Thomas Bailey Aldrich.—With his “Ballad of Babie Bell” (1855) in the New York Journal of Commerce, Aldrich (1836–1907) began a career whose high-water mark was the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890. His initial volume of poetry, published in 1854, was “The Bells,” which was succeeded in 1858 by “The Ballad of Babie Bell, and Other Poems.” Of his numerous later poetical works, “Pampinea, and Other Poems” (1861), “Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems” (1874), “Flower and Thorn” (1876), etc., perhaps the tragedy of “Mercedes” (“Mercedes, and Later Lyrics,” 1884) deserves particular notice, having been successfully staged, a test which few dramas by American poets have been able to endure. Aldrich was a master of his craft. Deep in his reverence for Tennyson, whom he ranks third in English poetry—after Shakespeare and Milton,—he sometimes exercises an almost Tennysonian harmony in the selection of detail; witness the Oriental luxury and splendour in “When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan.”
Edmund Clarence Stedman.—Stedman’s services to literature as a critic and anthologist are doubtless of much greater importance than his own poetry; but neither the one nor the other may be disparaged. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833, his mother (by her second marriage Mrs. J. C. Kinney, the friend of the Brownings) being a woman of educated taste and herself a poet. Entering Yale at the age of fifteen, Stedman showed ability in Greek and in English composition, and shortly gained a prize by his poem on “Westminster Abbey.” On account of a boyish prank he was compelled to leave college before the end of the course. Prior to the Civil War he was connected with The Norwich Tribune and Winsted Herald, and for a time with The New York Tribune; in this he printed his “Tribune Lyrics” (among them “Osawatomie Brown”). From 1861 to 1863 he was war correspondent of the New York World; later he was assistant to Edward Bates, Attorney-General under Lincoln. His interest in the first Pacific railroad brought him into relations with Wall Street, where, in 1869, he became an active member of the New York Stock Exchange. Here he remained until 1900, an influential man of affairs, respected by financiers as well as literary men, amassing and enjoying the means which he desired for the pursuits of literature. He was a thorough patriot, an earnest advocate of international copyright, above all a steady labourer for the education of public taste. His lectures on “The Nature and Elements of Poetry,” delivered first at Johns Hopkins University, subsequently at the University of Pennsylvania, and again at Columbia, unfolded the dignity of a subject that is often regarded as a matter of indifference. By his “Victorian Anthology” (1895) he gave further evidence of the powers of selection displayed in “A Library of American Literature” (1888–1889), on which he collaborated with Ellen M. Hutchinson. His “American Anthology” (1901, etc.), several times reissued, contains selections from about six hundred American poets, with brief biographies, and is, to say the least, an indispensable volume to the general student of our literature. The present section of this Manual is much indebted to Stedman’s “Anthology.” One would hardly make too liberal an assertion in saying of Stedman that he was the most thoroughly read man of his time in the poetry of his own nation. It is possible that he was over generous in his recognition of the work of inferior authors; but let us not impute this to him as too serious a fault. Of the fifteen poems of his own to which he allowed admission in the “American Anthology” (sixteen, counting the “Prelude” to the volume), the best known are “The Discoverer,” “Pan in Wall Street,” and “The Hand of Lincoln.” He died on January 18, 1908.
James Whitcomb Riley.—This artist in the “Hoosier” dialect of Indiana (born 1853), though still in middle life, seems to belong with the older rather than the younger generation of American poets. Unwilling to follow his father’s profession of attorney, he early betook himself to a wandering life, gaining experience of the world as a vendor of patent medicines, sign-painter, actor, and the like. Settling at Indianapolis, he became known by his contributions to various newspapers, and when his reputation was established, won additional success by public readings from his poetry. His verse is bright and crisp, and he has pathos, humour, and good powers of description and narrative. He has an unusually keen understanding for the experiences of country life, particularly of youth and boyhood in rural villages and on the farm. “The Old Swimmin’-Hole, and ’Leven More Poems” (1883) was his first notable venture. “Afterwhiles” appeared in 1888. Within ten years or so he then published “Old-Fashioned Roses” (1888), “Pipes o’ Pan at Zekesbury” (1889), “Rhymes of Childhood” (1890), “Neighbourly Poems” (1891), and, among other volumes, “A Child-World” (1896), and the “Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers” (1899). As a writer of dialect in verse, he falls not very far short of Lowell. His allusions to nature, to insect life for example, are simple and true. If but a bird or butterfly sit down beside him, he is as happy as if the same were a maiden-queen.
