The American Spirit in Literature Part 5

His poetry was in the best sense of the word "occasional," and his prose was only an incidental or accidental harvest of a long career in which his chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in the Harvard Medical School. He had studied in Paris under sound teachers, and after some years of private practice won the appointment which he held, as active and emeritus professor, for forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, and amusing lecturer, and printed two or three notable medical essays, but his chief Boston reputation, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of a wit and diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then came his great hour of good luck in 1857, when Lowell, the editor of the newly-established "Atlantic Monthly," persuaded him to write "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." It was the public's luck also, for whoever had been so unfortunate as not to be born in Boston could now listen--as if across the table--to Boston's best talker. Few volumes of essays during the last sixty years have given more pleasure to a greater variety of readers than is yielded by "The Autocrat." It gave the Doctor a reputation in England which he naturally prized, and which contributed to his triumphal English progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly in "Our Hundred Days." "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" and "The Poet at the Breakfast Table" are less successful variations of "The Autocrat." Neither professors nor poets are at their best at this meal.

Holmes wrote three novels--of which "Elsie Venner," a somewhat too medical story, is the best remembered--memoirs of his friends Emerson and Motley, and many miscellaneous essays. His life was exceptionally happy, and his cheery good opinion of himself is still contagious.

To p.r.o.nounce the words Doctor Holmes in any company of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a smile of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The word Goldsmith has now lost, alas, this provocative quality; the word Stevenson still possesses it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race of friends of mankind, and a few of his poems, and some gay warm-hearted pages of his prose, will long preserve his memory. But the Boston which he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam Johnson's London.

James Russell Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and though he died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the present. Although by birth as much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years as much of a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our universal American life on many sides, represented us worthily in foreign diplomacy, argued the case of Democracy with convincing power, and embodied, as more perfect artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow could never have done, the subtleties and potencies of the national temperament. He deserves and reveals the closest scrutiny, but his personality is difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote his biography with careful competence, and Ferris Greenslet has made him the subject of a brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely in their a.s.sessment of the value of his prose and verse, and in their understanding of his personality.

The external facts of his career are easy to trace and must be set down here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After a somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, the year of Emerson's "Divinity School Address." He studied law, turned Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental Maria White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to be "the most Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ten years out of college, in 1848, he published "The Biglow Papers" (First Series), "A Fable for Critics," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal." After a long visit to Europe and the death of his wife, he gave some brilliant Lowell Inst.i.tute lectures in Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's successor at Harvard. He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after entering upon his work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served for four years as the first editor of "The Atlantic," and helped his friend Charles Eliot Norton edit "The North American Review." The Civil War inspired a second series of "Biglow Papers" and the magnificent "Commemoration Ode" of 1865. Then came volume after volume of literary essays, such as "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows," and an occasional book of verse. Again he made a long sojourn in Europe, resigned his Harvard professors.h.i.+p, and in 1877 was appointed Minister to Spain. After three years he was transferred to the most important post in our diplomatic service, London. He performed his duties with extraordinary skill and success until 1885, when he was relieved. His last years were spent in Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was born, and he was still writing, in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891.

Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many personal moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellectual stimulus from enormously wide reading in cla.s.sical and modern literatures. Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have inherited a strain of levity which he could not always control, and, through his mother's family, a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling second sight. His physical and mental powers were not always in the happiest mutual adjustment: he became easily the prey of moods and fancies, and knew the alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black despair. The firm moral consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet his playful remark about belonging in a hospital for incurable children had a measure of truth in it also.

Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite integrated into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, at its best, is n.o.ble and delightful, full of human charm, but it is difficult for him to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. This temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness of his letters, unless to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many grateful and loyal readers nevertheless feel in his criticism. Lowell was more richly endowed by nature and by breadth of reading than Matthew Arnold, for instance, but in the actual performance of the critical function he was surpa.s.sed in method by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant perception, in a limited field, by Poe.

It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our literature, and it is by means of certain pa.s.sages in the "Biglow Papers" and the "Commemoration Ode" that he has most moved his countrymen. The effectiveness of The "Present Crisis" and "Sir Launfal,"

and of the "Memorial Odes," particularly the "Ode to Aga.s.siz," is likewise due to the pa.s.sion, sweetness, and splendor of certain strophes, rather than to the perfection of these poems as artistic wholes. Lowell's personal lyrics of sorrow, such as "The Changeling,"

"The First SnowFall," "After the Burial," have touched many hearts.

His later lyrics are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quant.i.ty; and in the field of political satire, such as the two series of "Biglow Papers," he had a theme and a method precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached Lowell's success in this difficult genre: the swift transitions from rural Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to n.o.blest idealism reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher lurked in this Puritan from first to last, and the war against Mexico and the Civil War stirred him to the depths.

