Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/771

Rh AMERICAN LITERATURE 727 whom he has lately passed. His symbolic yet real cha racters Hester and Pearl by the forest brook; Dimmesdale by the scaffold, with the red morning upon his brow ; the dead Judge sitting with his watch; the Cleopatra of Brook Farm plunging in the pool; Miriam and Hilda, and Donatello the Faun are stamped in letters of fine gold on the pages of hia country s literature, and the music of his quiet sentences yet lingers on the ear of strangers as of friends. But his name remains as a warning as well as an example. In one sense he was a patriot, glorying in the great deeds of his country s past. Of this feeling the &quot; Gray Champion &quot; and &quot; Howe s Masquerade&quot; give suffi cient evidence. At the close of the last he writes, as we may fancy with a grim Puritan smile : &quot; On the anniver sary night of Britain s discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide through the portals of the Province House.&quot; But as a politician he wrecked himself with the democratic party. He looked upon slavery as &quot; one of those evils which Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances.&quot; He had no sympathy with the abolitionists, and at least a half sympathy with the planters. &quot; As regards human progress,&quot; lie wrote, &quot; let them believe it who can ; &quot; and in the pre face to his last completed work, as his excuse for laying the scene in Italy, &quot; There is in our country no shadow, no ambiguity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.&quot; &quot; Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall flowers, need ruin to make them grow.&quot; Hawthorne lived to see the beginning of what he could only regard as ruin : he did not live to see his country rising stronger after a great struggle with a gloomy wrong. holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the accomplished physician of Harvard, better known as a humourist and author of occasional verses, has contributed to psychological romance two remarkable volumes : Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel. The former, and more striking of the two, is a weird tale of destiny, dwelling upon the idea of transmitted qualities in a manner which suggests comparison with The House, of the Seven Gables ; but Holmes s story has a more incredible plot, the chief character being a sort of sprite, having mysterious relations to the animal world, a snake- charmer, herself half a snake (as Donatello in Transforma tion is half a faun), like the Lamia of tradition and Keats, but endowed with the graces of Undine. The vigorous sketch of the hero Langdon, with which the book opens, is impaired by the somewhat obtrusive manner in which he is vaunted as a type of the blue-blooded or Brahmin caste of New England. The same pathological treatment of human nature pervades The Guardian Angel, which turns partly on mysterious physical and psychical affinities. The idd. Margaret of Sylvester Judd, a Unitarian clergyman of Maine, belongs, by virtue of some of the problems with which it deals, to the category of metaphysical novels. This work of decided genius, to which a just tribute is paid by Mr Lowell in his Fable for Critics, has hardly attained the popularity it merits, owing to the slender cha racter of the plot, and the frequency of the dissertations by which the author endeavours to impress his own views of society, art, and religion. But it is a powerful picture of the more ideal sides of New England life; the character of Margaret and Chilion are permanent types, and the whole book is extremely fresh and original. The most finthrop. genuine successor of Hawthorne is Theodore Winthrop, who left a counting-house in New York for an adventurous life, and fell at Great Bethel in 1861 in his thirty-third year. His best novel, Cecil Dreeme, teems with life-like characterisation, bathed in a poetic element of mystery ; and John Brent, the next in merit, is a graphic sketch of romantic incidents in the Far West, drawn from his own experience. Of tales evincing talent there is a plethora ; they lie on the Minor shelves of the libraries &quot;thick as tho leaves on Vallombrosa.&quot; novelist Among those worthy of note are the pictures of Southern society by W. G. Simms, whose fertile brain is said to have produced fifty volumes in twenty years ; The Bee Hunter, and other narratives of the south-west, by T. B. Thorpe of Baton Eouge ; John Weal s Rachel Dyer and fiuth Elder; the classical romances of Ware, Zenobia, and Probus and Julian; Mrs E. 0. Smith s Indian Reminiscences; The Linwoods, Hope Leslie, and other philan- throphic tales of New England, by Miss Sedgwick ; Mrs Lydia Child s Hobomok, and her Philothca, a romance of Pericles and Aspasia, somewhat too sentimental in its style, and not free from anachronisms ; with the anti-slavery pictures represented by Mrs Stowe s Uncle Tom-, a book which, inspired by ordinary talent and written in an earnest spirit, owed its success to the air of simple narration which pervades it, and its having the aggressive strength of a political pamphlet appearing at the right time in harmony with the passion on one side of an impending struggle. The light but ,.,,. graceful and often incisive sketches of N&quot;. P. Willis take a some- W 1U1S&amp;lt; what higher rank. A rapid writer, but at his best a brilliant colourist, his fertile fancy has been employed in almost all the countries of Europe, and in his own, in prose and verse, with more than average success. His Pendllings by the Way and People 1 have Met are among the most agreeable of books for a leisure hour ; his descriptions are always interesting as well as accurate, and his characters, grave and gay, are generally life-like. His picture of the Indian girl, Nunu, iii the Inklings of Adventure, is fascinating and vivacious enough to be worthy of a higher artist. Books of TRAVEL, among which those of Mr Willis hold a Travels respectable place, superabound in the literature of the West. Nine-tenths of the literary men of America have crossed the Atlantic, and nine-tenths of those who have done so have published their impressions of the Old World, with every variety of good and bad taste, from the Old Home to the Innocents Abroad. After that of his birth, an American author s travels are the first essential of his being. We may next predict his praise of Italy, his half satirical half curious view of England, and his wonder at the Pyramids. Of the multifarious descriptions of Europe to which this habit has given birth, the worthiest of note are those of Hawthorne and Emerson, of Stoiy and Cheever, and Curtis s Nile Notes. In the &quot; Lotus Eating &quot; of the last named we have pleasing reminiscences of the watering- places of his own country. But the most interesting records of western scenery are those of Fremont ; Win- throp s Canoe and Saddle, and Life in the Open Air; and the numerous remarkable &quot; Excursions &quot; of Emerson s leading pupil, II. D. Thoreau his &quot; Maine Woods,&quot; &quot;Cape Cod,&quot; and &quot;Merrimack;&quot; with the vacation voyage to Cuba of the younger Dana. 4. A leading feature of transatlantic literature is its Humor HUMOUK. Humour is a word of many meanings : it begins on the low level of any laughter-provoking absurdity, and rises, as in the speeches of Lear s Fool, to a tragic height. In the Greek classics it shows itself in the Rabelaisian exuberance of Aristophanes or in the Socratic irony : in the English we have an even more subtle appre ciation of the curiosities of character, and a deeper sense of the contradiction or conflict between the higher and lower phases of human nature. In Sterne and Fielding, as in Ben Jonson, we have every man in his humour. As developed in America, this quality of the mind seldom penetrates to the under-currents of life ; its insight is clear but not profound ; it relies mainly on exaggeration, and a blending of jest and earnest which has the effect of singing comic words to a sad tune, or telling a preposterous story with a grave face. Mr Lowell makes us laugh by his description of a negro &quot; so black that charcoal made a chalk mark upon him,&quot; and of a wooden shingle &quot; painted so like marble that it sank in the water.&quot; Mr Browne (Artemus Ward) excited the same sort of laughter by his remark in pointing to a hill daubed on his canvas, &quot; the highest part of this mountain is the top.&quot; In both cases there is a surprise, excited in the one by a falsehood plausibly pre tending to be the truth, in the other by a truism asserting