by abrupt stops and shifts. Indeed, and would our critic not likewise guess, especially if recently schooled at Leipzig under Sievers, the very pitch of his voice in verse-strongest in the lower octaves-as well as the intrinsic alliteration, an alliteration as natural as breathing, in its context unobtrusive as such to the conscious ear because so involved in a diction which is itself the outgrowth of very mood and meaning? In quite different ways, Bryant is, with Poe, America's finest artist in verse. Perhaps this is, with Bryant's genuineness of manhood, a reason why Bryant was the one native contemporary that Poe thoroughly respected. What to puzzled readers seems "characteristically Bryant's blank verse" is really the total impression of both materials and manner, manner itself including diction as well as metrics. But the metrics alone do have their peculiarities, which can, however, hardly be examined here: line endings like "and the green moss, caesuras at the end of the first and of the fourth foot, the tendency to repeat the same caesura and cadence through a succession of lines, a stanza group of five or more lines with full stop followed by a single line or so, inverted accent at the beginning of a line, and a differentiated, strong cadence at the conclusion of the whole poem which gives the effect of a completion, not of a mere stopping,-these are all contributing factors. Yet Bryant is not one of the world's master-poets. It is not so much that he contributed little or nothing to philosophic thought or spiritual revolution, not altogether that his range was narrow, not that he never created a poem of vast and multitudinous proportions, drama, epic, or tale, not that he knew nature better than human life and human life better than human nature, not that he now and then lapsed from imaginative vision into a bit of sentiment or irrelevant fancy,—not either that there is not a single dark saying, or obscure word, construction, allusion, in all his verse, for the judicious to elucidate at a club or in a monograph. He is not one of the world's master-poets, because he was not pre-eminently endowed with intellectual intensity and imaginative concentration. The character of his whole mind was discursive, enumerative, Largely on b and frequently in idiomatic pairs, as "bees and birds," "bled or broke." tending, when measured by the masters, to the diffuse. Thus, among other results, his report of things has given man's current speech but few quotations, of either epigrammatic criticism or haunting beauty. A book could be written on this thesis, but a paragraph must suffice. It is just as well: it is better to realize what Bryant was than to exploit what he was not. And if he was and is a true poet, he belongs to our best traditions also as critic. He was never, to be sure, the professional guide of literary taste, like Arnold and Lowell. Apart from sensible but obvious memorial addresses on Irving, Halleck, and Cooper, his best known essay is introductory to his Library of Poetry and Song; it enunciates fewer keen judgments on individuals, fewer profound principles, than does Emerson's introduction to his Parnassus, but it does enunciate the primacy of "a luminous style" and of themes central to common man, in noble paragraphs that should not be forgotten, certainly not by any one who believes that criticism gains in authority when it is the concentrated deduction of experience. Of his services as editor of a leading metropolitan paper, through nearly two generations of crisis after crisis in the nation's life, only an historian should speak. Not even Godwin, his editorial colleague, has spoken, it seems, quite the definitive word. Why should it not be spoken? The fact is, no such man ever sat, before or since, in the editorial chair; in no one other has there been such culture, scholarship, wisdom, dignity, moral idealism. Was it all in Greeley? in Dana? What those fifty years may have meant as an influence on the American press, especially as counteracting the flamboyant and vulgar, the layman may only conjecture. There is no space to speak of his letters beyond noting that, with all their elegance, courtesy, criticism, information, they do not belong, with Cicero's, Gray's, Cowper's, Byron's, Emerson's, Meredith's, to the literature of correspondence, because they are without zest for little details of human life (whether in others or in himself), or without informal spontaneity and flashes of insight-or without whatever it be that makes a private letter ultimately a public joy. As a whole, Bryant's prose style has quality as well as qualities, but here a word only on its relation to the style of his poetry. Bryant more than once explicitly differentiated the functions of the two harmonies1; but Prescott was not the only one who detected in both the same qualities of mind: obviously a man is not two different beings according to whether he is playing a violin or a cello, singing or talking. Bryant, as Dowden said of Burke, saw "the life of society in a rich, concrete, imaginative way"; and not unlike Burke he had, as politician, the poet's generalizing power. But the point here of special interest is the recurrence in his prose so often, when his prose rises to things in their significance (as apart from their mere relations), of the same imaginative procedure: there is the "broad survey," as in the account of