The movement quickly grew to its first culmination. A brilliant period commenced in the thirties, when Hawthorne, Holmes, Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Curtis, and Margaret Fuller, all of New England, became the luminaries of the literary New World. And like the prelude to a great epoch rings the song of the one incomparable Edgar Allan Poe, who did not fight for ideas like a moral New Englander, but sang simply in the love of song. Poe’s melancholy, demoniacal, and melodious poetry was a marvellous fountain in the country of hard and sober work. And Poe was the first whose fantasy transformed the short story into a thing of the highest poetical form. In New England no one was so profoundly a poet as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of “The Scarlet Letter.” His “Marble Faun,” of which the scene is laid in Italy, may show him in his fullest maturity, but his greatest strength lay in the romances of Massachusetts, which in their emotional impressiveness and artistic finish are as beautiful as an autumn day in New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the rhapsodical philosopher, wrote poems teeming over with thought, and yet true poems, while Whittier was the inspired bard of freedom; and besides these there was the trio of friends, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes. Harvard professors they were, and men of distinguished ability, whose literary culture made them the proper educators of the nation. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the only one of this circle now living, remaining over, as it were, from that golden age. He fought at first to free the slaves, and then he became the stout defender of the emancipation of women, and is to-day, as then, the master of the reflective essay. His life is full of “cheerful yesterdays”; his fame is sure of “confident tomorrows.”
Longfellow is, to the German, mainly the sensitive transposer of German poetry; his sketch-book, “Hyperion,” opened up the German world of myth, and brought the German romance across the ocean. His ballads and his delightful idyll of “Evangeline” clothed New England life, as it were, in German sentiment; and even his Indian edda, “Hiawatha,” sounds as if from a German troubadour wandering through the Indian country. Longfellow became the favourite poet of the American home, and American youth still makes its pilgrimage to the house in Cambridge where he once lived. Lowell was perhaps more gifted than Longfellow, and certainly he was the more many-sided. His art ranged from the profoundest pathos by which American patriotism was aroused in those days of danger, to the broadest and most whimsical humour freely expressed in dialect verses; and he also wrote the most finished idyllic poetry and keenly satirical and critical essays. It is common to exalt his humorous verses, “The Biglow Papers,” to the highest place of typical literary productions of America; nevertheless, his essential quality was fine and academic. Real American humour undoubtedly finds its truer expression in Holmes. Holmes was also a lyric poet, but his greatest work was the set of books by the “Autocrat.” His “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” has that serious smile which makes world literature. It was the first of a long series, and at the writing he was a professor of anatomy, sixty-four years old.
Then there were many lesser lights around these great ones. At the middle of the century Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” of which ten thousand copies were sold every day for many months. And romance literature in general began to increase. At the same time appeared the beautiful songs of Bayard Taylor, whose later translation of Faust has never been surpassed, and the scarcely less admirable lyrics of Stedman and Stoddard. So it happened that at the time when the Civil War broke out, America, although deficient in every sort of productive science except history, had a brilliant literature. Science needed, first of all, solid academic institutions, which could only be built patiently, stone on stone—a work which has been witnessed by the last three decades of the century. Poetry, however, needed only the inner voice which speaks to the susceptible heart, and the encouragement of the people. For science there has been a steady, quiet growth, parallel with the growth of the institutions; for letters there have been changing fortunes, times of prosperity and times of stagnation. When the powder and smoke of the Civil War had blown away the happy days of literature were over; it began to languish, and only at the present day is it commencing to thrive once more.
This does not mean that there has been no talent for three decades, or that the general interest in literature has flagged. Ambitious writers of romance like Howells, James, Crawford, and Cable; novelists like Aldrich, Bret Harte, and Hale, Mary Wilkins, and Sarah Orne Jewett; poets like Lanier and Whitman, and humourists like Stockton and Mark Twain, have done much excellent work, and work that is partly great, and have shown the way to large provinces of literary endeavour. Nevertheless, compared with the great achievements which had gone before, theirs is rather a time of intermission. And yet many persons are quite prepared to say that Howells is the greatest of all American authors, and his realistic analyses among the very best modern romances. And Howells himself pays the same tribute to Mark Twain’s later and maturer writings.
But there is one poet about whom only the future can really decide; this is Walt Whitman. His “Leaves of Grass,” with their apparently formless verse, were greatly praised by some; by others felt to be barbarous and tasteless. There has been a dispute similar to that over Zarathustra of Nietzsche. And even as regards content, Whitman may be compared with Nietzsche, the radical democrat with the extreme aristocrat, for the exaggerated democratic exaltation of the ego leads finally to a point in which every single man is an absolute dictator in his own world, and therefore comes to feel himself unique, and proudly demands the right of the Uebermensch. “When they fight, I keep silent, go bathing, or sit marvelling at myself,” says this prophet of democracy. “In order to learn, I sat at the feet of great masters. Oh, that these great masters might return once more to learn of me.” The similarity between American and German intellects could readily be traced further, and was, perhaps, not wholly unfitted to reveal a certain broad literary perspective. As we have compared Whitman and Nietzsche, so we might compare Bryant with Platen, Poe with Heine, Hawthorne with Freytag, Lowell with Uhland, Whittier with Rückert, Holmes with Keller, Howells with Fontane, Crawford with Heyse, and so on, and we should compare thus contemporaries of rather equal rank. But such a parallelism, of course, could not be drawn too far, since it would be easy to show in any such pair important traits to belie the comparison.
