History of American Literature Part 11

Why are Brown's romances called "Gothic"? What was the general type of American fiction preceding him? Specify three strong or unusual incidents in the selections read from Brown. What does he introduce to give an American color to his work?

POETRY.--In the selections read from Dwight, Barlow, and Trumbull, what general characteristics impress you? Do these poets belong to the cla.s.sic or the romantic school? What English influences are manifest? What qualities in Freneau's lyrics show a distinct advance in American poetry?

CHAPTER III

THE NEW YORK GROUP

A NEW LITERARY CENTER.--We have seen that Ma.s.sachusetts supplied the majority of the colonial writers before the French and Indian War. During the next period, Philadelphia came to the front with Benjamin Franklin and Charles Brockden Brown. In this third period, New York forged ahead, both in population and in the number of her literary men. Although in 1810 she was smaller than Philadelphia, by 1820 she had a population of 123,706, which was 15,590 more than Philadelphia, and 80,408 more than Boston.

This increase in urban population rapidly multiplied the number of readers of varied tastes and developed a desire for literary entertainment, as well as for instruction. Works like those of Irving and Cooper gained wide circulation only because of the new demands, due to the increasing population, to the decline in colonial provincialism, and to the growth of the new national spirit. Probably no one would have been inspired, twenty-five years earlier, to write a work like Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_. Even if it had been produced earlier, the country would not have been ready to receive it. This remarkable book was published in New York in 1809, and more than a quarter of a century had pa.s.sed before Ma.s.sachusetts could produce anything to equal that work.

In the New York group there were three great writers whom we shall discuss separately: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. Before we begin to study them, however, we may glance at two of the minor writers, who show some of the characteristics of the age.

DRAKE AND HALLECK

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE]

Two friends, who in their early youth styled themselves "The Croakers,"

were Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), "the Damon and Pythias of American poets." Drake was born in New York City in the same year as the English poet, John Keats, in London. Both Drake and Keats studied medicine, and both died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, but moved to New York in early youth, where he became a special accountant for John Jacob Astor. Although Halleck outlived Drake forty-seven years, trade seems to have sterilized Halleck's poetic power in his later life.

The early joint productions of Drake and Halleck were poems known as _The Croakers_, published in 1819, in the New York _Evening Post_. This stanza from _The Croakers_ will show the character of the verse and its avowed object:--

"There's fun in everything we meet, The greatest, worst, and best; Existence is a merry treat, And every speech a jest: Be't ours to watch the crowds that pa.s.s Where Mirth's gay banner waves; To show fools through a quizzing-gla.s.s And bastinade the knaves."

This was written by Drake, but he and Halleck together "croaked" the following lines, which show that New York life at the beginning of the nineteenth century had something of the variety of London in the time of Queen Anne, at the beginning of the eighteenth century:--

"The horse that twice a week I ride At Mother Dawson's eats his fill; My books at Goodrich's abide, My country seat is Weehawk hill; My morning lounge is Eastburn's shop, At Poppleton's I take my lunch, Niblo prepares my mutton chop, And Jennings makes my whiskey punch."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FITZ GREENE HALLECK]

Such work indicates not only a diversified circle of readers, who were not subject to the religious and political stress of earlier days, but it also shows a desire to be entertained, which would have been promptly discouraged in Puritan New England. We should not be surprised to find that the literature of this period was swayed by the new demands, that it was planned to entertain as well as to instruct, and that all the writers of this group, with the exception of Bryant, frequently placed the chief emphasis on the power to entertain.

Fortunately instruction often accompanies entertainment, as the following lines from _The Croakers_ show:--

"The man who frets at worldly strife Grows sallow, sour, and thin; Give us the lad whose happy life Is one perpetual grin, He, Midas-like, turns all to gold."

Drake's best poem, which is entirely his own work, is _The Culprit Fay_, written in 1816 when he was twenty-one years of age. This shows the influence of the English romantic school, and peoples the Hudson River with fairies. Before the appearance of this poem, nothing like these lines could have been found in American verse:--

"The winds are whist, and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid; And naught is heard on the lonely hill But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katydid; And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings, Ever a note of wail and woe, Till morning spreads her rosy wings And earth and sky in her glances glow."

Although _The Culprit Fay_ shows the influence of Coleridge's _Christabel_, yet this American poem could not have been written by an English poet.

Drake did not sing the praises of the English lark and the nightingale; but chose instead an American bird, the whippoorwill, and a native insect, the katydid, and in writing of them showed the enjoyment of a true poet.

Drake's best known poem, _The American Flag_, which was signed "Croaker & Co.," because Halleck wrote the last four lines, is a good specimen of rhetorical verse, but lacks the poetic feeling of _The Culprit Fay_.

Fitz-Greene Halleck's best known poem is _Marco Bozzaris_ (1827), an elegy on the death of a Grecian leader, killed in 1823. America's sympathies went out to Greece in her struggles for independence against the Turks. In celebrating the heroic death of Bozzaris, Halleck chose a subject that was naturally fitted to appeal to all whose liberties were threatened. This poem has been honored with a place in almost all American anthologies.

Middle-aged people can still remember the frequency with which the poem was declaimed. At one time these lines were perhaps as often heard as any in American verse:--

"Strike--till the last armed foe expires; Strike--for your altars and your fires; Strike--for the green graves of your sires; G.o.d--and your native land!"

