 
 oldest and the foremost of American universi- 
 ties. Longfellow was born under a lucky star. 
 To how many scholars has it been given to suc- 
 ceed so rapidly.? And now the spoiled darling 
 of the Muses writes to his father that good luck 
 has come to him at last, whereas it had never 
 forsaken him for a moment. 
 
 He makes a second tour of Europe; and again 
 he makes it alone, his young wife having died 
 after but a few weeks' sojourn with him on the 
 Continent. The poet tries to assuage his grief 
 by zealous study. At Heidelberg he attends 
 lectures on Shakespeare and Schiller, and makes 
 the acquaintance of Gervinus; the beauties of 
 nature and the pleasing sociability at Heidel- 
 berg endear the old university town to him. 
 Ever deeper Longfellow penetrates into Ger- 
 man life and German literature; he reads Middle 
 High German and more modern masterpieces 
 
122 American Literature 
 
 with equal facility; German literature has 
 henceforth a chief share in his culture and his 
 poetic production. 
 
 In the year 1836 he returns to Cambridge, and 
 the lectures that he designed for 1837 show that 
 German literature had made a most profound 
 impression upon Longfellow's universal spirit. 
 Of the twelve lectures six are devoted to the 
 Germans. And this scholar does not hesitate 
 to devote two of the latter to a semi-contempo- 
 rary, the author of Siehenkds, Jean Paul Richter. 
 
 Henceforth Longfellow's life flows on quietly 
 and peacefully; the life of a thinker and poet, 
 who, raised above parties, strives to realize in 
 his activity the ideal of a man of culture. The 
 still Sabbath peace, the solemn devoutness of a 
 clear Sunday morning filled with sunshine and 
 the warbling of birds, hover over Longfellow's 
 creations. 
 
 The good and the noble in human nature, that 
 is the real province of this American poet. The 
 heavenly daughters, Hope and Love, are the 
 Muses to whom he owes his inspiration, and it 
 is but fitting that full justice is done by the poet 
 to the third in the union. Faith. The hope- 
 ful, trusting, loving human heart he understood 
 eminently well and voiced its feeHngs in con- 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 123 
 
 vincing words; in depicting malice, often as he 
 made the attempt, he never succeeded. 
 
 As a lyric poet Longfellow is well-nigh German 
 in his tenderness and melody, in his experiences 
 and moods. The German evensong {Abendlied) 
 is unique in literature; what language can point 
 to anything like "Fullest wieder Busch und 
 Thai," or even "Die Sonne sank?" Longfellow 
 approaches very closely to the German Ahend- 
 lied. The cozy twilight, the peaceful evening, 
 the rejuvenating night — to these impressions 
 his soul is most delicately attuned, and to them 
 are we indebted for his most deep-felt, most 
 genuine, one might say most German, verses: 
 The Light of the Stars, Hymn to the Night, Foot- 
 steps of Angels, The Day Is Done, The Belfry of 
 Bruges. The evening song dominates in Long- 
 fellow's lyricism, and he was fully conscious of 
 it, for in the poems of 1846 an evening song 
 opens and concludes the volume. 
 
 The first stanzas of the poem Curfew may 
 be cited as an example: 
 
 Solemnly, mournfully, 
 Dealing its dole, 
 The Curfew Bell 
 Is beginning to toll. 
 
124 American Literature 
 
 Cover the embers 
 
 And put out the Hght; 
 
 Toil comes with the morning 
 
 And rest with the night. 
 
 Dark grow the windows, 
 And quenched is the fire; 
 Sound fades into silence — 
 All footsteps retire. 
 
 No voice in the chambers, 
 No sound in the hall; 
 Sleep and oblivion 
 Reign over all! 
 
 In his best productions, notably in those of 
 his first period, Longfellow lays his scenes in 
 medieval times, or at least in countries of the 
 Catholic faith. Baumgartner,* one of his biog- 
 raphers, observes that in this predilection of the 
 poet the longing "that one faith, one Christian- 
 ity, one Church, may again unite all nations 
 into a single Christian family, finds expression.'' 
 
 Such an idea was altogether foreign to Long- 
 fellow's mind. To his peace-loving nature 
 
 *Longfellow's Dichtungen. Ein literarisches Zeitbild aus dem 
 Geistesleben Nordamerikas, von Alexander Baumgartner, S. J. 
 Zweite vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Mit Longfellow's 
 Portrait. Freiburg im Breisgau, Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 
 1887. 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 125 
 
 every sort of controversy is repellent, and many 
 passages might be cited from his prose and verse 
 which plainly contradict such an interpretation 
 as this. No, what captivated him in Catholic 
 subjects was the plastic part that religious faith 
 plays in them, on the one hand, and the vivid, 
 variegated coloring on the other. "The Spanish 
 Student" has the oft-treated story of Preciosa 
 as its theme; the innocence of the pious maiden 
 triumphs over all malice and baseness. In this 
 play, hardly strong dramatically, the coloring is 
 thoroughly Spanish, and invested, accordingly, 
 with all the peculiarities of the Catholic char- 
 acter. Whoever attaches weight to local color 
 will find great enjoyment in reading the piece 
 and will admire the impartiality of the poet; but 
 who will be inclined to see in Preciosa a glorifica- 
 tion of Catholic Spain? Did Weber perchance 
 have that purpose in view when he popularized 
 the same subject in Germany through his music? 
 No less faithful as regards historical and 
 local color is The Golden Legend, the story of 
 Der arme Heinrich in dramatic form. It may 
 be confidently asserted that the medieval poem 
 occupies a higher place artistically, by its con- 
 sistency and verity, than does the somewhat 
 ambitious adaptation of the modern poet. 
 
126 American Literature 
 
 There the chief figures are boldly bodied forth, 
 with powerful strokes; we comprehend per- 
 fectly the maiden's heroic deed, and equally 
 the knight's decision to accept so unnatural a 
 sacrifice. Longfellow wished to make of the 
 legend a comprehensive, one might almost say 
 an exhaustive, picture of the Middle Ages. But 
 the incidental matter is far too rich for the two 
 leading figures of the drama. The poet has 
 utiHzed here all the knowledge of the Middle 
 Ages that he acquired in his painstaking studies. 
 The Golden Legend is a plastic panorama, in 
 which we behold the life of a German town in 
 the twelfth century from the most varied points 
 of view. And one cannot, indeed, marvel 
 sufficiently at the fidelity with which Long- 
 fellow presents all the conditions upon which he 
 touches. He is almost more medieval than his 
 prototype, Hartmann von Aue. The miracle play 
 in the midst of the drama is a little masterpiece 
 of imitation; were we to come across it in some 
 library, in Old English orthography, we should 
 without hesitation declare it to be a valuable 
 find, a production of the thirteenth century. 
 
 Tone and color, then, are medieval through 
 and through. But the characters, their thoughts 
 and emotions ? 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 127 
 
 Longfellow has treated Der arme Heinrich 
 not as a romantic but as an objective poet — 
 indeed, were it not for Zola and his associates, 
 one might very well say as a realist; the play 
 is a historical painting, matter and color are 
 from the Middle Ages, the soul is derived from 
 our time. For what is the idea that animates 
 the poet ? Not the maiden's longing for celestial 
 beatitude, nor her spirit of self-sacrifice alone; 
 for what then would signify the prologue, the 
 storm of the Powers of the air about the Stras- 
 burg Cathedral and the intervention of Lucifer? 
 The underlying idea is clearly enough given at 
 the close: 
 
 It is Lucifer 
 
 The son of mystery; 
 
 And since God suffers him to be. 
 
 He, too, is God's minister. 
 
 And labors for some good 
 
 By us not understood. 
 
 That is to say, "he is the Spirit that desires 
 evil and produces good"; in other words: Hate 
 wishes to destroy us, love uplifts us. Who is not 
 reminded here of Faust.? As the fundamental 
 idea of The Golden Legend differs from that of 
 Der arme Heinrich, so also is the motive of the 
 
128 American Literature 
 
 maiden humanized in Longfellow by a love that 
 is earthly and yet so divine. 
 
 Longfellow made repeated attempts to force 
 the dramatic form — always without success. 
 In 1868 appeared his "New England Tragedies"; 
 one of the dramas has for its theme the persecu- 
 tion of the Quakers in Boston, the other the 
 burning of witches at Salem. Both pieces are 
 failures, and are justly pronounced even by 
 American critics to be unsatisfactory and un- 
 palatable. Judas Maccdbceus (1872) can hardly* 
 be characterized, being no more than a sketch. 
 In the Divine Tragedy the life and passion of 
 Christ are represented with an intentional sim- 
 plicity meant to remind us of the medieval 
 mysteries. The Masque of Pandora (1875) 
 treats the old myth in a style formed, indeed, 
 upon great models, but which does not even 
 distantly approach them. Longfellow's last 
 dramatic poem, Michael Angela, is the biography 
 of the hero in the shape of a dialogue, but again 
 replete with carefully studied details like The 
 Golden Legend, so that the reader obtains a 
 faithful picture of the civilization of Italy in 
 the sixteenth century. 
 
 Narrative poetry Longfellow offers us in two 
 
 *Schonbach, "Aufsatze," p. 261. 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 129 
 
 forms — the ballad and the epic. Both give 
 evidence of the German school through which 
 he passed. The Skeleton in Armor, The Wreck 
 of the Hesperus, and the other ballads are vigor- 
 ous, fresh, stirring; the reader is carried away 
 by the swing of the rhythm as with Burger, the 
 sustained style creates an emotional tension as 
 with Uhland. 
 
 Of the epics, Evangeline, The Courtship of 
 Miles Standish, Hiawatha, and Tales of a Way- 
 side Inn, the first two are in hexameter, a 
 mark that suggests Voss and Goethe. 
 
 The widely read epic, Evangeline, relates how 
 two young and hopeful lives are bHghted by 
 the clumsy, merciless interposition of a political 
 measure. The EngHsh government orders a 
 sudden attack upon the French village of Grand- 
 Pre and the inhabitants are scattered to the 
 four quarters of the earth. Thus Evangeline 
 and her affianced lover are torn asunder forever. 
 Throughout her life Evangeline seeks the lost 
 one; when an aged woman, she finds him dying 
 in a hospital. As the use of the hexameter itself 
 indicates, Longfellow was encouraged in his 
 attempt by Hermann und Dorothea. He no- 
 wise approached Goethe's creation, however. 
 The creation of human characters was not Long- 
 
130 American Literature 
 
 fellow's strong point; the figures in Evangeline 
 are bloodless shadows. 
 
 The language is simple and popular. All the 
 more discordant are certain labored similes, as 
 in 
 
 Sweet was her breath as the breath of kine that feed 
 in the meadows. 
 
 or 
 
 Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of 
 
 heaven, 
 Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the 
 
 angels. 
 
 Far above Evangeline stands the legend of 
 Hiawatha. The matter is actually, as the poet 
 says, taken 
 
 From the forests and the prairies. 
 From the great lakes of the Northland, 
 From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands 
 Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, 
 Feeds among the reeds and rushes. 
 
 The primitive world of old America finds 
 admirable expression in Hiawatha, and the hero, 
 Hiawatha, the promoter of religion and peace, 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 131 
 
 has taught us moderns, too, who have advanced 
 so far in culture, many a good precept. 
 
 Longfellow enriched American literature by 
 excellent translations from Old-English, Ger- 
 man, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian (Dante), 
 Portuguese, and Spanish. 
 
 Of all Longfellow's works The Golden Legend, 
 Evangeline, and Hiawatha have been the most 
 widely read and have found the greatest rec- 
 ognition. In truth, the poet gave his best in 
 these productions, and the critic need add but a 
 few lyrics in order to arrive at a judgment of his 
 work and to designate his place in the literature 
 of his people and of the world at large. 
 
 Longfellow took Goethe's saying about world- 
 literature perhaps too seriously; rarely do we 
 find in his works a note that takes hold of us as 
 something new, never heard before. He reflects 
 the literature of the old and the new time, of the 
 East and the West. He is a master of form ; and 
 in the art of entering into the spirit of a strange 
 people he has scarcely a peer. He is the Herder 
 of English Hterature. And as the words " Light, 
 Love, Life!" decorate his tombstone, so the 
 character of Longfellow's poetry is best sum- 
 marized by the words "Faith, Love, and Hope." 
 
 3. HOLMES. — OHver Wendell Holmes (1809- 
 
132 American Literature 
 
 1894) was likewise born under a lucky star, and 
 the quintessence of his writings would be of the 
 nature of a hymn of happiness. So profound, 
 so clear-sighted, and at the same time so genial 
 an optimist the world has perhaps never seen. 
 Fate, to be sure, dealt very kindly with him. 
 Holmes was extremely fortunate as son, friend, 
 husband; vulgar cares he never knew; and, as a 
 native American, there was little occasion for 
 him to feel the weight of any political or social 
 evils. But not all of his antecedents were as 
 favorable to the philosopher as were the good 
 family from which he sprang, the social inter- 
 course and the new-world freedom which he en- 
 joyed. The asceticism of the Calvinist Puritan, 
 and his terrifying sense of sin, might well have 
 stifled a philosophic inclination to laughter in 
 this son and grandson of Puritans, had not 
 Holmes possessed the gift of shaking off all these 
 unwholesome influences of his ungenial sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 Holmes is a unique phenomenon; he has no 
 parallel among the writers of any age. Born in 
 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he grows up 
 surrounded by books and book-learning in an 
 atmosphere of clergymen and university digni- 
 taries; at the age of fifteen he goes to Phillips 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 133 
 
 Academy at Andover, where, under the disci- 
 plinary rod of a teacher, stiff, narrow, orthodox 
 to the core, he. is to be won over to the charms of 
 a theological career. When, after a year's stay, 
 he leaves the school, he is ready to study every- 
 thing — except theology. First he tries law, 
 but he soon abandons it for medicine. For 
 three years he studies in America; then he pre- 
 vails upon his father to allow him to finish his 
 studies in Paris. In 1833, accordingly, he goes 
 to France, adapts himself readily to Parisian 
 conditions, is enthusiastic about the language, 
 the food, the professors, and enjoys his youth to 
 the full. From Paris he"travels to get a glimpse 
 of the Rhine, and makes a flying visit to Switzer- 
 land and Italy. In 1836 Holmes is home again; 
 in a not especially elegant street of Boston a 
 red lamp announces that Dr. Holmes has begun 
 his practice. The sick have at first no great 
 confidence in the laughing physician. All the 
 greater was his confidence in himself; in his 
 thirty-first year he married — ^with his uncertain 
 income a double hazard. But it turned out that 
 he had won the grand prize in the lottery. His 
 wife was the best, the most charming, the clever- 
 est woman in the world. His practice, none 
 too large, allowed him leisure for scientific work. 
 
134 American Literature 
 
 He published a number of papers, among others 
 a very severe polemic against homoeopathy, and 
 in 1847 he was appointed professor of anatomy 
 and physiology at Harvard University. In the 
 year 1882 he retired on a pension; four years 
 later he sojourned in Europe for a hundred days, 
 and in October, 1894, in the eighty-sixth year 
 of his age, he slipped, almost in the midst of a 
 chat, into the great realm of the unknown. 
 
 These biographical details we gather more or 
 less clearly from his table-talk books,* nor can 
 much more be learned from the two-volume 
 biographyf. The author's complete works in 
 thirteen volumes! contain, in reality, all the 
 material for a detailed biography; the docu- 
 ments and letters appended to Morse's work 
 have in no way changed the picture of Holmes 
 that we formed from his own writings. 
 
 Holmes is the best representative of the spirit 
 of the nineteenth century, if one is willing to 
 reckon the last ten, or possibly the last fifteen, 
 years as belonging to a new period. The cen- 
 
 *"The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" 1857-58; "The Pro- 
 fessor at the Breakfast-Table," i86o; "The Poet at the Breakfast- 
 Table," 1872; "Over the Teacups," 1891. 
 
 t"Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes," by John T. 
 Morse, Jr., London, 1896. 
 
 ^Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1891. 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 135 
 
 tury of natural sciences and inventions; of in- 
 tellectual, moral, and political emancipation; 
 the century that in all things explains the pres- 
 ent by the past; the century that produced 
 philosophers without systems — that marvelous 
 century might be inferred from the writings of 
 this American provincial were all other litera- 
 ture to disappear from the face of the earth at 
 the behest of a new Omar. 
 
 The sequence of Holmes's writings shows 
 very clearly the advance of liberalism in the 
 Anglo-Saxon world. With the utmost discre- 
 tion is the domain which theologians and philos- 
 ophers claim exclusively as their own touched 
 upon in the first work, "The Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast-Table" (1858). "Do you want an 
 image," says the Autocrat, "of the human will 
 or the self-determining principle as compared 
 with its prearranged and impassable restric- 
 tions ? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; 
 you may see such a one in any mineralogical col- 
 lection. One little fluid particle in thecrystaUine 
 prism of the soHd universe!" 
 
 " But you weaken moral obligations I" exclaim 
 the company at table. 
 
 "Weaken moral obligations ? No, not weaken 
 but define them." 
 
136 American Literature 
 
 Ten years later, 1868, the "Professor" permits 
 himself to handle these subjects quite differ- 
 ently. Among the imaginary table companions 
 there is a divinity student; the author has as- 
 signed to this young man the role of agent pro- 
 vocateur. His objections and reflections incite 
 the Professor to ever greater boldness; they act 
 as little obstructions which heighten the fresh- 
 ness and vivacity of his flow of speech. 
 
 "I am afraid," he remarked, "you express 
 yourself a little too freely on a most important 
 class of subjects. Is there not danger in intro- 
 ducing discussions or allusions relating to mat- 
 ters of religion into common discourse?" 
 
 " Danger to what ? " I asked. 
 
 "Danger to truth," he replied, after a slight 
 pause. 
 
 "I didn't know Truth was such an invalid," 
 I said. "How long is it since she could only 
 take the air in a close carriage ? . . . Truth 
 is tough. . . . Does not Mr. Bryant say 
 that Truth gets well if she is run over by a loco- 
 motive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she 
 scratches her finger?" 
 
 And now a conversation ensues in which the 
 theologian is told the "truth." Much of it is 
 long since antiquated, but many a saying pro- 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 137 
 
 duces an effect of freshness and power as though 
 the words were spoken to-day. 
 
 "The active mind of the century is tending 
 more and more to the two poles, Rome and 
 Reason, the sovereign church or the free soul, 
 authority or personality, God in us or God in 
 our masters." 
 
 He waxes most vehement when it is a question 
 of giving the coup de grace to the theological con- 
 ception of sin: one sees how heavily the Calvinist 
 consciousness of sin must have weighed upon 
 his youth. 
 
 Of course in these things a German can learn 
 but little from Holmes; for it was in Germany 
 that the natural sciences were first used as 
 battering-rams against the theological strong- 
 holds, and free souls, in the German sense, the 
 Anglo-Saxon world has never even up to the pres- 
 ent day produced in any considerable number. 
 Philosophy on the other side of the channel 
 and the ocean is still in large measure a hand- 
 maid of theology; consciously or unconsciously, 
 every philosopher is intent upon finding satis- 
 factory answers, from a modern standpoint, to 
 the old theological questions; the religious inter- 
 est dominates — often tacitly — the study of an- 
 tiquity and ethnology; even the agnostic spirits 
 
138 American Literature 
 
 look to stones for disclosures which in Germany 
 have long since ceased to be of interest. It is 
 no wonder, then, that Holmes, too, the grandson 
 and great-grandson of Puritans, concerns him- 
 self so deeply with original sin; it is, on the con- 
 trary, very remarkable that he has devoted so 
 little space to that subject. For it is not re- 
 ligion or the philosophy of religion, but philos- 
 ophy in its most modern sense, that he is above 
 all concerned with. Holmes is primarily a psy- 
 chologist; and he was certainly the precursor, 
 perhaps the teacher, of the Germans in a very 
 essential chapter of psychology. 
 
