History of American Literature Part 14

"... from all around-- Earth and her waters and the depth of air-- Comes a still voice.-- Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more ..."

No other poem presents "all-including death" on a scale of such vastness.

The majestic solemnity of the poem and the fine quality of its blank verse may be felt in this selection:--

"... The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,--the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods--rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man."

_Thanatopsis_ shows the old Puritan tendency to brood on death, but the _Inscription for Entrance to a Wood_, written in 1815 and published in the same number of _The North American Review_ as his first great poem, takes us where

"... the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds."

The gladness of the soft winds, the blue sky, the rivulet, the mossy rocks, the cleft-born wild-flower, the squirrels, and the insects,--all focus our attention on the "deep content" to be found in "the haunts of Nature," and suggest Wordsworth's philosophy of the conscious enjoyment of the flower, the gra.s.s, the mountains, the bird, and the stream, voicing their "thousand blended notes."

We may say of Bryant what was true of Cooper, that when he enters a forest, power seems to come unbidden to his pen. Bryant's _Forest Hymn_ (1825) finds G.o.d in those green temples:--

"Thou art in the soft winds That run along the summit of these trees In music."

He points out the divinity that shapes our ends in:--

"That delicate forest flower, With scented breath and look so like a smile."

No Puritan up to this time had represented G.o.d in a guise more pleasing than the smile of a forest flower. This entire _Hymn_ seems like a great prayer rooted deep in those earlier prayers to which the boy used to listen.

Although Bryant lived to be eighty-four, he wrote less poetry than Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, and about one third as much as Sh.e.l.ley, who was scarcely thirty when he was drowned. It is not length of days that makes a poet. Had Bryant died in his thirtieth year, his excellence and limitations would be fairly well shown in his work finished at that time.

At this age, in addition to the five poems in his 1821 volume (p. 139), he had written _The Winter Piece_, _A Forest Hymn_, and _The Death of the Flowers_. These and a number of other poems, written before he had finished his thirtieth year, would have ent.i.tled him to approximately the same rank that he now holds in the history of American poetry. It is true that if he had then pa.s.sed away, we should have missed his exquisite call to _The Evening Wind_ (1829), and some of his other fine productions, such as _To the Fringed Gentian_ (1829), _The Prairies_ (1832), _The Battle-Field_ (1837), with its lines which are a keynote to Bryant's thought and action:--

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, Th' eternal years of G.o.d are hers."

We are thankful for the ideals voiced in _The Poet_ (1863), and we listen respectfully to _The Flood of Years_ (1876), as the final utterance of a poet who has had the experience of fourscore years.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Bryant is the first great American poet. His poetry is chiefly reflective and descriptive, and it is remarkable for its elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. He lacks dramatic power and skill in narration. Calmness and restraint, the lack of emotional intensity, are also evident in his greatest work. His depths of s.p.a.ce are vast, but windless. In _The Poet_ he says that verse should embody:--

"... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the windless deep."

His chosen field is describing and interpreting nature. He has been called an American Wordsworth. In the following lines Bryant gives poetic expression to his feeling that a certain maiden's heart and face reflected the beauty of the natural scenes amid which she was reared:--

"... all the beauty of the place Is in thy heart and on thy face.

The twilight of the trees and rocks Is in the light shade of thy locks."

[Footnote: "O Fairest of the Rural Maids." (1820.)]

With these lines compare Wordsworth's _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_ (1799):--

"... she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pa.s.s into her face."

Bryant himself says that under the influence of Wordsworth, nature suddenly changed "into a strange freshness and life." It is no discredit to him to have been Wordsworth's pupil or to have failed to equal the magic of England's greatest poet of nature.

Bryant's range was narrow for a great poet, and his later verse usually repeated his earlier successes. As a rule, he presented the sky, forest, flower, stream, animal, and the composite landscape, only as they served to illumine the eternal verities, and the one verity toward which nature most frequently pointed was death. His heart, unlike Wordsworth's, did not dance with the daffodils waving in the breeze, for the mere pleasure of the dancing.

The blank verse of his _Thanatopsis_ has not been surpa.s.sed since Milton.

In everything that he did, Bryant was a careful workman. Painters have noticed his skill in the use of his poetic canvas and his power to suggest subjects to them, such as:--

"... croft and garden and orchard, That bask in the mellow light."

Three vistas from _To a Waterfowl_,--"the plashy brink of weedy lake,"

"marge of river wide," and "the chafed ocean side,"--long ago furnished the suggestion for three paintings.

Bryant's Puritan ancestry and training laid a heavy hand upon him. Thoughts of "the last bitter hour" are constantly recurring in his verse. The third line of even his poem _June_ brings us to the grave. His great poems are often like a prayer accompanied by the subdued tones of a mighty organ.

Nothing foul or ign.o.ble can be found in his verse. He has the lofty ideals of the Puritans.

