Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/541

AMERICAN LITERATURE. lishpd tlirec other novels in 1801, and his literary activity, which was mainly associated with Phila- delpliia, promised much for the new Rcpuhlic. But his work was cut short by ill-lieaUh and an early death, and to modern readers his stories, while marked by distinct imaginative power, are too plainly connected with the extravagant school of Godwin and Mrs. Radclifle to be attractive. Brown deserves, however, to be remembered as the first American who made the profession of letters a success, and he was a genuine predecessor of Hawthorne and Poe.

The opening decade of the nineteenth century was one of great political importance; but it is marked by few literary names of note, John Mar- shall's Life of ^yaflhi)ll|loll (1804) being less im- portant than his judicial decisions, and the writ- ings of the Rev. JI. L. Weenis and William Wirt not meaning much to the sophisticated readers of a centviry since. But In 1809 a work that will probably never lose its interest made it certain that American literature, in the true sense of the term, had been born. In this year Washing; ton Irving gave the world "Diedrich Knicker- bocker's" Histort/ of Xeic Yorlc. Irving may be a little out of fashion to-day with some readers, and he may seem almost as much a British as an American classic; but a classic he is. whose style has perhaps not been surpassed, and whose es- says, short stories and works of travel, biogra- phy and history must be read by all cultivated Americans. During his long life he was the worthy head of the Knickerbocker school of writers who made New York the literary centre of the country before the rise of New England Transcendentalism.

It was more than a decade, however, after Irving's success before a really great writer arose to keep him company. Such poets as Washington Allston, John Pierpont and Mrs. Sigourney, and such a dramatist as John Howard Payne, can- not send us back, with any great enthusiasm, to the second decade of the century just passed. It is true, nevertheless, that the founding of the Xorlh Amcricnn Review at Boston in May, 1813, was an important event, and that by publishing two years later the youthful Bryant's Tlmnatop- sis, it introduced to the work! a poet of dignity and power, who, if not precisely great, was at least able to interpret pleasingly and satisfac- torily to Americans the natural beauties of their native land. Two other poets, inferior to Bryant, yet still remembered, .Toseph Rodman Drake, author of The Culprit Fay, and Fitz- Greene Hallcck, author of an elegy on Drake and some stirring lyrics, also made their first appear- ance in this decade.

When James Fenimore Cooper published Precaution, in 1820, he gave the public no evidence that one of the gi'catest of modern writers of fiction had arisen. A competent reader of The iipy, which was issued the very next year, might, however, have perceived the fact. Two years later. The I'ilut and The Pioneers showed that al- though Cooper might be essentially a follower of Scott, and although his style might be often slip- shod and his power of characterization, especially in the case of women, almost nil. he was, never- theless, master in his own splendid domain, the sea, the forest, and the prairie. The Leather- stocking Tales have been frequently called the real American epic, and a recognition of the truth of this statement would prevent many per- sons from underrating the genius of one of the few Americans who have won a world-wide fame by their writings. America has produced several authors of finer genius than Cooper possessed, but perluips none of larger.

Besides Cooper, the third decade of the last century brought into notice the poet James Gates Pereival, who unfortunately did not de- serve the re|)utation he speedily acquired. A less highly praised poet, Edward Coate Pinkney, is now more interesting on account of his small but genuine lyric vein. The same decade counts among its worthies the indefatigable historiog- rapher, Jared Sparks, and the admirable student of Spanish literature, George Ticknor. Lydia Maria Child, Edward Everett, the elder William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott also made their appearance as writers; and Poe and Haw- thorne published juvenile works that are now very rare. But perhaps the best-known produc- tion of the period is Webster's reply to Hayne, which struck the keynote that was to dominate our literature for the next generation.

The year IS.'Jl saw the establishment of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and the publication of Whittier's first book. Legends of eio England. Both men were to do a great work for the anti- slavery cause, and Whittier in especial was to endear himself to his native section as its true poet laureate. The writer who best represented New York at this period was Nathaniel Parker V^'illis, poet, traveler, and journalist. But he, though still interesting, h:.s greatly declined in reputation. The same thing is true of those representative ante-bellum Southern writers, William Gilmore Siinms, of South Carolina, and .lolin Pendleton Kennedy, of Maryland, who, with Robert Montgomery Bird, of Pennsylvania, formed a group of romancers inferior indeed to Cooper, yet worthy of being read, at least in their best novels, such as The Yemassee, Horse- shoe 1,'ohinson, and yirk of the Woods. Besides these writers, who began their careers in the thirties, we should recall the historian George Bancroft, whose Histiirij of the United States re- mains eminently valuable.

The Transcendental movement in New England, culminating in The Dial of the early forties, is, of course, the prime fact of American literary history before the Civil War. Yet many of the writers more or less connected with it, such as the critics George Ripley and Mar- garet Fuller, and the poets C. P. Cranch and Jones Very, have long since become mere names to most readers. The poet - naturalist, Thoreau, however, has not only held his own, but gained ground year by year, and Emerson has taken his phice with Hawthorne and Poe in the very front rank of American writers. Through- out his long life. Emerson was to his countrymen and to many Europeans not merely a great writer but an inspiring seer, and there are not wanting readers to-day who consider him, in his double capacity of pliilosopher and poet, the gi-eatest of American men of letters. Since the publication of his Hcurlet Letter (1850), this position has been assigned to Hawthorne by the majority of his fellow citizens, while foreign readers have unhesitatingly assigned it to Edgar Allan Poe, whose haunting poems and tales have seemingljr exerted a greater literary influence than the works of any other American.

More infiuential, so far as the culture of the American people is concerned, has been the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It has