 The "Philosophy of the Unconscious," which 
 first obtained a name and a following in Ger- 
 many in 1869 through Eduard von Hartmann, 
 was presented in a masterly way, and ardently 
 advocated, by Holmes fully eleven years earlier 
 (1858). It is not, of course, a philosophical 
 system, for it is not in the plan of the breakfast- 
 table to present systems; but those observations 
 of the year 1858 contain, in the germ and in epi- 
 grammatic form, the fundamental ideas of the 
 new doctrine which gained such popularity 
 through Hartmann. Ten years later "The 
 Professor at the Breakfast-Table" takes up the 
 reflections of the "Autocrat" at more than one 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 139 
 
 point, and in June, 1870, Holmes delivered 
 before the famous Harvard chapter of the Phi 
 Beta Kappa Society his address on Mechanism 
 in Thought and Manners, which aims to combine 
 these aphorisms into a sort of system. The 
 essay bears at its head Pascal's significant 
 motto: "Car il ne faut pas se meconnaitre; 
 nous sommes automates autant qu' esprit." 
 
 Holmes makes very little ado about his contri- 
 bution to the knowledge of the unconscious. 
 In the first place, he takes the greatest pains to 
 point out the elements of that knowledge in 
 Leibnitz and mentions a number of contempo- 
 rary scholars, in order to show how the Philos- 
 ophy of the Unconscious occupied the attention 
 of all psychologists in the sixties. 
 
 "The readers of Hamilton and Mill, of Aber- 
 crombie, Laycock, and Maudsley, of Sir John 
 Herschel, of Carpenter, of Lecky, of Dallas, 
 will find many variations on the text of Leibnitz, 
 some new illustrations, a new classification and 
 nomenclature of the facts; but the root of the 
 matter is all to be found in his writings." 
 
 Secondly, thewitty American's own reflections 
 are so highly spiced that their scientific sig- 
 nificance, their deep earnestness, may easily 
 escape the reader. The very first remark of the 
 
140 American Literature 
 
 "Autocrat," which is meant to acquaint us with 
 the workings of the Unconscious, is calculated 
 to arouse mirth rather than deep reflection. 
 "You don't suppose that my remarks made at 
 this table are like so many postage stamps, do 
 you — each to be only once uttered ? . . . 
 I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea 
 often. ... A thought is often original, 
 though you have uttered it a hundred times. 
 It has come to you over a new route, by a new 
 and express train of associations. Sometimes^ 
 but rarely, one may be caught making the same 
 speech twice over, and yet be held blameless. 
 Thus, a certain lecturer, after performing in an 
 inland city, where dwells a Litteratrice of note, 
 was invited to meet her and others over the 
 social teacup. She pleasantly referred to his 
 many wanderings in his new occupation. 'Yes,' 
 he replied, 'I am like the Huma, the bird that 
 never lights.' . . . Years elapsed. The 
 lecturer visited the same place once more for 
 the same purpose. Another social cup after 
 the lecture, and a second meeting with the dis- 
 tinguished lady. 'You are constantly going 
 from place to place,' she said. 'Yes,' he an- 
 swered, 'I am like the Huma ' and finished 
 
 the sentence as before. What horrors when it 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 141 
 
 flashed over him that he had made this line 
 speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was 
 not true, as the lady might perhaps have fairly 
 inferred, that he had embellished his conversa- 
 tion with the Huma daily during the whole 
 interval of years. On the contrary, he had 
 never once thought of the odious fowl until the 
 recurrence of precisely the same circumstances 
 brought up precisely the same idea." 
 
 No less facetious, only far more profound, is 
 the following observation: "I want to make 
 a literary confession now, which I believe no- 
 body has made before me. You know very well 
 that I write verses sometimes, because I have 
 read some of them at this table. (The com- 
 pany assented — ^two or three of them in a re- 
 signed sort of way, as I thought, as if they sup- 
 posed I had an epic in my pocket and were 
 going to read half a dozen books or so for their 
 benefit.) I continued : Of course I write some 
 lines or passages which are better than others; 
 some which, compared with the others, might 
 be called relatively excellent. It is in the nature 
 of things that I should consider these relatively 
 excellent lines or passages as absolutely good. 
 So much must be pardoned to humanity. Now 
 I never wrote a 'good' line in my life but the 
 
142 American Literature 
 
 moment after it was written it seemed a hundred 
 years old. Very commonly I had a sudden con- 
 viction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly 
 I may have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, 
 but I do not remember that I ever once detected 
 any historical truth in these sudden convictions 
 of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase. 
 . . . This is the philosophy of it. (Here 
 the number of the company was diminished by a 
 small secession.) Any new formula which sud- 
 denly emerges in our consciousness has its roots 
 in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when 
 it first makes its appearance among the recog- 
 nized growths of our intellect. Any crystalline 
 group of musical words has had a long and still 
 period to form in." 
 
 How immense the range Holmes assigns to 
 the Unconscious, how far-reaching the effects 
 he ascribes to it, may be descried in the following 
 conceit: "There is a natural tendency in many 
 persons to run their adjectives together in 
 triads, as I have heard them called — thus : He 
 was honorable, courteous, and brave; she was 
 graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. Johnson 
 is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who 
 said you could separate a paper in the 'Rambler' 
 into three distinct essays. Many of our writers 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 143 
 
 show the same tendency — my friend, the Pro- 
 fessor, especially. Some think it is in humble 
 imitation of Johnson — some that it is for the 
 sake of the stately sound only. I don't think 
 they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an 
 instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind 
 to present a thought or image with the three 
 dimensions which belong to every soHd. . . . 
 It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove 
 it, and a great deal easier to dispute it than to 
 disprove it. But mind this: the more we ob- 
 serve and study, the wider we find the range of 
 the automatic and instinctive principles in body, 
 mind, and morals, and the narrower the limits 
 of the self-determining conscious movement." 
 
 The predominance of the Unconscious in our 
 psychic life, and the great influence of heredity, 
 are perhaps the only two theories of natural 
 science which Holmes advances with almost 
 dogmatic assurance and steadily insists upon. 
 He even wrote two novels, "Elsie Venner" and 
 "The Guardian Angel," in order to expound his 
 views regarding the prevailing ideas of sin and 
 personal responsibility. Otherwise, however, his 
 attitude is that of smiling skepticism toward 
 all dogmas, even those of natural science. He is 
 enthusiastic about his vocation, he loves science 
 
144 American Literature 
 
 and delights royally in its successes, particularly 
 where it annihilates blind credulity. 
 
 But it is just this that makes this lovable 
 personality so unique, so wonderfully engaging. 
 Holmes is the laughing philosopher, not only 
 as regards theology, but also as regards the nat- 
 ural sciences and even himself. 
 
 "The Professor," he says of himself (for the 
 "Autocrat," the "Professor," and the "Poet" 
 are, of course, really one and the same person), 
 "considers himself, and I consider him, a very 
 useful and worthy kind of drudge. I think he 
 has a pride in his small technicalities. I know 
 that he has a great idea of fidelity; and though 
 I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times 
 at the grand airs 'Science' puts on, as she stands 
 marking time, but not getting on, while the 
 trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating 
 — yet I am sure he has a liking for his specialty 
 and a repect for its cultivators." 
 
 Here is Holmes to the life, the laughing philos- 
 ophersummedup in brief: humanityis a comedy, 
 but we all are at once actors and spectators — let 
 us not be spoil-sports; let every one take his part 
 as well as he can, and play his role (which, in- 
 deed, he has not selected himself) with consum- 
 mate art, if possible. 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 145 
 
 Holmes says that he never really hated a man; 
 we may declare, upon the unanimous testimony 
 of his survivors, that no man ever suffered on 
 account of him. 
 
 Old age, said to be uncongenial to all men, is 
 the surest test of a philosopher; Holmes stood 
 the test splendidly. At fifty he wrote a charm- 
 ing causerie about old age — a rather objective 
 topic to him as yet; at sixty he returned fear- 
 lessly to the unpleasant theme, and after he had 
 passed his eightieth year he jested as delight- 
 fully about it as if it had been infinitely remote 
 from him. 
 
 "The meaning of it all," he relates in the 
 volume which is entitled "Over the Teacups," 
 and which concludes the series of table talks, 
 "was that this was my birthday. My friends, 
 near and distant, had seen fit to remember it. 
 . . . Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects 
 were displayed on a side table. . . . How 
 old was I ? ... I had cleared the eight- 
 barred gate ... I was a trespasser on the 
 domain belonging to another generation. The 
 children of my coevals were fast getting gray 
 and bald, and their children beginning to look 
 upon the world as belonging to them, and not 
 to their sires and grandsires. . . . But, on 
 
146 American Literature 
 
 the other hand, I remember that men of science 
 have maintained that the natural hfe of man is 
 nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. 
 I always think of a familiar experience which I 
 bring from the French cafes, well known to me 
 in my early manhood. ... A guest of the 
 establishment is sitting at his little table. He 
 has just had his coflFee, and the waiter is serving 
 him with his petit verre . . . the guest is 
 calHng to the waiter, 'Gar9on! et le bain de 
 pieds!' The little glass stands in a small tin 
 saucer or shallow dish, and the custom is to 
 more than fill the glass, so that some extra 
 brandy runs over into this tin saucer or cup- 
 plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer. 
 
 "Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of 
 spirit. At seventy years it used to be said that 
 the Httle glass was full. We should be more apt 
 to put it at eighty in our day. ... I am 
 wilHng to concede that all after fourscore is the 
 'bain de pieds.'" 
 
 4. LOWELL. — James Russell Lowell (1819- 
 1891) was ambitious, on his first appearance as 
 a humorist, to imitate and, if possible, surpass 
 the wit of Thomas Hood, which consists essen- 
 tially in a play upon words. In this aspiration 
 he had the desired success. The poem ^ Fable 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 147 
 
 for Critics, which appeared in 1848, is a brilliant 
 coruscation of deliciously happy puns, one more 
 surprising than the other, and irresistible as a 
 whole. 
 
 Phoebus Apollo is sitting idly in the shade of a 
 laurel, when an American critic, D. (the person 
 indicated is Duyckink, the publisher of the 
 "Cyclopaedia of American Literature") ap- 
 proaches, and they engage in a conversation 
 upon literature. Apollo now takes aim at a 
 number of noted American writers, and sketches 
 a brief portrait of each. Emerson, Alcott, 
 Willis, Parker, Dana, Neal, Bryant, Whittier, 
 Hawthorne, Cooper, Margaret Fuller (under the 
 pseudonym "Miranda"), Halleck, Franco, Ir- 
 ving, Poe, Holmes, and Lowell himself — are all 
 assigned the most amiable characteristics; even 
 Margaret Fuller, whom the poet could not abide, 
 comes off well. Apollo bewails the fate of his 
 Daphne, who, as is well known, was able to 
 escape his stormy wooing only by the gods trans- 
 forming her into a laurel, in the following verses : 
 
 When last I saw my love, she was fairly embarked 
 In a laurel, as she thought — but (ah, how Fate 
 
 mocks!) 
 She has found it by this time a very bad box; 
 Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it. 
 
148 American Literature 
 
 You're not always sure of your game when you've 
 
 treed it. 
 Just conceive such a change taking place in one's 
 
 mistress! 
 What romance would be left? — who can flatter or 
 
 kiss trees? 
 And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a 
 
 dialogue 
 With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a 
 
 log,— 
 Not to say that the thought would forever intrude 
 That you've less chance to win her the more she is 
 
 wood ? 
 Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still 
 
 grieves, 
 To see those loved graces all taking their leaves; 
 Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but 
 
 now. 
 As they left me forever, each making its bough! 
 If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was 
 
 right, 
 Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite. 
 
 And as if in these efforts he had not proved 
 himself sufficiently a disciple of Thomas Hood, 
 he wrote two years later, 1850, the poem, The 
 Unhappy Lot of Mr. Knott, which outdoes even 
 the Fable for Critics in play upon words. Other 
 means, too, to achieve humorous effects, such 
 as have become customary in English verse 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 149 
 
 since the time of Byron and Frere — the bur- 
 lesque reference to time-honored things, and 
 extraneous matter such as the use of foreign 
 proper names and the rhyming of foreign words, 
 but, above all, the broken rhyme — were em- 
 ployed by Lowell in most abundant measure. 
 Lowell gained instruction from Byron on more 
 than one point; or he studied under the same 
 masters, namely, the rationalist Pope and his 
 successors, to whom English literature is in- 
 debted for a great number of highly polished, 
 even though hardly very profound or weighty, 
 aphorisms. The Fable for Critics contains many 
 current impressions about literature and crit- 
 icism; many a rhymed couplet can even to-day 
 be applied as a motto for existing conditions. 
 Thus, for example, what is said about the erudite 
 critic who can fill pages about books long since 
 recognized but is struck helplessly dumb when 
 he confronts a new literary apparition: 
 
 But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart, 
 And you put him at sea without compass or chart. 
 
 Against the prevalent view that lyric stands 
 so far below epic art, he says: 
 
 A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak. 
 
150 American Literature 
 
 The satirical digressions, too, into domains 
 which have no connection with the actual theme, 
 such as the thrusts against the advocates of cap- 
 ital punishment and of slavery, Lowell learned 
 from Byron. 
 
 A digression, likewise, is the song of praise to 
 Massachusetts, but not of a satirical kind, in- 
 spired as it is by a glowing love of his native soil. 
 
 To Lowell as lyric poet we are indebted for an 
 abundance of melodious verse and not a few 
 happy delineations of inward experiences. The 
 First Snowfall, in its directness of feeling and 
 simplicity of expression, is the most moving of 
 elegies, and that in a literature so eminently 
 rich in elegies. Strange to say, American 
 readers of Lowell have given the preference to 
 his poem, After the Burial — perhaps because it 
 bewails three losses at once, the death of two 
 children and a beloved wife. 
 
 Lowell's Odes — on the battle of Concord, on 
 Washington's assumption of the command of 
 the American forces, and on the Fourth of July 
 — are patriotic without degenerating into bom- 
 bast; as, indeed, all of Lowell's occasional poems 
 confine themselves within the limits of good 
 taste. 
 
 The famous "Biglow Papers" are verses by 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 151 
 
 the provincial Hosea Biglow relating to the 
 questions of the day, in the Yankee dialect. 
 Lowell entirely renounced here the artificial re- 
 course to puns, foreign words, and labored, 
 grotesque rhymes, which would, of course, have 
 been out of keeping with Hosea's iUiterate per- 
 sonality. He produced his powerful effects ex- 
 clusively by the sheer originality of a speech 
 humorous in itself and by the native wit of the 
 Yankee. The celebrated "confession of faith," 
 cited a thousand times, may be given as an ex- 
 ample: 
 
 I du believe with all my soul 
 
 In the gret press's freedom, 
 To pint the people to the goal 
 
 An' in the traces lead 'em; 
 Palsied the arm thet forges jokes 
 
 At my fat contracts squintin', 
 An' withered be the nose that pokes 
 
 Inter the gov'ment printin'! 
 
 I du believe thet I should give 
 
 Wut's his'n unto Caesar, 
 For it's by him I move an' live, 
 
 Frum him my bread and cheese air; 
 I du believe thet all o' me 
 
 Doth bear his souperscription — 
 Will, conscience, honor, honesty. 
 
 An' things o' thet description. 
 
152 American Literature 
 
 I du believe in prayer an' praise 
 
 To him that hez the grantin' 
 O' jobs — in everythin' that pays. 
 
 But most of all in CANTIN'; 
 This doth my cup with marcies fill, 
 
 This lays all thought o' sin to rest — 
 I don't believe in princerple, 
 
 But, O, I du in interest. 
 
 I DU believe in Freedom's cause, 
 
 Ez fur away as Paris is; 
 I love to see her stick her claws 
 
 In them infamal Pharisees; 
 It's wal enough agin a king 
 
 To dror resolves an' triggers — 
 But libbaty's a kind o' thing 
 
 Thet don't agree with niggers. 
 
 Lowell's Essays owed their origin in great part 
 to lectures; they are, consequently, character- 
 ized by both the merits and the defects of the 
 spoken word. They are addressed to a limited 
 circle of persons, who are presumably upon a 
 somewhat like level of culture; who, at any r^te, 
 are prepared in a certain measure for the sub- 
 ject of the discourse. This often leads the lec- 
 turer to content himself with a brief intimation. 
 In the printed essay, which is addressed to the 
 world at large, this brevity sometimes produces 
 an effect of paucity and obscurity. 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 153 
 
 The humor of the Essays becomes ponderous 
 at times by being based too largely upon literary 
 reminiscences and far-fetched allusions. The 
 delicious Moosehead Journal (1853), in its pres- 
 ent shape, yields ready enjoyment only to the 
 highly educated; had not Lowell, on the very 
 first page, conjured up Virgil, Kenelm Digby, 
 and Empedocles, its fresh, popular tone and its 
 wealth of brilliant fancies would regale thou- 
 sands of readers. By his dauntless devotion 
 to truth alone, Lowell's literary criticism towers 
 above that worship of success, tending to half- 
 truths and all manner of compromises, which 
 marked the Victorian age. When Carlyle was 
 at the zenith of his fame (1866), Lowell wrote 
 that estimate,* which, with all its urbanity and 
 reverence, made the hollow thunder-din of 
 Carlyle's verbosity ridiculous. In a few deli- 
 cious epigrams he disposed of the stage-lightning 
 of Carlyle, the supposed demigod. " Mr. Carlyle 
 is for caUing down fire from Heaven whenever 
 he cannot readily lay his hand on the match- 
 box." — "Cromwell would have scorned him as a 
 babbler more long-winded than Prynne . . . 
 Friedrich would have scoffed at his tirades as 
 dummes Zeug." And the same inexorable 
 
 *Literary Essays II, 77 ff. 
 
154 American Literature 
 
 judge is the most unstinting, the most enthu- 
 siastic, admirer of genuine greatness. No 
 German has paid so high a tribute to the genius 
 and character of Lessing as has Lowell; no pro- 
 fessional politician has so enthusiastically lauded 
 the civic patriotism of great Americans of the 
 stamp of Josiah Quincy and James Abram Gar- 
 field. The delectable and refreshing thing about 
 Lowell is that in spite of his predilection for the 
 utterance of generalizations, which often comes 
 dangerously near to Puritan didacticism, he 
 always remains natural, spontaneous, chatty, 
 playful. When he relates in his "Leaves from 
 My Journal in the Mediterranean," how he 
 made the acquaintance of the Chief Mate, he 
 does not content himself with recounting the 
 fact that the Mate admired his pocket-knife, 
 but (genuine Lowellesque: a little nature, a 
 little human nature, and a great deal of I) he 
 appends a generalization: "I like folks who 
 like an honest bit of steel. . . . There is 
 always more than the average human nature in 
 a man who has a hearty sympathy with iron. 
 It is a manly metal, with no sordid associations 
 like gold and silver." Not exactly new, not 
 astonishing, but individual, spontaneous, con- 
 vincing. Lowell had a profound sympathy for 
 
The Harvard Intellectuals 155 
 
 the unadulterated soul of the people, for persons 
 in the lowest ranks. His spirit always found 
 repose and refreshment in intercourse with the 
 unlettered, "like what the body feels in cush- 
 iony moss." Conversation with people of kin- 
 dred pursuits he likens to the grinding of the 
 upper and nether millstones, which wear each 
 other smooth. Genuine human nature was 
 always a source of delight to him. He found 
 it "wholesome as a potato, fit company for any 
 dish." His wit rejoiced in the comedy of homely 
 topics. One need only instance his little known 
 but dehciously humorous translation of Prof. 
 F. J. Child's // Pesceballo (The Fishball!), 
 a mock Italian operetta.* 
 
 5. KINDRED SPIRITS. — The cosmopolitan tra- 
 dition of Harvard is represented by other men 
 besides these. Charles Eliot Norton (1827- 
 1908) maintained the relationship with the great 
 men of England. To him we are indebted for 
 the publication of the correspondence between 
 Goethe and Carlyle (1886), the "Letters of 
 J. R. Lowell" (1893), and "The Letters of John 
 Ruskin" (1904). 
 