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD

As we saw in the preceding chapter, WORDSWORTH and COLERIDGE at the close of the last century began to exert a new influence on literature.

Wordsworth's new philosophy of nature (p. 99) can be traced in the work of Bryant. The other poets of this age belong to the romantic school. BYRON (1788-1824), the poet of revolt against the former world, shows the same influences that manifest themselves in the American and the French Revolution. He voices the complaints, and, to some extent, the aspirations of Europe. He shows his influence in Fitz-Greene Halleck's _Marco Bozzaris_. Sh.e.l.ley, who also belongs to the school of revolt, has a peculiar position as a poet of ethereal, evanescent, and spirit-like beauty. He is heard in the voice of the West Wind, the Cloud, the unseen Skylark, the "Spirit of Night," and "the white radiance of Eternity."

Bryant's call in _The Evening Wind_ (1829) to

"... rouse The wide old wood from his majestic rest, Summoning from the innumerable boughs The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast,"

may even have been suggested by Sh.e.l.ley's _Ode to the West Wind_ (1819)

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own?

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone."

In the early part of this period, Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley were both making these harmonies of nature audible to ears which had hitherto not heard them. KEATS (1795-1821) is the poet of beauty, and he makes more of an appeal to the senses than Sh.e.l.ley. The favorite creed of Keats was:--

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

His influence will gradually extend to later American verse.

SIR WALTER SCOTT was the great prose writer of the age preceding the Victorian. The first of his series of _Waverley_ novels was published in 1814, and he continued until his death in 1832 to delight the world with his genius as a writer of romances. His influence may be traced in Cooper's work, although the American author occupies an original field. Readers are still charmed with the exquisite flavor and humor in the essays of CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). The essays of DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) are remarkable for precision, stateliness, and harmony.

LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS, 1809-1849.

During these forty years, the facts most important for the student of literature are connected with the expansion and social ideals of the country. Progress was specially manifest in two ways: in "the manufacture of farms" and in the introduction and use of steam. At the time of the inauguration of Washington in 1789, the center of population of the entire country was thirty miles east of Baltimore. The progress of settlements westward, which had already begun in the last period, became in an increasing degree one of the remarkable events in the history of the world.

We may observe that the second war with England (1812) resulted in welding the Union more closely together and in giving it more prestige abroad. We should next note the unparalleled material development of the country; the opening of the Erie Ca.n.a.l in 1825, the rapid extension of steamboats on rivers, the trial of the first steam locomotive in 1828, the increased westward movement of population, which reached California in 1849, several hundred years ahead of schedule time, as those thought who prophesied before the introduction of steam. The story of the material progress of the country sounds like a new _Arabian Nights' Tale_.

The administration of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) is really the beginning of the modern history of the United States. The change during these years was due more to steam than to any other single cause. At the beginning of his administration, there were no steam railroads, but fifteen hundred miles were in operation before the end of his second term. His predecessor in the presidential chair was John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate and an aristocrat. Jackson was illiterate, a man of the people. There was an extension of the social democratic feeling.

All cla.s.ses, the poor as well as the rich, spoke their minds more freely on every subject. Even Jackson's messages relating to foreign nations were sometimes not couched in very diplomatic terms. Every one felt that he was as good as anybody else, and in the new settlements all mingled on terms of equality. When Cooper came back to the United States in 1833, after an absence of six years in Europe, he found that he had returned to a new country, where "everybody was everywhere," and n.o.body was anywhere, and where the chase for the dollar seemed to have grown more absorbing than ever before.

Slavery had become one of the leading questions of the day. To keep the balance between the North and the South, states were often admitted in pairs, one free and one slave state. In 1845 there were in the Union thirteen free and fourteen slave states. The decade between 1840 and 1850 witnessed the war with Mexico and the acquisition from her of our vast southwestern territory,--Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and some interior lands to the north of these. The South was chiefly instrumental in bringing about this extension of our boundaries, hoping that this additional territory would be open for the employment of slaves and would tend to make more nearly even the influence of each section in the national government.

SUMMARY

With the publication of Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_ in 1809, the literary center of the United States shifted to New York, then the second city in the country. Drake and Halleck, two minor poets, calling themselves "The Croakers," issued a series of poems with the princ.i.p.al object of entertaining readers. Drake wrote a fine romantic poem called _The Culprit Fay_. Halleck's best works are the poems on the death of Drake and _Marco Bozzaris_.

Washington Irving's chief fame is based on his original creation of the "Knickerbocker Legend" in his _History of New York_, _Rip Van Winkle_, and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. He is an unusually successful writer of short stories, of essays like those in Addison's _Spectator_, and of popular history and biography. He is the first American writer whose works are still read for pure pleasure. Humor and restrained sentiment are two of his p.r.o.nounced qualities. While the subject matter of his best work is romantic, in his treatment of that matter he shows the restraint of the cla.s.sical school. His style is simple and easy-flowing but not remarkable for vigor.