For the influence of Byron on Poe and on various other impressionable Americans see the index to this volume, and note the variety of ways in which it was recorded.
Light will be thrown on Poe’s relationship to the periodicals through a reading of passages on the magazines with which he was connected in “The Magazine in America,” by Algernon Tassin. See also the volume called “The Southern Literary Messenger,” by B. B. Minor.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
With the passing of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant the leadership in American letters was lost to New York. Indeed, by 1850, while all this trio were living, four men in eastern Massachusetts were in full career,—Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier; and before the death of Irving, in 1859, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Holmes came into their full powers. The New Yorkers had done a very distinguished work. The two prose writers in particular had shown talents of which their countrymen could be proud and had introduced the New World to the Old. Yet, though their fame was destined to live, their influence on other authors was bound to die with them because they both were looking backward. The roots of these men were struck deep in the eighteenth century. Cooper’s strength lay in his ability to write stories of the romantic past. Even when he brought them up to date, as in “The Pioneer” and “The Prairie,” he presented the decline of a passing type of American life. When he wrote of the present pointing to the future, as in “Homeward Bound” and “Home as Found,” he was filled with distress and alarm. He was bred in the traditions of aristocracy; he believed in the theories of democracy, but he was very much afraid that they would not turn out well in practice. Irving was a gentleman of the old school. He was loyal to the ideals of his country and confident of its future, but he was fascinated by the traditions of England and Europe. When he wrote of the weaknesses of his city and his fellow-citizens he cast his gentle satires into the form made popular by two Englishmen of a bygone day, and limited himself, as they had done, to commenting on customs, manners, recreations—the external habits of daily life. Of the three Bryant was the only modern man. His later life was finely admirable; but, though his thinking was wise and just, he influenced men less as a thinker than as a stalwart citizen. The New Yorkers, in a word, all wrote as men who were educated in the world of action; they were almost untouched by the deeper currents of human thought which in the nineteenth century were to make great changes in the world.
In 1821, the year of the fifth edition of “The Sketch Book” and “The Spy” and Bryant’s first volume, there was growing up in the quieter surroundings of Boston a generation of New England boys with a different training. They all went to and through college, most of them to Harvard, and after college they set to reading philosophy. Many of them came from a long line of Puritan ancestry, as Bryant did. Unlike Bryant several of them felt a distrust and dislike for the sternness of the old creeds. Yet they had the strength of Puritan character in them and the born habit of thinking deeply on “the things that are not seen and eternal.” What was new in them was that they were prepared to think independently and to come to their own conclusions. The reading of these boys was no longer chiefly in Pope, Addison, and Goldsmith. It was in the great English writers who were just arriving at fame—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle—or in the French and German philosophers.
In the Concord group—Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne—the contrast with the New Yorkers is particularly striking. They were anything but men of the world. When they began to write they stayed in the seclusion of little villages and waited patiently. They matured slowly. Emerson was past middle life before America heeded him; Hawthorne was forty-six at the time of his first marked success; Thoreau’s fame did not come till after his death. They were not “team workers.” Emerson was a clergyman for a short while, but retired in the very year when Bryant began his long service with the Evening Post; Hawthorne was a recluse for fourteen years after college and then held positions reluctantly for only half of his remaining life; Thoreau never put on the harness. They were not swept into the current of city life,—“warped out of their own orbits,”—but, instead, they made Concord, whose “chief product” was literature, more famous than any center of shipping or banking or manufacture.
“Concord is a little town,” Emerson wrote in his Journal, “and yet has its honors. We get our handful of every ton that comes to the city.” In his address at the two hundredth anniversary he dwelt on his pride in its history and character. He traced the earliest settlement, the partitioning of the land, the events leading up to the Revolution, and, in the presence of some of the aged survivors, the firing by the embattled farmers of “the shot heard round the world” in 1775. The institution in Concord that most appealed to him was the town meeting, where the whole body of voters met to transact the public business. The meetings of those two hundred years had witnessed much that was petty, but on the whole they had made for good.
It is the consequence of this institution that not a school-house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam hath been set up, or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider at leisure the wisdom and error of their judgments.
Emerson noted that the English government had recently given to certain American libraries copies of a splendid edition of the “Domesday Book” and other ancient public records of England. A suitable return gift, he thought, would be the printed records of Concord, not simply because Concord was Concord but because Concord was America. “Tell them the Union has twenty-four states, and Massachusetts is one. Tell them that Massachusetts has three-hundred towns, and Concord is one; that in Concord are five hundred rateable polls [that is, taxable voters] and every one has an equal vote.” In closing his address Emerson gave his reason for choosing when thirty-one years old to come back to “the fields of his fathers” and spend his life there.