 George Ticknor (1791-1887) wrote "A His- 
 
 *Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1862. Reprinted by Thomas B. 
 Mosher, Portland, Maine, 1911. 
 
156 American Literature 
 
 tory of Spanish Literature" (1849) which has 
 not to this day been surpassed; 
 
 Francis James Child (1825-1896) became 
 famous the world over by his monumental work, 
 "EngHsh and Scottish Popular Ballads" (1859). 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson has a trait 
 in common with the great ones of Harvard — his 
 versatility; and Barrett Wendell is an excellent 
 representative of literary history at the famous 
 seat of learning. 
 
 A figure of a peculiar kind of greatness, such 
 as could perhaps be produced on Massachusetts 
 soil alone, is Edward Everett Hale (i 822-1909), 
 who did notable work as journalist, story-teller, 
 preacher, historian. By his famous story, "The 
 Man Without a Country," he will perhaps out- 
 live all the celebrities of the day. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TALE 
 
 1. HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS 
 
 Both Poe and Hawthorne were affected by the 
 influence of that blood-curdling romanticism 
 which in England, too, had its after-eflPects up to 
 the middle of the nineteenth century, as is evi- 
 denced by Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte. 
 The_Americans,_however, borrowed only the. 
 mood. and the jtechnicaL methods of the blood- 
 curdling romance; of the medieval apparatus — 
 the historical setting and the belief in ghosts — 
 there is not a trace. All the thrills and terrors 
 in Hawthorne and Poe are produced by the dark 
 sides of man's in ner Ij^f e. The problems first 
 presented in artistic form by E. T. A. Hoffman 
 — of dual personaHty, of the migration of souls, 
 and other questions from the infinite domain of 
 the unconscious and the semi-conscious — have a 
 particular fascination for Hawthorne and Poe.* 
 
 *Attention should be drawn to the fact that at the time when 
 Poe and Hawthorne took their themes from the realm of the un- 
 conscious, Oliver Wendell Holmes was seeking to illuminate this 
 darkness with his clear understanding. 
 
 1S7 
 
158 American Literature 
 
 Hawthorne's journals show in more than one 
 passage that he contemplated for many years 
 making the identity of soul of an English 
 ancestor and his American descendant the sub- 
 ject of a novel, and "The Marble Faun" is es- 
 sentially a precipitate of that idea. But while 
 Hawthorne, a pronounced rationalist,, never 
 abandoned the firm ground of the world of sense, 
 of the perceptible, only toying with spiritualism 
 and mesmerism^ Poe has given expression to all 
 occult thoughts,„all the twilight states of th^e 
 soul — analyzed dream and swoon, death and 
 resurrection, mental darkness, and the hallu- 
 cinations of the criminal. Along with this in- 
 tense interest in the purely psychological, JEoe 
 and Hawthorne had the keenest sense for their 
 material surroundings. What Poe says more 
 than once about his problematic characters 
 applies both to him and to Hawthorne: they 
 possessed a faculty of perception which no de-_ 
 .tail escaped. This_ rnarvelous combination 
 of the keenest perception of the^ extejrnal^ 
 world with a never-resting,, dissection - of the 
 soul, of a realistic feeling for environment with 
 fancies so far removed from earth, i&-the_dis=- 
 tinguishing characteristic of Hawt-h»rne -and - 
 Poe. 
 
The Psychological Tale 159 
 
 2. POE. — To understand Edgar Allen Poe 
 ( 1 809-1 849), it is essential to know the story of 
 his life. 
 
 Poe was born in Boston in 1809, but was de- 
 scended on his father's side from an old and 
 highly respected Maryland family. The grand- 
 father of the poet took a prominent part in the 
 War of Independence and was a friend of La- 
 fayette. The father was not true to type. 
 Instead of studying law, as the family had ex- 
 pected, he went on the stage and married EHza- 
 beth Arnold, an actress of English descent. 
 Edgar was two years old when he lost both his 
 parents. A childless pair in Richmond adopted 
 the little boy. The husband, having occasion 
 to go to London on business, took his wife 
 and the boy with him; thus Edgar was placed 
 in an EngHsh school, such as he describes in his 
 story, "William Wilson." Returning to Amer- 
 ica, he first attended a high school, then the 
 University of Virginia. He was a highly gifted 
 student, not lacking in industry, and was already 
 versed in Latin, French, and Italian literature. 
 But now and then he fell a victim to the demon 
 of play, and outdid his college-mates in drinking 
 as well; by the close of his first and only year 
 at the university he had incurred a gambling 
 
i6o American Literature 
 
 debt of two thousand dollars. His adoptive 
 father put him into business. Poe soon ran 
 away from it. When his money gave out he 
 enlisted as a private soldier, and persevered in 
 the service fully two years, until he was released 
 by his adoptive father, who secured his appoint- 
 ment to the Military Academy at West Point. 
 There he neglected his duties and was ignomini- 
 ously dismissed (1831). Poe was now entirely 
 dependent upon his pen; from this time to his 
 awful end he is scarcely ever free from want and 
 care. Not that his poetic genius lacked recogni- 
 tion. The gifted novelist, John P. Kennedy, 
 admired him greatly, and made him editor of 
 The Southern Literary Messenger. Kennedy had 
 no occasion to regret his choice, for Poe made 
 the journal famous. He had married a cousin, 
 Virginia Clemm, an ideally beautiful girl of 
 thirteen, and he was ecstatically happy. But 
 social dissipation, such as was customary in the 
 luxurious South, robbed him of reputation and 
 bread. Wine was poison to his hypersensitive 
 nerves. After he had been drinking, he was 
 simply sick for days. Thus he lost his posi- 
 tion, and he moved with his young wife and her 
 mother, a very fine character — the touching 
 poem. To My Mother, is addressed to her— 'first 
 
The Psychological Tale i6i 
 
 to New York, then to Philadelphia, then back 
 again to New York. For years he refrained 
 conscientiously from all alcoholic drinks. All 
 his thoughts were centred at that time upon at- 
 taining fame as a writer and providing the com- 
 forts of life for a wife whom he idolized. His 
 sensitive temperament, his pride, the conscious- 
 ness of his superiority to the mediocrity which 
 figures so prominently in the press — all this was 
 not calculated to make friends for him. The 
 year 1845 brought him the coveted renown, for 
 The Raven had appeared and was greeted in 
 America and England with a storm of applause. 
 But it came too late. His wife had been a con- 
 sumptive for years, and Poe suffered daily 
 martyrdom in beholding her struggle with 
 death. After she passed away (1847) there 
 was an end to his self-restraint. He had not 
 even sufficient strength of character to keep the 
 memory of his great love unsullied, but flitted 
 in sentimental amorousness from one woman 
 to another. On the 3rd of October, 1849, he 
 was found unconscious in Baltimore amid the 
 most sordid surroundings; a few days later he 
 died in a hospital. 
 
 America, as if somewhat to counterbalance the 
 abnormal realism of the majority, has produced 
 
1 62 American Literature 
 
 a number of abnormal visionaries such as per- 
 haps no other country in the nineteenth century 
 can show. Poe, Emerson, Walt Whitman, in 
 spite of their clear, keenly observant vision, go 
 through life as in a dream. And of the three 
 Poe is perhaps the most remote from the ma- 
 terial. His imagination is so powerful that it 
 transforms the world of sense into pure fable 
 and symbols, into ideas and arithmetical prob- 
 lems, into poetical tissues. Everything that 
 he sees and experiences subtilizes itself for him 
 into a dreamlike narrative or an ethereal poem. 
 He was about twelve years old when he came 
 across a woodland lake in Scotland. Instantly 
 the dark lake overshadowed by pines appeared 
 to him an Avernus which aroused all the agonies 
 of death within him, and at the same time 
 brought the solace of deliverance from the 
 bondage of intolerable fancies. The poem based 
 upon that experience. The Lake, is a marvel 
 of language, melody, and imagination, when 
 one considers the youth of its author, and at the 
 same time it sounds the underlying note of his 
 poetic art. While for other and happier poets — 
 for a Dickens or a Walt Whitman — the world is 
 a fairyland with infinite joys and pleasures, for 
 Poe it is filled with spectres, mortal anguish, the 
 
The Psychological Tale 163 
 
 mouldy odor of the grave. Nowhere else is Poe, 
 the poet, so intense, so true, so compelling, as in 
 that masterly combination of euphony and grue- 
 some imagery which appears for the first time 
 as the story "Ligeia," and as The Conqueror 
 Worm in the collected works. Had the death 
 of his parents made so indelible an impression 
 upon the soul of the child of two, or is the germ 
 of this disposition of his mind to be found in his 
 ancestry.'' Poe's biographers have thus far 
 given no answer to the question. 
 
 Narrowness and malice have done much to 
 make difficult the comprehension of Poe's dis- 
 tinctive art. One of the seemingly ineradicable 
 errors, one which, it is true, was furthered by 
 Poe himself, is the view that he was merely a 
 virtuoso, in the sense of the young Romanticists 
 of France, in the sense of the maxim "art for 
 art's sake"; an artist in words pure and simple, 
 as there are artists in color, in marble, in mosaic, 
 in brick, in iron and concrete. Given a certain 
 task and a certain material, the artist produces 
 the required work according to his endowment, 
 without inner experience, without inner com- 
 pulsion. 
 
 The myth, created by Poe himself, that The 
 Raven was the result of pure calculation, cold 
 
164 American Literature 
 
 reflection, and that view of the essence of poetic 
 art which he has repeatedly expressed in his 
 critical essays, explains the origin of this error. 
 Poe's poems did not originate in any such way. 
 Perhaps The Bells, possibly The Raven; assuredly 
 no other. All of Poe's lyricism has its roots in 
 experience; it is personal, in spite of its sem- 
 blance of objectivity. The polished verses of 
 The Conqueror Worm produce an impression of 
 sententiousness, of universality. What can be 
 more impersonal than the thought of the all- 
 destroyer, Death? And yet even that poem is 
 a personal experience. Poe wrote it at the bed- 
 side of his sick wife. 
 
 The tales, too, contain far more of the per- 
 sonal than one would suppose. We have, to 
 begin with, the weird fantasy, "Ligeia," with its 
 intricate scrollwork of exotic decoration. One 
 would surmise a reminiscence of the Arabian 
 Nights and of Monk Lewis. But we know that 
 the soul of the narrative, the will to live, flamed 
 daily, hourly, into the poet's sight from the 
 eyes of his dying wife and compelled him to give 
 it embodiment and poetic shape. The same 
 applies to "William Wilson" and other tales. 
 
 Poe and Hawthorne developed the short 
 story, introduced into literature by Washington 
 
The Psychological Tale 165 
 
 Irving, to its highest perfection. Hawthorne's 
 tales are essentially the embodiment of a psy- 
 chological idea, or an allegory; in Poe, on the 
 other hand, three species of stories are to be 
 distinguished : 
 
 1. Psychological problems for their own 
 sake. — Such are the tales: "The Pit and the 
 Pendulum," "The Black Cat," "The Facts in 
 the Case of M. Waldemar," "The Cask of 
 Amontillado," "The Fall of the House of 
 Usher," "WilHam Wilson," "L'igeia." 
 
 2. Pseudo-scientific phantasies. — Such are: 
 "The Adventures of one Hans Pfaal," "A De- 
 scent into the Maelstrom." 
 
 3. Ingenious disentanglements. — These are 
 of two kinds. A seemingly senseless jumble 
 of signs and figures on a scrap of paper is 
 deciphered by the hero of the story as the 
 description of a place where a treasure of tre- 
 mendous value is hidden. "The Gold Bug" is 
 the typical representative of this species. The 
 second sort is the detective story. The eccen- 
 tric Parisian, Dupin, with his incomparable 
 gift of analysis, is the hero of "The Murders 
 in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined 
 Letter." 
 
 An unparalleled boldness of invention, mas- 
 
1 66 American Literature 
 
 terly structure, a compelling logic, are common 
 to all three species. It is a capital observation 
 made by the American professor, Alphonso 
 Smith, a remark that penetrates into the inner- 
 most essence of Poe, that his genius was of the 
 architectural order. In his briefest poem, as in 
 his longest tale, everything is characterized by 
 the most perfect harmony; the relation of the 
 individual parts to each other, as well as that of 
 the individual parts to the whole, is ideal. It 
 is all a matter of artistic design, artistic effective- 
 ness— but only to the eye of the reflecting critic; 
 he who reads for enjoyment has not the slightest 
 suspicion of the consciously manipulated tech- 
 nique of the poet, to him all seems spontaneous 
 nature. 
 
 Poe's language is elevated throughout, in his 
 prose as well as his verse; in its aversion to all 
 that is vulgar it is even the least bit labored. 
 Be the subject ever so repellent, the situation 
 ever so mean — this can never tempt him to use 
 a coarse word. Where a word of Latin deriva- 
 tion is in rivalry with an Anglo-Saxon one of 
 the same significance, Poe prefers the former. 
 This, strange to say, he has in common with the 
 much-derided rhetoric of his compatriots. 
 
 Poe was amazingly well-read and had an ex- 
 
The Psychological Tale 167 
 
 ceptional memory. This accounts for the cir- 
 cumstance that in reading his verse one now 
 and again has an impression of plagiarism. 
 
 The last couplet of the first stanza of the 
 poem For Annie — 
 
 And the fever called "Living" 
 Is conquered at last, 
 
 which Longfellow admired so much that he sug- 
 gested it as an epitaph for the unhappy poet, 
 is a reminder of Shakespeare's "Life's fitful 
 fever." 
 
 The effective concluding verse of every stanza 
 in the world-famous poem The Raven, with the 
 refrainlike words more — evermore — nevermore, 
 had occurred in Longfellow, and in one of the 
 earliest of Lowell's poems {Threnodia, 1839). 
 
 More striking is the resemblance between the 
 third stanza of the same poem. The Raven, and 
 a passage in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Lady 
 Geraldine's Courtship. 
 
 Poe has it: 
 
 And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple 
 
 curtain 
 Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never 
 
 felt before. 
 
1 68 American Literature 
 
 The corresponding couplet in Mrs. Browning's 
 poem reads: 
 
 With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air the 
 
 purple curtain 
 Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless, 
 
 pale brows. 
 
 Nevertheless, one would hesitate to raise the 
 charge of plagiarism against Poe, as he heedlessly 
 did against Longfellow and Aldrich. We know 
 that he was very familiar with Mrs. Browning's 
 poems and that he admired them; it is to her, 
 indeed, that he dedicated the collection The 
 Raven and other Poems in almost hyperboHcal 
 language. Her words simply came to his pen, 
 without his recognizing them as her property — 
 that was all. It was assuredly not plagiarism, 
 but unconscious reminiscence, for Poe was an 
 extraordinarily well-read man, versed in many 
 domains of literature. One only wonders when 
 and where he read all the long-forgotten, strange 
 books which he cites. The English mystic, 
 Joseph Glanvil, furnishes him with the funda- 
 mental idea for the story "Ligeia"; "The Fall 
 of the House of Usher" shows that he was a 
 student of Swedenborg and other occult masters, 
 
The Psychological Tale 169 
 
 not to mention the treatises of natural philos- 
 ophy to which he is indebted for the material 
 of his pseudo-scientific stories, such as "Hans 
 Pfaal" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom." 
 
 We should have a goodly catalogue were we to 
 name all the literary influences, demonstrated 
 or surmised, to which Foe was subject. Let us 
 mention Schiller, whose Geisterseher appeared in 
 the English language, on American soil, as early 
 as 1798. If Poe did not read the famous work, 
 he was certainly familiar with Charles Brockden 
 Brown's imitation, Wieland* Then there is 
 E. T. A. Hoffman, to whom Poe owes the 
 impulse of at least five tales ;t and Samuel 
 Taylor Coleridge, whom Poe cites with the 
 greatest veneration, and whose famous poem, 
 The Ancient Mariner, may be regarded as a 
 starting-point for the "Manuscript Found in a 
 Bottle." 
 
 Poe's indebtedness to his predecessors be- 
 comes altogether a vanishing quantity when 
 one compares it with the debt which the litera- 
 ture of the last sixty years owes to him. Aside 
 
 *W alter Just, "Die romantische Bewegung in der Amerikan- 
 ischen Literatur." Berlin, 1910, p. 26-31. 
 
 fPalmer Cobb, "The Influence of E. T. A. HoflFmann on the 
 Tales of Edgar Allen Poe," Chapel Hill, 1908 ("Studies in 
 Philology," Vol. III). 
 
170 American Literature 
 
 from the imitators of his poetry, the English, 
 the Germans, and the French have been pupils 
 of the story-teller Poe and have won, as disci- 
 ples of the master, resounding fame in both hem- 
 ispheres. The Americans Fitz-James_O^Brien 
 and Ambrose^Bierce, the Englishman, Rudyard 
 Kipling — to name the master of the species in 
 England — the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant, 
 learned the technique of the short story from 
 him. O'Brien's tale, "What Was It?" ap- 
 proached its model very closely, at least so far 
 as the technique is concerned. Ambrose Bierce 
 (born 1842) in his collection of tales, "In the 
 Midst of Life," has pictured the last moments 
 of the dying with fearfully convincing imagina. 
 tive force. Jules Verne, Curd Laszwitz, and 
 H. G. Wells have imitated the pseudo-scientific 
 cosmic romances; Robert Louis Stevenson has 
 spun the thread of Captain Kidd's hidden treas- 
 ure further; and Conan Doyle's copy of Poe's 
 Dupin, the now ubiquitous detective genius 
 Sherlock Holmes, has crowded his prototype 
 out of the memory of the world. 
 
 3. HAWTHORNE. — Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 (i 804-1 864) was descended from one of the old- 
 est Puritan families in New England and passed 
 his youth in his native town, Salem, amid ultra- 
 
The Psychological Tale 171 
 
 orthodox surroundings.* He was but four 
 years old when his father, a sea captain, died 
 in a foreign land. His training by his mother, 
 a high-minded and keenly sensitive woman, was 
 not conducive to the development of the sturdier 
 fibres in her son. The boy was quiet, self- 
 contained, and much alone. After completing his 
 university studies (1825) he returned home and 
 lived there for twelve years, lost in dreams and 
 in his Uterary endeavors. From the outside 
 world he held aloof. He made a veritable cult 
 of his seclusion; even his meals he ate alone in 
 his room. He would walk out only after dark- 
 ness had set in. In his "Note-Books" we find 
 this entry: 
 
 "And now I begin to understand why I 
 was imprisoned so many years in this lonely 
 chamber, and why I could never break through 
 the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner 
 made my escape into the world, I should have 
 grown hard and rough ... by rude en- 
 counters with the multitude. But Hving in 
 solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still 
 kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of 
 my heart." 
 