In the positively bewildering literature of to-day, the novel and the short story strongly predominate. The Americans have always shown a special aptitude and fondness for the short story. Poe was the true master of that form, and the grace with which Aldrich has told the story of Marjorie Daw, and Davis of Van Bibber, the energy with which Hale has cogently depicted the Man Without a Country, or Bret Harte the American pioneer, and the intimacy with which Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett have perpetuated the quieter aspects of human existence, show a true instinct for art. A profound appreciation, fresh vigour, and fine feeling for form, graceful humour and all the good qualities of American literature, combine to make the short story a perfect thing. It is not the German Novelle, but is, rather, comparable to the French conte. The short stories are not all of the single type; some are masculine and others feminine in manner. The finely cut story, which is short because the charm of the incidents would vanish if narrated in greater detail, is of the feminine type. And, of the masculine, is the story told in cold, sharp relief, which is short because it is energetic and impatient of any protracted waits. In both cases, everything unessential is left out. Perhaps the American is nowhere more himself than here; and short stories are produced in great numbers and are specially fostered by the monthly magazines.
Of humourists there are fewer to-day than formerly. Neither the refined humour of Irving, Lowell, and Holmes, nor the broader humour of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, finds many representatives of real literary importance. There are several, it is true, who are delighted with Dooley’s contemporary comment in the Irish dialect, but there is a much truer wit in the delicately satirical society novels of Henry James, and to a less degree in those of Grant, Herrick, Bates, and a hundred others, or in the romances of common life, such as Westcott’s “David Harum.”
The historical romance has flourished greatly. At first the fantasy went to far regions, and the traditional old figures of romance were tricked out in the gayest foreign costumes. The most popular of all has been Wallace’s “Ben Hur.” The Americans have long since followed the road which German writers have taken from Ebers to Dahn and Wildenbruch, and have revived their own national past. To be sure, the tremendous editions of these books are due rather to the desire for information than the love of poetry. The public likes to learn its national history while being entertained, since the national consciousness has developed so noticeably in the last decade and the social life of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has doubtless become thus living and real for millions of Americans. Æsthetic motives predominate, nevertheless, and although books like Churchill’s “The Crisis,” Bacheller’s “D’ri and I,” Miss Johnston’s “Audrey,” Ford’s “Janice Meredith,” and others similar are merely books of the day, and will be replaced by others on the next Christmas-trees, nevertheless they are works of considerable artistic merit. They are forcibly constructed, dramatic, full of invention and delightful diction. It is undeniable that the general level of the American romance is to-day not inferior to that of Germany.
Historical romance aims, first of all, to awaken the national consciousness. So, for instance, the romances of the versatile physician, Weir Mitchell, are first of all histories of the Revolutionary period of the whole nation, and, secondarily, histories of early Pennsylvania. But the story which depends on local colour flourishes too. Here shows itself strongly that trait which is distinguishable in American writing through the whole century, from Irving, Cooper, and Bryant to the present day—the love of nature. Almost every part of the country has found some writer to celebrate its landscape and customs, not merely the curious inhabitants of the prairie and gold-fields, but the outwardly unromantic characters of the New England village and the Tennessee mountains, of the Southern plantations and the Western States. And new stories of this sort appear every day. Especially the new West figures prominently in literature; and the tireless ambition on which the city of Chicago is founded is often depicted with much talent. The novels of Fuller, Norris, and others are all extraordinarily forceful descriptions of Western life and civilization. The South of to-day, which shows symptoms of awaking to new life, is described more from the Northern than from the Southern point of view. It is surprising that the mental life of the American negro has attracted so little attention, since the short stories of Chestnut point to unexplored treasures.
The longer efforts are always in prose, and since the time of Evangeline epic verse has found almost no representative. Verse is almost wholly lyrical. The history of American lyric is contained in the large and admirable collections of Stedman, Onderdonk, and others; and it is the history of, perhaps, the most complete achievement of American literature. One who knows the American only in the usual caricature, and does not know what an idealist the Yankee is, would be surprised to learn that the lyric poem has become his favourite field. The romantic novel, which appeals to the masses, may have, perhaps, a commercial motive, while the book of verse is an entirely disinterested production. The lyric, in its fresh, intense, and finished way, reveals the inner being of American literature, and surprisingly much lyric verse is being written to-day. Even political newspapers, like the Boston Transcript, publish every day some lyric poem; and although here as everywhere many volumes of indifferent verse see the light of day, still the feeling for form is so general that one finds very seldom anything wholly bad and very often bits of deep significance and beauty. Here, too, the best-known things are not the most admirable. We hear too much of Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe,” and too little of Santayana’s sonnets or of Josephine Preston Peabody. Here, too, local colour is happily in evidence—as, for instance, in the well-known verses of Riley. The Western poet goes a different road from the Eastern. The South has never again sent a messenger so full of melodies as Sidney Lanier.