Moreover, in painting the scenery of the Hampshire hills, and in saturating his descriptions with the moral tonic I have spoken of, Bryant became the representative of a phase of New England life which has had an incalculable influence on the development of this nation. The mitigated Spartanism amid which his youth was passed bred those colonists who carried New England standards with them to the shores of the Pacific. A Puritan by derivation and environment, Bryant was by training and conviction a Unitarian,—a combination which made him in a sense the exemplar both of the austerity which had characterized New England ideals in the past, and of the liberalism which during this century has nowhere found more strenuous supporters than in New England.
On many positive grounds, therefore, Bryant’s title to fame rests; he was one of Nature’s men, he shed moral health, he uttered the ideals of a great race in a transitional epoch. His temperament, in making his poetic product small, gave him yet another hostage against oblivion. The poet who, having so many claims to the consideration of posterity, can also plead brevity, need not worry himself about what is called literary immortality. Bryant’s typical and best work is comprised in a dozen poems, the longest not exceeding 140 lines. Read “Thanatopsis,” “The Yellow Violet,” “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,” “To a Waterfowl,” “Green River,” “A Winter Piece,” “The Rivulet,” “A Forest Hymn,” “The Past,” “To a Fringed Gentian,” “The Death of the Flowers,” and “The Battlefield,” and you have Bryant’s message; the rest of his work either echoes the notes already sounded in these, or represents uncharacteristic, and therefore transitory, moods.
Not less conspicuous than his excellences are Bryant’s limitations. We may say of him that, like Wordsworth, he did not always overcome a tendency to emphasize the obvious, and that, like almost all contemplative poets, he sometimes made the didactic unnecessarily obtrusive. We have all heard parsons who, after finishing their sermon, sum it up in a valedictory prayer, with a hint as to its application, for the benefit of the Lord; equally superfluous, even for mortal readers, is the moral too often appended to a poem which is well able to convey its meaning without it. In this respect Bryant resembles most of our American poets, in whom didacticism has prevailed to an extent that will lessen their repute with posterity; for each generation manufactures more than enough of this commodity for its own consumption, and cannot be induced to try stale moralities left over from the fathers.
Bryant’s self-control, the backbone of a character of high integrity, prevented him from indulging in emotions which, if they be not the substance of great poetry, are the color, the glow, which give great poetry its charm. He addresses the intellect; he has, if not heat, light; and he does not, as emotional poets sometimes do, play the intellect false or lead it astray.
In his versification he is compact and stately, though occasionally stiff. He came at the end of that metrical drought which lasted from Milton’s death to Burns, when the instinct for writing musical iambics was lost, and, instead, men wrote in measured thuds, by rule. That phenomenon the psychologist should explain. How was it that a people lost, during a century and a half, its ear for metrical music, as if a violinist should suddenly prefer a tom-tom to a violin? Probably the exorbitant use of hymn and psalm singing, that came in with the Puritans, helped to degrade English poetry. The spirit which expelled emotion from worship, and destroyed whatever it could of the beauty of England’s churches, had no understanding for metrical harmony. Any poor shred of morality, the tritest dogmatic platitude, if stretched thin, chopped into the required number of feet, rhymed, and packed into six or eight stanzas, with clumsy variations on the doxology at the end, made a hymn, for the edification of persons whose object was worship and not beauty. As a means to unction, mere doggerel, sung out of tune, would serve as well as anything.
At any rate, the taste for rigid iambics would naturally be acquired by Bryant at his church-going in childhood, and from the eighteenth century poets whom he read earliest. The beautiful variety of modulations which Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson have shown this verse—the historic metre of our race—to be susceptible of, lay beyond Bryant’s range. His verse is either simple, almost colloquial, or dignified, as befits his theme; even in ornament he is sober. As he never surpassed the grandeur of conception of “Thanatopsis,” so, I think, he did not afterward equal the splendid metrical sweep of certain passages in that wonderful poem.
And this fact points to another: Bryant is one of the few poets of genuine power whose poetic career shows no advance. The first arrow he drew from his quiver was the best, and with it he made his longest shot; many others he sent in the same direction, but they all fell behind the first. This accounts for the singleness and depth of the impression he has left; he stands for two or three elementals, and thereby keeps his force unscattered. He was not, indeed, wholly insensible to the romanticist stirrings of his time, as such effusions as “The Damsel of Peru,” “The Arctic Lover,” and “The Hunter’s Serenade,” bear witness. He wrote several pieces about Indians,—not the real red men, but those imaginary noble savages, possessors of all the primitive virtues, with whom our grandfathers peopled the American forests. He wrote strenuously in behalf of Greek emancipation and against slavery; but even here, though the subject lay very near his heart, he could not match the righteous vehemence of Whittier, or Lowell’s alternate volleys of sarcasm and rebuke. Like Antaeus, Bryant ceased to be powerful when he did not tread his native earth.
We have thus surveyed his poetical product and genius, for to these first of all is due the celebration of his centennial, and we conclude that his contemporaries were right and that we are right in holding his work precious. But while it is through his poetry that Bryant survives, let us not forget the worth of his personality. For sixty years he was the dean of American letters. By his example he swept away the old foolish idea that unwillingness to pay bills, addiction to the bottle and women, and a preference for frowsy hair and dirty linen are necessary attributes of genius, especially of poetic genius. He disdained the proverbial backbiting and envy of authors. As the editor of a newspaper which for half a century had no superior in the country, he exercised an influence which cannot be computed. We who live under the régime of journalists who conceive it to be the mission of newspapers to deposit at every doorstep from eight to eighty pages of the moral and political garbage of the world every morning,—we may well magnify Bryant, whose long editorial career bore witness that being a journalist should not absolve a man from the common obligations of moral cleanliness, of veracity, of scandal-hating, of delicacy, of honor.
Finally, Bryant was a great citizen,—that last product which it is the business of our education and our political and social life to bring forth. In a monarchy the soldier is the type most highly prized; but in a democracy, if democratic forms shall long endure, citizens of the Bryant pattern, whose chief concern in public not less than in private life is to “make reason and the will of God prevail,” must abound in constantly increasing numbers. Happy and grateful should we be that, in commemorating our earliest poet, we can discern no line of his which has not an upward tendency, no trait of his character unfit to be used in building a noble, strong, and righteous State.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.