A history of literature in America

Front matter

THE LIBRARY

OF

LOS ANGELES

Book I Chapter Page

I. English History from 1600 to 1700 n

II. English Literature from 1600 to 1700 18

III. American History from 1600 to 1700 23

IV. Literature in America from 1600 to 1700 . . . .31 V. Cotton Mather 42

VI. Summary 50

Book II

I. English History from 1700 to 1800 53

II. English Literature from 1700 to 1800 .... 55

III. American History from 1700 to 1800 .... 69

IV. Literature in America from 1700 to 1776 .... 71 V. Jonathan Edwards 77

VI. Benjamin Franklin 83

VII. The American Revolution 92

VIII. Literature in America from 1776 to 1800 .... 98

IX. Summary no xii Contents

Book III The Nineteenth Century Chapter Page

I. English History from 1800 to 1900 113

II. English Literature from 1800 to 1900 118

III. American History from 1800 to 1900 121

IV. Literature in America from 1800 to 1900 . .125

Book IV Literature In The Middle States From 1798 To 1857

I. Charles Brock den Brown 129

II. Washington Irving 136

III. James Fenimore Cooper 148

IV. William Cullen Bryant 158

V. Edgar Allan Poe 169

VI. The Knickerbocker School 179

Book V

I. Some General Characteristics of New England . . 189

II. The New England Orators 201

III. The New England Scholars and Historians . . . 210

IV. Unitarianism 229

V. Transcendentalism 239

VI. Ralph Waldo Emerson 254

VII. The Lesser Men of Concord . . . . • . . . 266

Contents xiii

CHAPTER PAGE

VIII. The Antislavery Movement 275

IX. John Greenleaf Whittier 289

X. The Atlantic Monthly 298

XI. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 305

XII. James Russell Lowell 315

XIII. Oliver Wendell Holmes 327

XIV. Nathaniel Hawthorne 34°

Book VI The Rest Of The Story

I. New York Since 1857 355

II. Walt Whitman 371

III. Later New England 379

IV. The Novel: Ho wells, James, and Crawford . . .395 V. The South 399

VI. The West ,. . 412

VII. Mark Twain 421

VIII. Conclusion 425

INDEX 437

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

John Winthrop 26

Samuel Sewall 28

Jonathan Edwards 78

Timothy Dwight 102

Joel Barlow 106

Sunnyside, Irving's Home at Tarrytown 139

Nathaniel Parker Willis 182

Daniel Webster 204

Edward Everett 206

George Ticknor 216

William Hickling Prescott ,221

Francis Parkman 226

William Ellery Channing 234

Margaret Fuller 247

Brook Farm 249

George Ripley 252 xvi List of Illustrations

PAGE

Amos Bronson Alcott 267

Henry David Thoreau 269

William Lloyd Garrison 278

Harriet Beecher Stowe 284

James Thomas Fields 302

Longfellow's Home, Craigie House, Cambridge .... 308

Longfellow in his Library 312

Elmwood, Cambridge, Mass., Birthplace of James Russell

Lowell 318

Holmes's Birthplace, Cambridge 329

Commencement Day at Harvard in Holmes's Time . . .331

An Early Home of Hawthorne, Old Manse, Concord . . . 343 Wayside, Concord, Home of Nathaniel Hawthorne . . -347

Samuel Langhorne Clemens . . . 422

A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN AMERICA

Introduction

LITERATURE, the lasting expression in words of the meaning of life, is of all fine arts the most national: each Literature language grows to associate with itself the ideals and the 1! aspirations and the fates of those peoples with whose life it is inextricably intermingled.

