Bryant himself must have been subjected, consciously or unconsciously, to the influences we have surveyed,—for who can escape breathing the common atmosphere? But he had within him that which is more potent than any external mould, and is the one trait hereditary in genius of every kind,—he had sincerity. What he saw, he saw with his own eyes; what he spake, he spake with his own lips; and inevitably it followed that men proclaimed him original. His secret, his method, were no more than this. “I saw some lines by you to the skylark,” he writes to his brother in 1838. “Did you ever see such a bird? Let me counsel you to draw your images, in describing Nature, from what you observe around you, unless you are professedly composing a description of some foreign country, when, of course, you will learn what you can from books. The skylark is an English bird, and an American who has never visited Europe has no right to be in raptures about it.” That last sentence explains Bryant; it is worth a hundred essays on The American Spirit; it should be the warning of every writer. The raptures of Americans over English skylarks they had never seen were then, and have always been, the bane of our literature. Eighty years ago the lowlands at the foot of our Helicon had been turned into a slough by the tears of rhymesters who did not feel the griefs they sang of, and the woods howled with sighs which caused no pang to the sighers. Bryant, by merely being natural and sincere, was instantly recognized as belonging to that lineage every one of whose children is a king.
The story of his entry into literature, though well known, cannot be too often told. Born at Cummington, a little village on the Hampshire hills, Massachusetts, November 3, 1794, his father was a genial, fairly cultivated country doctor; his mother, Sarah Snell, an indefatigable housewife, with Yankee common-sense and deep-grained Puritan principles. William Cullen, the second of several children, was precocious; both parents encouraged his aptitude for verse-making, and a satire which he wrote in 1807 on Jefferson and the Embargo his father was proud to have printed in Boston. In 1810 young Bryant entered the sophomore class of Williams College, and spent a year there. He hoped to pass from Williams to Yale, where he looked for more advanced instruction, but his father’s means did not permit, and the son, instead of finishing his course at Williams, went into a country lawyer’s office and fitted himself for the bar. Just at the moment of indecision, in the autumn of 1811, Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis.” Contrary to his custom, he did not show it to his father, but laid it away with other papers in a drawer. Six years later Dr. Bryant, whose duties as a member of the Massachusetts legislature took him often to Boston, and whose bright parts and liberal views made him welcome in the foremost circles there, was asked by his friends, who edited the North American Review, for some contribution. On returning to Cummington, he happened to find his son’s sequestered papers, and, choosing “Thanatopsis”—of which, the original being covered with many corrections, he made a copy—and “The Waterfowl,” he sent them off to Boston, and they appeared in the Review for September, 1817. The young poet, having meanwhile completed his legal studies, was practicing law at Great Barrington, unconscious of the fame about to descend upon him. Owing to the handwriting of the copy of the poems sent to the Review, however, Dr. Bryant had for a moment the credit of being the author of “Thanatopsis.”
After duly allowing for the common tendency to make fame retroactive, we cannot doubt that “Thanatopsis” secured immediate and, relatively, immense recognition. The best judges agreed that at last a bit of genuine American literature was before them; the uncritical but appreciative, from ministers to school children, read, learned, admired, and quoted the grave, sonorous lines.
Thanatopsis,—a Vision of Death! A strange corner-stone for the poetic literature of the nation which had only recently sprung into life,—a nation conscious as no other had been of its exuberant vitality, of its boundless material resources, of its expansiveness and invincible will. Yet neither the glory achieved nor the ambition cherished fired the imagination of the youthful poet. He looked upon the earth, and saw it but a vast grave; he looked upon men and beheld, not their high ambitions nor the great deeds which blazon human story, but their transience, their mortality. Nothing in life could so awe him as the majestic mystery of death.
The mood, I believe, is not rare among sensitive and thoughtful youths, who, just as their faculties have ripened sufficiently to enable them to feel a little of the unspeakable delight of living, are staggered at realizing for the first time that death is inevitable, and that the days of the longest life are few. That this terrific discovery should kindle thoughts full of sublimity need not surprise us; but we may well be astonished that Bryant at seventeen should have had power to express them in a poem which is neither morbid nor religiously commonplace.
