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 privacy; high, clear, brief in voice, and yet, as it were, as of something hidden in the sky or grove or brook, or as if the rock spoke, it is nature in her haunts; it is the voice of the peak, the forests, the cataracts, the smile of the blue gentian, the distant rosy flight of the water-fowl,—with no human element less simple than piety, death or the secular changes of time. It is, too, an expression of something so purely American that it seems that it must be as uncomprehended by one not familiar with the scene as the beauty of Greece or Italian glows; it is poetry locked in its own land. This presence of the pure, the pristine, the virginal in the verse, this luminousness, spaciousness, serenity in the land, this immemorialness of natural things, is the body and spirit of the true wild, such as Bryant’s eyes had seen it and as it had possessed his soul. In no other American poet is there this nearness to original awe in the presence of nature; nowhere is nature so slightly humanized, so cosmically felt, and yet poetized. Poetry of this sort must be small in amount; a few hundred lines contain it all; but they alone shrine the original grandeur, not so much of the American landscape, as of wild nature when first felt in the primitive American world.

American romanticism thus began with these three writers, who gave it characterization after all by only a few simple traits. There was in it no profound passion nor philosophy nor revolt; especially there was no morbidness. It was sprung from a new soil. The breath of the early American world was in Bryant’s poetry; he had freed from the landscape a Druidical nature-worship of singular purity, simple and grand, unbound by any conventional formulas of thought or feeling but deeply spiritual. The new life of the land filled the scene of Cooper; prairie, forest and sea, Indians, backwoodsmen and sailors, the human struggle of all kinds, gave it diversity and detail; but its life was the American spirit, the epic action of a people taking primitive possession, battling with its various foes, making its world. Irving, more brooding and reminiscent, gave legend to the landscape, transformed rudeness with humour and brought elements of picturesqueness into play; and in him, in whom the new race was more mature, was first shown that nostalgia for the past, which is everywhere a romantic trait but was peculiarly strong under American conditions. He was consequently more free in imagination than the others, and first dealt with other than American subjects, emancipating literature from provinciality of theme, while the modes of his romantic treatment, the way he felt about his subjects, still owed much to his American birth. In all this literature by the three writers there was little complexity, and there was no strangeness in their personalities. Irving was more genially human, Cooper more vitally intense; Bryant was the more careful artist in the severe limits of his art, which was simple and plain. Simplicity and plainness characterize all three; they were, in truth, simple American gentlemen, of the breeding and tastes that a plain democracy produced as its best, who, giving themselves to literature for a career, developed a native romanticism, which, however obvious and uncomplicated with philosophy, passion or moods, represented the first stage of American life with freshness of power, an element of ideal loftiness and much literary charm.

Though Irving, Cooper and Bryant were associated with New York, there was something sporadic in their germination. They have no common source; they stood apart; and their work neither overlapped nor blended, but remained self-isolated. None of them can be said to have founded a school, but Irving left a literary tradition and Cooper had followers in the field of historical fiction. The literary product up to the middle of the century presents generally from its early years the appearance of an indistinguishable mass, as in colonial days, in which neither titles nor authors are eminent. The association of American literature with the periodical press is, perhaps, the most important trait to be observed. New York and Philadelphia were book-markets, and local presses had long been at work issuing many reprints. Magazines in various degrees of importance sprang up in succession to the earlier imitations of English 18th-century periodicals, which abounded at the beginning of the century; and as time went on these were accompanied by a host of annuals of the English Keepsake variety. Philadelphia was especially distinguished by an early fertility in magazines, which later reached a great circulation, as in the case of Godey’s and Graham’s; the Knickerbocker became prominent in New York from 1833, when it was founded; Richmond had in The Southern Literary Messenger the chief patron of southern writers from 1834, and there were abortive ventures still farther south in Charleston. These various periodicals and like publications were the literary arena, the place of ambition for young and old, for known and unknown, and there literary fame and what little money came of its pursuit were found. Minor poetry flourished in it; sketches, tales, essays, every sort of writing in prose multiplied there. A change in the atmosphere of letters is also to be noted. The 18th century was fairly left behind. The Philadelphian reprint of Galignani’s Paris edition of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge had brought in the new romantic poetry with wide effect; and Disraeli, Bulwer and, later, Dickens are felt in the prose; in verse, especially by women, Mrs Hemans and Mrs Browning ruled the moment. The product was large. In poetry it was displayed on the most comprehensive scale in Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s (1815–1857) collections of American verse, made in the middle of the century. Mrs Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865), a prolific writer, and Mrs Maria Gowan Brooks (1795–1845), known as Southey’s “Maria del Occidente,” a more ambitious aspirant, the “Davidson sisters,” (1808–1825: 1823–1838), and Alice (1820–1871) and Phoebe Cary (1824–1871) illustrate the work of the women; and Richard Henry Wilde (1789–1847), George Pope Morris (1802–1864), Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806–1884) and Willis Gaylord Clark (1810–1841) may serve for that of men. In this verse, and in the abundant prose as well, the sentimentality of the period is strongly marked; it continued to the times of the Civil War. Two poets of a better type, Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), distinguished by delicacy of fancy, and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867), who showed ardour and a real power of phrase, are remembered from an earlier time for their brotherhood in verse, but Drake died young and Halleck was soon sterilized, so that the talents of both proved abortive. The characteristic figure that really exemplifies this secondary literature at its best is Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) who, though born in Portland, Maine, was the chief littérateur of the Knickerbocker period. He wrote abundantly in both verse and prose, and was the first of the journalist type of authors, a social adventurer with facile powers of literary entertainment, a man of the town and immensely popular. He was the sentimentalist by profession, and his work, transitory as it proved, was typical of a large share of the taste, talent and ambition of the contemporary crowd of writers. Neighbouring him in time and place are the authors of various stripe, known as “the Literati,” whom Poe described in his critical papers, which, in connexion with Griswold’s collections mentioned above, are the principal current source of information concerning the bulk of American literature in that period.

This world of the magazines, the Literati and sentimentalism, was the true milieu of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Born in Boston, his mother a pleasing English actress and his father a dissipated stage-struck youth of a Baltimore family, left an orphan in childhood, he was reared in the Virginian home of John Allan, a merchant of Scottish extraction; he received there the stamp of southern character. He was all his life characteristically a southerner, with southern ideals of character and conduct, southern manners towards both men and women and southern passions. He showed precocity in verse, but made his real début in prose as editor of The Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond in 1835. He was by his talents committed to a literary career, and being usually without definite means of support he followed the literary market, first to Philadelphia and later to New York. He was continuously associated with magazines as editor, reviewer or contributor; they were his means of sustenance; and, whether as cause or effect, this mode of life fell in with the nature of his mind, which was a contemporary mind. He was perhaps better acquainted with contemporary