Languages grow and live and die in accordance with laws of their own. This English of ours may be taken as typical. Originating from the union and confusion of older tongues, it has struggled through the infantile diseases of dialect, each of which has left some trace, until long ago it not only had become the sole means of expression for millions of people, but also had assumed the form which now makes its literature in some respects the most remark able of modern times. Whatever else it may be, this lit erature is the most spontaneous, the least formal and con scious, the most instinctively creative, the most free from excess of culture, and so, seemingly, the most normal. Its earliest forms were artless; songs and sayings began to stray from oral tradition into written record, laws were sometimes phrased and chronicles made in the robust young terms which carried meaning to unlearned folk as well as to those versed in more polite tongues, such as French or Latin. Presently came forms of literature which, at least comparatively, were artistic. The earliest of these which has lasted in general literary memory reached its height in the works of Chaucer (about 1340-

1400). After his time came a century or more of civil disturbance, when Englishmen were too busy with wars of the Roses and the like for further progress in the arts of peace. Then, with the new national integrity which grew under the Tudors, came a stronger literary impulse, un surpassed in vigorous spontaneity.

In 1575 there was hardly such a thing as modern Eng lish literature; in 1625 that great body of English litera ture which we call Elizabethan was complete. Fifty years had given us not only incomparable lyric verse and the final version of the English Bible (1611), but the works too of Spenser (1552-1599), of Shakspere (1564-1616) and the other great dramatists, of Hooker (1553-1600), of Ralegh (1552-1618), of Bacon (1561-1626), and of all their fellows. Among these, of course, Shakspere stands supreme, just as Chaucer stood among his contempo raries, whose names are now forgotten by all but special scholars; and one feature of Shakspere's supremacy is that his literary career was normal. Whoever has followed it from his experimental beginning, through the ripeness to which he brought comedy, history, and tragedy alike, to its placid close amid the decadent formality of another established literary tradition, will have learned something more than even the great name of Shakspere includes, — he will have had a glimpse of the natural law which not only governed the course of Shakspere himself and of Elizabethan literature, but has always governed the growth, development, and decline of all literature and of all fine art. Lasting literature has its birth when a creatiye imPulseJ which we may call imaginative, moves men to break the shackles of tradition, making things which have not been before; sooner or later this impulse is checked by a growing sense of the inexorable limits of fact and of language; and then creative imagination sinks into some new tradition, to be broken only when, in time to come, the vital force of imagination shall revive.

As English literature has grown into maturity, the con stant working of this law has become evident. The first impulse, we have seen, gave us the work of Chaucer; the second, which came only after generations, gave us the Elizabethan lyrics and dramas, Spenser and Shakspere, and the final form of the English Bible. This last, prob ably the greatest masterpiece of translation in the world, has exercised on the thought and the language of English-speaking people an influence which cannot be overesti mated. As a translation, however, it rather indicates how eager Elizabethan Englishmen were to know the splendors of world-old literature, than reveals a spontaneous impulse towards native expression. Apart from this supreme work, the fully developed literature of the Elizabethan period took on the whole the form of poetry; that of the eighteenth century, on the other hand, took on the whole the form of prose; and as English prose literature has developed, no phase of it has developed more highly than its fiction. This general statement is perhaps enough to indicate an important tendency. The first form in which any normal literature develops is instinctively poetic ; prose comes later; and prose fiction, that intricate combination of poetic impulse with prosaic form, comes later still. In 1625 English literature was fully developed only in the forms of lyric and dramatic poetry.

It was about this time that America came into existence. America It began with a number of mutually independent settle ments, each of which grew into something like political integrity. When the Constitution of the United States was adopted, the sentiment of local sovereignty in the sepa rate States was accordingly too strong to allow the federal power to assume an independent name. As the power thus founded developed into one of the most considerable in modern history, its citizens found themselves driven by this fact of national namelessness to a custom which is often held presumptuous; they called themselves Americans, a name geographically proper to all natives of the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Patagonia. By this time the custom thus established has given to the name "Amer ica" the sense in which we generally use it. The America with whose literary history we are to be concerned is only that part of our continent which is dominated by the Eng lish-speaking people now subject to the government of the United States.

A literary history of America should therefore concern itself with such lasting expressions in words of the mean ing of life as this people has uttered during its three cen turies of existence; or, in simpler terms, with what America has contributed to the literature of the English language.

