Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/776

Rh 732 AMERICAN LITERATURE the ghosts and the famine the parable of human life, with its incidents of birth, love, and death of civilisation and decay is told in a narrative of child-like tenderness as well as masculine grasp. He who runs may read it, and yet the whole is lit up by an imagination like an aurora borealis. A recent New York critic ridicules the European view of &quot; Hiawatha&quot; as an American poem. It is true that the feverish ardour of Wall Street has no place in its pages; but it is none the less manifestly transatlantic and sui generis. In celebrating Red Indian life, it inevitably discloses some of the features of the race which has come into close contact with that life. The New Zealand myth about the strength of the dead enemy passing into his conqueror applies here. Mr Dixon has dwelt very justly on the extent to which the aborigines of America have communicated their spirit to the pioneers before whom they have given way. Hiawatha singes of the decadence of a primitive people in strains that recall by their pathos the old British legends of the death of Arthur, but has also a prophetic side; from the meeting-point of two races it looks before as well as after. More devoid of national sentiment and local colouring are the remarkable verses of Edgar Allan Poe, to whom we have before referred as a romancer. If the aim of poetry be to astonish or to fascinate, Poe takes a high rank among poets. According to Wordsworth s definition of the art, he has hardly a place among them at all. He teaches nothing, and living in one world writes in another. All we know of the personality of most of the authors we have named adds to the charm of their works. Regarding Poe s career it is otherwise. The vain and captious jea lousy of his criticism is as repulsive as his graver defects. It has been said that he is the greatest of American writers in verse. This is an exaggeration of his powers only surpassed by his own exaggeration of them. It is true, however, that by pure intensity of delirium he now and then takes a flight beyond that of any other Western poet. His &quot;Politian&quot; is perhaps the stupidest fragment of a play that exists. But in his lyrics the fervour of his sympathy with himself makes artistic recompense for his want of sympathy for others. The passion of &quot; Annabel Lee &quot; is at a white heat, and is pervaded by a true pathos. The class finish of the best of his verses is unsurpassed, and his musical cadences give a charm even to those which are comparatively meaningless. The &quot; Raven&quot; is at the worst a marvellous piece of mechanism; and the same deli cacy of touch is everywhere visible in the rushing lines of &quot;Annie,&quot; &quot;Eulalie,&quot; &quot;Ulalume,&quot; &quot;Lenore,&quot; and the &quot;City in the Sea.&quot; The purity of those poems is one of their most remarkable features. By the side of the author s life, they are like nuns in the convent of a disorderly city; but they are at the same disadvantage their isolation gives them an air of unreality. The &quot;banners, yellow, glorious, golden,&quot; of his fancy &quot; float and flow &quot; on the roof of an imaginary palace. 2. SCHOOL OF AMERICAN SCENERY AND ADVENTURE. The French critic M. De Tocqueville remarks that, in democratic communities, where men are all socially insig nificant, poetry will be less apt to celebrate individuals, but will incline to dwell on external nature or on the ideas which concern mankind in general. It will be either descriptive or abstract. The works of Mr Bryant, the earliest considerable American poet, help to vindicate the generalisation. His &quot; Thanatopsis,&quot; written in his 19th year, is perhaps the masterpiece of his sombre contempla tive imagination. The reason why the author has never surpassed this effort of his youth is be found partly in the cast of his mind, characterised by a narrow greatness, and partly in the fact that, during the major part of his life he has been constrained to &quot; scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen&quot; as the editor of a daily newspaper: a fact to which, at the close of his &quot; Green River,&quot; he makes a touching reference. Mr Bryant has lived in thronging cities, an honest and energetic politician; but in his leisure hours his fancy has roamed to breezy hills and valleys and the undulating sea of the prairies. The perpetual autumn of his writings is peculiar. He has written smoothly in various measures, but he is never lively. An American Alastor, he loves &quot; the air that cools the twilight of the sultry clay&quot; better than morning &quot;clad in russet vest.&quot; In the beautiful verses on the &quot; Death of the Flowers &quot; his ear catches a dirge in the wind The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find them in the wood and bv the stream no more.&quot; The high rank grass of the meadow is to his eye the garniture of the graves of a race represented by his &quot; Dis interred Warrior.&quot; His &quot; Evening Wind,&quot; &quot; Forest Hymn,&quot; &quot; Monument Mountain,&quot; &quot; The Burial Place/ and &quot; The Past,&quot; are set to the same slow music, and pervaded by the thought of life as the avenue of death. If we com pare his &quot; Address to a Waterfowl&quot; with Wordsworth s or Shelley s &quot; Skylark,&quot; we appreciate the monotony of his mind, which is like that of Cowper without Cowper s occasional vivacity. Mr Bryant stands on a high level, but the space he covers is limited; he has no touch of humour, and only the distant pathos of prevailing melan choly. Master of his position where he is at home in the woods, he loses his inspiration when he draws near his own cities. His nature-worship has a parallel in the feeling which animates some of the most graphic passages in New England prose; as when Emerson writes &quot;At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world ia forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. . . . We have crept out of our crowded houses into the night and morning. .... The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Hero no history or church or state is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year.&quot; The whole life and writings of the morbidly eccentric Thoreau genius H. D. Thoreau are a comment on the results of this one-sided spirit. It pervades half the volumes of Theodore Winthrop, a manlier though less original nu nd. It has taken possession of the poetic advocate of Far Western and wild Indian life, Joaquin Miller, whose &quot; Songs of the Sierras &quot; in their best passages add to Bryant s descriptive power more of the fire of adventure, finding expression in the quicker piilse of the verse. But the lyrics of this writer, though the vehicle of national thought, bear the mark of foreign influence. Their cadences are echoes of Mr Swinburne. The impulse which made captive the &quot; Scholar Gipsy,&quot; which the hero of &quot; Locksley Hall&quot; welcomes and then rejects, is a leading feature of Western literature. Imaginative and ardent minds, oppressed by what Mr Arnold calls &quot; this strange disease of modern life,&quot; try to escape from the region of the real drama into that of the ideal lyric, &quot; arva, beata petamus arva, divites et insulas,&quot; and have now and then endeavoured to convert it into an actual idyll, as when Thoreau buried himself in a log hut by Walden lake, or Theodore Winthrop, leaving his ledgers in New York, scoured over the crags of Oregon; or Home, with his &quot; Orion&quot; still unsold, was found mining in a quarry of New South Wales. But this emigre spirit, when put into practice, ultimately cures itself: a poet soon tires of working with his hands for a livelihood. The aspirations of dough s &quot; Bothie&quot; are stifled by the vitiosae curce of a hard life, or terminate in the catastrophes of a fanaticism, such as Hawthorne has branded with his genius in the Blithcdale Romance. The philosophical refugees