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Space forbids any delay upon George Henry Boker (1823–1890), diplomat and dramatist, and his metrical drama, “Francesca da Rimini” (1856); or Francis Miles Finch (1827–1907), professor in Cornell University, and his celebrated poem “The Blue and the Gray” (in The Atlantic Monthly, 1867), a gift of healing from the North to the South; or John Hay (1838–1905), whose manifold services to his country were roofed and crowned with an abiding interest in literature (“Pike County Ballads,” published in The New York Tribune); or Richard Watson Gilder (born 1844), editor of The Century Magazine, social reformer, and author of several volumes of finished verse; or Stephen Collins Foster (1836–1864), composer, whose songs, “The Old Folks at Home,” “The Suwanee River,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” familiar the country over, are significant of the influence which the negroes have exerted on the language and art of the whites; or Will H. Thompson (born 1848), and “The High Tide at Gettysburg”; or John Townsend Trowbridge (born 1827), one of the original contributors to The Atlantic Monthly, author of “The Vagabonds” (1863), and steeped in the spirit of New England; or John Boyle O’Reilly (1844–1890), the Fenian, who escaped from imprisonment in Australia, and became a journalist in Boston (“Songs, Legends, and Ballads,” “Songs of the Southern Seas,” etc.); or Eugene Field (1850–1895), witty, eccentric, friend and student of children; or Richard Hovey (1864–1900), cut off in the flower of his promise (“Taliesin: a Masque,” 1899); or Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), the negro poet, dead before his time, who wrote good and stirring English as well as pathetic dialect; or William Vaughn Moody, professor in the University of Chicago (“The Masque of Judgment,” 1900); or Bliss Carman (born 1861) and Clinton Scollard (born 1860). All these and many more must pass with insufficient notice or none; otherwise the page would contain only a meaningless enumeration of names and dates. As was implied at the beginning, very few American writers who have won distinction in other ways have refrained from publishing a volume of lyrics “and other poems.” Also, in spite of the slender encouragement from publishers to new authors of original verse, the occasional volume from the hitherto and hereafter unknown poetaster, who foots the bill for printing, continues to emerge and sink again at the present day.
The immediate outlook for poetry in the United States is not bright. It does not appear that with the material growth of the country we have developed a unified national spirit capable of expression at the hands of a great poet, were he to arise. It does not appear that we have among the younger men a first-class poet capable of expressing the national soul, were this more unified and precise. Furthermore, the type of humanistic education which fostered our elder poets of New England is generally discredited, and seems to be passing away without leaving any hope of a popular training in the near future worthy to succeed it. Simplicity, rigour, precision, and accuracy, all of them friendly to the poetic spirit, and among its necessary conditions, have fewer and fewer champions in the schools. Many subjects are studied, and almost nothing is mastered and retained. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is not in esteem. “Literature” is taught—though not learned; yet the children know no poetry. Worst of all, and a primary cause of much of the evil, the reading of standard works within the family is becoming less and less common. In particular, though there is much talk about the Bible, the Bible, like the classics, is becoming unfamiliar, to the great detriment of popular thought and style.
On the other hand, to offset the deficiency of our secondary schools and the decay of culture in the home, the last thirty years have witnessed an immense expansion in advanced scholarship, most notable, perhaps, in the investigation of the vernacular and related literatures. Graduate study of English, and of the literatures from which English literature has sprung, offers a refuge to such persons as have a serious and abiding interest in belles-lettres; it is undoubtedly developing the personalities of investigators to the highest point of efficiency possible under present conditions, and making ready for another generation, more fortunate, whose poetry shall find root in the fields that are to-day so thoroughly cultivated; working downward, it is already tending to bring about salutary changes here and there in the procedure of the schools, and hence eventually to have an influence in the home. A generation of scholars to clear the way, as in the beginning of the Renaissance—to produce the literary atmosphere which now is wanting—may be regarded as a hopeful sign of a generation of poets to come. Finally, if American poetry now seems moribund, we must yet remember the eternal power that the true poet is always in alliance with; the power that at any time can make the poet say of any literature: The maid is not dead, but sleepeth.[21]
IV. THE ESSAYISTS AND THE HUMOURISTS.
English Influences on American Letters.—Springing from a common stock, the two branches of eighteenth-century English literature showed many similarities. The charge of imitation and even of plagiarism has been brought against the American writers of that period; but it seems in no way unsafe to point to the single origin as the probable cause of the same characteristics appearing in the literature produced here, and that produced in the mother-country. No one can deny, of course, that not a few of our authors went to school to Englishmen, but the assertion that America until recently has produced nothing but pinchbeck literature is as false as it is absurd. That like produces like may be a trite saying, but its frequent repetition does not impair its truth. The English mind, whether expressing itself at home or in the colonies, naturally put forth the same kind of shoots: that their development was not in all respects equally rapid, that in time they became so much unlike as to appear unrelated, can be traced, no doubt, to the unsheltered fortune of the American scion in early days, and to the complete removal of the slip from the parent stem in after-years.
With this thought in mind, the most thorough-going American may admit, without apologetic reserve, that the essayists of eighteenth-century England have counterparts in Irving and certain of his contemporaries, and that those of a slightly later date have much in common with Emerson and Thoreau. Should one feel, however, that excusable pride is to be taken only in those authors who exhibit qualities indigenous to America, one may triumphantly mention Warner, and Lowell, and Margaret Fuller; for, although these essayists show the racial instinct of English writers, they are none the less emphatically American in thought, tone, and expression. In passing, it is perhaps well to notice that a large number of American writers have tried their hands at more than one form of literature. For this reason Irving is discussed as an essayist, although he might be placed with the humourists, or perhaps better still, with fiction-writers, since he has the right to dispute with Poe the claim to be regarded as the progenitor of the American short story. Again, Emerson, like George Eliot, felt that his fame would eventually rest upon his poetry, but his readers almost always think and speak of him as an essayist. Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier, on the other hand, are properly reviewed at large as poets, despite the fact that their prose work is not inconsiderable nor unimportant and must therefore receive some attention in even a rapid survey of the American essay.