Yet not despairing entirely, he celebrated the chivalry of the Revolution in "The Field of Grounded Arms," made his greatest stroke for popular favor with the oft-declaimed "Marco Bozzaris," and, as a man of seventy-five, came out in "Young America" with one more flash at the sound of battle, though, rather sadly, with one concluding bit of cynicism at the end of this valedictory. Such a discontent as he felt with the uninspired and uninspiring qualities of American life found its more effective expression in satire. If he could not emulate Scott, he could imitate Byron, and, in a mild and well-mannered way, he did play with the measures of "Beppo" and "Don Juan," and suggests their author in his lighter moods. "It would be heaven," he had said one day in his twenty-third year, "to lounge upon the rainbow, and read Tom Campbell." Young Dr. Joseph Rodman Drake, standing by, was delightedly eager to share the perch. So their friendship began, but, working by logical contraries, what they arrived at some six years later was the quite different experience of sitting, as it were, in a metropolitan bay-window and reading the social signs of the times. What they read was recorded in the National Advocate and The New York Evening Post, under the signature of "The Croakers." Their success was equal to that of Irving and his associates in the, also anonymous, “Salmagundi Papers" of a dozen years earlier. But "The Croakers," through the Evening Post, had a much wider circulation than did the independently printed "Salmagundi's," and, coming in rapid succession, thirty-five in about one hundred days, were far more startling than the earlier series of twenty-odd which extended through a whole year. Finally, through their more direct satire, which was addressed to city celebrities by name, they challenged and held the attention of the townsfolk, who were amused at what they read and curious to know where the lightning would next strike. The most personal and local of these verses, as one looks back, have the least title to respect to-day, for the reason that they rely on immediate breakfast-table reading, by offering jaunty impertinences in the place of either sense or sentiment. The more general in theme had in them the same satirical canniness which belonged to the "Salmagundi's" and, in their simple and sometimes brutal directness, must have afforded then, as they do now, an immense relief to the reader who had been surfeited on the pompous imitations of the would-be classical poets. Go on great painter! dare be dull; No longer after nature dangle; Call rectilinear beautiful; Find grace and freedom in an angle: Pour on the red-the green-the yellow"Paint till a horse may mire upon it," And while I've strength to write or bellow, I'll sound your praises in a sonnet. So, in "The man who frets at worldly strife," and "To Simon,” and “The Love of Notoriety," the young critics used shotguns instead of rifles as they popped at cheap pessimism, social extravagance, and self-puffery. For three months, from behind the ambush of their pseudonym, they bombarded the delighted city with their poetical confetti. The death of Drake, in September, 1820, which inspired Halleck's most famous lyric, broke up this literary partnership; but before that time Halleck had responded to the general applause with another popular satire, "Fanny." This was a poem of 175 six-lined stanzas, done in Halleck's best Byronesque manner. It was unsigned, like "The Croakers," but generally understood to be by one of the same hands. It tells the story of the sky-rocket rise and fall of Fanny and her father in wealth and social position, a story which gave every opportunity for cynical commentary on the ways of the world in general and New York in particular. In the literature of Manhattan, Stedman's "Diamond Wedding" has been the only thing to approach it, and both of them have been broadly and keenly applicable to the life of any rapidly growing commercial city. When, two years later, at the age of about thirty, Halleck had written "Marco Bozzaris," the best expression of his romantic side, he had risen to his highest point. With his nicety of taste, his keen eye, his fund of humor, and his frankness, he was an established literary and social favorite. He was the kind of handsome and courtly gentleman of the old school, as was Irving also, who became a friend and associate of the leading financier of the day. There was nothing restless or disconcerting about him. He was a critic of manners, but not of the social order. He probably knew little of Emerson, and he certainly disapproved of Whitman. In 1848, when less than sixty years of age, he went back to his native town in Connecticut, and lived there till after the Civil War, totally unaffected as a man of letters, except as the conflict seems to have silenced him. But he was not alone, for when he sank into eclipse, all the "Knickerbockers" disappeared with him. Their vogue was over. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878) Bryant was born at Cummington, Mass., in 1794. He could trace his descent through both parents to the oldest Plymouth stock. After his early education, which was largely under clergyman tutors, his father, a country doctor, was able to send him to college, at Williams, for only one year. He subsequently became an attorney, and practised law from 1816 to 1825. Within the first three years, he had come to feel a repugnance to drudging "for the dregs of men," and the tastes of success given him by his verses in the North American Review, his Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1821, and his volume of poems in the same year, made natural his decision to go into magazine work in New York in 1825. The New York Review and Athenæum Magazine failed in a year, but after a few months of return to the law, Bryant was offered the assistant editorship of The New York Evening Post. Three years later, in 1829, he suc1 See closing stanza of "Green River." ceeded to the editorship, which he held with distinction until his death, in 1878. Although the shift from law to journalism did not withdraw him from "the sons of strife," it made him more than an adjuster of their difficulties. As a moulder of public opinion, he was doing God's work in "Quickening the restless mass that sweeps along.' "1 His seven trips abroad, and his nine publications of poetry in book form, after he came to New York, prove that his life was not utterly absorbed in the routine of newspaper editing. Bryant's career as a poet was very long, extending from the preparation, at thirteen, of a volume of school poems, paraphrases and translations, to the writing of "A Lifetime" and "The Flood of Years," sixtyeight years later, in 1876. Volumes of poems from his pen appeared in 1808, 1821, 1831, 1834, 1836, 1842, 1844, 1854, 1863, 1870, 1872. I. Texts. Poems, Vols. III and IV, in Life and Works of W. C. Bryant, by Parke Godwin. New York, 1883. Prose, Vols. V and VI, in Life and Works of W. C. Bryant, by Parke Godwin. New York, 1883-1884. Poetical Works. "Roslyn" edition, 1903. II. Biography. Life and Works of W. C. Bryant, Vols. I and II, by Parke Godwin. W. C. Bryant (American Men of Letters), by John Bigelow. III. Criticism. Poets and Poetry of America, by Churton Collins. Works of E. A. Poe, Vols. VIII, IX, X, XIII. Poets of America, by E. C. Stedman. America in Literature, by G. E. Woodberry. The Nation, "Growth of Thanatopsis," by Carl van Doren, Vol. CI, p. 432. IV. Supplementary. Publication of Century Association on the Bryant Festival, Novenber 5, 1864. The Bryant Memorial Meeting, November 12, 1878. The most startling event that took place in Bryant's long poetic career was the publication of "Thanatopsis," in 1817. It appeared in the midst. of an extremely arid period in American literature, and of a correspondingly fruitful one in England. Southey had only recently become poet laureate, and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats 1 See "Hymn of the City" and also "I broke the Spell that Held me Long," and "I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion." were all at the height of their powers. In America, at this time, however, poetry quite properly shared the fate of Wordsworth's Lucy, "whom there were none to praise, And very few to love." In the period from 1813 to 1817, when, in addition to the English poets mentioned above, Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers, Hunt, Jane Auste, and Maria Edgeworth were pouring forth their best; the finest that America had produced was Allston's "Sylphs of the Seasons," Payne's "Juvenile Poems" and "Lispings of the Muse," Carey's "Olive Branch," Mrs. Sigourney's "Moral Pieces," Pierpont's "Airs of Palestine," and the one volume worth rememberingFreneau's "Poems on American Affairs." James K. Paulding was perhaps the best known native writer; Irving was in his decade of silence between the "Knickerbocker History" and "The Sketch Book," and Cooper and Halleck and Drake had not published anything. Naturally, the appearance of a great poem would have been sufficiently amazing even if it had not been composed by a boy in the 'teens. But, for this fact, Bryant has had, in a way, to suffer ever since, for popular estimation has neglected or refused to recognize that in the length of his career he ever showed any real development in artistry or increase in power. As a matter of fact, "Thanatopsis" was an extraordinary combination of boyishness and genius. The genius lay in its fine mastery of blank verse, in its free and sonorous rhythmic flow. The boyishness resided in Bryant's quite natural inclination to make his own statement of the theme that "All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity." He was at the stage in life where such meditations rise in a young man's mind as were recorded in poem after poem of his until he went down to New York, where life became more fascinating to him than death. He came from an ancestry that made the Hebraic application in the concluding lines as natural as the last couplet in Milton's sonnet "On arriving at the Age of Twenty Three." He lived in a period when the influence of the "Graveyard Poets," Blair, White, and Porteus, was widely prevailing, and he was in part stimulated to the "Thanatopsis" writing as a commentary on and a reply to White.2 1 The wonder of the poem is, therefore, not that it represented unusual maturity of thought, but that it gave evidence of such poetic skill that Dana should have exclaimed upon seeing it ". no one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses." In respect to its poetic form, Bryant, perhaps, did not excel this in any other of his youthful efforts or even in the work of his later years. In content and general pervasive effect of his point of view, his work, as a whole, was quite in harmony with it as long as he remained in the little New England towns, but quite different after he had thrown himself into the metropolitan tide of affairs. Up to about 1829, when he was thirty-five years old, Bryant's thought was prevailingly self-conscious and strongly tinged with religious sentimentalism. The religious predilection was born in him, the self-consciousness was the characteristic of his immaturity, the sentimentalism belonged to his literary generation. He was like any 1 See Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy," chapter on "Hebraism and Hellenism." 2 See "The Nation," Vol. 101, p. 432. Article by Carl van Doren on "Growth of Thanatopsis." other impressionable youth in being a part of all he looked upon, and in his literary vista, little that he looked upon was real. "It was a needlework world, a world in which there was always moonlight on the lake and twilight in the vale; where drooped the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens, and the nightingale chanted in the grove 'neath the mouldering, ivy-mantled tower." 1 Poem after poem in these years was given a personal religious application-not only "Thanatopsis," but "The Waterfowl," "A Forest Hymn," "The Poet," and even "To the Fringed Gentian." Poem after poem was overshadowed by the thought of dissolution. The "Hymn to Death," he acknowledged, was built upon a fallacy, but he preserved it nevertheless. He thought of the forest as a vast cemetery, of June as a pleasant month to die in, of the flowers as reminders of the brevity of human life. In two bits of reminiscence, he sentimentalized over his abandonment of poetry, evidently feeling that poetry was nothing deeper than a mildly emotional obligato to life-such a thing as Monument Mountains 2 are made of. But during the latter half of his life the general tenor of his work was changed. Entrance into the world of opinions gave him more of an interest in life itself, and less in its embellishments. Journalism absorbed most of his time and strength, and participation in public meetings no small share of his margin. There was no complete reversal of attitude in Bryant's work, but he suffered a sea change of which there were two broad indications. The first and less important was that nature did not inevitably lead to mournful or even sober thoughts. "The Planting of the Apple Tree" is serenely recorded in "quaint old rhymes"; the stanzas on "Robert of Lincoln" are positively jolly. The other sign of change appears in the increasing proportion of poems which, like his editorial articles and his commemorative addresses, were definitely related to life. He went on at once, in the "Hymn of the City," to celebrate the presence of God, in town as well as country,3 and, in "The Battle Field," to display his zest for justice and good citizenship: "The Antiquity of Freedom" and "O Mother, of a Mighty Race" are both songs of democracy. So, too, with direct reference to the Civil War, are “Our Country's Call" and the small group that follow it. And, in a larger way, the "Song of the Sower" chants an ample chorus upon the implications of democracy, which deserves more attention than it has yet received. It is the logical predecessor of Timrod's "Cotton Boll" in its broadest sweep, and of Lanier's "Symphony" in its sense of the invading forces of industrialism. At the very end of his career, in his "Lifetime" and "The Flood of Years," he seems, at first glance to have reverted to his youthful point of view; but this is not a fair statement of the case, for old age may justify what was forced and exotic in young manhood. It was natural enough that at eighty-two the retrospect should be tinged with sadness and that 1 "Nathaniel Parker Willis," by H. A. Beers, p. 78. See text, pp. 171-173. 3 Compare Wordsworth's sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge." |