Bryant reinforced these letters with an editorial, remarkable as an expression of confidence in the brilliant future of American letters. It was a mistake, he maintained, to suppose that in the absence of an international copyright agreement the United States had wholly the best of the situation:
Within the last year, the number of books written by American authors, which have been successful in Britain, is greater than that of foreign works which have been successful in this country. Robertson’s work on Palestine, Stephens’s Travels in Central America, Catlin’s book on North American Indians, Cooper’s Deerslayer, the last volume of Bancroft’s American history, several works prepared by Anthon for the schools—here is a list of American works republished in England within the year for which we should be puzzled to find an equivalent in works written in England within the same time, and republished here. Our eminent authors are still engaged in their literary labors. Cooper within a fortnight past has published a work stamped with all the vigor of his faculties, Prescott is occupied in writing the History of Peru, Bancroft is engaged in continuing the annals of his native country, Sparks is still employed in his valuable historical labors, and Stephens is pushing his researches in Central America, with a view of giving their results to the world. We were told, the other day, of a work prepared for the press by Washington Irving, which would have appeared ere this but for the difficulties in the way of securing a copyright for it in England, as well as here.
He drew an inspiring picture of the effect of the success of these authors in raising up aspirants for literary fame. Irving had just told him, he wrote, “that if American literature continued to make the same progress as it had done for twenty years past, the day was not very far distant when the greater number of books designed for readers of the English language would be produced in America.”
The editor continued his unavailing efforts for a sound copyright law year after year, decade after decade. He took pains to do justice to the opposition, recognizing that it was by no means all mercenary, and that economists like Matthew Carey advanced arguments worthy of examination. When Dickens published a letter (July 14, 1842) in the London Morning Chronicle, asserting that the barrier to the reform in America was the influence of “the editors and proprietors of newspapers almost exclusively devoted to the republication of popular English works,” and that they were “for the most part men of very low attainments, and of more than indifferent reputation,” Bryant hastened in the Evening Post to call this a misrepresentation. He knew many sincere and respectable men who condemned the international copyright proposals from the best of motives. But the crusade was always near his heart. When in 1843 a petition for the needed law was presented to Congress by ninety-seven firms and persons engaged in the book trade, he supported it, and he did the same when ten years later five New York publishers addressed Secretary of State Everett in behalf of a copyright treaty with Great Britain. At this time he believed that the chief obstacle was the simple indifference of Congressmen; that they did not comprehend the question, nor try to comprehend it, because no party advantage or disadvantage was connected with it.
In the thirties and forties book-reviewing, in the strict sense of the phrase, was almost unknown in the New York daily press. The chief exceptions to the rule were furnished by Edgar Allan Poe, who in the middle forties contributed some genuine criticism to N. P. Willis’s Mirror and other journals, and by Margaret Fuller. Miss Fuller, writing in the Tribune for more than a year and a half preceding her visit to Europe in 1846, performed a signal service to American letters by her courage and acuteness, for her criticism of Longfellow as too foreign in his themes and of Lowell as too imitative had a salutary effect upon those poets. But Poe and Margaret Fuller were passing meteors in New York journalism. Until George Ripley and John Bigelow joined the Tribune and Evening Post respectively in 1849 mere hasty notices were given most books.
The newspaper most conspicuously in a position to pronounce upon new volumes was the Evening Post, for the literary judgment of Bryant and Parke Godwin was excellent. But Bryant had no ambition to be known as a critic. Apart from his shrewd but not deeply penetrative discourses upon Irving, Cooper, Verplanck, and Halleck, he wrote only a half-dozen extensive literary essays, the best known being his really fine “Poets and Poetry of the English Language,” with its insistence upon a “luminous style.” Moreover, so straitened were the paper’s circumstances and so small in consequence was its staff, that he and Godwin had no time for reading and reviewing. “I see the outside of almost every book that is published, but I read little that is new,” runs a letter of Bryant’s to Dana in 1837. Frank avowal was frequently made that a formal review was not within the Evening Post’s powers. The notice of Cooper’s “Wyandotte” (1843) opened with the remark that “we have not had time to read it, but we are informed by the preface....” Five years later Bryant wrote of J. T. Headley’s “Cromwell”: “We have not time in the midst of the continual hurry in which those are involved who write for a daily newspaper, to examine the work with any minuteness; this will be done doubtless by professed critics.”
Slight as were the Post’s comments upon most books, a particular interest attaches to those upon current volumes of poetry, for Bryant wrote them; his associate, John Bigelow, has expressed surprise that Parke Godwin, in his biography, did not collect them. In the “Fable for Critics,” Lowell speaks of Bryant’s “iceolation,” and biographers of both Longfellow and Poe have accused him of indifference to these younger poets. There is much evidence, however, as in Bryant’s admiring letter to Longfellow in 1846, that the charge is unfair; and a study of the Evening Post files indicates that its editor carefully followed the work of his juniors in poetry, was glad to bring it to public notice, and was a good deal more prone to over-praise than to underrate it. Bryant was the dean among American poets, the first to gain fame, and regarded by Griswold, Walt Whitman, and many others as the best of them; as the Bryant Festival in 1864 showed, in which Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, and Whittier participated, they all looked up to him.
Longfellow was the next eldest of the truly great poets. In the pages of the United States Review in the twenties some of his earliest poems are found side by side with Bryant’s. In later life he acknowledged to Bryant how much he owed the latter: “When I look back upon my early years, I cannot but smile to see how much in them is really yours. It was an involuntary imitation, which I most readily confess.” Bryant was interested in his career long before he had published a volume of verse, and took care in the Evening Post to give his first two books, the prose “Outre Mer” (1835) and “Hyperion” (1839) due praise. Of the former he said that it “is very gracefully written, the style is delightful, the descriptions are graphic, and the sketches of character have often an agreeable vein of quiet humor.” The latter was treated a little less warmly. The romance is “tinged with peculiarities derived from the author’s fondness for German literature,” Bryant wrote, and its strain of deeper reflection “now and then passes into the grand dimness of German speculation.” The story was slight, and had little attraction for those who wished a narrative of crowded incident. But the verdict as a whole was favorable: “upon the slender thread of his narrative the author has hung a tissue of agreeable sketches of the different parts of Germany, supposed to be visited by the hero, delineations of character, and reflections upon morals and literature.”
The Evening Post’s review of Longfellow’s first volume of poems, “Voices of the Night” (1839; signed J. Q. D.) was short but flattering. It quoted the purest poetry of the little book:
I heard the trailing garments of the night
Sweep through her marble halls!