In the history of America each century has traits of its own. In 1600 there was no such thing as English-speak ing America; in 1700 all but one of the colonies which have developed into the United States were finally estab lished, and the English conquest of the middle colonies founded by the Dutch or the Swedes was virtually com plete. In 1700 every one of the American colonies was loyally subject to the government of King William III; in 1800 there remained throughout them no vestige of British authority. In 1800, the last complete year of the presidency of John Adams, the United States were still an experiment in government, of which the result remained in doubt; the year 1900 found them a power which seems as established and as important as any in the world. Clearly these three centuries of American history are at kast as distinct as three generations in any race.

Again, the typical American character of the seventeenth The century differed from that of the eighteenth, and that of the eighteenth from that of the nineteenth, as distinctly as the historical limits of these centuries differed one from the other. In the seventeenth century the typical Ameri can, a man of English-speaking race, seemed to himself an immigrant hardly at home in the remote regions where his exiled life was to be passed. In the eighteenth century the typical American, still English at heart, was so far in descent from the immigration that almost unawares his personal ties with the mother country had been broken. In the nineteenth century the typical American, politically as well as personally independent of the old world, and English only so far as the traditions inseparable from an cestral law and language must keep him so, has often felt or fancied himself less at one with contemporary Eng lishmen than with Europeans of other and essentially foreign blood.

Yet we Americans are English-speaking still; the ideals The ideals which underlie our conscious life must always be the of Rl*ht

and of

ideals which underlie the conscious life of the mother Rights, country. Morally and religiously these ideals are im mortally consecrated in King James's version of the Bible; legally and politically they are grouped in the Com mon Law of England. Morally, these ideals are com prised in a profound conviction that we are bound to do right; legally they may be summarized in the statement that we are bound to maintain our rights. But the rights contemplated by our ancestral law are not vague things, which people imagine, on general principles, that they ought to have; they are privileges and practices which custom and experience have proved favorable to the wel fare of people like ourselves.

Three Recurring to our division of native Americans into the ,itera- three types which correspond with the three centuries of American history, we perceive that only the last, the Ameri cans of the nineteenth century, have produced literature of any importance. The greater part of our study must con sequently concern the century lately at an end. For all that, the two earlier centuries were not sterile ; rather indeed the amount of native American writing which each pro duced is surprising. What is more, American writings of the eighteenth century differed from those of the seven teenth quite as distinctly as did American history or Ameri can character. Of both centuries, meanwhile, two things are true: neither in itself presents much literary variety, and most of what was published in each has already been forgotten. Our task, accordingly, is to glance at the liter ary history of America during the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, and to study that literary history during the past hundred years.

Taking each century in turn, we may conveniently begin by reminding ourselves briefly of what it contributed to the history and to the literature of England. With this in mind we may better understand a similar but more minute study of America during each of the three periods in ques tion. When we come to the last and most important of these, the nineteenth century, we may find ourselves a little troubled by the fact that so much of it is almost con temporary with ourselves. Contemporary life is never quite ripe for history; facts cannot at once range them selves in true perspective; and when these facts are living men and women, there is a touch of inhumanity in writing of them as if we had already had the misfortune to lose them. Yet write of them we must, with what approach to certainty contemporary judgment may make, in order that by carrying our record through the year 1900 we may try to discern what America has so far contributed to the literature of our ancestral English language.

Book I The Seventeenth Century Book I The Seventeenth Century

I

ENGLISH HISTORY FROM 1600 TO 1700

Gardiner, Chapters xxx-xliii. A list of books for further study of this period is given by Gardiner, p. 577; for our purposes, however, Gardi ner's own chapters are sufficient.

IN 1600 the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603)* was xheSoverdrawing to its close. After her came the pragmatic Scotch man, James I (1603-1625). After him came Charles I (1625-1649), whose tragic fate has combined with the charm of his portraits to make him at least a pathetically romantic hero. Then came Cromwell (1649-1658), as sternly sovereign in his fleeting Commonwealth as ever king was in monarchy. Then came Charles II (1660- 1685) with all the license of the Restoration; then James II (1685-1689), displaced by the revolution which broke out in 1688; finally (1689-1702) came the Dutch Prince of Orange with his English Queen, Mary (1689- 1694). Seven sovereigns in all we find, if we count Will iam and Mary together; and of these only six were royal. Of the six royalties, four were Stuarts, who came in the

* The dates after the names of sovereigns indicate the limits not of their lives but of their reigns.