the waters of the Mississippi3 (themselves introduced as a simile to illustrate the fame of Homer); there are his fundamental metaphors, the grammar of his dialect, as that of the past as a place, occurring in the editorial on the amendment abolishing slavery, which is besides in many details of imagery almost another version of the poem on the same theme, written, says Godwin, a little later. In a public address on the electric telegraph 5 he said: My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea, to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. Is not this in imagination, mood, manner, even in the recurrent blank verse cadences, veritably as if an unpublished fragment of A Hymn of the Sea? So we return to the Poet. Yet when all is said, it is the whole man that is ours and that should be ours. He is the Citizen of 1 Godwin, Prose, vol. II, p. 22. 3 Godwin, Prose, vol. II, p. 269. s Godwin, Prose, vol. 11, p. 259. 2 Godwin, Life, vol. II, p. 36. 4 Godwin, Life, vol. II, p. 235. our tradition; not to us today so much for his hand in the founding of two political parties, nor for his counsels by personal letter and speech that Lincoln, the Statesman of our tradition, heard with such grave respect, nor for his civic activities in art, charity, and reform; but for that Mosaic massive head, those deep, peering, brooding eyes, those white shaggy brows, and the great beard over the old man's cloak that, in the engraving after Sarony's photograph, has been now for a generation familiar in so many homes of our land. II. MINOR POETS When Bryant, pioneer and patriarch, was laid away on that bright June afternoon of 1878 in the cemetery at Roslyn, Long Island, his oldest and dearest friend was still alive. Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879), one of the founders of The North American Review and of the serious tradition in our literary criticism, is remembered, if at all, as verse-writer mainly through Bryant's praise, as Mason is remembered through Gray's. How remote the short jerky stanzas of The Buccaneer (1827), an ambitious tale of pirate and spectre, were from the talents and temper of the Bostonian descendant of the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, one may realize who reflects what Coleridge would have done with the spell and the uncanny, and what Byron with the crime and the movement-the two poets whom Dana was obviously emulating. But there are some good lines on the sea in The Buccaneer, and Dana's lyric, The Little Beach Bird, gets a traditional honourable mention in the manuals. The other minor poets about Bryant lived in or near New York. James Kirke Paulding, humorist and proseman of no mean reputation, and collaborator with Bryant in prose stories, deserves mention here as an early representative of a conscious movement to make poetry out of American materials, convinced that Thrice happy he who first shall strike the lyre, See Book II, Chap. xx. Tales of the Glauber Spa (1832). See also Book II, Chaps. I, III, IV, and VII. The Backwoodsman (1818), from which this conventional couplet is taken, recounts, without much plot, in sturdy heroics more like Crabbe's realism than Goldsmith's idyllic sentiment, the rugged life and wild surroundings of a frontiersman and his family. It is an honest document, if not distinguished literature. James Gates Percival (1795-1856) typified that crude manifestation of Romanticism, the self-constituted, the self-conscious poetic genius. Similarly, he typified the poetic mood that is without the poetic reason. The stuff of him is preeminently the stuff of poetry, but unclarified, uncontrolled, unorganized. It is often as if the personalities of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Moore, and Bryant had been merged into one helpless hypnoidal state of metrical and emotional garrulity. Yet every now and then an open-minded reader is surprised by some first-hand observation, some graceful analogy, some picturesqueness or energy, some short lyric cry; and once at least he wrought a little gem-his simple stanzas on Seneca Lake. He typified, too, a not altogether ignoble phase of earlier American culture in his zealous acquisitiveness, both in science (he died as state geologist of Wisconsin), and in languages (he wrote verse in Scandinavian and German, and translated from innumerable tongues). But he belongs chiefly to the student of human nature; lonely, shy, unmarried, disappointed, poor, and dirty, he was in appearance and mode of life a character for Dickens, in heart and soul a character for Thackeray or George Eliot. Lowell pilloried him in an essay; Bryant was perhaps juster in his kindlier obituary criticism in The Evening Post. He was once a famous man. Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842) and George P. Morris (1802-1864), Knickerbocker editors of literary journals and charitably remembered respectively for The Old Oaken Bucket and Woodman, Spare that Tree, were popular song writers in the sentimental fashion (perhaps more developed in America than in England) that seems to have originated with Tom Moore. Yet such songs had music, point, and refinement that sets them far above their popular descendants-the raucous, vulgar inanities born of vaudeville and cabaret. Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-1884), another Knicker* See Book II, Chaps. II and vi. See Book II, Chap. XX. |