His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste of his pages. But the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling was American, and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our soil. Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his reaction to the New England scene. Th.o.r.eau himself, whom Lowell did not like, was not more veracious an observer than the author of "Sunthin'

in the Pastoral Line," "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," and "My Garden Acquaintance." Yet he watched men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and bobolinks, and no shrewder American essay has been written than his "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." Wit and humor and wisdom made him one of the best talkers of his generation. These qualities pervade his essays and his letters, and the latter in particular reveal those ardors and fidelities of friends.h.i.+p which men like Emerson and Th.o.r.eau longed after without ever quite experiencing. Lowell's cosmopolitan reputation, which was greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, seemed to his old a.s.sociates of the Sat.u.r.day Club only a fit recognition of the learning, wit, and fine imagination which had been familiar to them from the first. To hold the old friends throughout his lifetime, and to win fresh ones of a new generation through his books, is perhaps the greatest of Lowell's personal felicities.

While there are no other names in the literature of New England quite comparable with those that have just been discussed, it should be remembered that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of these representative poets and prose writers were dependent upon the existence of an intelligent and responsive reading public. The lectures of Emerson, the speeches of Webster, the stories of Hawthorne, the political verse of Whittier and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting audience, mentally and morally exigent. The spread of the Lyceum system along the line of westward emigration from New England as far as the Mississippi is one tangible evidence of the high level of popular intelligence. That there was much of the superficial and the spread-eagle in the American life of the eighteen-forties is apparent enough without the amusing comments of such English travellers as d.i.c.kens, Miss Martineau, and Captain Basil Hall. But there was also genuine intellectual curiosity and a general reading habit which are evidenced not only by a steady growth of newspapers and magazines but also by the demand for substantial books. Biography and history began to be widely read, and it was natural that the most notable productiveness in historical writing should manifest itself in that section of the country where there were libraries, wealth, leisure for the pursuits of scholars.h.i.+p, a sense of intimate concern with the great issues of the past, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout the community.

It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor, Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Parkman, were Ma.s.sachusetts men.

Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in 1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he began collecting the papers of George Was.h.i.+ngton by 1825. John Marshall, the great jurist, had published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Was.h.i.+ngton and to edit his writings. He also edited a "Library of American Biography," wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As editor of the writings of Franklin and Was.h.i.+ngton, he took what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error of judgment has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in historical research.

George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste for history. He studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned schoolmaster, Democratic politician and office-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and then to the German Empire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, though the real pa.s.sion of his life was his "History of the United States," which he succeeded in bringing down to the adoption of the Const.i.tution. The first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today like a stump speech by a st.u.r.dy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian period. But there was solid stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft proceeded, decade after decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and philosophy of democracy and utilized increasingly the vast stores of doc.u.ments which his energy and his high political positions had made it possible for him to obtain.

Late in life he condensed his ten great volumes to six. Posterity will doubtless condense these in turn, as posterity has a way of doing, but Bancroft the historian realized his own youthful ambition with a completeness rare in the history of human effort and performed a monumental service to his country. He was less of an artist, however, than Prescott, the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of the well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of Boston historians. All of these men, together with their friend George Ticknor, who wrote the "History of Spanish Literature" and whose own "Life and Letters"

pictures a whole generation, had the professional advantages of inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make deliberate choice of a historical field which offered freshness and picturesqueness of theme.

All were tireless workers in spite of every physical handicap; all enjoyed social security and the rich reward of full recognition by their contemporaries. They had their world as in their time, as Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live in.

Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in college destroyed the sight of one eye, and left him but a precarious use of the other.

Nevertheless he resolved to emulate Gibbon, whose "Autobiography" had impressed him, and to make himself "an historian in the best sense of the term." He studied arduously in Europe, with the help of secretaries, and by 1826, after a long hesitation, decided upon a "History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella." In ten years the three volumes were finished. "Pursuing the work in this quiet, leisurely way, without over-exertion or fatigue," wrote Prescott, "or any sense of obligation to complete it in a given time, I have found it a continual source of pleasure." It was published at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, and met with instantaneous success. "My market and my reputation rest princ.i.p.ally with England," he wrote in 1838--a curious footnote, by the way, to Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of the year before. But America joined with England, in praising the new book. Then Prescott turned to the "Conquest of Mexico," the "Conquest of Peru," and finally to his unfinished "History of the Reign of Philip II." He had, as Dean Milman wrote him, "the judgment to choose n.o.ble subjects." He wrote with serenity and dignity, with fine balance and proportion. Some of the Spanish doc.u.ments upon which he relied have been proved less trustworthy than he thought, but this unsuspected defect in his materials scarcely impaired the skill with which this unhasting, unresting painter filled his great canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians are incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in the same year as Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the present hour.