 *He has described Salem in the introduction to the "The Scar- 
 let Letter." 
 
172 American Literature 
 
 This dream-life came to an end when he fell 
 in love and contemplated marriage. He ob- 
 tained a position in the Boston custom-house. 
 When after two years another political party 
 came to the helm he, more Americano, lost his 
 place, but married, nevertheless (1842), and 
 passed four ideally happy years in Concord, in 
 closest proximity to the TranscendentaHsts. 
 Again there was a change in political manage- 
 ment, and Hawthorne became surveyor of 
 customs at Salem (1846). There he wrote 
 "The Scarlet Letter." In 1853 a friend of his 
 youth who had attained great political power 
 procured him the post of consul at Liverpool, 
 where he remained four years. He also enjoyed 
 the privilege of a well-nigh two years' sojourn 
 in France' and Italy. Then he returned to his 
 native land and died. 
 
 The germ pf_gygry_tale of H awthorne's is a 
 psychological problem. Action, local color, de- 
 tails — all these occupy a secondary place. His 
 "Note- Books" give us unequivocal evidence of 
 this. "A change from a gay young girl to an 
 old woman; the melancholy events, the effects 
 of which have clustered around her character, 
 and gradually imbued it with their influence, 
 till she becomes a lover of sick chambers, taking 
 
The Psychological Tale 173 
 
 pleasure in receiving dying breaths and laying 
 out the dead; also having her mind full of funeral 
 reminiscences, and possessing more acquaint- 
 ances beneath the burial turf than above it."* 
 This idea was carried out in "Edward Fane's 
 Rosebud." 
 
 "To represent the process by which sober 
 truth gradually strips off' all the beautiful dra- 
 peries with which imagination has enveloped a 
 beloved object, till from an angel she turns out 
 to be a merely ordinary woman. "f This like- 
 wise was carried out, at least in part, in Mrs. 
 Bullfrog. 
 
 That Hawthorne's delight in psychological 
 studies is, in its ultimate essence, of a Puritanic- 
 spiritualist nature and not the instinctive 
 gratification of a bent for analysis, is shown, in 
 the first pl'ace, by the fact that the Calvinist 
 bogy of guilt and sin furnishes him with his most 
 powerful motifs; furthermore, by the circum- 
 stance that in his "Note-Books" he just as 
 frequently sketches plots for parables and alle- 
 gories — naturally with a decidedly didactic 
 tendency. "A snake taken into a man's stom- 
 ach and nourished there from fifteen years to 
 
 *"American Note-Books," I, 9. 
 \Ibid., p. II. 
 
174 American Literature 
 
 thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A 
 type of envy or some other evil passion." "Two 
 lovers to plan the building of a pleasure house 
 on a certain spot of ground, but various seem- 
 ing accidents prevent it. Once they find a 
 group of miserable children there; once it is the 
 scene where crime is plotted; at last the dead 
 body of one of the lovers or of a dear friend is 
 found there . . . The moral. . . ." 
 "To describe a boyish combat with snowballs, 
 and the victorious leader to have a statue of 
 snow erected to him. A satire on ambition and 
 fame. . . ." 
 
 Of course it is difficult to say how much of 
 this inclination to allegory is a Puritan inheri- 
 tance, how much literary borrowing; for we 
 know from Hawthorne's biography as well as 
 from his "Note-Books" that not only Bunyan's 
 "Pilgrim's Progress," but also Spenser's "Faerie 
 Queene," had made a most profound impression 
 upon him. 
 
 But literary influence is far less noticeable in 
 Hawthorne than in Poe. Anton Schonbach 
 justly rejects the view expressed by Poe that 
 Tieck served Hawthorne as a model. On the 
 other hand, it may be assumed with a certain 
 degree of confidence that he is indebted to Bal- 
 
The Psychological Tale 175 
 
 zac, at least for growth in the direction which 
 he had marked out for himself. 
 
 Hawthorne's masterpiece is the historical tale, 
 "The Scarlet Letter," a s_tory of three human 
 beings with scarcely any outward incident. A 
 young and beautiful woman, full of life, is put 
 into the pillory in the Puritan town of Salem, 
 and condemned to wear the letter A (signifying 
 adulteress) on her breast in scarlet embroidery 
 visible to all; for she has given birth to a girl, 
 although her husband, the aged Dr. Prynne, 
 had not been heard of for years. Her punish- 
 ment proves all the heavier since, in spite of all 
 the pressure that is brought to bear on her, she 
 refuses to reveal the name of her partner in 
 guilt. She is expelled from the community of 
 the pious and moves into a cottage remote from 
 the town, away by the sea, where she supports 
 herself and her singularly beautiful and uncom- 
 monly capricious child with handiwork; she is a 
 mistress in the art of the needle. Gradually 
 people accustom themselves to her guilt and 
 the flaming sign upon her breast; for Hester 
 Prynne is quiet and inoffensive, but ever ready 
 to help where she is needed in want and sick- 
 ness. 
 
 On the very day that she stood in the pillory 
 
176 American Literature 
 
 there appeared in the settlement a little old 
 man, Roger Chillingworth, who had long lived 
 among the savages and learned from them the 
 heahng powers of plants. He is very welcome 
 to the Puritans. The old man strives to win 
 the friendship of Dimmesdale, the minister, who, 
 though a young man, is universally rever- 
 enced for his piety and learning. Dimmesdale 
 at first repels the advances of the strange and 
 uncanny-looking physician, but finally succumbs 
 to his persistence and his more powerful will. 
 They move into the same house, ostensibly 
 because the minister, who daily grows paler and 
 thinner, is in need of a watchful doctor in his 
 immediate neighborhood. Thus the old man is 
 enabled not only to observe Dimmesdale at all 
 hours of the day and night, but to make him 
 talk, even against his will. The old man is, 
 of course, the husband of the adulteress, and his 
 revenge consists in his gloating daily and hourly 
 over the anguish of Hester, who at once rec- 
 ognized him, and the tortured conscience of the 
 noble-minded minister. Dimmesdale a tones for 
 his passion like a saint, and- is wr£cked-_hy 
 his sin. Hester, howeve r, t riumphs over the 
 vindictiveness of her tormentor by c ontinuin g 
 to an advanced old age her labors ^f ^lov-fi 
 
The Psychological Tale 177 
 
 among her fellow-creatures; enjoying well- 
 earned respect and honor in spite of the scarlet 
 letter. 
 
 Thus there is scarcely any actifen, nothing 
 but inward experience. Nevertheless, "The 
 Scarlet Letter" is the greatest novel, artistically, 
 in American literature. This is due, above all, 
 to the sure touch with which the best means 
 are employed to produce the intended effect. 
 Hawthorne sees his characters as if he had them 
 bodily before him, and his delineation is so 
 careful, so true to Hfe, that he compels us to see 
 them with his eyes. Not a single trait is to be 
 found that is not in keeping with the character, 
 not a single word that we feel to be superfluous. 
 All is as if cast in bronze. 
 
 For Americans and Englishmen the work has 
 besides its purely poetic value still another 
 significance, in that it represents the. esserice of 
 the Puritan spirit, without any historical les- 
 sons, without a mass of external details. The 
 ejitire atmosphere is.filled with Calvinistic views, 
 without the author thinking it necessary so 
 much as once to explain those views, as other 
 delineators of that time have done, Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe for example. The German reader 
 does not bring this historic interest to bear upon 
 
178 American Literature 
 
 thenovel; theefFectuponhimis more unalloyed — 
 that of a work of art pure and simple. 
 
 Hawthorne's second novel dealing with Puri- 
 tan surroundings, "The House of the Seven 
 Gables," has found more readers but fewer 
 admirers. The gloom of the old house and its 
 inmates is illuminated by the rosy youth of the 
 maiden from the country, and in spite of the 
 sad figures of the old judge and the anaemic 
 Hepzibah with her inflexible patrician pride, 
 the sunshine of a redeeming humor hovers over 
 the whole. 
 
 The other novels of Hawthorne are as good 
 as forgotten to-day, even in America. 
 
 4. JAMES AND HOWELLS. — -It is a long way 
 from Poe and Hawthorne to James and Howells, 
 and it is customary, in histories of American 
 Hterature, to keep the two pairs pretty carefully 
 apart by broad streams flowing between. And 
 yet, psychologically considered, they belong 
 together. What binds them together is not 
 only the combination. of the study of the soul 
 with realism, but also literary tradition. 
 
 Henry James (born 1843), who years ago 
 wrote, not very sympathetically, of the life and 
 work of Hawthorne, would perhaps object to 
 the honor of being classed as a fellow-artist with 
 
The Psychological Tale 179 
 
 Poe and Hawthorne; the European, the man of 
 the world, and the humorist in him would pro- 
 test against a spiritual kinship with the New 
 England recluse and moralist Hawthorne. And 
 yet they belong together, for both cultivated 
 the same species of art — the psychological novel. 
 In the choice of matter alone do they differ en- 
 tirely — a natural result of the different circum- 
 stances of their lives. Henry James left his 
 native town, New York, in his twelfth year, 
 and returned to America only for the short 
 period of his university studies, and after that 
 always merely as a fleeting guest. He feels 
 at ease in France and Italy; in England he is per- 
 fectly at home. This explains why he prefers 
 to select his men and women among travellers, 
 among the most restless people of our time, who, 
 a fructifying stream of gold, annually pour over 
 Europe from the western shores of the Atlantic. 
 His heroes and heroines are almost always of the 
 New World, but we make their acquaintance in 
 Switzerland (Daisy Miller), in England (Isabel 
 Archer), in Italy, in France (The Americans) — 
 everywhere, only not in their own home. 
 
 James began as a disciple and imitator of 
 Hawthorne. Tales like "The Madonna of the 
 Future" and "A Passionate Pilgrim" are psy- 
 
i8o American Literature 
 
 chological problems with an allegorical core, 
 like most of Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales." 
 But James swiftly ends his apprenticeship, and 
 soon discovers his own art. 
 
 Henry James, son and grandson of gentlemen 
 and scholars, is an embodied protest against the 
 vulgar misuse of language which celebrates its 
 triumphs in the rhetoric characteristic of a certain 
 portion of the trans-Atlantic press. 
 
 Polysyllabic words of Latin origin, prolixity, 
 circumlocution, crass exaggeration, sensation- 
 alism, constant striving for crude effects, hurrah- 
 patriotism, fawning upon the mob, a mania for 
 quotation, predilection for the commonplace of 
 the school of Martin Tupper, false sentimental- 
 ity, complacent philistinism — James abhors 
 these abominations with all his soul. And in 
 his hatred of this crudity and flatness of pro- 
 vincial authorship, his ideal of art is to keep 
 aloof as far as possible not only from the com- 
 mon, but also from the popular, from the 
 obvious, and likewise from the readily compre- 
 hensible. He has such contempt for the piling 
 up of incidents that, where possible, he elimi- 
 nates action altogether. Psychological analysis 
 and mastery of the art of words are to him the 
 only legitimate resources of the writer of fiction. 
 
The Psychological Tale i8i 
 
 William Dean Howells, too (born 1837), who 
 started out with journalistic writing and be- 
 trays his practice as a reporter in many of his 
 novels, sedulously avoids any unusual incidents 
 and seeks to gain the reader's interest exclu- 
 sively by character study and style. 
 
 The distinguishing characteristic of James and 
 Howells is "finesse." The reader to whom their 
 figures would appeal must be prepjaredL to_,SQlve 
 psychological . pralxkmsy-enigfnas of- character. 
 They themselves only furnish the material in 
 a certain way. They exhibit a man or a 
 woman in daily life — show us how they eat and 
 drink, pay visits and talk, how they go about 
 their work and pass their leisure hours. In the 
 midst of these everyday occurrences a fateful 
 situation is evolved — what he or she will do in 
 that juncture signifies a decision affecting their 
 whole future : how will he, how will she, decide ? 
 In the case of every other story-teller one can 
 predict with a great degree of probability what 
 the decision will be — with James never, rarely 
 with Howells. The women, particularly, are 
 inscrutable to the average intelHgence. The 
 story " Daisy Miller," by James — ^which, by the 
 way, is the most perfect work of his pen and a 
 prime illustration of the nature of his art — and 
 
1 82 American Literature 
 
 "Miss Bellard's Inspiration," by Howells, are 
 excellent examples of how these writers main- 
 tain to the end the reader's tense interest in 
 their psychological riddles. 
 
 "Daisy Miller," regarded as a portrait — this 
 is admitted by all of James's critics, even those 
 adversely inclined — is unsurpassed in American 
 literature. The young American girl, who, with- 
 out culture, almost without education, under- 
 stands the art of dressing like a lady of the best 
 society, and who accepts the homage of the male 
 world like a born princess, as a fitting tribute; 
 who allows herself all sorts of liberties without 
 ever compromising herself, who defies and tor- 
 ments the man she loves because his spiritual 
 superiority oppresses her — this study of a 
 woman really comprehends all the psychological 
 art that has made James famous; only the colors 
 are fresher, the lines more vigorous, the whole a 
 youthful inspiration. 
 
 Undiscerning critics, to whom the suggestive 
 art of this novelist does not appeal, have found 
 Daisy Miller's attitude toward her admirers 
 enigmatical, her early death in Rome forced, 
 the denouement unsatisfactory. Henry James 
 has no doubt smilingly thought to himself re- 
 garding such censors: "My dear sir, I did not 
 
The Psychological Tale 183 
 
 write this story for you; you are a reader after 
 Martin Tupper's and Marie Corelli's own heart." 
 
 Of the longer stories the three-volume novel 
 entitled "The Portrait of a Lady," in spite of 
 the thread of the story being, on the whole, too 
 long drawn-out, contains a number of characters 
 that are simply unforgettable; above all, the 
 "lady" herself, Isabel Archer, again an Ameri- 
 can, but this time (in contrast with Daisy Miller) 
 an over-refined spirit that is almost wrecked by 
 her over-refinement. 
 
 The literary ideal of this group is expressed 
 by Howells in few words: 
 
 "I wonder," says a Bostonian who is fasci- 
 nated by Quebec's picturesque charms, "Quebec 
 isn't infested by artists the whole summer long. 
 They go about hungrily picking up bits of the 
 picturesque along our shores and country roads 
 when they might exchange their famine for a 
 feast by coming here." 
 
 "I suppose," replies the heroine of the story, 
 "there's a pleasure in finding out the small graces 
 and beauties of the poverty-stricken subjects, 
 that they wouldn't have in better ones, isn't 
 there ? At any rate, if I were to write a story, 
 I should want to take the slightest sort of plot, 
 and lay the scene in the dullest kind of place. 
 
184 American Literature 
 
 and then bring out all their possibilities. I'll 
 tell you a book after my own heart: 'Details' — 
 j ust the history of a week in the life of some young 
 people who happen together in an old New 
 England country house; nothing extraordinary, 
 little, everyday things told so exquisitely, and 
 all fading naturally away without any particular 
 result, only the full meaning of everything 
 brought out."* 
 
 It often results from this self-conscious art 
 that the artist, in his effort not to be dominated 
 by matter, commits the mistake of renouncing 
 matter altogether — of wishing to make bricks 
 with neither loam nor straw. 
 
 *"A Chance Acquaintance," Boston, 1874, p. 164. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE HUMORISTS 
 
 1. General.^ — ^No species of literature is repre- 
 sented in America with such richness, variety, 
 completeness, and brilliancy as that shown in its 
 humor. Humorists of genius and esprit, who 
 turn to this subtlest form of art, like QliKer 
 Wendell Ho lmes, and are satisfied if their_whijn- 
 jjcal words eUcit a smile; popular humorists, 
 who pre-suppose in their readers no more than 
 a little knowledge of human nature, and pro- 
 voke bursts _jQ£_Jaughter, Hke Mark—Twain^ 
 humorists who appeal to the boisterousness 
 latent in us all, like Art«nu_s Ward, and tickle 
 us with the rudest devices of a clown, so that we 
 roar — all these are found in greater abundance 
 in American literature than in that of any other 
 country. 
 
 2. REFINED HUMOR.^ — Refined humor finds 
 
 its highest literary expression in "elegant" 
 
 poetry, in the so-called vers de societe, or, 
 
 as the Americans prefer to call it, famiUar 
 
 I8S 
 
1 86 American Literature 
 
 verse,* which occupies about the same place in 
 poetry that still-life or genre pictures do in 
 painting. The master of this species, as Locker- 
 Lampson declares, is Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 and as examples of this kind we may desig- 
 nate his exquisite poems Contentment, To an 
 Insect, The Last Leaf, On Lending a Punch- 
 Bowl, Bill and Joe, Dorothy Q.\ 
 
 John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) leans too 
 much upon the English poet Praed|, but sur- 
 passes his prototype through his American 
 vivacity; The Mourner a la Mode, The Heart and 
 the Liver, Little Jerry, My Familiar, Early Ris- 
 ing, The Pedagogue, are most deserving of men- 
 tion. 
 
 To Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855-1896), who 
 conducted Puck for a number of years, we are in- 
 debted — besides his lively prose sketches which 
 link him with the short-story writers — for a num- 
 ber of vers de societe: The Way to Arcady, Can- 
 dor, The Chaperon, Forfeits, Poetry and the Poet. 
 
 *The character of this peculiar species, little regarded in Ger- 
 man literary criticism, is discussed at length by Frederick Locker- 
 Lampson in the introduction to his anthology Lyra Elegantiarum 
 (Kellner, Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Konigin 
 Viktoria, p. 171), and by Brander Matthews, "American Familiar 
 Verse," p. 1-28. 
 
 tOn Oliver Wendell Holmes, see above i. Chap. 5. 
 
 jKellner, loc. cit. p. 163. 
 
The Humorists 187 
 
 Out of the great mass of poets who, after 
 Holmes, cultivated this species, Eugene Field 
 (1850-1895) towers head and shoulders above 
 the rest; a journalist, a newspaper poet, so to 
 speak, such as, in point of versatility, richness, 
 and individuality no country but America 
 has thus far produced. The whole phenom- 
 enon is so new in literature, so characteris- 
 tically American, that it is worth while to 
 analyze it. 
 
 Field brought to his calling a classical edu- 
 cation, gained in high school and university. 
 He served an apprenticeship upon little pro- 
 vincial papers, until the editor of the Daily 
 News of Chicago offered him a position on the 
 editorial staff, where he was to write humorous 
 verse as a "specialty." The poems attained a 
 rare popularity and were repeatedly published 
 in book form: "Culture's Garland" (1887), "A 
 Little Book of Western Verse" (1889), "With 
 Trumpet and Drum" (1892), "Second Book of 
 Verse" (1893), "Echoes from a Sabine Farm" 
 (1893), and others.* 
 
 He can accommodate himself to anything, no 
 
 *In "The Poems of Eugene Field," complete edition, Charles 
 Scribner's Sons, 191 1, the best poems are collected in convenient 
 form. 
 
1 88 American Literature 
 
 species is impossible to him. He is bound by 
 only one trammel: the poem must not transcend 
 the limits of a feuilleton. We may not, there- 
 fore, look for an epic poem from his pen — other- 
 wise every poetical species is represented by 
 him. He has little lyrics that almost sing them- 
 selves, which remind one of Burns; drinking 
 songs; verses of his married life, springing from 
 genuine, deep emotion; ballads; parodies; ele- 
 gant vers de societe; masterly translations of 
 Horatian odes, and — ^hymns. 
 