II middle of the list; and the Stuart dynasty was broken Cromwell, mid way by Cromwell, the one English sovereign not royal.

Literally, then, Cromwell is the central figure of English history during the seventeenth century. Love him or hate him, reverence or detest his memory, one fact you must grant : never before in English history had men seen dominant the type of which he is the great representative; never since his time have they again seen that dominant type, now vanished with the world which brought it forth, — the type of the dominant Puritan.

The Puritan character, of course, is too permanently English to be confined to any single period of English history. In the seventeenth century, however, Puritanism for a while acquired the unique importance of national dominance, which it proved politically unable to maintain beyond the lifetime of its chief exponent. A religious sys tem, one generally thinks it; and rightly, for it was pro foundly actuated by conscious religious motives, and by passionate devotion to that system of Christian theology which is known as Calvinism. A political movement, too, it often seems ; and rightly, for never in the course of Eng lish history have native Englishmen so striven to alter the form and the course of constitutional development. In such a study as ours it has both aspects; the dominance of Puritanism may best be thought of as the period when for a little while the moral and religious ideals which underlie our language were uppermost, when for once the actuating impulse of authority was rather that the will of God should be done on earth than that any custom — however fortified and confirmed by the experience formulated in the Com mon Law — should for its own sake be maintained.

That the will of God should be done, on earth as it is in

Puritan ism.

Heaven, no good man will ever deny. What the will of God is, on the other hand, when directly concerned with the matters of this world, even good Englishmen cannot always agree. Among the Puritans themselves there was plenty of dissension, but one thing seems fairly sure, — no good Puritan questioned the truth of Calvinism. To un derstand Puritanism, in England and in America alike, we must therefore remind ourselves of what Calvinistic theology taught.

In the beginning, the Puritans held, God created man, responsible to Him, with perfect freedom of will. Adam, in the fall, exerted his will in opposition to the will of God ; thereby Adam and all his posterity merited eternal punish- Calvinism, ment. As a mark of that punishment they lost the power of exerting their will in harmony with the will of God, without losing their hereditary responsibility to Him. But God, in His infinite mercy, was pleased to mitigate His justice. Through the mediation of Christ, certain human beings, chosen at God's pleasure, might be relieved of the just penalty of sin, and received into everlasting salvation. These were the elect ; none others could be saved, nor could any acts of the elect impair their salvation. Now, there were no outward and visible marks by which the elect might be known; there was a fair chance that any human being to whom the gospel was brought might be of the number. The thing which most vitally concerned every man was accordingly to discover whether he were elect, and so free from the just penalty of sin. The test of elec tion was ability to exert the will in true harmony with the will of God; whoever could willingly do right had a fair ground for hope that he should be saved. But even the elect were infected with the hereditary sin of humanity;

and, besides, no wile of the Devil was more frequent than that which deceived men into believing themselves regen erated when in truth they were not. The task of assuring one's self of election could end only with life, — a life of passionate aspirations, ecstatic enthusiasms, profound discouragements. Above all, men must never forget that the true will of God was revealed, directly or by implica tion, only and wholly in Scripture; incessant study of Scrip ture was the sole means by which any man could assure himself that his will was really exerting itself, through the mediatory power of Christ, in true harmony with the will of God.

Calvinism Calvinism this creed is commonly called, in memory of Evolu- J°hn Calvin (1509-1564), the French reformer, who has tion. been its chief modern exponent; but perhaps we might

better call it the system of Saint Augustine. Both Augus tine and Calvin are remembered chiefly, perhaps wholly, as theologians, and seem intangibly remote from the workaday life of this age, whose most characteristic energies are de voted to scientific research. Yet, strangely enough, the conceptions which underlie the most popular scientific philosophy of our own time have much in common with those which actuated both Augustine and Calvin. Earthly life, the modern evolutionists hold, consists in a struggle for existence wherein only the fittest can survive. In the days when Calvin pondered on the eternities, and still more in those tragic days of toppling empire when Augustine strove to imprison divine truth within the limits of earthly lan guage, science was still to come. But what Augustine and Calvin saw, in the human affairs whence each inferred the systems of Heaven and Hell, was really what the modern evolutionists perceive in every aspect of Nature. Total depravity is only a theological name for that phase of life which moderns name the struggle for existence; and like wise election is only a theological name for what our newer fashion calls the survival of the fittest.

Now, any struggle is bound to be at its fiercest where the struggling forces are most concentrated. In human affairs, both good and evil struggle hardest where human beings are most densely congregated. Augustine wrote in a world still formally dominated by that imperial power of Rome whose health and strength were gone. Calvin wrote in the populous Europe of the Renaissance, where the whole system of mediaeval life was doomed, and where the pressure of economic fact was already forcing the more adventurous spirits of every European race to explore our Western Hemisphere. Noble, too, though we may find the traditions of that merry old England, which was so vital under Queen Elizabeth, which faded under the first two Stuarts, and which vanished in the smoke of the Civil Wars, the plain records, both of history and of literature, show it to have been a dense, wicked old world, whose passions ran high and deep, and whose vices and crimes, big as its brave old virtues, were such as to make the grim dogmas of the Puritans seem to many earnest minds the only explanation of so godless a fact as human life.

God's will be done on earth, then, the Puritans cried, Puritan honestly conceiving this divine will to demand the political dominance of God's elect. The society over which they believed that these elect should make themselves politically dominant had all the complexity which must develop itself during centuries of national and social growth; and this growth, fortified by the unwritten Common Law of Eng land, had taken through the centuries an earthly course at variance with what the Puritans held to be their divinely sanctioned politics. Towards the end of Cromwell's dominance they tried to mend matters by giving England a written constitution. In many respects this Instru ment of Government seems theoretically better than the older system which had grown under the unwritten Common Law, and which since Cromwell's time has de veloped into the Parliamentary government now control ling the British Empire. The Instrument of Government, however, had a mortal weakness: it was not historically continuous with the past ; and this was enough to prevent any historical continuity with the future. The struggle for political existence in England was inevitably fatal to principles and ideals so little rooted in national life as those which the Puritans formulated. So in England, after the momentary irruption of dominant Puritanism, the old Common Law surged back; and it has flowed on to the present day, the stronger if not the nobler of the two ideals of our race.

The records which remain to us of Elizabethan England, and of the England which finally broke into civil war, seem to concern men of a remote past. Take, for example, the adventurer, Ralegh; the soldier and courtier, Essex; and, a little later, that most chivalrous of autobiographers, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. All three are marked by a big, simple, youthful spontaneity. Take, equally at ran dom, three other names which belong to the years after Cromwell's dominant Puritanism had failed: Samuel Pepys, the diarist; Halifax, the great Trimmer; and John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Though by no means contemporary with ourselves, these seem, in com parison with the elder group, almost modern, — old-fashioned men rather than men of an earlier type than those we live with. The contrast is typical. The England which came before Cromwell, the England which we may name "Elizabethan," vanished when Puritan dominance broke for a while the progress of English constitutional law; the England which came afterwards, whatever its merits or its faults, lacked, as England has continued to lack ever since the Restoration, certain traits which we all feel in the old Elizabethan world.

For our purpose there is hardly anything more important than to realize, if we can, what these Elizabethan traits Three were, which distinguish the England before Cromwell's be^an time from that which has come after him. Perhaps we Traits, shall have done a little to remind ourselves of what Eliza bethan England possessed, when we begin to feel how throughout that older time we find three characteristics which in later days are more and more rare, — spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility.

II English Literature From 1600 To 1700

For this chapter, as for the others on English literary history, the gen eral authorities (see p. vii) are sufficient. Whoever wishes more about this period may consult George Saintsbury's History of Elizabethan Liter ature, London: Macmillan, 1887, and A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 3 vols., London: Mac millan, 1899.

The Three THE social history of seventeenth-century England groups itself in three parts : that which preceded the domi nant Puritanism of the Commonwealth; the dominant Puri tanism itself; and what came after. All three of these phases of English life found expression in literature. Be tween 1600 and 1605 appeared plays by Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Shakspere, Marston, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman; Florio's translation of Montaigne; Campion's Art of English Poetry; and, among many other lesser works, the last volume of Hakluyt's Voyages. Be tween 1648 and 1652 appeared works by Fuller, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Bunyan, Izaak Walton, and George Herbert. Finally, between 1695 and 1700 appeared plays by Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh; and works of one sort or another by Bentley, Defoe, Evelyn, Lord Shaftesbury, and Dryden; not to speak of Tate and Brady's version of the Psalms. These random lists will suggest the outline of the literary history we need to keep in mind.

The beginning of the century marked the height of Elizabethan literature, in which the central figure is Shakspere. Among the men who were writing in the middle of the century, men in whom the Elizabethan spirit was no longer strong, one rose almost as superior to the rest as Shakspere had been fifty years before. That one, of course, is Milton (1608-1674). In the last five years of the century, there was another group, as different from either of the others as were the periwigs of Marlborough from the jewelled caps of Sir Walter Ralegh; and in this last group, as in the others, one figure emerges from the rest. Here that figure is John Dryden (1631-1700), the first great maker of heroic couplets, and the first masterly writer of such English prose as we now feel to be modern. It is worth our while to glance in turn at each of these literary periods, — the periods of Shakspere, of Milton, and of Dryden.

Elizabethan literature, in which Shakspere now ap- The Pepears supreme, is at once the first, and in many respects r^^°f the greatest, of the schools or periods of letters which con- spere. stitute modern English literature. Marked throughout by spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility, this period is clearly marked as well by the fact that it brought to final excellence two kinds of poetry, — the lyric, and a little later the dramatic. In thinking of Elizabethan literature, one is accordingly apt to forget that it includes noble prose as well. Yet no reader of English can long forget that to this same period belong the scientific work and the later essays of Bacon. It was within the first fifteen years of the seventeenth century, too, that Ralegh, in the Tower, was writing his History 0} the World; and that various mas terly translations were accompanying the growth of that final masterpiece of translation, the English Bible of 1611. Meanwhile there were minor phases of literature: the name of Hakluyt, the collector of so many records of ex ploration, is still familiar; so is that of Richard Hooker, whose Ecclesiastical Polity remains the chief monument of religious controversy in the reign of Elizabeth. Poetry was first, then, and supreme, but there was sonorous and thoughtful prose in philosophy and history alike; much matter of contemporary chronicle, such as Hakluyt's Voyages; and much controversial writing.

Throughout this literature there is one trait which the lapse of three centuries has tended to obscure. This is a sort of pristine alertness of mind, evident in innumerable details of Elizabethan style. One may best detect it, perhaps, by committing to memory random passages from Elizabethan plays. If the trait occurred only in the work of Shakspere, one might deem it a mere fresh miracle of his genius; but it occurs everywhere. Such literature as the Elizabethan world has left us bears witness through out that the public for which it was made was quick of wit, and eager to enjoy a wide variety of literary effects. ThePe- By the middle of the century, this trait had begun to Milton ^a<^e out °^ English letters. Our brief list of mid-century publications revealed Milton, not as the chief of a school, but rather as the one great figure in a group of fastidi ously careful minor poets and elaborate makers of over wrought rhetorical prose, often splendid but never simple. Fuller, Taylor, and Walton fairly typify seventeenth- cen tury prose; to complete our impression of it we might glance at Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and at Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1642). One term by which we may characterize this mid-century English literature, to distinguish it from what came before, is the term "deliberate." Mysteriously but certainly the spontaneity and versatility of Elizabethan days had dis appeared. The literature of Cromwell's England was as different from that of Elizabeth's as Cromwell was from Walter Ralegh. The names of Shakspere and Milton tell the story.