Fifty years ago the readers of this poem would have been surprised to be told that interest in it would ever wane, but it was fitted to arouse the enthusiasm, not of all time, but of an age,--an age that knew from first-hand experience the meaning of a struggle for hearth fires and freedom. Most critics to-day prefer Halleck's lines _On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake_:--

"Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days!

None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise."

This poem is simpler, less rhetorical, and the vehicle of more genuine feeling than _Marco Bozzaris_.

The work of Drake and Halleck shows an advance in technique and imaginative power. Their verse, unlike the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, does not use the maiming cudgel, nor is it ponderous like Barlow's _Columbiad_ or Dwight's _Conquest of Canaan_.

WASHINGTON IRVING, 1783-1859

[Ill.u.s.tration: WASHINGTON IRVING]

LIFE.--Irving was born in New York City in 1783, the year in which Benjamin Franklin signed at Paris the treaty of peace with England after the Revolutionary War. Irving's father, a Scotchman from the Orkney Islands, was descended from De Irwyn, armor bearer to Robert Bruce. Irving's mother was born in England, and the English have thought sufficiently well of her son to claim that he belonged to England as much as to America. In fact, he sometimes seemed to them to be more English than American, especially after he had written something unusually good.

When Irving was a boy, the greater part of what is now New York City was picturesque country. He mingled with the descendants of the Dutch, pa.s.sed daily by their old-style houses, and had excellent opportunities for hearing the traditions and learning the peculiarities of Manhattan's early settlers, whom he was afterwards to immortalize in American literature. On his way to school he looked at the stocks and the whipping post, which had a salaried official to attend to the duties connected with it. He could have noticed two prisons, one for criminals and the other for debtors. He could scarcely have failed to see the gallows, in frequent use for offenses for which the law to-day prescribes only a short term of imprisonment.

Notwithstanding the twenty-two churches, the pious complained that the town was so G.o.dless as to allow the theaters to be open on Sat.u.r.day night.

Instead of going to bed after the family prayers, Irving sometimes climbed through a window, gained the alley, and went to the theater. In school he devoured as many travels and tales as possible, and he acquired much early skill in writing compositions for boys in return for their a.s.sistance in solving his arithmetical problems--a task that he detested.

At the age of fifteen he was allowed to take his gun and explore the Sleepy Hollow region, which became the scene of one of his world-famous stories.

When he was seventeen, he sailed slowly up the Hudson River on his own voyage of discovery. Hendrick Hudson's exploration of this river gave it temporarily to the Dutch; but Irving annexed it for all time to the realm of the romantic imagination. The singers and weavers of legends were more than a thousand years in giving to the Rhine its high position in that realm; but Irving in a little more than a decade made the Hudson almost its peer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IRVING AT THE AGE OF TWENTY TWO]

In such unique environment, Irving pa.s.sed his boyhood. Unlike his brothers, he did not go to Columbia College, but like Charles Brockden Brown studied law, and like him never seriously practiced the profession. Under the pen name of "Jonathan Oldstyle," he was writing, at the age of nineteen, newspaper letters, modeled closely after Addison's _Spectator_. Ill health drove Irving at twenty-one to take a European trip, which lasted two years.

His next appearance in literature after his return was in connection with his brother, William Irving, and James K. Paulding. The three started a semi-monthly periodical called _Salmagundi_, fashioned after Addison's _Spectator_ and Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_. The first number was published January 24, 1807, and the twentieth and last, January 25, 1808.

"In Irving's contributions to it," says his biographer, "may be traced the germs of nearly everything he did afterwards."

The year 1809 was the most important in Irving's young life. In that year Matilda Hoffman, to whom he was engaged, died in her eighteenth year.

Although he outlived her fifty years, he remained a bachelor, and he carried her _Bible_ with him wherever he traveled in Europe or America. In the same year he finished one of his masterpieces, Diedrich Knickerbocker's _History of New York_. Even at this time he had not decided to follow literature as a profession.

In 1815 he went to England to visit his brother, who was in business there.

It was not, however, until the failure of his brother's firm in 1818 that Irving determined to make literature his life work. While in London he wrote the _Sketch Book_ (1819), which added to his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. This visit abroad lasted seventeen years. Before he returned, in 1832, he had finished the greater part of the literary work of his life.

Besides the _Sketch Book_, he had written _Bracebridge Hall_, _Tales of a Traveller_, _Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus_, _The Conquest of Granada_, _The Companions of Columbus_, and _The Alhambra_. He had been secretary of the American legation at Madrid and at London. He had actually lived in the Alhambra.

Soon after his return, he purchased a home at Tarrytown (now Irvington) in the Sleepy Hollow district on the Hudson. He named his new home "Sunnyside." With the exception of four years (1842-1846), when he served as minister to Spain, Irving lived here, engaged in literary work, for the remainder of his life. When he died in 1859, he was buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, near his home.

Long before his death he was known on both sides of the Atlantic as America's greatest author. Englishmen who visited this country expressed a desire to see its two wonders, Niagara Falls and Irving. His English publishers alone paid him over $60,000 for copyright sales of his books in England. Before he died, he had earned more than $200,000 with his pen.

Irving's personality won him friends wherever he went. He was genial and kindly, and his biographer adds that it was never Irving's habit to stroke the world the wrong way. One of his maxims was, "When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUNNYSIDE, IRVING'S HOME AT TARRYTOWN]