 Everywhere the same ease and smoothness, 
 everywhere an ordinary vocabulary, at most 
 the exploiting of an antique orthography and of 
 a few familiar archaisms. All men of consider- 
 able talent, indeed, are at home in the older 
 English literature; some, like Eugene Field, 
 imitate without difficulty the ballads of the 
 fourteenth century.* The astonishing thing 
 about it is that such literary delicacies are 
 understood and appreciated by the public at 
 large. 
 
 Eugene Field is the genuine humorist by grace 
 of God. He is endowed with the rare gift of 
 
 *Cf. Madge the Hoyden, A Proper Trewe Idyll of Camelot (the 
 last verse alone contains the satirical fling at Chicago), The Ballad 
 of the Taylor Pup. 
 
The Humorists 189 
 
 making merry over himself, of bestowing a com- 
 passionate smile upon his own foibles and mis- 
 haps, and thus robbing them of all the unloveli- 
 ness of everyday things. He was fond of a good 
 glass of wine, perhaps even a glass too much; 
 and he was not averse to a dainty dish, either, 
 which compelled him later to do penance at 
 Karlsbad. But how cheerful sounds the psalm 
 of penance from the Bohemian Mecca, with the 
 refrain: 
 
 When you were weighing twenty stone and 
 I weighed ten stone three — 
 
 or the merry poem of the bottle of wine and the 
 tender roast chicken, or the still merrier one of 
 the " pneumogastric nerve," or the hymn of the 
 "delicious roast beef." 
 
 He is a bibliomaniac. He dotes, above all, 
 upon old pigskin-covered tomes of all ages and 
 cHmes. They crowd out from his heart not only 
 his friends but also the young ladies. Books are 
 like women — pleasing to the eye, they incite to 
 purchase, and they are of every size and kind. 
 He didn't care for a folio, only a middle-sized, 
 bonnie octavo, full of verse and prose, with an 
 occasional happy idea, with variety for body 
 and soul. 
 
igo American Literature 
 
 Revolt against a style that servilely follows 
 English models, a style that anxiously avoids 
 any native individuality, set in at an early stage 
 of American literature; the bold introduction of 
 dialect into literature (by Lowell and Holmes) 
 is the most marked expression of that emanci- 
 pation. 
 
 But in the last quarter of the nineteenth 
 century the intimate intercourse between the 
 wealthy classes of England and America resulted 
 in America's once more falling under the yoke 
 of English society. Against this Eugene Field 
 stood on his guard, in his humorous way, by de- 
 fending the old shibboleth of American indi- 
 viduality, "I guess," against the English idiom, 
 "I fancy." 
 
 The old Puritan trust in God, which in its 
 ultimate analysis is nothing but a trust in one's 
 own strength, and the Titanic defiance which 
 conquers Fate because it looks upon the worst, 
 upon Death, with fearless eyes, is met with, 
 even among the most worldly of American poets 
 — the newspaper poets. Verses like the short 
 poem of two stanzas, Contentment, by Eugene 
 Field, show that the chase after the dollar, the 
 corruption of cities, the shortcomings in gov- 
 ernmental administration, the irresponsibility 
 
The Humorists 191 
 
 of those in authority, are transitory, because 
 superficial, phenomena: the marrow of the "na- 
 tion," as the United States terms itself by pref- 
 erence, is of an indestructible Puritan soundness. 
 
 Eugene Field's dialect poems of the West re- 
 mind one by their rhythm, and their diction 
 -in general, of KipUng's Barrack-Room Ballads. 
 Which of the two has the priority? 
 
 A former gold-seeker revels in remembrance 
 of the days "When the money flowed like lik- 
 ker, and the folks wuz good and true." 
 
 The children's poems lack the originality, the 
 freshness, of a natural growth; most of them 
 give evidence of effort, of having been made at 
 the desk. In the Armenian, the Sicilian, the 
 Jewish cradle songs, we see the poet supporting 
 his head on his left arm and cudgeling his brains. 
 I do not think it is going too wide of the mark 
 to assume that Robert Louis Stevenson's child 
 verses incited the American to follow his exam- 
 ple. 
 
 Of wit there is almost none, and hardly any 
 playing upon words; but the most refreshing and 
 delicate humor, whose geniality is not a whit 
 lessened by the admixture of a grain of harmless 
 irony. 
 
 Darts of satire we occasionally find, but they 
 
192 American Literature 
 
 are never very sharply pointed, never poisoned. 
 The sally against Longfellow in the poem, Peter 
 Fogel, is an illustration : 
 
 This is the legend of old, told in the tumtitty metre 
 Which the great poets prefer, being less labor than 
 
 rhyming 
 (My first attempts at the same, my last attempt, too, 
 
 I reckon). 
 
 Humor of the most delightful sort is mani- 
 fested in tales like "Marjorie Daw," by Aldrich; 
 "Pomona's Novel," "The House of Martha," 
 by Stockton; " The Pursuit of the Piano," by 
 Howells. A conceit, a whim, a mood is carried 
 out to its utmost conclusion, regardless of real- 
 ity and probability — this produces capriccios 
 of the most airy, the merriest, most innocent na- 
 ture. The art of this species of humor consists 
 primarily in lulUng us gently into a dreamy 
 state, in consigning the laws of gravity to obliv- 
 ion; if the humorist has brought us to this 
 point, it is easy for him to carry us along in his 
 excursions into the realms of the fantastic. 
 
 "The House of Martha," by Stockton, may 
 be taken as an example. The narrator — it is 
 noteworthy that this type of humor prefers the 
 use of the first person — has spent a whole year 
 
The Humorists 193 
 
 in Europe. His travels in England, France, 
 Italy, were experiences which produced a most 
 enduring effect. When he returns to his Ameri- 
 can nest and begins to speak of his impressions, 
 people run away from him or interrupt him with 
 talk about their local trivialities. The traveller 
 thus makes the astounding discovery that the 
 ears of the modern man are not intended for 
 hearing, but serve rather as spies and watchers 
 of the tongue, to descry a pause in the talk of 
 others: presto! the tongue leaps into the breach 
 and makes itself mistress of the situation. 
 "Modern conversation has degenerated into the 
 Italian game of moccaletti, in which every one 
 endeavors to blow out the candles of the others, 
 and keep his own alight." What resource is left 
 to the traveller under such circumstances but to 
 hire a listener.? After a number of futile at- 
 tempts he procures the right man and passes 
 most enjoyable hours with him. 
 
 That is the introduction; the humorist has 
 expended the greatest care upon it, for it is deci- 
 sive of the fate of his book. The heavy, refrac- 
 tory reader, who will not allow the suggestion 
 of a joke, lays the book down after the first few 
 pages; spirits of a lighter calibre, on the con- 
 trary, have been adequately hypnotized by the 
 
194 American Literature 
 
 introduction; nothing on the part of this Euro- 
 pean traveller who hires a listener can anylonger 
 astonish them. The love story which now fol- 
 lows between the amiable visionary and his 
 amanuensis is no longer a struggle against prob- 
 ability and reason, but a charming extrava- 
 ganza. 
 
 The inoffensive presentation, too, of the 
 foreign, semi-Americanized element belongs to 
 this sort of subtle humor. The model of this 
 species was furnished by Charles Godfrey Le- 
 land (1824-1903) — who, Hke Bayard Taylor, 
 had lived a great deal abroad and had the keen- 
 est appreciation of German literature* — in the 
 "Hans Breitmann's Ballads." 
 
 The poems commemorate Hans Breitmann and 
 his heroic deeds in all situations of life, as peace- 
 ful citizen, as patriotic warrior, as father of the 
 Fatherland. The heroic poems are extremely 
 popular in America and England. The poet 
 first introduces his hero to us when, as a loyal 
 adopted son of the North American Republic, 
 he goes to battle against the rebellious Southern 
 States. Since the battles of 1848 his sword has 
 been rusting; now he girds up his loins, mounts a 
 charger, and rides at the head of a brave band 
 
 *He made Heine and Victor SehefiFel familiar in America. 
 
The Humorists 195 
 
 of compatriots to meet the foe. Forthwith he 
 encounters a cavalry detachment from Texas, 
 whose leader, a young German, challenges him 
 to combat. After a genuinely epic exchange of 
 scornful speeches in the style of the Old German 
 poem of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, they en- 
 gage in a terrible fight, in which the old man 
 vanquishes the young one. He has lifted his 
 arm for the fatal blow, when he suddenly 
 changes his mind and asks his beaten opponent: 
 
 Pelievst du in Moral Ideas. If so I let you free. 
 
 But no, the lad knows nothing, alas, about 
 morality, for since the time when, still a boy, he 
 lost his father Breitmann, he has received no 
 instruction of any kind. Whereupon the old 
 man: 
 
 Und war dy fader Breitmann ? Bist du sein kit and 
 
 kin? 
 Dann know dat ich der Breitmann, dein lieber vater 
 
 bin. 
 
 But in spite of all his joy, Hans Breitmann 
 cannot refrain from a slight suspicion. When 
 he left his wife he knew nothing of his paternal 
 bliss! It is only when the meeting is celebrated 
 over lager beer, and the lad quickly empties a 
 
196 American Literature 
 
 barrel instead of a beaker, that the old man 
 cries enthusiastically: 
 
 Bei Gott dat settles all dis dings — 
 I know du hist main Sohn. 
 
 Hans Breitmann distinguishes himself by brav- 
 ery in the war on every occasion, and the reck- 
 less daring, in particular, with which he captures 
 a brewery garrisoned by five hundred rebels, is 
 admired throughout the land; as a reward the 
 hero, crowned with fame, is nominated by his 
 compatriots as a member of Congress. The 
 appeal to the voters is composed in conjunction 
 with Dr. Emsig Griibler, 
 
 Who in Jena once studiert; 
 
 it contains six great moral ideas. Old Griibler 
 constructs them with artistic gradation, the last 
 and best appropriately crowning the rhetorical- 
 philosophical edifice: 
 
 Die sechste greate Moral Idee: 
 Since it very well is known 
 Dat mind is de result of food, 
 As der Moleschott has shown, 
 Und as mind is de highest form of God, 
 As in Fichte tut appear — 
 He must always go mit de Barty 
 Dat go for Lager-bier. 
 
The Humorists 197 
 
 In consonance with these philosophical prin- 
 ciples there is a big barrel in the polling-place; 
 every voter gets 
 
 Of allerbest Markgrafler Wain 
 Dazu zwolf Glaser Bock. 
 
 Breitmann keeps on continuously with his 
 election speech, which is received with enthu- 
 siasm and consists exclusively of two sentences: 
 
 Zapfet aus! 
 Schenket ein! 
 
 The moral ideas assist Breitmann in obtain- 
 ing an immense majority over his Anglo-Saxon 
 rival; the victory is, of course, fittingly cele- 
 brated over the lager beer, and the hero of the 
 day is modest enough to recognize in his tri- 
 umph the triumph of the German spirit, the 
 superiority of the world-conquering intelligence 
 of the Germans over that of the English. He 
 demonstrates to his hearers the simple, yet thus 
 far generally misunderstood, truth that America 
 belongs by rights to the Germans, for the dis- 
 coverer of the new world was by origin a Ger- 
 man! 
 
igS American Literature 
 
 For as his name was Colon 
 It visibly tut shine 
 Dat his elders are geboren been 
 In Cologne an dem Rhein. 
 Und Colonia war a Colonie, 
 Daher es leicht bemerkbar ist, 
 Dass Columbus in Amerika 
 War der erste Colonist. 
 
 And, above all, the world-redeeming German 
 philosophy! No people can boast of philo- 
 sophical systems so profound and unfathomable 
 that their discoverers themselves do not com- 
 prehend them; Germany alone can point to 
 such heroes: 
 
 As der Hegel sagt of his system 
 
 Dat only one man knew 
 
 Wat der teufel it meant; 
 
 Und der Jean Paul Richter too, 
 
 Who said: God knows I meant somedings 
 
 When erst this buch I writ, 
 
 But God only knows wat dat buch means now 
 
 For I have forgotten it. 
 
 A man who can boast of such countrymen 
 naturally makes his way in politics, and if 
 genuine merit continues to be appreciated in 
 America in the future, then Hans Breitmann 
 will some fine day become Presidenfr. 
 
The Humorists 199 
 
 3. THE HUMOR OF EXAGGERATION. — ^The sec- 
 ond sort of humor, which provokes us to hearty 
 laughter — such as the humor of Washington Irv- 
 ing in his " History of New York," to cite the 
 oldest example — and which is essentially based 
 upon exaggeration, is hkewise very abundantly 
 represented in American literature. That ex- 
 aggeration is the essence of a certain type of 
 American humor is unhesitatingly admitted by 
 the Americans themselves, and was recognized 
 as far back as fifty years ago by Gladstone, to 
 whom we are indebted for the following example 
 of American exaggeration: A firm in America 
 which plumed itself upon its enormous business, 
 found that its expenses increased too rapidly, 
 and decided, from considerations of economy, 
 that it should use less ink for its business cor- 
 respondence. A shareholder proposed that the 
 dot on the " i " be omitted . The suggestion was 
 followed, and at the close of the year the firm 
 reported a net saving of a hundred thousand 
 dollars. 
 
 Exaggeration would not amuse were it not an 
 ingredient of the American character; it is this 
 circumstance that makes it available for the 
 humorist's purposes, for it supplies the spice of 
 self-mockery. The following conceit in an Amer- 
 
200 American Literature 
 
 ican newspaper made the rounds of the entire 
 press: "Has it occurred to you, Mr. Chairman, 
 that the cotton cloth that is annually manu- 
 factured in South Carolina would make a bed- 
 spread large enough to cover thev/hole surface of 
 America and Europe, and that it would, besides, 
 hang over the toes of Asia ? And, sir, if all the 
 cattle that are annually raised in South Caro- 
 lina were a single cow, she could feast upon the 
 vegetation of the equator while her tail would 
 strip the icicles from the North Pole. Her milk 
 would furnish a whole ship's load of butter and 
 cheese, to be transported from Charleston to 
 New York. If all the mules that we breed 
 every year were a single mule, he could consume 
 the entire annual production of corn of North 
 Carolina at a single meal, and could pluck out 
 the spot from the sun with his hind feet without 
 shaking his flank or wagging his tail. If all 
 the pigs that we raise annually were a single pig, 
 it could dig the Panama Canal with three move- 
 ments of its snout, and its grunting would be 
 so loud that the cocoanuts would drop from the 
 trees throughout Central America." 
 
 The chief representative of this species of 
 humor in America is "Mark Twain" — Samuel 
 Langhorne Clemens — (1835-1910). Born in the 
 
The Humorists 201 
 
 village of Florida, Missouri, he was thrown upon 
 his own resources at an early age, and earned his 
 living first as a compositor, then upon a Missis- 
 sippi steamer, until he discovered his literary 
 gift. 
 
 A light-hearted fellow, brimful of roguishness 
 without a grain of malice, a merry-andrew who 
 is ready every instant to conjure up something 
 before his own and others' eyes without, in do- 
 ing so, ever making an approach to truth; a 
 visionary and star-gazer who never loses sight 
 of the earth under his feet; a vagabond and 
 adventurer who remains a gentleman from the 
 crown of his head to the sole of his foot, and, 
 with the grandiose mien of a Walter Scott, re- 
 tains his commercial honor unblemished — that 
 is the writer, Mark Twain, and the citizen, Samuel 
 Langhorne Clemens, in one. We know enough 
 of Mark Twain's life to understand the author 
 of "TomSawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"; but 
 even if nothing of the days of his childhood and 
 youth had penetrated to the pubHc, any literary 
 novice could easily have inferred the author 
 from his works. In this humorist truth and 
 fiction are intimately blended. The sleepy 
 little town on the Mississippi where Tom Sawyer 
 performed his heroic feats is Florida, where 
 
202 American Literature 
 
 Mark Twain was born, but, to the despair of his 
 parents, not educated; the pious, kind-hearted 
 Aunt Polly, who labors in vain to make a de- 
 cent scholar of the harebrained truant, is his 
 own mother, who never lost faith in her trouble- 
 some child, even after his teacher and his own 
 father had given him up. And more even than 
 outward circumstances and happenings does 
 Tom Sawyer reveal the inmost soul of the future 
 globe-trotting bohemian, the ungovernable im- 
 pulse for freedom, the yearning for distant 
 scenes, the vague presentiment of a stirring 
 future, the childish consciousness of superior 
 power. How after the death of his father he, a 
 lad of twelve, obtained employment with a 
 newspaper, which he retained for three years, 
 fetching water from the village pump, sweeping 
 the office and delivering the papers; how after 
 this strenuous apprenticeship he threw up the 
 job and started out with twelve whole dollars 
 in his pocket, to try his luck in New York; how, 
 sobered and disappointed, he returned to the 
 Mississippi, took charge of his education him- 
 self, and really learned the business of river 
 piloting; how, in the silence of the night, under 
 the deep blue vault of heaven, he discovered his 
 vocation, and the archaic seaman's cry "Mark 
 
The Humorists 203 
 
 Twain! " (the leadsman's phrase for two fathoms 
 of water) suggested his nom-de-plume — all this 
 he has himself related in the simple and, per- 
 haps for that reason, the most impressive way. 
 That he did not persevere long as a pilot on the 
 Mississippi, but tried his hand at writing in the 
 West; that he led a Hfe of adventure as a gold- 
 digger with Bret Harte — a congenial compan- 
 ion, yet fundamentally different from himself — 
 and after all sorts of frustrated hopes finally and 
 definitively joined the writers' guild; these 
 things may be gleaned from his sketches. His 
 happy marriage and beautiful family life the 
 Viennese learned to know with their own eyes 
 in the winter of 1898-9. 
 
 For decades Mark Twain's name was con- 
 nected with the story of the celebrated Jumping 
 Frog, as in England and America up to the pres- 
 ent Schiller's name calls up Die Rduber, a.s though 
 "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell" had never 
 been written. But The Jumping Frog exhibits 
 only one side of the humorist, the most promi- 
 nent, the most obvious one, his consummate 
 descriptive talent. A loafer in a certain gold- 
 mining camp, who is an inveterate better, has 
 trained a frog, as well as some other creatures, 
 and offers to bet all comers that said frog can 
 
204 American Literature 
 
 beat any other frog in the world at jumping. 
 And he always wins. One day he happens to ■ 
 meet a newly arrived stranger and offers him 
 the usual bet. The artless-looking stranger is 
 willing, for he cannot, he says, discover any 
 special jumping muscles in the celebrated frog. 
 Now, while the owner of the jumping frog is 
 away looking for an ordinary frog in the nearest 
 swamp, the wily stranger pours a load of buck- 
 shot into the jumping frog's body and wins. 
 By the time the infuriated trainer discovers the 
 fraud, the cunning fellow has vanished. This 
 is the whole point of the story through which 
 Mark Twain introduced himself into literature, 
 and through which he gained a foremost place 
 in the throng of American humorists. Strange, 
 is it not? Well, the fact is that it is vain to 
 attempt to retell a story of Mark Twain's, for 
 he is not a wit, but a humorist. As far as I know 
 he never made a witticism, not even a pun; and 
 puns, owing to the numerous significations of 
 English words, naturally enter most commonly 
 and readily into Anglo-Saxon humor; even 
 Dickens, who never made a good witticism, 
 succeeds in making very acceptable puns, and 
 in James Payn they are as thick as raisins in a 
 Christmas pudding. Mark Twain produces his 
 
The Humorists 205 
 
 effects solely by his humor. Only a German 
 should not for a moment think of trying to fit 
 Jean Paul's, Friedrich Schlegel's, or Vischer's 
 definition of humor to this pecuHar American 
 product; even the comparatively simple quali- 
 ties demanded of humor in Lazarus' Lehen der 
 Seele must not be looked for. If it had occurred 
 to any one to bring the profound researches of 
 those thinkers to bear upon the works of the 
 American humorist, it would indeed have been 
 a grateful return gift of the Germans to the old 
 man, for it would have furnished him royal 
 sport. 
 
