Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/888

 England but with the continent, was more constant, varied and intimate than fell to the fortune of any other city, and owing to the serious temper of the community the intellectual commerce with the outer world through books was more profound. Coleridge was early deeply influential on the thought of the cultivated class, and to him Carlyle, who found his first sincere welcome and effectual power there, succeeded. The influence of both combined to introduce, and to secure attention for, German writers. Translation, as time went on, followed, and German thought was also further sustained and advanced in the community by Frederick Henry Hedge (1805–1890), a philosophical theologian, who conducted a propaganda of German ideas. The activity of the group about him is significantly marked by the issue of the series of Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (1838), edited by George Ripley (1802–1880), the critic, which was the first of its kind in America. French ideas, as time went on, were also current, and the field of research extended to the Orient, the writings of which were brought forward especially in connexion with the Transcendental Movement to which all these foreign studies contributed. In New England, in other words, a close, serious and vital connexion was made, for the first time, with the philosophic thought of the world and with its tradition even in the remote past. Unitarianism, which was the form in which the old Puritanism dissolved in the cultivated class, came in with the beginning of the century, and found its representative in the gentle character, refined intelligence and liberal humanity of William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), who has remained its chief apostle. It was the expression of a moral maturing and intellectual enlightenment that took place with as little disturbance as ever marked religious evolution in any community. The people at large remained evangelical, but they also felt in a less degree the softening and liberalizing tendency; nevertheless it was mainly in the field of Unitarianism that literature flourished, as was natural, and Transcendentalism was a phenomenon that grew out of Unitarianism, being indeed the excess of the movement of enlightenment and the extreme limit of intuitionalism, individualism and private judgment. These two factors, religion and scholarship, gave to New England literature its serious stamp and academic quality; but the preparatory stage being longer, it was slower to emerge than the literature of the rest of the country.

The first stirrings of romanticism in New England were felt, as in the country to the south, by men of literary temperament in a sympathetic enjoyment and feeble imitation of the contemporary English romantic school of fiction exemplified by Mrs Radcliffe, Lewis and Godwin. Washington Allston (1779–1843), the painter, born in South Carolina but by education and adoption a citizen of Cambridge, showed the taste in Monaldi (1841), and Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879) in Paul Felton (1833); in his poem of the same date, “The Buccaneer,” the pseudo-Byronic element, which belongs to the conception of character and passion in this school of fiction, appears. These elder writers illustrate rather the stage of imaginative culture at the period, and show by their other works also—Allston by his poems “The Sylphs of the Seasons” (1813), and Dana by his abortive periodical The Idle Man (1821) issued at New York—their essential sympathy with the literary conditions reigning before the time of Irving. They both were post-Revolutionary, and advanced American culture in other fields rather than imagination, Allston in art and Dana in criticism, as editor of The North American Review, which was founded in 1815, and was long the chief organ of serious thought and critical learning, influential in the dissemination of ideas and in the maintenance of the intellectual life. The influence of their personality in the community, like that of Channing, with whom they were closely connected, was of more importance than any of their works.

The definite moment of the appearance of New England in literature in the true sense was marked by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803–1882) Nature (1836), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804–1864) Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807–1882) Voices of the Night (1839). Of this group of men Longfellow is the most national figure, and from the point of view of literary history the most significant by virtue of what he contributed to American romanticism in the large. He felt the conscious desire of the people for an American literature, and he obeyed it in the choice of his subjects. He took national themes, and his work is in this respect the counterpart in poetry to that of Cooper in prose. In Hiawatha (1855) he poetized the Indian life; and, though the scene and figures of the poem are no more localized than the happy hunting-grounds, the ideal of the life of the aborigines in the wilderness is given with freshness and primitive charm and with effect on the imagination. It is the sole survivor of many poetic attempts to naturalize the Indian in literature, and will remain the classic Indian poem. In Evangeline (1847), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) and The New England Tragedies (1868), he depicted colonial life. As he thus embodied national tradition in one portion of his work, he rendered national character in another, and with more spontaneity, in those domestic poems of childhood and the affections, simple moods of the heart in the common lot, which most endeared him as the poet of the household. These are American poems as truly as his historical verse, though they are also universal for the English race. In another large portion of his work he brought back from the romantic tradition of Europe, after Irving’s manner, motives which he treated for their pure poetic quality, detached from anything American, and he also translated much foreign verse from the north and the south of Europe, including Dante’s Divine Comedy (1867). He has, more than any other single writer, reunited America with the poetic past of Europe, particularly in its romance. The same serenity of disposition that marked Irving and Bryant characterized his life; and his art, more varied than Bryant’s or Irving’s, has the same refinement, being simple and so limpid as to deceive the reader into an oblivion of its quality and sometimes into an unwitting disparagement of what seems so plain and natural as to be commonplace. In Longfellow, as in Irving, one is struck by that quietude, which is so prevailing a characteristic of American literature, and which proceeds from its steady and even flow from sources that never knew any disturbance or perturbation. The life, the art, the moods are all calm; deep passion is absent.

Hawthorne was endowed with a soul of more intense brooding, but he remained within the circle of this peace. He developed in solitude exquisite grace of language, and in other respects was an artist, the mate of Poe in the tale and exceeding Poe in significance since he used symbolism for effects of truth. He, like Longfellow, embodied the national tradition, in this case the Puritan past; but he seized the subject, not in its historical aspects and diversity of character and event, but psychologically in its moral passion in The Scarlet Letter (1850), and less abstractly, more picturesquely, more humanly, in its blood tradition, in The House of the Seven Gables. In his earlier work, as an artist, he shows the paucity of the materials in the environment, especially in his tales; but when his residence in Italy and England gave into his hands larger opportunity, he did not succeed so well in welding Italy with America in The Marble Faun (1860), or England with America in his experimental attempts at the work which he left uncompleted, as he had done in the Puritan romances. He had, however, added a new domain to American romanticism; and, most of all these writers, he blended moral truth with fiction; he, indeed, spiritualized romance, and without loss of human reality,—a rare thing in any literature. Both Longfellow and Hawthorne were happy in reconciling their art with their country: both, not less than Poe, were universal artists, but they incorporated the national past in their art and were thereby more profoundly American.

Emerson, whose work lay in the religious sphere, not unlike Jonathan Edwards at an earlier time of climax but in a different way, marked the issue of Puritanism in pure idealism, and was more contemporaneously associated with life in the times than were the purely imaginative writers. He was the central figure of Transcendentalism, and apart from his specific teachings stood for the American spirit, disengaged from authority, independent, personal, responsible only to himself. He reached a revolutionary