History of American Literature Part 32

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Poe was a great literary artist, who thought that the creation of beauty was the object of every form of the highest art. His aim in both prose and poetry was to produce a p.r.o.nounced effect by artistic means. His continued wide circulation shows that he was successful in his aim. An English publisher recently said that he sold in one year 29,000 of Poe's tales, or about three times as many of them as of any other American's work.

The success with which Poe met in producing an effect upon the minds of his readers makes him worthy of careful study by all writers and speakers, who desire to make a vivid impression. Poe selected with great care the point which he wished to emphasize. He then discarded everything which did not serve to draw attention to that point. On his stage the colored lights may come from many different directions, but they all focus on one object.

Hawthorne and Poe, two of the world's great short-story writers, were remarkably unlike in their aims. Hawthorne saw everything in the light of moral consequences. Poe cared nothing for moral issues, except in so far as the immoral was ugly. Hawthorne appreciated beauty only as a true revelation of the inner life. Poe loved beauty and the melody of sound for their own attractiveness. His effects, unlike Hawthorne's, were more physical than moral. Poe exalted the merely technical and formal side of literary excellence more than Hawthorne.

Poe's prose style is direct, energetic, clear, and adequate to the occasion. His mind was too a.n.a.lytic to overload his sentences with ornament, and too definite to be obscure. He had the same aim in his style as in his subject matter,--to secure an effect with the least obstruction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUST OF POE IN UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA]

His poetry is of narrower range than his prose, but his greatest poems hold a unique position for an unusual combination of beauty, melody, and sadness. He retouched and polished them from year to year, until they stand unsurpa.s.sed in their restricted field. He received only ten dollars for _The Raven_ while he was alive, but the appreciation of his verse has increased to such an extent that the sum of two thousand dollars was recently paid for a copy of the thin little 1827 edition of his poems.

It has been humorously said that the French pray to Poe as a literary saint. They have never ceased to wonder at the unusual combination of his a.n.a.lytic reasoning power with his genius for imaginative presentation of romantic materials,--at the realism of his touch and the romanticism of his thought. It is true that many foreign critics consider Poe America's greatest author. An eminent English critic says that Poe has surpa.s.sed all the rest of our writers in playing the part of the Pied Piper of Hamelin to other authors. At home, however, there have been repeated attempts to disbar Poe from the court of great writers. Not until 1910 did the board of electors vote him a tablet in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

It may be admitted that Poe was a technical artist, that his main object was effectiveness of impression and beauty of form, that he was not overanxious about the worth of his subject matter to an aspiring soul, and that he would have been vastly greater if he had joined high moral aim to his quest of beauty. He overemphasized the romantic elements of strangeness, sadness, and horror. He was deficient in humor and sentiment, and his guiding standards of criticism often seem too coldly intellectual.

Those critics who test him exclusively by the old Puritan standards invariably find him wanting, for the Puritans had no room in their world for the merely beautiful.

Poe's genius, however, was sufficiently remarkable to triumph over these defects, which would have consigned to oblivion other writers of less power. In spite of the most determined hostile criticism that an American author has ever known, the editions of Poe's works continue to increase.

The circle of those who fall under his hypnotic charm, in which there is nothing base or unclean, is enlarged with the pa.s.sing of the years. As a great literary craftsman, he continues to teach others. He is now not likely to be dislodged from that peculiar, narrow field where he holds a unique and original position among the great writers of the world.

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS, 1806-1870

William Gilmore Simms, often styled the "Cooper of the South," was born of poor parents in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1806. His mother died when he was very young, and his father moved west into the wilds of Mississippi.

The boy was left behind to be reared by his grandmother, a poor but clever woman, who related to him tales of the Revolutionary War, through which she had lived. During a visit to his father, these tales were supplemented by stories of contemporary life on the borders of civilization. In this way Simms acquired a large part of the material for his romances.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS]

He prospered financially, married well, became the owner of a fine estate, and bent every effort to further southern literature and a.s.sist southern writers. He became the center of a group of literary men in Charleston, of whom Hayne and Timrod were the most famous. The war, however, ruined Simms.

His property and library were destroyed, and, though he continued to write, he never found his place in the new order of life. He failed to catch the public ear of a people satiated with fighting and hair-raising adventures.

He survived but six years, and died in Charleston in 1870.

Being of humble birth, Simms lacked the advantage of proper schooling.

Although he was surrounded by aristocratic and exclusive society, he did not have the a.s.sociation of a literary center, such as the Concord and Cambridge writers enjoyed. He found no publishers nearer than New York, to which city he personally had to carry his ma.n.u.scripts for publication. Yet with all these handicaps, he achieved fame for himself and his loved Southland. This victory over adverse conditions was won by sheer force of indomitable will, by tremendous activity, and by a great, honest, generous nature.

His writings show an abounding energy and versatility. He wrote poetry, prose fiction, historical essays, and political pamphlets, and amazed his publishers by his speed in composition. His best work is _The Yema.s.see_ (1835), a story of the uprising of the Indians in Carolina. The midnight ma.s.sacre, the fight at the blockhouse, and the blood-curdling description of the dishonoring of the Indian chief's son are told with infectious vigor and rapidity. _The Partisan_ (1835), _Katherine Walton_ (1851), and _The Sword and Distaff_ (1852), afterwards called _Woodcraft_, also show his ability to tell exciting tales, to understand Indian character, and to commemorate historical events in thrilling narratives.