His young friend Motley, of "Dutch Republic" fame, was another Boston Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. He attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Gottingen became a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley wrote a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after five years, scored an immense triumph with his "Rise of the Dutch Republic." He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists; and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four volumes of the "History of the United Netherlands." During the Civil War he served usefully as American minister to Vienna, and in 1869 was appointed minister to London. Both of these appointments ended unhappily for him. Dr. Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does not conceal the fact that a steadier, less excitable type of public servant might have handled both the Vienna situation and the London situation without incurring a recall. Motley continued to live in England, where his daughters had married, and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he felt socially at home. His last book was "The Life and Death of John of Barneveld." His "Letters," edited after his death in 1877 by George William Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life among the cultivated and leisurely cla.s.ses. The Boston merchant's son was a high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to make his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather dull and provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley had had the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a subject which captivated the interest of Europe and gave the historian international fame. He had more eloquence than the Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, but there may be here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of future generations who will bet on "The Autocrat," after all.

The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious material to the student of New England's golden age. In the seventy years of his heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the characteristic forces of the age reached their culmination and decline, and his own personality indicates some of the violent reactions produced by the over-strain of Transcendentalism. For here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a clergyman's son, who detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to manhood in the eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism, Philosophy, Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained at Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who disliked the ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the Sat.u.r.day Club who was bored with literary talk and literary people; a staunch American who despised democracy as thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought suffrage a failure; a nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for philosophy, science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for their tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Th.o.r.eau as effeminate sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves. In Parkman "the wheel has come full circle," and a movement that began with expansion of self ended in hard Spartan repression, even in inhibition of emotion.

Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his life work at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: "I have not yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed." "Before the end of the soph.o.m.ore year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my various schemes had crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the 'Old French War,' that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada, for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other pa.s.sage of our history. It was not till some years later that I enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night."

To understand "the history of the American forest" young Parkman devoted his college vacations to long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two years after graduation, he made the epoch-making journey described in his first book, "The Oregon Trail."

"The Conspiracy of Pontiac," a highly-colored narrative in two volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by the hards.h.i.+ps of his Oregon Trail journey, and by ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion.

His disease took many forms--insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that "he never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career." Even when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of his eyesight are characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and then resting for an equal time, this alternate process may gradually be continued for about half an hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day.

By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been composed." There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight against odds in the history of literature.

For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a dozen of them--"The Pioneers of France," "The Jesuits in North America,"

"La Salle," "The Old Regime," "Frontenac," "Montcalm and Wolfe," "A Half-Century of Conflict"--the boy's dream realized, the man's long warfare accomplished. The history of the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with the dark wilderness for a background, and, for the actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers, soldiers of France--all struggling for a vast prize, all changing, pa.s.sing, with a pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a superb theme, better after all for an American than the themes chosen by Prescott and Ticknor and Motley, and precisely adapted to the pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier-minded, soldier-hearted author.

The quality which Parkman admired most in men--though he never seems to have loved men deeply, even his own heroes--was strength of will. That was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of the limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought manfully by such admirable men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained intelligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful cultivation of appropriate story-telling and picture-painting style, all these were theirs. But the "wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he crossed the bare Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe dreamed in the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove which Th.o.r.eau lost long ago and could not find in his but at Walden, these were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens esteemed as foolishness.

CHAPTER VIII. POE AND WHITMAN

Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their egotism, two outsiders who upset most of the conventional American rules for winning the literary race, two men of genius, in short, about whom we are still quarreling, and whose distinctive quality is more accurately perceived in Europe than it has ever been in the United States.

Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in the tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also late comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning to ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824.

He was untouched by the n.o.bler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Sh.e.l.ley. His prose models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a deadbeat.

A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of his nativity--as much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father died early of tuberculosis, and his mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease and poverty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The boy, by physical inheritance a neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity in youth, was adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond, Virginia. Poe liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to school in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short, bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good record in French and Latin, read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Mountains, and did not notably exceed his companions in drinking and gambling. But his Scotch foster-father disapproved of his conduct and withdrew him from the University. A period of wandering followed. He enlisted in the army and was stationed in Boston in 1827, when his first volume, "Tamerlane," was published. In 1829 he was in Fortress Monroe, and published "Al Aaraf" at Baltimore. He entered West Point in 1830, and was surely, except Whistler, the strangest of all possible cadets. When he was dismissed in 1831, he had written the marvellous lines "To Helen," "Israfel," and "The City in the Sea." That is enough to have in one's knapsack at the age of twenty-two.

In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that of a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which Poe wrote back to Philadelphia the morning after he arrived with his child-wife in New York: "We are both in excellent spirits.... We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon." When the child-wife died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body was covered with the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from West Point. If Poe met some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it must be remembered that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was pitiably poor, and that the slightest indulgence in drink set his overwrought nerves jangling. