A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

VII

The period may be said to have produced in the South two inspired poets, Lanier and Irwin Russell, and in many ways the two were alike. Both were frail of body and sensitive of temperament, both were passionately given to music and found their poetic field by means of it, both were educated men, eager students of the older literatures, both discovered the negro as poetic material, and both died when their work was just beginning, Russell, like Keats, at the boyish age of twenty-six. But Russell added what Lanier had no trace of, a waywardness of character and a genius for goodfellowship that wrecked him even earlier than it did Burns.

The life of Russell is associated with four cities: Port Gibson, Mississippi, where he was born in 1853; St. Louis, where he spent the earlier years of his life and where later he completed the course at the Jesuit University; Port Gibson again, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar; New York City, of which he was a resident from January until July, 1879; and New Orleans, where he died in December of the same year. His life was fitful and restless. He did little with his profession, turning from it to learn the printer's trade, and then after a few listless months, drifting into other things. He had dreams of California and wandered on foot in its direction as far as Texas; he attempted to run away to sea, and he spent much time on the river boats making jovial friends of the captains and the pilots. His banjo assured him of a welcome wherever he might go.

The writing of poetry was never to him a serious occupation. He composed with abandon when the mood was on him, he seldom revised, and he cared little for the finished product save as it might please his friends. One finds many evidences in his work that he learned his art from Burns, whom he considered the greatest poet the world had ever produced. He had saturated himself too with the English balladists and the genuine old poets of the early periods. The poetry of his own time angered him. In "The Hysteriad" (Scribner's, 16:759) he satirizes with bitterness the contemporary product. "A poem of the period," he said, "or a periodical poem, is a thing that is altogether emotional, and is not intended to convey any idea in particular." To him poetry meant something not esoteric and idealized, but something that lay very close to the life of every day, something redolent of humanity, like Burns's songs. He maintained that his own inspiration had come not at all from other poets, but from actual contact with the material that he made use of. His own words concerning the composition of his first poem have a peculiar value. They are a part of the history of the period:

You know I am something of a banjoist. Well, one evening I was sitting in our back yard in old Mississippi "twanging" on the banjo, when I heard the missis—our colored domestic, an old darkey of the Aunt Dinah pattern—singing one of the outlandish camp-meeting hymns of which the race is so fond. She was an extremely "'ligious" character and, although seized with the impulse to do so, I hesitated to take up the tune and finish it. I did so, however, in the dialect I have adopted, and which I then thought and still think is in strict conformity to their use of it, I proceeded, as one inspired, to compose verse after verse of the most absurd, extravagant, and, to her, irreverent rime ever before invented, all the while accompanying it on the banjo and imitating the fashion of the plantation negro.... I was then about sixteen and as I had soon after a like inclination to versify, was myself pleased with the performance, and it was accepted by a publisher, I have continued to work the vein indefinitely.[129]

To what extent the poet was indebted to the Pike balladry that had preceded his first work, at least so far as wide publication in Northern magazines was concerned, is not easily determined. It seems extremely probable that he had seen it. Lanier, as has been shown, had published negro dialect poetry in Scribner's nearly a year before Russell, but whoever was pioneer, the author of "Christmas-night in the Quarters" was the one who first caught the attention of the reading public and exerted the greatest influence upon the period. He undoubtedly was the leading pioneer. Page and Gordon dedicated their Befo' de War "To Irwin Russell, who awoke the first echo," and Joel Chandler Harris, manifestly an authority, declared that "Irwin Russell was among the first—if not the very first—of Southern writers to appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character, and of the unique relations existing between the two races before the war, and was among the first to develop them."[130]

In the last year of his life Russell, encouraged by the reception of his magazine poems, went to New York to make literature his profession. Bunner, the editor of Puck, and Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson of the Century staff, and others, recognized his ability, and gave him every encouragement possible. One of the most prominent of the poets of the older school, it may be remarked, also became interested in him and urged him to drop the ephemeral type of verse to which he had addicted himself and devote his talents to really serious work. For a brief period he obeyed, with what success one may judge from the poems at the end of his volume.

Success came too late. His friends were powerless to control his wayward genius. His frail constitution gave way. From a bed of fever he arose still half delirious, staggered to the docks, engaged to work his way on a New Orleans boat as a coal-heaver, and in New Orleans secured a position on the Times. But the end was near. To a member of the Times staff he opened his heart in words that might have come from Poe:

It has been the romance of a weak young man threaded in with the pure love of a mother, a beautiful girl who hoped to be my wife, and friends who believed in my future. I have watched them lose heart, lose faith, and again and again I have been so stung and startled that I have resolved to save myself in spite of myself.... I never shall.[131]

He died a few weeks later.