Some of the characteristic features of the Romantic movement may be readily got at, by prefixing a negative to the qualities of the classical school. The country, out door life, rugged mountains, folk-songs, ballads in every form, the picturing of English people in English scenery were used as subject-matter—in other words, the telling what the writer had himself seen and, therefore, what he really knew, instead of what he had read. It was this reaction against formalism which produced such men as Chatterton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott.
It is not within the purpose of this paper to give a full list of the writers who may be said to be the forerunners of this movement which dominated English poetry during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Nor is it needful to enter into the controversy as to who first gave evidence of the changing attitude. So careful a critic as Theodore Watts assigns the place of priority to Thomas Chatterton, styles him the Father of the Romantic School, and insists that to his influence may be traced some of the best work of Keats and of Coleridge. It will always be well to remember that changes in literary habit do not take place in a year, rarely in a decade. It will, therefore, be easy to point out poets as early as Gray who gave prophecy of the new era. This much at least is noteworthy—putting aside the question as to who comes first of all—that the new current of ideas began very early to flow through poets who were hardly more than boys. Professor Beers has already reminded us that in Joseph Warton as well as in Thomas Chatterton—neither of whom was more than eighteen years of age—we may see the set of the literary current.
It may not be insisting too strongly on a parallel to see in the history of Southern literature a state of affairs much like that we have just sketched. It will be remembered that in 1818 Bryant sounded his protest against a "sickly and affected imitation of the peculiar manner of the late popular poets of England." As late as 1848 Lowell did not hesitate roughly to assert:
They stole Englishmen's books and thought Englishmen's thought,
With English salt on the tail our wild Eagle was caught.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that Sydney Smith should have asked with suggestion of truth even if with evidence of venom, "Who reads an American book?" American literature in the Northern and Middle sections escaped from bondage many years before the South came into its own literary inheritance. Just as unreasoning worship of a pseudo-classicism had its death-grip on Eighteenth Century writers so a like uncritical devotion to the usually read classic writers and to earlier English authors had checked the growth of the budding Southern literature of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Conservative as the South has always been in matters of thought it was not surprising that this should be so. Paul H. Hayne tells what contemptuous references were made by the literary coterie of Charleston to the early efforts of Simms because he dared aspire to cultivate the Muses, when he must needs get his Homer through the medium of Chapman or of Pope. This respect unto classical authority was of long continuance among cultured men and showed itself, also, in the dry and tedious essays of Legare who was reputed a great scholar.
It was, indeed, not until 1870 that the South may be said to have achieved literary independence. As the sway of Greece and Rome passed away, the South came to be a literary dependency of England. Kennedy and Sims are dominated by Scott, just as Wirt and his friends of the "Old Bachelor" group got their inspiration from the Spectator. Of course there were poets as Hayne and Timrod and story-writers as Johnston and Thompson who sang and wrote clearly and with a note of individuality. But Lowell might have described the greater part of Southern literary work in the words:
Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean.
With the same thought in mind Poe wrote that "one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel, their having crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction."
This natural conservatism was upheld by the fact that many Southerners of means sent their sons to England to be educated. The South being settled for the most part by emigrants of English blood, it is not surprising that the controlling influence should be from mother-country.