There are many good reasons why we should celebrate the one hundredth birthday of William Cullen Bryant.[34] Not the least of them is this, that in bringing him our tribute we also commemorate the birthday of American poetry. He was our earliest poet, and “Thanatopsis” our earliest poem. Through him, therefore, we make festival to the Muse who has taught many since him to sing.
[34] First printed in The Review of Reviews, New York, October, 1894.
Older than Bryant were three single-poem men,—Francis Scott Key, Joseph Hopkinson, and John Howard Payne; yet, so far as I can learn, their three poems were written later than “Thanatopsis,” and, after all, neither “The Star Spangled Banner,” nor “Hail Columbia,” nor “Home, Sweet Home,” would rank high as poetry. Likewise, though Fitz-Greene Halleck was older than Bryant by four years, and once enjoyed a considerable vogue, his verse is now obsolescent, if not obsolete. In the anthologies—those presses of faded poetical flowers—you will still find some of his pieces; but which of us now regards “Marco Bozzaris” as the “finest martial poem in the language”?
Bryant’s priority among his immediate contemporaries is thus clearly established; furthermore, a considerable interval separated him from that group of American poets who rose to eminence in the two decades before the civil war. Bryant was born in 1794, Emerson in 1803, Longfellow and Whittier in 1807, Holmes and Poe in 1809, Lowell and Whitman in 1819. An almost unexampled precocity also set Bryant’s pioneership beyond dispute.
But when we call Bryant the earliest American poet, and “Thanatopsis” the earliest American poem, we must not suppose that both had not had many ineffectual predecessors. Versifiers, like milliners, flourish from age to age, and their works are forgotten in favor of a later fashion. Who the forgotten predecessors of Bryant were, he himself will tell us. Being asked in February, 1818, to write an article on American poetry for the North American Review he replied:—
“Most of the American poets of much note, I believe, I have read,—Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, Humphreys, Honeywood, Clifton, Paine. The works of Hopkins I have never met with. I have seen Philip Freneau’s writings, and some things by Francis Hopkinson. There was a Dr. Ladd, if I am not mistaken in the name, of Rhode Island, who, it seems, was much celebrated in his time for his poetical talent, of whom I have seen hardly anything; and another, Dr. Church, a Tory at the beginning of the Revolution, who was compelled to leave the country, and some of whose satirical verses which I have heard recited possess considerable merit as specimens of forcible and glowing invective. I have read most of Mrs. Morton’s poems, and turned over a volume of stale and senseless rhymes by Mrs. Warren. Before the time of these writers, some of whom are still alive, and the rest belong to the generation which has just passed away, I imagine that we could hardly be said to have any poetry of our own; and indeed it seems to me that American poetry, such as it is, may justly enough be said to have had its rise with that knot of Connecticut poets, Trumbull and others, most of whose works appeared about the time of the Revolution.”[35]
[35] A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, by Parke Godwin, i, 154.
Bryant’s list contains the name of not one poet whose works are read to-day. All these volumes belong to fossil literature,—literature, that is, which may be dug up and studied for the light it may throw on the customs of a time, or its intellectual development, but which, so far as its own vitality is concerned, has passed away beyond hope of resuscitation. The historical student of American poetry may read Barlow’s “Columbiad” as a matter of duty; but those of us to whom poetry is the breath of life will not seek it in that literary graveyard. Reverently, rather, will we read the titles on the tombstones and pass on.
Almost coeval with American independence itself was the notion that there ought to be an independent American literature. The Revolution had resulted in the formation of a republic new in pattern, in opportunities, in ideals; a republic which, having broken forever with the political system of Britain, would gladly have been freed from all obligations—including intellectual and æsthetic obligations—to her. We hardly realize how acute was the sensitiveness of our great-grandfathers on this point. The satisfaction they took in recalling the victories of Bennington and Yorktown vanished when they were reminded—and there was always some candid foreigner at hand to remind them—that a nation’s real greatness is measured, not by the size of its crops, nor by its millions of square miles of surface, nor by the rapidity with which its population doubles, nor even by its ability to whip King George the Third’s armies, but by its contributions to philosophy, to literature, to art, to religion. “What have you to show in these lines?” we imagine the candid foreigner to have been perpetually asking; and the patriotic American to have winced, as he had to reply, “Nothing;” unless, indeed, he happened to have Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical poise. To the slur of Abbé Raynal, that “America had not produced a single man of genius,” Jefferson replied: “When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded that the other countries of Europe and other quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name of ours on the roll of poets.”
Very few Americans, however, could bear with Jeffersonian equanimity the imputation of inferiority. All were well aware that they had just achieved a revolution without parallel in history; they were honestly proud of it; and they could not help feeling touchy when their critics, ignoring this stupendous achievement, censured them for failure in fields they had never entered. A few, like Jefferson, would respond, “Give us time;” the majority either masked their irritation under pretended contempt for the opinion of foreigners, or silently admitted the impeachment. There grew up, on the one hand, “spread-eagleism,”—brag over our material and political bigness,—and, on the other, an impatient desire to produce masterpieces which should not fear comparison with the best the world could show. The Hebrew patriarchs, whose faith Jehovah tested by denying them children till the old age of their wives, were not less troubled at the postponement of their dearest wishes than were those eager watchers for the advent of American genius. Long before Bryant’s little volume was published, in 1821, those watchers had begun to speculate as to the sort of work in which that genius would manifest itself, and then was conjured up that bogy, “The American Spirit,” which has flitted up and down through our college lecture-rooms and fluttered the minds of immature critics ever since. It was generally agreed that the question to be asked about each new book should be, “Has it The American Spirit?” and not, “Is it excellent?” Nobody knew how to define that spirit, but everybody had a teasing conviction that, unless it were conspicuous, the offspring of American genius could not prove their legitimacy. Foreigners, especially the English, encouraged this conviction. They expected something strange and uncouth; they would accept nothing else as genuine. Hence, years afterward, when Whitman, with cowboy gait, came swaggering up Parnassus, shouting nicknames at the Muses and ready to slap Apollo on the back, our perspicacious English cousins exclaimed, “There! there! that’s American! At last we’ve found a poet with The American Spirit!” For quite other reasons Whitman deserves serious attention; not for those extravagances which he deluded himself and his unrestrained admirers into thinking were most precious manifestations of The American Spirit. This bogy has now been pretty thoroughly exorcised, its followers being chiefly the writers of bad grammar, bad spelling, and slang,—which pass for dialect stories,—and an occasional student of literature, who finds very little of the American product that could not have been produced elsewhere. We may dismiss The American Spirit, bidding it seek its spectral companion, The Great American Novel, but we must remember that, even before Bryant began to write, it was worrying the minds of our literary folk.