In 1821 Bryant received what was then the blue ribbon of recognition in being asked to deliver a poem before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He wrote “The Ages,” read it in Cambridge and printed it, together with “Thanatopsis” and a few other pieces, in a little volume. The previous conviction was confirmed; every one spoke of Bryant as the American poet. Even the professional critics—those sapient fellows whose obtuseness is the wonder of posterity, the clique which pooh-poohed Keats, and ha-hahed Wordsworth, and bear-baited Carlyle—made in Bryant’s case no mistake. Although one of them, indeed, declared that there was “no more poetry in Bryant’s poems than in the Sermon on the Mount,” yet the opinions were generally laudatory, and the critics were quick in defining the qualities of the new poet. They found in him something of Cowper and something of Wordsworth, but the resemblances did not imply imitation; Bryant might speak their language, but it was his also. No one questioned the genuineness of his inspiration, and not for a quarter of a century after the publication of “Thanatopsis,” that is, not until the early forties,—when Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, and Emerson began to have a public for their poetry,—did any one question Bryant’s primacy. He had been so long the only American poet that it was naturally assumed that he would always be the best. He had redeemed America from the reproach of barrenness in poetry, as Irving and Cooper redeemed its prose, and Americans could feel toward no others as they felt toward him.
A hundred years have elapsed since his birth; three generations have known his works: what is Bryant to us, who are posterity to him? Is he, like Cimabue in painting, a mere name to date from,—a pioneer whom we respect,—and nothing more? Far from it. Bryant’s poetry is not only chronologically but absolutely interesting: it lives to-day, and the qualities which have vitalized it for three quarters of a century show no signs of decay. It would be incorrect, of course, to assert that Bryant holds relatively so high a place in our literature as he held fifty years ago; his estate then was the first poetic clearing in the wilderness; its boundaries are still the same; but subsequent poets have made other clearings all round his, and brought different prospects into view and different talents under cultivation.
Let us look briefly at Bryant’s domain. Intimate and faithful portrayal of Nature is the product which first draws our attention; next we perceive that the observer who makes the picture is a sober moralist. He delights in Nature for her own sake, for her beauty and variety; and then she suggests to him some rule of conduct, some parallel between her laws and the laws of human life, by which he is comforted and uplifted. Bryant, I have said elsewhere, interprets Nature morally, Emerson spiritually, and Shelley emotionally. We need not stop to inquire which of these methods of interpretation is the highest. Suffice it for us to realize that all of them are valuable, and that the poet who succeeds in identifying himself in a marked degree with any one of them will not soon be forgotten.
That Wordsworth preceded Bryant in the moral interpretation of Nature detracts nothing from Bryant’s merit. The latest prophet is no less original than the earliest; for originality lies in being a prophet at all. Young Bryant, wandering over the bleak Hampshire hills or in the woods or along the brawling streams, had original impressions, which he trustingly recorded; and to-day, if you go to Cummington, you will marvel at the fidelity of his record. But his poetry is true not only there; it is true in every region where Nature has similar aspects; symbolically, it is true everywhere.
There being no doubt as to the veracity of his pictures, what shall we say of that other quality, the moral tone which pervades them? That, too, is of a kind men will not soon outgrow. It inculcates courage, patience, fortitude, trust; it springs from the optimism of one who believes in the ultimate triumph of good, not because he can prove it, but because his whole being revolts at the thought of evil triumphant. He has the stoic’s dread of flinching before any shock of misfortune, the Christian’s dread of the taint of sin. Here are two ideals, each the complement of the other, which the world cannot outgrow, and the poet who—pondering on a fringed gentian or the flight of a waterfowl, or on a rivulet bickering among its grasses—found new incitements to courage and virtue, thereby associated himself with the eternal. To interpret nature morally in this fashion, which is Bryant’s fashion, is to rise far above the level of the common didacticism of our pulpits. Professional moralists go to nature for figures of speech to furnish forth their sermons and religious verse, as they go to their kitchen garden for vegetables; but they do not enter Bryant’s world.