Simms wrote rapidly and carelessly. He makes mistakes in grammar and construction, and is often stilted and grandiloquent. All of his romances are stories of adventure which are enjoyed by boys, but not much read by others. Nevertheless, his best works fill a large place in southern literature and history. They tell in an interesting way the life of the border states, of southern crossroads towns, of colonial wars, and of Indian customs. What Cooper did for the North, Simms accomplished for the South. He lacked Cooper's skill and variety of invention, and he created no character to compare with Cooper's Leatherstocking; but he excelled Cooper in the more realistic portrayal of Indian character.

HENRY TIMROD, 1829-1867

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Henry Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1829. He attended the University of Georgia; but was prevented by delicate health and poverty from taking his degree. He was early thrown upon his own resources to earn a livelihood, and having tried law and found it distasteful, he depended upon teaching and writing. His verses were well received, but the times preceding the Civil War were not propitious for a poor poet. As he was not strong enough to bear arms at the outbreak of hostilities, he went to the field as a war correspondent for a newspaper in Charleston and he became later an a.s.sociate editor in Columbia. His printing office was demolished in Sherman's march to the sea, and at the close of the war Timrod was left in a desperate condition. He was hopelessly ill from consumption; he was in the direst poverty; and he was saddened by the death of his son. There was no relief for Timrod until death released him from his misery in 1867. Yet in spite of all his trials, he desired earnestly to live, and when his sister told him that death would, at least, bring him rest, he replied, "Yes, my sister, but love is sweeter than rest."

Timrod's one small volume of poetry contains some of the most spontaneous nature and love lyrics in the South. In this stanza to _Spring_, the directness and simplicity of his manner may be seen:--

"In the deep heart of every forest tree The blood is all aglee, And there's a look about the leafless bowers As if they dreamed of flowers."

He says in _A Vision of Poesy_ that the poet's mission is to

"... turn life's tasteless waters into wine, And flush them through and through with purple tints."

His best known and most original poem is _The Cotton Boll_. This description of the wide stretches of a white cotton field is one of the best in the poem. He shows the field

"... lost afar Behind the crimson hills and purple lawns Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams Against the Evening Star!

And lo!

To the remotest point of sight, Although I gaze upon no waste of snow, The endless field is white; And the whole landscape glows, For many a shining league away, With such acc.u.mulated light As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!"

Simplicity and sincerity in language, theme, and feeling are special characteristics of Timrod's verse. His lyrics are short and their volume slight, but a few of them, like _Spring_ and _The Lily Confidante_, seem almost to have sung themselves. So vivid is his reproduction of the spirit of the awakening year in his poem _Spring_, that, to quote his own lines:--

"... you scarce would start, If from a beech's heart, A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say, 'Behold me! I am May.'"

Timrod shows the same qualities of simplicity, directness, and genuine feeling in his war poetry. No more ringing lines were written for the southern cause during the Civil War than are to be found in his poems, _Carolina_ and _Ethnogenesis_.

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE, 1830-1886

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Paul Hamilton Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1830. His family was rich and influential, and he inherited a fortune in his own right. After graduating at Charleston College, he studied law, but devoted his independent leisure entirely to literature. He became a.s.sociated with _The Southern Literary Gazette_, and was the first editor of _Russell's Magazine_, an ambitious venture launched by the literary circle at the house of Simms. Hayne married happily, and had every prospect of a prosperous and brilliant career when the war broke out. He enlisted, but his health soon failed, and at the close of the war he found himself an invalid with his fortune destroyed. He went to the Pine Barrens of Georgia, where he built, on land which he named Copse Hill, a hut nearly as rude as Th.o.r.eau's at Walden. Handicapped by poverty and disease, Hayne lived here during the remainder of his life, writing his best poems on a desk fashioned out of a workbench. He died in 1886.

Hayne wrote a large amount of poetry, and tried many forms of verse, in almost all of which he maintained a smoothness of meter, a correctness of rhyme, and, in general, a high level of artistic finish. He is a skilled craftsman, his ear is finely attuned to harmonious arrangements of sounds, and he shows an acquaintance with the best melodists in English poetry. The limpid ease and grace in his lines may be judged by this dainty poem:--

"A tiny rift within the lute May sometimes make the music mute!

By slow degrees, the rift grows wide, By slow degrees, the tender tide-- Harmonious once--of loving thought Becomes with harsher measures fraught, Until the heart's Arcadian breath Lapses thro' discord into death!"

His best poems are nature lyrics. In _The Woodland Phases_, one of the finest of these, he tells how nature is to him a revelation of the divine:--

"And midway, betwixt heaven and us, Stands Nature in her fadeless grace, Still pointing to our Father's house, His glory on her mystic face."

Hayne found the inspiration for his verse in the scenes about his forest home: in the "fairy South Wind" that "floateth on the subtle wings of balm," in

"... the one small glimmering rill That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye,"

in the solitary lake

"Shrined in the woodland's secret heart,"

in

"His blasted pines, smit by the fiery West, Uptowering rank on rank, like t.i.tan spears,"

in the storm among the Georgian hills, in the twilight, that

"... on her virginal throat Wears for a gem the tremulous vesper star,"

and in the mocking-birds, whose