Henry Wadsworth Longfellow presents the beauty and charm of American life and history in melodious and figured verse; John Greenleaf Whittier expresses the soul of our life and history in lyrics of most sincere human quality; Edgar Allan Poe gives a few most intense emotions in singularly perfect and individual form, while Walt Whitman expresses a certain American ideality in a strange mode of utterance, which despite its faults is characteristically strong.
As a poet Lowell is at his best in satire, Holmes in wit, Emerson in sententious wisdom.
In the field of fiction there was not so much that was good. It was not till he had written short stories for twenty years that Hawthorne found time for the novel for which he had so long felt himself capable. He wrote four, of which three at least are masterpieces. As a novelist he had no rivals; but there were not a few who carried on the tradition of the short story, of whom the most noteworthy were Fitz James O’Brien (1828-1862), Harriet Prescott, 1835 (afterward Mrs. Spofford), and Edward Everett Hale. The Diamond Lens, The Amber Gods, and The Man Without a Country of the latter are very typical works.
In history also there was first-rate expression. George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman, were all original workers and all men of literary power. The first two were rather too much influenced by the literary ideals of the past, but Motley and Parkman attain a perfection of literary history which seems impossible in our day of development and division of labor.
More specifically American, though perhaps more temporary, is the oratory of the period. Political conditions were still such as to encourage eloquence. Three names stand together as representative of American public life: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. Their oratory has dignity, representative character and force. Three other orators should be mentioned: Edward Everett, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher, one eminent on great public occasions, one in public discussion and agitation, and the third in the pulpit. And we must add the name of a speaker whose simple sincerity gave him at times a greater power of speech than that of any other man of his day, Abraham Lincoln.
Several other elements of the literature of this time are important. The New England movement of idealistic thought, somewhat expressed by Transcendentalism, is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a figure more thoroughly characteristic of American thinking than any other writer. Singularly individual and different from any other man of his time, he is yet typical of a combination of ideality and common sense thoroughly American.
James Russell Lowell is another important figure of the period: noteworthy as a poet, a critic, a scholar, an essayist, he is especially interesting as the successor of Irving as the representative man of his literary generation. He made literature an active factor in life and yet never allowed it to lose its literary quality.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is best known as a humorist, and perhaps the most American in that field in which America has a very special place. Humor is more than most branches of literature a matter of taste. It must be enough, therefore, to note, without attempting to discriminate or describe, the achievements of Artemus Ward (1834-1867), of Mark Twain and of Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). In this second period of our literature occurred the Civil war. Such an event could not have been without its effect upon men of letters both South and North. In the North especially do we perceive the strongest influence: the anti-slavery element cannot be dissociated from the work of Lowell or Whittier. Yet in literature the war produced little of permanence. It is the backbone of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s title to remembrance; but powerfully effective as was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is probable that there was more real genius in those presentations of that old New England life of which she was herself a product.
SECOND NATIONAL PERIOD, 1865- ——
In considering the period from the Civil war to the present, the most remarkable thing is the great increase of production and the slight accession to the rolls of genius. Such is especially the case with fiction; there have been very many good novels and short stories written, but there is no such commanding personality as Hawthorne.