CHAPTER XXI.
Literature in the United States.—Poets.—Novelists.—Essayists.—Critics.—Historians.—Humorists.—Journalists.—Writers for the Young.—Future of American Literature.
merica has not yet produced a transcendent literary genius; but she has the right to be proud of a national literature which includes poets, historians, novelists, essayists, and critics of a superior order.
The English admit that the best history of their literature has been written by a Frenchman, M. Taine. The Athenæum acknowledged, a short while ago, that the best criticism on the English poets of the Victorian era was that written by Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, himself one of the most graceful bards of contemporary America.
In this rapid sketch, I must needs confine myself to the mention of merely the principal names which adorn the different branches of American literature.
In poetry, the bright lights are William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both pure and noble, and as much appreciated by the English as by their own compatriots; Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Bayard Taylor, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Richard Watson Gilder, Edgar Fawcett, William Winter (the celebrated dramatic critic of the New York Tribune), Maria Brooks, and a number of women, who form a graceful garland in this garden of poets. In the Western dialects, a young poet, Mr. Whitcombe Riley, knows how to draw tears through the smiles which his humour provokes: he promises to be the future Jasmin of America.
In the domain of romance, we find writers whose reputation is as firmly established in Europe as in America. Who has not read in his youth the novels of Fenimore Cooper? Who has not thrilled over the weird tales of Poe? Among the most famous names in fiction are also Washington Irving, Parker Willis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Marion Crawford, Frank Stockton, George W. Cable, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Henry James, W. D. Howells, Julian Hawthorne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Charles Dudley Warner, Bret Harte (who is also a poet), Edward Eggleston, Brander Matthews, Eliza Wetherell. All these names are household words wherever the English tongue is spoken. The greatest success of the century has been attained by an American novel, directed against slavery, and instrumental in its destruction.
Its author, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a sister of the celebrated Henry Ward Beecher, whom America still mourns.
In the philosophical essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Ingersoll are unapproachable in their different styles. The first shines by his originality and a subtle power of reasoning; the second by the grandeur of his language, his keen, clear reasoning power, and his humour and pathos.