Bryant was a deliberate and fastidious writer. His literary executors could never have said of him that they found ‘neither blot nor erasure among his papers.’ His copy, written on the backs of old letters or rejected manuscripts, was a wilderness of interlineations and corrections, and often hard to decipher.
Famous as he was for correctness, it seems a mere debauch of eulogy to affirm that all of Bryant’s contributions to the ‘Evening Post’ do not contain ‘as many erroneous or defective forms of expression’ as ‘can be found in the first ten numbers of the Spectator.’ But there is little danger of overestimating his influence on the English of journalism during the forty years and more that he set the example of a high standard of daily writing. He was sparing of advice, though in earlier days he could not always conquer the temptation to amuse himself over the English of his brother editors.[5] It has been denied that he had any part in compiling the famous ‘index expurgatorius,’ but it is not unreasonable to suppose that this list, embodying traditions of the editorial office, had his approval. Bryant was for directness and precision in writing. Ideas must stand on their merits, if they have them, for such phrasing will define them perfectly.
His prose style may be studied in his books of travel and his addresses. The literary characteristic of Letters of a Traveller and its companion volumes is excessive plainness, a homely quality like that of a village pedagogue careful not to make mistakes. One is often reminded of the honest home-spun prose of Henry Wansey’s Excursion to the United States.
Turning to the volume of Orations and Addresses, the reader finds himself in another world. Bryant’s memorial orations are among the best of their kind, stately, uplifting, and at times even majestic. They belong to a type of composition which lies midway between oratory and literature and unites certain characteristics of each. Written primarily to be heard, and adapted to public utterance, they are also meant to be read. They must stand the test of the ear and then that of the eye. The listener must find his account in them as they come from the lips of the orator, and he who afterward turns at leisure the pages of the printed report must be satisfied. Bryant’s speeches are markedly ‘literary;’ and though oratorical they are wholly free from bombast. Poet though he was, he built no cloud-capped towers of rhetoric.
Coming now to his verse, we find that his poetic flights, though lofty, were neither frequent nor long continued. Apparently he was incapable of writing much or often. This seems true even after allowance is made for his busy and exacting life as a journalist. For years together he composed but a few lines in each year.
His theory fitted his own limitations. Bryant maintained that there is no such thing as a long poem, that what are commonly called long poems are in reality a succession of short poems united by poetical links. The paradox grows out of the vagueness attaching to the words ‘length’ and ‘poem.’ Exactly what a poem is, we shall never know. That is a shadowy line which divides poetry from verse. And there is no term so unmeaning as length. When does a poem begin to be long—is it when the poet has achieved a hundred verses or a thousand, when he has written six cantos or twelve?
To say, as Bryant is reported to have said, that ‘a long poem is no more conceivable than a long ecstasy,’ is to make all poetry dependent on an ecstatic condition. And it reduces all poetic temperaments to the same level. Why may not poetry be an outcome of ‘the true enthusiasm that burns long’?
Bryant showed skill in handling a variety of metrical forms; it is unsafe to say that he excelled only in blank verse. With declared partisanship for the short poem, he nevertheless did not cultivate the sonnet. Up to the time he was fifty-eight years of age he had written but twelve, and for some of these he apologized, saying, ‘they are rather poems in fourteen lines than sonnets.’
Comparing the length of his life with the slenderness of his poetical product, we are tempted to bring against this eminent man the charge of wilful unproductiveness. This reluctance, or inertia, or whatever it may be called, has helped to give the impression of a lack of spontaneity. We are aware of the effort through the very exactness with which the thing has been done. Bryant resembled certain pianists who plead as excuse for not playing, a lack of recent practice. When after repeated urgings one of the reluctant brotherhood ‘consents to favor us,’ he plays with precision enough but rarely with abandon. The conscious and over-solicitous artist shows in every note.
If much writing has its drawbacks, it also has its value. And the poet who sings frequently cannot offer as a reason for not performing, the excuse that his lyre has not been out of the case for weeks, and that in all probability a string is broken.