 "The spirit of humor," says Lazarus, "sees it- 
 self and its actual life remote from their idea, 
 powerless to attain their ends and its intent, 
 consequently subdued and crushed and often 
 condemned to the despairing derision of self- 
 contempt; and, on the other hand, uplifted and 
 purified by the consciousness of possessing and 
 dominating the idea (and the infinite) despite 
 everything, and of presenting and living it, 
 though in ever so imperfect a form, and of being 
 one with it in its deepest essence, if only through 
 the knowledge gained from it and the painful 
 sense of imperfection," etc. 
 
 Shall we actually try to apply this analysis 
 
2o6 American Literature 
 
 of humor to the Jumping Frog, or to the scene 
 where Tom Sawyer obtains the prize for Bible 
 study? Let us first have the facts. The re- 
 ward for reciting two verses perfectly consisted 
 in a little blue slip, upon which was printed a 
 passage from the Bible. Ten blue slips could 
 be exchanged for a red one, ten red ones for a 
 yellow one. For ten yellow ones the pupil re- 
 ceived from the parson a small cheap-looking 
 Bible which among brethren was worth about 
 forty cents. Only the oldest and most sedate 
 pupils had the persistence to accumulate so many 
 slips and obtain the ardently longed-for prize. 
 The lazy rogue, Tom Sawyer, was ambitious of 
 such a distinction, not, of course, for the sake 
 of the shabby copy of the Bible, but on account 
 of the splendor connected with the ceremony. 
 But where to obtain the necessary slips? Now 
 he had not gathered Bible verses in his brain, 
 but precious objects in his pocket, such as 
 licorice, fishing-hooks, marbles, and other treas- 
 ures. These he traded off very skilfully to his 
 honest schoolmates, and he succeeded in de- 
 frauding them of so many slips that on the day 
 of the distribution of prizes, to the astonishment 
 of the parson, he claimed the reward for industry 
 and perseverance; and owing to the presence 
 
The Humorists 207 
 
 of the district judge he actually obtained it 
 without opposition. Unfortunately, the dis- 
 trict judge was too highly dehghted with the 
 recipient of the prize and was anxious to learn 
 from him the names of the first two apostles. 
 The parson's heart sank into his boots, Tom 
 Sawyer grew redder and redder, but as the dis- 
 trict judge would by no means desist, he burst 
 out with "David and GoHath." 
 
 Now has any one the courage to apply 
 Lazarus's theory of humor to these two little 
 stories? No; the very first element in Mark 
 Twain's humor is the human, the only too hu- 
 man, delight in the weakness, perversity, folly, 
 of a beloved fellow-creature. And the more 
 directly we are made to realize that weakness, 
 perversity, folly, the greater is our enjoyment. 
 We decent, well-bred people do not wish harm to 
 any fellow-creature. Heaven forbid ! We should 
 be quite horrified, cold shudders would run 
 up and down our back, if the elegant gentleman 
 who slipped on the slimy November pave- 
 ment broke his leg; but if his brand-new stove- 
 pipe lies in the gutter, and its owner turns it 
 about in his finely gloved hands, we onlookers 
 cannot suppress a smile. A smile, be it re- 
 marked, most fleeting, lasting but an instant; 
 
2o8 American Literature 
 
 but in that instant we were unconscionable 
 rogues, untamed rascals checked by no altru- 
 istic sentiments. One dare not breathe this — 
 but it is an inexpressible pleasure: for the space 
 of an instant we felt freed from the chains which 
 innumerable thousands of years of social inter- 
 course have forged about our innate savagery. 
 
 This is, of course, but one of the elements in 
 the humor of our American; and it is free to 
 every truly good man (for instance to one who 
 cannot even so much as smile at the mishap of 
 the elegant gentleman) to seek out in his jokes 
 the metaphysical contradiction between the idea 
 and the reality. But wherever he produces gross 
 effects by gross means it is unnecessary to look 
 for deeper explanations. We are confirmed in 
 this view if we notice that we are most stirred to 
 laughter when the dupe tells the story in the 
 first person, thus reaping scorn in addition to 
 injury. Mark Twain is particularly addicted 
 to this form, and happy in the use of it. All the 
 far-famed stories of the watch that runs per- 
 fectly for a hundred and fifty years, until it 
 falls into the ungodly hands of the watchmaker; 
 of the writer who is called in the midst of a pro- 
 foundly erudite essay to have hghtning-rods 
 set up on his house; of the husband whose wife 
 
The Humorists 209 
 
 has a dread of storms and children's diseases; 
 of the journalist who goes to Tennessee to im- 
 prove his health — from the crudest horseplay 
 to the subtlest, keen-edged satire, he has not dis- 
 dained to flatter us with our superiority, and to 
 exploit, in just sufficient measure, our capacity 
 for taking pleasure in other people's mischances. 
 Mastery of the art of description is a matter of 
 course in the case of a great humorist; and his 
 most telling eff"ects are grounded in the pleasure 
 we derive from mimicry. Here Mark Twain is 
 the king of humorists. In three sentences he 
 projects a character outlined with perfect clear- 
 ness. And what a gallery of paintings of con- 
 temporary American life did he produce in the 
 forty years of his activity as an author! All 
 strata, all callings, all climes, all temperaments 
 and destinies are represented in him. The 
 pompous senator is not spared, the poor nigger 
 Jim not forgotten. 
 
 This is the chief reason why to foreigners 
 Mark Twain comes so much closer than do the 
 more recent American humorists, who surpass 
 him, perhaps, in keenness and wit; the reason 
 why Germans in particular regard him almost as 
 one of their own; I believe no English or Amer- 
 ican writer of to-day has found as many trans- 
 
2IO American Literature 
 
 lators and publishers in Germany. Our Ameri- 
 can, in his fine humanity, in his idealism, in his 
 gentleness, is almost an old-fashioned gentle- 
 man. It is a pity that the Puritan spirit, which 
 still prevailed in the home of Mark Twain's 
 parents, is dying out. True enough, it often pro- 
 duced blind zealots, intolerable pedants. But 
 where the Puritan shoot encountered the suit- 
 able psychical disposition, we had a Lincoln, an 
 Emerson, an Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Mark 
 Twain. Mark Twain did not study his Bible 
 verses in the Sunday-school, but he absorbed and 
 carried with him into life the Biblical ideal of 
 the children of one God, the faith in right and 
 justice. Whether this ancient ideal, the growth 
 of a distant soil, is, as our supermen tell us, an 
 ignis fatuus, the near future will teach us; in 
 countries of the Anglo-Saxon tongue it has, al- 
 ways up to the present at any rate, proved a 
 trustworthy pole-star. 
 
 Sensitive natures have taken exception to 
 Mark Twain's grotesque exaggeration, and, on 
 account of this characteristic, have set his humor 
 down as of a low order. This judgment is 
 based on a misunderstanding. Exaggeration 
 is not an essential trait of his humor, even if it 
 aids it in its broadest effects; but subjectively 
 
The Humorists 211 
 
 it can not be dissociated from Mark Twain's 
 whole art as a writer. His countryman, the 
 physiologist, Oliver Wendell Holmes — far too 
 little known among us — divides mankind some- 
 where into microscopic and telescopic natures. 
 Writers like Dickens and Mark Twain require 
 in their lives, as in their presentations, enormous 
 dimensions. Both always craved space, dis- 
 tance, new lands; both passed half their Hves 
 in wanderings, and both indulged in boundless 
 exaggeration. What is odd about it is that 
 Dickens in his descriptions of travel in America 
 covers the exaggeration of the Yankees with 
 ridicule, not suspecting that by it the exuber- 
 ance of the young giant stood revealed, just as 
 was the case with himself. The younger writers 
 of America no longer give occasion for such re- 
 proach; on the other hand, their humor has be- 
 come so measured, so fine spun, that even micro- 
 scopic eyes are unable to discern it. 
 
 4. THE HUMOR OF PUN AND SLANG. — The 
 
 third and cheapest, but assuredly also the most 
 effective species of American humor, employs 
 the pun, slang, and perversions of language of 
 every sort, in addition to exaggeration. An 
 occasional use of the pun is met with among the 
 finest humorists; Thomas Hood owed a great 
 
212 American Literature 
 
 part of his effects to this unacquirable knack, 
 and Oliver Wendell Holmes makes quite abun- 
 dant use of it. But there are many well-known 
 examples of American verse which present noth- 
 ing but a play upon words, with no trace of 
 inherent humor. The poem, A Coat Tale, by 
 H. C. Dodge, one of the best-known humorists, 
 is an example of this: 
 
 Old Tommy Taylor, tailor and 
 
 Retailer, doth retail 
 Old army coats and coats-of-arms. 
 
 And also coats of male. 
 
 With coats of paint he paints his coats- 
 
 Of-arms above his door; 
 His motto is, "I sew the tares, 
 
 Sow all may rip the more." 
 
 He is an artist tailor, and 
 
 His artist work, he'll tell. 
 Is getting pay from customers 
 
 Until he custom well. 
 
 Whene'er his sewing was a lot 
 
 His owing was a little. 
 And though ill fits he never got, 
 
 He often got a fit ill. 
 
 Of much the same sort is The Ahkoond of 
 Swat, by George T. Lanigan, and many other 
 
The Humorists 213 
 
 verses in the comic papers, Life and Puck, and 
 in the New York Sun. 
 
 Perversions of speech based upon analogy 
 and the like are not rare. A few stanzas from 
 Conjugal Conjugations, by A. W. Bellow, will 
 illustrate this: 
 
 Dear maid, let me speak 
 
 What I never yet spoke: 
 You have made my heart squeak, 
 As it never yet squoke. 
 And for sight of you both my eyes ache as they ne'er 
 before oke. 
 
 With your voice my ears ring, 
 
 And a sweeter ne'er rung, 
 Like a bird's on the wing 
 When at mom it has wung. 
 And gladness to me it doth bring, such as never 
 voice brung. 
 
 My feelings I'd write 
 
 But they cannot be wrote, 
 And who can indite 
 What was never indotc! 
 And my love I hasten to plight — the first that I 
 plote. 
 
 Another source of humor is the unrestrained 
 language of the lower middle classes in the towns 
 — slang. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes a 
 
214 American Literature 
 
 moderate use of it; "the young fellow they call 
 John" in the "Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" 
 is very refreshing by the free bluntness of his 
 speech. It is only the recent humorists who 
 have elevated slang to the rank of an essential 
 of their humor, as for instance George Ade in 
 his widely read "Fables in Slang" (Chicago and 
 New York, 1902). A recasting into the lan- 
 guage of the educated would cause the humorous 
 aroma to evaporate. 
 
 Artemus Ward, whose real name was Charles 
 F. Browne (i 834-1 867), combined in his humor- 
 ous lectures punning, perversion of speech, and 
 slang. The following sketch, describing a visit 
 among the Mormons, met with the greatest 
 success: 
 
 BROTHER KIMBALL is a gay and festive cuss, 
 of some seventy summers, or some 'er's there about. 
 He has one thousand head of cattle and a hundred 
 head of wives. He says they are awful eaters. 
 
 Mr. Kimball had a son, a lovely young man, who 
 was married to ten interesting wives. But one day 
 while he was absent from home these ten wives went 
 out walking with a handsome young man, which so 
 enraged Mr. Kimball's son — which made Mr. Kim- 
 ball's son so jealous — that he shot himself with a 
 horse-pistol. 
 
 The doctor who attended him — a very scientific 
 man — informed me that the bullet entered the par- 
 
The Humorists 215 
 
 allelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, superin- 
 cluding hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basil- 
 icon thaumaturgist. It killed him. I should have 
 thought it would. 
 
 {Soft Music) 
 
 I hope this sad end will be a warning to all young 
 wives who go out walking with handsome young men. 
 Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He sleeps be- 
 neath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The 
 music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kim- 
 ball's son. He died by request. 
 
 I regret to say that efforts were made to make a 
 Mormon of me while I was in Utah. 
 
 It was leap-year when I was there, and seventeen 
 young widows, the wives of a deceased Mormon 
 offered me their hearts and hands. I called on them 
 one day, and, taking their soft white hands in mine, 
 which made eighteen hands altogether, I found them 
 in tears, and I said, "Why is this thus? What is the 
 reason of this thusness?" 
 
 They hove a sigh — seventeen sighs of different 
 size. They said: 
 
 "Oh, soon thou wilt be gonested away!" 
 
 I told them that when I got ready to leave a place 
 I wentested. 
 
 They said, "Doth not like us?" 
 
 I said, "I doth— I doth." 
 
 I also said, "I hope your intentions are honorable, 
 as I am a lone child, my parents being far — far 
 away." 
 
2i6 American Literature 
 
 Then they said, "Wilt not marry us?" 
 
 I said, "Oh, no, it cannot was!" 
 
 Again they asked me to marry them, and again I 
 declined, when they cried, "Oh, cruel man! this is too 
 much, Oh, too much!" 
 
 I told them that it was on account of the muchness 
 that I declined. . . , 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 TALES OF THE SOIL 
 
 1. Origin and development. — ^The art of de- 
 picting everyday life, with its specific local 
 color, was cultivated in Scotland with some 
 success as early as the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century. In America the realistic por- 
 trayal of provincial life and the use of dialect 
 dates back to the beginnings of her imaginative 
 literature; Catherine Maria Sedgwick's "A 
 New England Tale," a story which is designated 
 as the forerunner of the whole species, appeared 
 in 1822. But as in England, where it required 
 a master of the stamp of George Eliot to gain 
 appreciation and popularity for this form of art, 
 so in America it was not until the appearance 
 of a creative writer of the abounding vigor, the 
 sensitive temperament, and the varied experi- 
 ence of Bret Harte, that the literature of pro- 
 vincialism became an established fact. "The 
 Luck of Roaring Camp" (1869), a bold piece of 
 impressionist open-air painting of the life of the 
 217 
 
21 8 American Literature 
 
 California gold-seekers — a work of the most 
 absolute directness, without perspective, almost 
 without sifting of its material^marks the be- 
 ginning not of American local-color literature 
 in general, but of that relating to sections other 
 than the Eastern States. For the student of 
 comparative literature it is a particularly note- 
 worthy fact that the pioneer of provincial 
 realism, this very Bret Harte, was a poet of the 
 first water, a litterateur of fastidiously delicate 
 taste who really felt himself exiled, as it were, 
 among the untamed children of nature in the 
 California gold-diggings. He was delighted 
 with the offer of a chair of modern literature 
 (1870); he left America without regret when he 
 was appointed consul at Krefeld (1878); and in 
 London, which he chose as his permanent abode 
 in 1885, he consorted with the best society. 
 His novels and tales, whose substance is taken 
 from the Sierras, were, with the exception of 
 two, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat," all written from 
 memory. 
 
 Another pioneer of realistic local fiction was 
 Edward Eggleston (i 837-1902), whose "Hoosier 
 Schoolmaster" appeared in 1871. In this first 
 effort Eggleston, who had made Taine's theory 
 
Tales of the Soil 219 
 
 of environment his own, describes his own ex- 
 periences; in conscious contrast with the method 
 of idealizing embellishment. It reminds the 
 German reader of Pestalozzi's narrative writ- 
 ings, and still more of Jeremias Gotthelf. And 
 now there follow in rapid succession the works 
 of the great American masters of local fiction, 
 almost every state being represented by a num- 
 ber of story-tellers. 
 
 But brief as is the span of time that separates 
 us from Bret Harte, the development of this 
 species of American art has been extraordinary 
 — almost as remarkable as that of the society 
 depicted. The writers of the seventies and 
 eighties content themselves with rough out- 
 lines; they give to happenings and descriptions 
 the priority over psychological analysis. With 
 Bret Harte color and mood, with Eggleston 
 environment, are the most essential things; the 
 style is as direct and simple as the human na- 
 ture. The farther we get away from these 
 beginnings, the finer do we find the lines, the 
 more careful the psychology, the more dis- 
 tinguished the style. George Washington Cable 
 (born 1844) is already far removed from the 
 style of Bret Harte and Eggleston; the whole 
 distance between 1869 and the close of the cen- 
 
220 American Literature 
 
 tury is to be seen in James Lane Allen (born 
 1849) who must on that account be presented 
 somewhat more fully. 
 
 The work upon which his reputation chiefly 
 rests is "The Choir Invisible," which appeared 
 in 1897. The title itself shows that a poet with 
 the literary spirit is addressing fastidious tastes. 
 What does it suggest to a simple mind.? As- 
 suredly something ethereal, something perhaps 
 from the other shore, spirits or angels. The 
 book, however, does not concern itself in the 
 slightest with the world from which "no traveller 
 returns." On the contrary it is a presentiment 
 of the most stirring life imaginable, the heroic 
 age of the pioneers of Kentucky. And the 
 misleading title, a concession to the learned 
 snobbery of our time, which acts as if it had 
 read everything and forgotten nothing, is taken 
 from a poem of George Eliot's: 
 
 O may I join the choir invisible 
 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 
 In minds made better by their presence: live 
 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 
 For miserable aims that end with self. . . . 
 
 The invisible choir of the title is the band of 
 heroes whose names are not recorded by history, 
 
Tales of the Soil 221 
 
 and yet who in their quiet way have made 
 America the grandiose spectacle which it is to- 
 day. A historical novel, then? No; but a 
 little heroic epic in prose, a brief episode in the 
 life of two noble beings, just as befits an epic, 
 the romance of two strong natures who are too 
 proud to steal their happiness, and not modern 
 enough to relegate the ideas of mine and thine 
 to the lumber room. The single man and the 
 married woman remain separated; that is the 
 whole extent of their defeat. Otherwise they 
 are victorious all along the Hne; victorious over 
 wilderness and savages, over malice and stu- 
 pidity, over temptation and their own hearts. 
 The book exhales youth and strength. The 
 story opens with a half-tempting, half-chiUing 
 day of early spring, and like a northern May, 
 which promises all yet withholds all, does the 
 whole book affect our spirit. 
 
 The strongest side of the American writers 
 of local fiction — in contrast with the great cos- 
 mopolitan novelists of America like Howells 
 and James — is their narrow horizon, their quite 
 childlike, unsubdued nature; it gives them a 
 spiritual kinship to the na'ive poets of the ancient 
 world. Allen's "Choir Invisible" is not the 
 first or the only work of this kind, but it is the 
 
222 American Literature 
 
 finest; the strong heart of a poet finds expression 
 in it. We have, above all, the deep attachment 
 to the soil, which envelops us like the murmur of 
 the woods. There is in reality nothing special 
 about the soil of Kentucky; neither glaciers nor 
 geysers, neither canyons nor silver or gold. 
 Only an undulating landscape with a splendid 
 robe of rich verdure; that is all. But the eye of 
 a poet rests lovingly upon this spot of ordinary 
 earth, and behold, it is sanctified and transfigured 
 for us. And indeed the characters of the story 
 are as everyday as the soil. One almost hesi- 
 tates to say what the vocation of the hero is. 
 He is a schoolmaster, a young fellow, poor as 
 Job, who has been thrown upon his own re- 
 sources from childhood, and strives withal un- 
 swervingly for high objects, as the flame is 
 drawn upward : 
 
 "Sorely as I have struggled, I have yet to en- 
 counter that common myth of weak men, an 
 insurmountable barrier. The imperfection of 
 our lives — ^what is it but the imperfection of our 
 planning and doing? Shattered ideals — ^what 
 hand shatters them but one's own.? I declare 
 to you," says the schoolmaster to the woman 
 kindred to him in spirit, "at this moment, stand- 
 ing here in the clear light of my own past, that 
 
Tales of the Soil 223 
 
 I firmly believe I shall be what I will, that I shall 
 have what I want, and that I shall now go on 
 rearing the structure of my life to the last de- 
 tail, just as I have long planned it." 
 
 That is the genuine American spirit, of the 
 stamp that made of a rail-spHtter a president of 
 the RepubHc. Our schoolmaster, too, climbs 
 the rungs of the social ladder to the top; he is 
 one of the invisible choir that unlocked the West 
 of the vast American continent. 
 
 Strong-willed, iron men and tender, adora- 
 ble women — these characters give a peculiar 
 stamp to James Lane Allen's art. In him we 
 should look in vain for those traits which are apt 
 to be regarded, by persons who get their im- 
 pressions from newspaper reading only, as 
 typically American. What a pleasant surprise 
 to find in this provincial the most delicate 
 shades and finest nuances, maiden-like reserve, 
 almost courtly taste. One is struck already in 
 "The Choir Invisible" with the austere reticence 
 that characterizes all well-bred descendants of 
 the Puritans; in the second masterpiece, discre- 
 tion is carried to the very limits of possibility. 
 The book is called "A Kentucky Cardinal," and 
 the title is a conscious ambiguity, a playful mis- 
 leading of the reader. For it is not a dignitary 
 
224 American Literature 
 
 of the church that is meant, but a shy warbler 
 of the family of the Fringillidce, whom the 
 Americans term the Virginia Cardinal on ac- 
 count of its scarlet plumage; and this warbler 
 is, of course, not the real subject of the idyl but 
 its symbol and culminating point : Hke the falcon 
 in the famous Italian tale, it brings the lovers 
 together. And wherefore the necessity for 
 such an unusual mediator? Because these 
 American provincials use language to conceal 
 their feelings. Man and woman revel in the 
 pains and ecstasies of the unexpressed. They 
 chat with each other in the most confidential 
 spirit as long as they confine themselves to half 
 words, to intimations and enigmas. If the man 
 begins to speak in distinct language of the real 
 feelings of his heart, she vanishes at once like a 
 shadow. But she is, in spite of her superabun- 
 dance of wit, a creature of warm blood and most 
 captivating womanliness, a combination that 
 has reached an ideal perfection in the American 
 woman of the Southwest, if the Hterary artists 
 of that section may be believed. They all lie 
 prostrate at the feet of their ideal. Reverence 
 for woman can no farther go. 
 
 2. NORTH AND SOUTH. — ^The Contrast between 
 the stubboin-soiled North, settled by Puritanic 
 
Tales of the Soil 225 
 
 provincials, and the luxuriant South, taken pos- 
 session of by the Cavalier families, finds expres- 
 sion not in history alone. In literature, too, the 
 productions of New England are sharply dif- 
 ferentiated from those of Virginia or Carolina. 
 The story writers, Margaret Deland (born 1862) 
 and Mary E. Wilkins (born 1862), give us a 
 picture of the life, feelings, and thoughts of the 
 North in their most intimate details. It is worth 
 while to reproduce the picture in miniature. 
 
 In the concerns of everyday life, in their 
 dwellings, their eating and drinking, in social in- 
 tercourse, in their beliefs and thoughts, in love 
 and hate, the natives pictured in the tales of 
 village life give the impression of fossils be- 
 longing to a long-vanished past. 
 
 The New England village is distinguished 
 from the all-levelling plutocratic city primarily 
 by its aristocracy of birth, its family pride. In 
 the country back of New York and Boston an- 
 cestors still count. The almighty dollar of the 
 self-made man tells, but only in the second or 
 third generation. The definition given of a 
 gentleman there is rather pretentious. A gen- 
 tleman should know the given name and the 
 vocation of his male ancestors at least to the 
 fifth generation; naturally, the vocation must 
 
226 American Literature 
 
 be such that its mention in good society is not 
 embarrassing. Among those ancestors one may 
 have been a member of the Provincial Council 
 of his Majesty, another a governor, a third 
 a doctor of divinity, a fourth a member of 
 Congress, if possible of the time of tasselled rid- 
 ing-boots. A gentleman should have family por- 
 traits, books with the names of their one-time 
 owners under the device "Hie liber est meus," 
 Hogarth's engravings in the original edition, 
 Pope's works in fifteen volumes, family silver, 
 and if possible a family ghost. Gentlemen with 
 such a splendid equipment are naturally rare 
 specimens, but the right sort of "family" has 
 one or other of these distinctions blazoned upon 
 its invisible coat-of-arms. The doctor of divin- 
 ity is particularly highly prized as an ancestor; 
 the clergyman stands even to-day at the head 
 of the aristocracy of a village, and he likewise rep- 
 resents the conservative principle. Dr. Howe, 
 the minister of the sleepy village to which Mar- 
 garet Deland's "John Ward, Preacher" trans- 
 ports us, is proud of the elegant tranquillity of 
 the little community in which his father and 
 grandfather passed their lives comfortably before 
 him; when the commercial and industrial ele- 
 ments contrive a plan to entice the railroad to 
 
Tales of the Soil 227 
 
 the dead-and-ahve village, he interposes with 
 his aristocratic authority. The workmen had 
 already cut into the greensward, the company 
 had plunged into expenditures; but the "fami- 
 lies" do not feel any need of contact with new 
 and doubtful elements. So the wounds are 
 healed once more which pickaxes and spade 
 had inflicted upon the ground, and pink clover 
 exhales its fragrance where it had been planned 
 to lay rails and destroy the idyl. 
 
 Self-sufficiency and isolation is another char- 
 acteristic of the New England village: every 
 village is a little entity complete in itself. Di- 
 vision of labor is hardly known there even by 
 name. Like their primitive Puritan ancestors, 
 who cleared the virgin forest, drove out the 
 redskins and the wild animals, and with the 
 same hand knew how to handle the rifle, the 
 carpenter's hammer, and the plow — and, in case 
 of necessity, the needle — the village inhabitants 
 of the New England of to-day are skilled in all 
 kinds of manual work and are fond of it. All 
 the needs of material civilization are supplied 
 by a few hands; industrial improvements, the 
 conveniences of modern invention, are proudly 
 ignored. Barnabas Thayer, in "Pembroke," 
 plows in the primitive fashion of his grandfather; 
 
228 American Literature 
 
 the housewives bake in brick ovens; for clothes 
 and linens the fundamental raw material only is 
 bought; the women spin, weave, sew, knit; for 
 such necessaries not a penny passes out of the 
 house. The village has a merchant, for sugar 
 and coffee are not produced in New England, 
 but in this limited sphere of village commerce 
 the oldest form of trade, exchange, still survives. 
 Rebecca Thayer is in need of sugar for domestic 
 use; hence she counts out two dozen eggs, and 
 William Berry, the merchant, weighs two and a 
 half pounds of sugar for her in return — exactly 
 according to the current rate. 
 
 At the same time a certain luxury is developed 
 which does not accord well with the Puritan 
 sobriety in other directions. The women dress 
 in silks and fine furs, the minister's daughter 
 possesses a small fortune in laces. The dwell- 
 ings are spacious and comfortable; a separate 
 bedroom for each person is a matter of course 
 with a people who entertain so great a respect 
 for individuality and all its rights. The learned 
 callings enjoy the highest esteem; for they, too, 
 are represented in the village. Besides the 
 doctor of divinity there is the doctor of medi- 
 cine and the lawyer; and the three representa- 
 tives of university culture — the lawyer, to be 
 
Tales of the Soil 229 
 
 sure, has not always the benefit of a university 
 education, and his professional knowledge, in 
 England and America, is mostly of a routine 
 character — live side by side on the most amica- 
 ble terms. Mutual entertaining, whist parties, 
 bring variety and a gentle excitement into the 
 drowsy monotony; when the children grow up, 
 they marry among themselves. Unhappy elec- 
 tive difficulties with a tragic sequel are handed 
 down like earthquakes and wars from genera- 
 tion to generation. 
 
 All foreigners and persons of alien religious 
 belief are barbarians in the eyes of the autoch- 
 thons of New England. The Irish Catholics, 
 who form so large a fraction of the population 
 of most of the great cities, and who by their 
 spirit and activity have contributed so largely 
 to the progress of the commerce and industry 
 of their adopted country, are a socially insig- 
 nificant element in the villages. Their creed is 
 conceived by the Presbyterians and Methodists 
 as something monstrous, unspeakable, hardly 
 imaginable. The Methodist preacher in Harold 
 Frederic's "Illumination," Theron Ware, has 
 occasionally seen an Irish servant and Irish 
 bricklayers, but in his imagination, which is the 
 imagination of his parents and his co-rehgionists. 
 
230 American Literature 
 
 the Irish are to blame for the drunkenness, the 
 vice, the crimes, the political corruption of the 
 American cities, and he looks upon their "false, 
 idolatrous religion" as the primal source of these 
 noxious things. When this autochthon acci- 
 dentally becomes a witness of how a dying Irish- 
 man receives extreme unction from the hands of 
 a Catholic priest, this one scene, which thrills 
 his inmost soul, makes him skeptical of his past, 
 of his faith, of himself. In reality the New 
 England villages are by their religion far more 
 closely related to the first half of the seventeenth 
 than to the end of the nineteenth century. The 
 inexorable Calvinist view of life which the first 
 Puritans brought over with them to America 
 in the Mayflower has been maintained by the 
 Presbyterians and Methodists in all its rigor 
 to the present day, and the theory is carried out 
 to its minutest practical consequences. The 
 word of the Bible, in its naked, sober significance, 
 is the standard for faith and thought, for life 
 and death. "Go to the Bible!" That is the 
 first and last resource of the inhabitants of 
 Ashurst, Pembroke, Tyre, Octavius, Lockhaven, 
 or whatever else may be the names of the vil- 
 lages of which Margaret Deland, Mary E. 
 Wilkins, and Harold Frederic give us convincing, 
 
Tales of the Soil 231 
 
 because concordant, pictures. The very names 
 are reminders of the times of Habakkuk : Stand- 
 fast-in-the-faith, Destroy-the-enemy. 
 
 Men and women are no longer given such sig- 
 nificantly picturesque names; the martial spirit 
 no longer exists, nor is there any need of it. But 
 of all the sources of name-giving which we meet 
 with in England and in American cities, there is 
 no trace in the New England village, History, 
 fiction, kinship, the calendar, whim — the place 
 of all these is taken by the Book of Books. The 
 firstborn is put into the arms of the happy 
 mother — what should it be called .? The young 
 woman doubtless cherishes a secret wish, the 
 name of her favorite hero would be infinitely 
 pleasant to her; but the wish of the mother is 
 not taken into account. Go to the Bible! The 
 hero of the village tale, therefore, is called 
 Barnabas, Caleb, Cephas, Ephraim, Levi, Eras- 
 tus, Silas; the women answer to such names as 
 Deborah, Rebecca, Sarah. Richard, Wilham^ 
 Charlotte, Rose, are modern exceptions in the 
 BibHcal company. 
 
 Hell and damnation are there not abstract ar- 
 ticles of faith, but ever-present, effective moral 
 forces; as in our life propriety and the police. 
 The drunkard who mercilessly maltreats wife 
 
232 American Literature 
 
 and child, unashamed before himself and the 
 world, trembles like an aspen leaf as soon as 
 John Ward, the preacher, reminds him of hell. 
 When, for the sake of his young wife, John omits 
 the mention of hell and everlasting damnation 
 from one of his Sunday sermons, he is over- 
 whelmed with reproaches by the wife of that 
 drunkard. Without the weekly reminder, Tom 
 cannot stand up straight for a day. In Harold 
 Frederic's story, Hkewise, the new preacher gets 
 a sound lecture at the hands of one of the elders. 
 Our congregation, says the good man, treads 
 the narrow path that leads to life in a gentle and 
 humble spirit; there are some churches where 
 the minister says nothing about hell and dam- 
 nation, but we are people of the old stamp, we 
 want to hear about hell, about fire and brim- 
 stone, where the wicked burn for ever and ever. 
 The pious have not many pleasures in the vil- 
 lages of New England; woe to him who would 
 try to rob them of their chief consolation, the 
 eternal damnation of the ungodly! 
 
 The English Sunday is regarded with shud- 
 dering on the continent as a horrible example 
 of Puritan self-torture; the absence of theatrical 
 performances and concerts seems an incompre- 
 hensible barbarism to the French and Germans. 
 
Tales of the Soil 233 
 
 But what is the ennui of an English Sunday in 
 comparison with the Sabbath of the American 
 Presbyterians and Methodists? Divine service 
 three times, with three sermons, interdiction of 
 any reading which might in any way be termed 
 amusing, stale bread, old milk — the cows are 
 milked, but the pious do not allow anything to 
 be brought into the house on Sunday — these 
 are the joys that distinguish the Lord's day from 
 the work days. In former times this kind of 
 Sunday was general throughout the land. Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes recalls them with shuddering 
 from his earliest childhood; and we beheve him 
 literally when he relates that the funereal coun- 
 tenances exhibited by the reverend gentlemen on 
 Sundays contributed not a little to render dis- 
 tasteful to him the ministerial calling to which 
 he had been destined by his father. This sort 
 of Sunday quiet has by this time disappeared 
 from the towns; in the villages, however, it has 
 survived with all its terrors. Harold Frederic's 
 preacher gets no fresh milk on Sundays, and 
 well-meaning people impress it upon his young 
 wife that she must not again appear in church 
 on Sunday with flowers in her hat. 
 
 This inflexible orthodoxy is connected with 
 the most prominent trait of the inhabitants of 
 
234 American Literature 
 
 the New England village. They are hard and 
 reserved to the extreme — nearly all of them char- 
 acters without a trace of temperament or imagi- 
 nation. The indomitable determination of the 
 Puritans, which humbled and crushed kings 
 and nations, which in the course of two centuries 
 created in a wilderness of wood and plain a 
 civihzation which Europe required two thousand 
 years to build, has survived as a heritage to the 
 people of Pembroke and Tyre to the present 
 day. If they undertake a thing they carry it 
 out or die; if they have said a thing it stands, 
 even if the persons or things for whose sake it 
 was said demand a retraction. What has once 
 become a matter of faith is not shaken by a 
 thousand arguments; a conviction is not aban- 
 doned even should it crush and destroy. The 
 old martyr blood, which flowed in the days of 
 Mary, Elizabeth, and Charles I., still runs in the 
 veins of the descendants of the Puritans. Deb- 
 orah Thayer drives her eldest son from the 
 house because he leaves his affianced on account 
 of a quarrel with his future father-in-law; she 
 does not like the girl, but she hates the injustice 
 that is done her, and with a breaking heart 
 casts oflF her firstborn because her conscience 
 demands it. Her second son is sickly from his 
 
Tales of the Soil 235 
 
 birth; he is somewhat humored, therefore, as 
 the doctor has positively forbidden any sort of 
 chastisement. Deborah, however, is embittered 
 by the disobedience and stubbornness of the 
 eldest son; and so, when the sickly younger son 
 is also about to offer opposition to his mother's 
 will, she fetches a stick. She knows that she is 
 imperilling his life by corporal punishment, and 
 he is now her only child; but it is better that he 
 should be dead than wicked, better that his body 
 suffer than his immortal soul. And the boy 
 dies, almost under her hands. Martyrs to their 
 Puritan loyalty to conviction are also the chief 
 figures in Margaret Deland's book, "John Ward, 
 Preacher." He adheres firmly to the orthodox 
 creed and preaches hell and damnation in the 
 Calvinist manner. Helen, his wife, is not to be 
 won over to that barbaric belief — she leaves her 
 home, therefore, and the lives of two choice 
 spirits are ruined for nothing. 
 
 3. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. — The distin- 
 guishing characteristic of life in the Southern 
 States was negro slavery, and it finds expres- 
 sion, naturally, not in politics and history alone, 
 but in literature as well. The intercourse of the 
 whites and blacks, the influence of the negroes up- 
 on the feelings and thoughts of the Caucasians, 
 
236 American Literature 
 
 have been depicted a thousand times — with or 
 without a purpose; the classical work of that 
 species was, and has remained to the present 
 day, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which appeared in 
 1852. 
 
 All historians, whether they belong to the 
 victorious North, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, or 
 to the vanquished South, agree in thinking that 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a leading factor in 
 bringing about the Civil War, which rent the 
 Union from 1861 to 1865; that the abolition of 
 slavery was in a great measure owing to that re- 
 markable book. And yet to-day, if one must 
 tell the truth, it is but slightly valued, not only 
 in the outside world, but in the United States 
 itself; and the new generation speaks of "Uncle 
 Tom," with the superior air of ignorant youth, 
 as an ephemeral political production. 
 
 The fact is that Harriet Beecher Stowe has in- 
 sofar shared the fate of many authors who have 
 become famous over night that posterity has 
 sought to counterbalance the former blind over- 
 estimate by exaggerated criticism, by petty 
 hair-splitting; but she comes off far better than 
 many of her fellow-sufferers, for her popularity 
 has outlived her fame. Directly after its ap- 
 pearance "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was sold by 
 
Tales of the Soil 237 
 
 hundreds of thousands, translated into all civil- 
 ized tongues, presented in dramatic form on 
 every stage. That honor has fallen to the share 
 of other books as well. But while other celeb- 
 rities of the day, of that and more recent times 
 — nomina sunt odiosa — are by this time forgot- 
 ten, the demand for "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 
 American circulating libraries continues almost 
 unabated year after year. This perennial youth 
 alone argues against the assertion that it is noth- 
 ing but a sensational blood-and-thunder novel, 
 devoid of all artistic objectivity, extravagant in 
 its heaping up of atrocities, puerile in its crude 
 contrasts of black and white, devils and angels, 
 and marred by its thickly laid-on morality and 
 its lengthy sermons. Neither the former lauding 
 to the skies nor the depreciation of to-day is 
 deserved. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood, in the first place, 
 that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a born story- 
 teller, like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, like 
 George Sand^like Clara Viebig. As to the meas- 
 ure of her talent, there may be a difference of 
 opinion; that her talent is essentially artistic, 
 that the impulse toward the portrayal of char- 
 acter was stronger in her than the inclination to 
 instruct and edify, she has shown unmistakably 
 
238 American Literature 
 
 in her later works, in the descriptions of the Hfe 
 of the Puritans in New England. There it is all 
 character study, without the shadow .of a pur- 
 pose, and precisely there does she show her- 
 self strongest and most self-confident. "Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin," in spite of its forming the zenith 
 of the authoress's life, must in justice be esti- 
 mated as what it was — the first literary attempt 
 of a woman born, bred, almost grown old, in a 
 clerical environment. Harriet was forty years 
 old when her first work appeared in The National 
 Era. If the novel contained no characters but 
 Marie St. Claire and Ophelia we should recog- 
 nize the hand of an inspired creative artist, for 
 they are two consummate portraits. 
 
 Less justified still than the reproach of di- 
 dacticism is the assertion that in "Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin" Mrs. Stowe lowers the art of the novelist 
 to the level of the preacher's pulpit. This can 
 only be maintained by those who have not the 
 remotest conception of the Hfe, the feelings and 
 thoughts, of the Anglo-American -race. What 
 appears to us as the preacher's tone is to them 
 a sustained style, what disgusts us as unctuous- 
 ness is to them an expression of religious emo- 
 tion. It was simply impossible for Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe to give an artistic reproduction of 
 
Tales of the Soil 239 
 
 Uncle Tom's environment without emphasizing 
 as forcibly as possible the godHness and relig- 
 iosity of all the better elements. The author 
 of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a Uberal in the 
 broadest sense of the word; all the freer in that 
 she had thrown off her spiritual fetters herself; 
 a woman of spirit, of modern culture. Whoever 
 repeats the judgment of her pious didacticism 
 current among ill-informed writers on American 
 literature has evidently read none of her other 
 books, in which the feeling for environment and 
 the subtle psychology remind one strongly of 
 George Eliot. Read the following clear-cut 
 sayings, and see how remote Mrs. Stowe was 
 from unction and cant : 
 
 "He was one of those men willing to play with 
 any charming woman the game of those naviga- 
 tors who give to simple natives glass beads and 
 feathers in return for gold and diamonds; to ac- 
 cept from a woman her heart's blood in return 
 for such odds, ends, and clippings as he could 
 afford her from the serious ambitions of life." 
 
 "If women have one weakness more marked 
 than another, it is toward veneration. They 
 are born worshippers — makers of silver shrines 
 for some divinity or other, which, of course, they 
 always think fell straight from heaven." 
 
240 American Literature 
 
 "He gave only the results of thought, not its 
 incipient processes; and the consequence was 
 that few could follow him." 
 
 "There are some people who receive from 
 nature as a gift a sort of graceful facility of 
 sympathy by which they incline to take on, for 
 the time being, the sentiments and opinions of 
 those with whom they converse, as the chame- 
 leon was fabled to change its hue with every 
 surrounding. Such are often supposed to be 
 wilfully acting a part, as exerting themselves to 
 flatter and deceive, when in fact they are only 
 framed so sensitive to the sphere of mental 
 emanation which Surrounds others that it would 
 require an exertion not in some measure to har- 
 monize with it." 
 
 "No moral argument, since the world began, 
 ever prevailed over 25 per cent, profit." 
 
 "Our minister was one of those cold, clear-cut, 
 polished crystals that are formed in the cooling- 
 down of society, after it has been melted and 
 purified by a great enthusiasm." 
 
 "Your Yankee has such a sense of value, that, 
 if he pays a man to thrash him, he wants to be 
 thrashed thoroughly." 
 
 As the daughter of a divine, Harriet under- 
 stood the inmost soul of Puritan theology, and 
 
Tales of the Soil 241 
 
 we are consequently indebted to her for a num- 
 ber of keen and illuminating sayings regarding 
 the Puritan spirit. 
 
 Jonathan Rossiter's confession of unbelief is 
 the result of long and varied experience in many 
 climes, of a rare self-knowledge and penetrating 
 analytical thought. One need not hesitate to 
 compare the author of that piece of literature 
 with a master like George Eliot. 
 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a wonderful hit, 
 but it was not an accident. Only now, after a 
 lapse of sixty years, are we in a position to judge 
 how much of its tremendous success was due to 
 a happy conjuncture of circumstances, how 
 much to intrinsic merit. We see now that 
 Harriet not only had as clear and correct a con- 
 ception of the negro question as her greatest con- 
 temporaries, but that she penetrated the future 
 with veritably prophetic genius. She divined, 
 what escaped men of the keenest vision, that 
 the negroes themselves were not ripe for free- 
 dom; that the time immediately succeeding 
 emancipation would be more dreadful than 
 slavery; she felt that the negroes faced years of 
 the sorest trials; that a purifying educational 
 process would be necessary in order to develop 
 these semi-animals into whole human beings. 
 
242 American Literature 
 
 Who was to take upon himself this formidable 
 task? Not the negro, but the mulatto. I have 
 remarked before that two of the characters in 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" are portraits, Marie St. 
 Claire and Ophelia; an essential addition must 
 be made to that observation. The mulatto, 
 George Harris, son of a white father and a negro 
 mother, is evidently carefully drawn from na- 
 ture. And to my mind this Harris, despite the 
 title of the book, is the centre of interest of the 
 whole story; and indeed it is with this character 
 that the conclusion of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is 
 concerned. Uncle Tom, the full-blooded negro, 
 dies; he succumbs to the torture inflicted by his 
 fiendish master; Harris, on the contrary, escapes 
 and triumphs over his tormentor. This con- 
 trast is significant, it is a fundamental idea of 
 the book. 
 
 The pure negro, childish, with few wants, 
 easily satisfied, trampled upon for thousands of 
 years by alien races, would never have brought 
 the unspeakable sufferings of slavery to the light 
 of day. The defenders of the system had a 
 shadow of right on their side when they pointed 
 to the exuberant cheerfulness of the negroes, 
 to their unfailing vitality, to their affection for 
 their owners, to the indisputable fact that many 
 
Tales of the Soil 243 
 
 of them would not accept the proffered freedom, 
 assigning the Biblical reason, "I love my mas- 
 ter. 
 
 The crying injustice of slavery was first felt 
 and expressed in all its enormity by colored 
 persons of mixed blood, like Harris; the blood 
 of a masterful nature inherited from the father 
 rebelled against a slave's fate, and was not to be 
 pacified either by kind treatment or by the lash. 
 
 "My master!" cried George, when, out of 
 sheer malice, his owner degrades him from a 
 mechanic to a field-hand, "and who made him 
 my master? That is what I think of — what 
 right has he to me? I'm a man as much as he 
 is. I'm a better man than he is. I know more 
 about business than he does; I am a better 
 manager than he is; I can read better than he 
 can; I can write a better hand — and I've learned 
 it all myself, and no thanks to him — I've learned 
 it in spite of him; and now what right has he to 
 make a dray-horse of me — to take me from 
 things I can do, do better than he can, and put 
 me to work that any horse can do? ... I 
 have been careful, and I have been patient, but 
 it's growing worse and worse; flesh and blood 
 can't bear it any longer. . . ." 
 
 And this George Harris, when he attains 
 
244 American Literature 
 
 freedom and a competence, devotes himself to 
 the service of the negro, in spite of the fact that 
 he could pass for a Spaniard or an Italian, so 
 little characteristic of the black are his features. 
 
 "I feel somewhat at a loss as to my future 
 course," he writes to a friend. "True, as you 
 have said to me, I might mingle in the circles of 
 the whites in this country, my shade of color is 
 so slight and that of my wife and family scarce 
 perceptible. Well, perhaps on sufferance, I 
 might. But, to tell you the truth, I have no 
 wish to. 
 
 "My sympathies are not for my father's race, 
 but for my mother's. To him I was no more 
 than a fine dog or horse; to my poor heart-broken 
 mother I was a child; and though I never saw 
 her, after the cruel sale that separated us, till 
 she died, yet I know she always loved me dearly. 
 I know it by my own heart. When I think of 
 all she suffered, of my own early sufferings, of 
 the distresses and struggles of my heroic wife, 
 of my sister— sold in the New Orleans slave- 
 market — though I hope to have no unchristian 
 sentiments, yet I may be excused for saying I 
 have no wish to pass for an American, or to 
 identify myself with them. 
 
 "It is with the oppressed, enslaved African 
 
Tales of the Soil 245 
 
 race that I cast in my lot; and, if I wished any- 
 thing, I would wish myself two shades darker 
 rather than one lighter." 
 
 How these words written sixty years ago have 
 been verified! If George Harris was then a 
 creature of the imagination, he has to-day found 
 embodiment in the negro leader W. E. Burghard 
 Du Bois. One must read what William Archer 
 has to say of that eminent man,* to see how pro- 
 foundly Harriet Beecher Stowe had penetrated 
 into the heart of the negro problem. 
 
 4. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. The SOul of the 
 
 American negro has been most vividly presented 
 to us by Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1906), the 
 author of "Uncle Remus." Uncle Remus is the 
 old negro who relates stories about the fox and 
 the rabbit to the son of the house. 
 
 In Puritan households the negroes represent 
 the natural, or, as theologians term it, the "crea- 
 ture" element in the family; the children always 
 sought refuge from parental chastisement in 
 Juno's or Caesar's loving and unquestioningly 
 wide-opened arms. It is to this loyal relation- 
 ship between the slaves and the children of the 
 house that we owe that wonderful children's 
 book, "Uncle Remus." 
 *"Through Afto-America," London, 191 1. 
 
246 American Literature 
 
 "Brer Fox" and "Brer Rabbit" live in a con- 
 stant feud, and the fox always gets the worst of 
 it. As an illustration let me reproduce the 
 delicious story of the "Tar-Baby": 
 
 THE WONDERFUL TAR-BABY STORY 
 
 "Didn't the fox never catch the rabbit, Uncle 
 Remus?" asked the little boy the next evening. 
 
 "He come mighty nigh it, honey, sho's you bawn 
 — Brer Fox did. One day atter Brer Rabbit fool 
 'im wid dat calamus root. Brer Fox went ter wuk 
 en got 'im som tar, en mix it wid some turkentine, 
 en fix up a contrapshun what he call a Tar-Baby, 
 an he tuk dish yer Tar-Baby an he sot 'er in de big 
 road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer ter see what 
 de news waz gwineter be. And he didn't hatter 
 wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer 
 Rabbit pacin' down de road — lippity-clippity clip- 
 pity-lippity — dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. Brer 
 Fox, he lay low. Brer Rabbit come prancin' 'long 
 twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his 
 behime-legs like he wuz 'stonished. De Tar-Baby, 
 she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 
 
 "'Mawnin' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee — 'nice wedder 
 dis mawnin',' sezee. 
 
 "Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin,' en Brer Fox, he 
 lay low. 
 
 "'How duz yo' sym'toms seem ter segashuate?' 
 sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. 
 
 "Brer Fox, he wink his eye slow, en lay low, en de 
 Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin.' 
 
Tales of the Soil 247 
 
 "'How you come on, den? Is you deaf?' sez 
 Brer Rabbit, sezee, 'Kaze if you is, I kin holler 
 louder,' sezee. 
 
 "Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 
 
 "'Youer stuck up, dat's what you is,' says Brer 
 Rabbit, sezee, 'en I gwineter kyore you, dat's what 
 I'm gwineter do,' sezee. 
 
 " Brer Fox, he sorter chuckle in his stummuck, he 
 did, but Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin'. 
 
 "'I'm gwineter learn you howter talk ter 'spec- 
 tubble fokes ef hit's de las' ack,' sez Brer Rabbit, 
 sezee. 'Ef you don't take off dat hat en tell me 
 howdy, I'm gwineter bus you wide open,' sezee. 
 
 "Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 
 
 "Brer Rabbit keep on axin' 'im, en de Tar-Baby, 
 she keep on sayin' nuthin', twel presently Brer 
 Rabbit draw back wid his fis', he did, en blip he 
 tuck 'er side er de head. Right dar's whar he broke 
 his merlasses jug. His lis' stuck, en he can't pull 
 loose. De tar hilt 'im. But Tar-Baby, she stay 
 still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. 
 
 " 'Ef you don't lemme loose, I'll knock you agin',' 
 sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, en wid dat he fotch 'er a 
 wipe wid de unner han', en dat stuck. Tar-Baby, 
 she ain't sayin' nuthin,' an Brer Fox, he lay low. 
 
 "'Tu'n me loose, 'fore I kick de natal stuffin' outen 
 you,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she 
 ain't sayin' nuthin'. She des hilt on, en den Brer 
 Rabbit he lose de use er his feet in de same way. 
 Brer Fox, he lay low. Den Brer Rabbit he squall out 
 det ef der Tar-Baby don't tu'n 'im loose, he butt 'er 
 
248 American Literature 
 
 cranksided. En den he butted, en his head got 
 stuck. Den Brer Fox, he sa'ntered fort', lookin' 
 des ez innercent ez wunner yo' mammy's mockin' 
 birds. 
 
 "'Howdy, Brer Rabbit,' sez Brer Fox, sezee. 
 'You look sorter stuck up dis mawnin',' sezee, en den 
 he rolled on de groun', en laft twel he couldn't lafF 
 no mo'. 'I speck you'll take dinner wid me dis 
 time. Brer Rabbit. I done laid in some calamus 
 root, en I ain't gwineter take no skuse,' sez Brer Fox, 
 sezee." 
 
 Here Uncle Remus paused, and drew a two-pound 
 yam out of the ashes. 
 
 " Did the fox eat the rabbit ? " asked the little boy 
 to whom the story had been told. 
 
 "Dat's all de fur de tale goes," replied the old 
 man. "He mout, en den again he moutent. Some 
 say Jedge B'ar come 'long en loosed him — some say 
 he didn't. I hear Miss Sally callin'. You better 
 run 'long." 
 
 To investigate the sources of the stories of the 
 fox and the rabbit is a task for the student of 
 folklore. The layman is struck with the idea 
 that in reversing the roles usually assigned to the 
 two animals in other animal stories and fables, 
 the oppressed negro race takes its harmless re- 
 venge by representing the strong and unscrupu- 
 lous creature as a victim of the weaker one. 
 Connoisseurs admire the wonderful fidelity with 
 
Tales of the Soil 249 
 
 which the pronunciation, the vocabulary, and 
 the sentence structure of the negro are repro- 
 duced in "Uncle Remus." 
 
 This little book, which in America is as widely 
 read as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was followed by 
 several sequels: "Nights with Uncle Remus" 
 (1883) and "Uncle Remus and His Friends" 
 
 (1893)- 
 The seamy side of negro emancipation is 
 
 brought out by Harris in the sketch "Free Joe." 
 The negro, Joe, was set free by his abolitionist 
 master. At first he was delighted with his un- 
 accustomed Hberty; gradually, however, he 
 realized his peculiar position: he became con- 
 scious that in spite of his freedom he was more 
 helpless than a slave. Since he had no owner, 
 everybody was his master. He noticed that he 
 was an object of suspicion; therefore all his little 
 resources — and how pitifully slender they were 
 — were employed to obtain not friendliness and 
 esteem but toleration; all his efforts were centred 
 upon mitigating the circumstances which made 
 his condition so much worse than that of the 
 other negroes, the negroes who had friends be- 
 cause they had masters. 
 
 Very recently Lucy Pratt, in her "Ezekiel," 
 has depicted with the deepest sympathy the 
 
250 American Literature 
 
 nature of the negro child. Stephen Collins 
 Foster (1826-1864) likewise sought to give ex- 
 pression to the inner life of the negro. He wrote 
 and set to music more than a hundred and 
 twenty-five negro songs. Of these, The Old 
 Folks at Home, so full of tenderness and pathos, 
 is the most widely known. Whether these 
 songs, which have become popular among the 
 whites, really represent the negro soul is a 
 question which the negroes alone can answer. 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Ade, George 214 
 
 Agassiz, J. L. R 16 
 
 Alcott, Amos Bronson 16, 80 
 
 Allen, James Lane 220-224 
 
 Bacheller, Irving S3 
 
 Bancroft, George . 10 
 
 Bierce, Ambrose . . 18, 170 
 
 Brackenbridge, Hugh Henry 9 
 
 Bradford, William 4 
 
 Bradstreet, Anna . 7 
 
 Brown, Charles Brockden 9 
 
 Bryant, William CuUen . . -13. 47, Si> 6i-6s 
 
 Bunner, H. C 186 
 
 Cable, G. W 219 
 
 Channing, William Ellery 16, 80 
 
 Child, Francis James 155 
 
 Churchill, Winston 23 
 
 Cooper, James Fenimore . . . .13, I4, 21, 32-39 
 
 Dana, Richard Henry S7 
 
 Deland, Margaret 225 
 
 Dodge, H. C 212 
 
 Drake, Joseph Rodman 60 
 
 Dwight, Timothy SS 
 
 251 
 
252 Index of Authors 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Earle, Alice Morse 44 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan 41 
 
 Eggleston, Edward 218-219 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo . . ... 16, 82-95 
 
 Field, Eugene 1 87-191 
 
 Fiske, John 10 
 
 Ford, Paul Leicester ... 23 
 
 Forster, Hannah W 9 
 
 Foster, Stephen Collins 250 
 
 FrankUn, Benjamin . . . 11, 14, 25-29 
 
 Frederic, Harold 229 
 
 Freneau, Philip 54 
 
 Fuller, Margaret 80 
 
 Hale, Edward Everett 156 
 
 Halleck, Fitz-Greene 57 
 
 Harris, Joel Chandler 245-249 
 
 Harte, Bret ... 217 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel . 14, 157, 158, 170-178 
 
 Higginson, T. W 156 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 131-146, 185, 186, 211 
 
 Howe, Julia Ward 73 
 
 Howells, William Dean 181-184 
 
 Irving, Washington 13, 29-32,199 
 
 Jackson, Helen Hunt 21 
 
 James, Henry 178-180 
 
 Judson, Emily 71 
 
 Lanier, Sidney 77, 78-79 
 
 Leland, C. G 194 
 
Index of Authors 253 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth . . -49, 120-13 1 
 
 Lowell, James Russell 13, 146-155 
 
 Melville, Herman 81, 116-117 
 
 Miller, Joaquin . . 6 
 
 Morton, Sarah Wentworth 21 
 
 Motley, J. L 16 
 
 Norris, Frank . 23 
 
 Norton, Charles Eliot 155 
 
 O'Brien, Fitz-James 170 
 
 Parkman, Francis 10 
 
 Parsons, T. W. . 72 
 
 Payne, J. H 55 
 
 Percival, J. G 50 
 
 Pierpont, John 71 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allen 77, 157, 158, 159-170 
 
 Pratt, Lucy 249 
 
 Rowson, Susanna Haswell 9 
 
 Saxe, J. G 186 
 
 Schoolcraft, Henry R 22 
 
 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria . . . .1 . . 217-218 
 
 Smith, Captain John 5 
 
 Stockton, Frank R 192 
 
 Stoddard, Richard Henry 74 
 
 Story, W. W. 72 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher .... 22, 43, 235, 245 
 
 Taylor, Bayard 74~76 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David 16, 95-99 
 
254 Index of Authors 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Ticknor, George 155 
 
 Timrod, Henry 77 
 
 Transcendentalists, The 16, 80 ff. 
 
 Trumbull, John • SS 
 
 Tucker, George 60 
 
 Twain, Mark 185, 200-21 1 
 
 Tyler, Royal 9 
 
 Very, Jones 72 
 
 Ward, Artemus 185, 214-216 
 
 Whitman, Walt 99-116 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf 65-71 
 
 Wilkins, Mary E 225 
 
 Willis, N. P 59 
 
 Woodworth, Samuel 60 
 
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 A Library of Good Citizenship 
 
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 will be the discussion of distinctively American 
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 future prosperity of the United States. 
 
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 the flywheel to keep the world's industry re- 
 volving. 
 
An inquiry into the meaning and tendency of 
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 matter of interest but of patriotic duty. The 
 publishers wish the American books to be a 
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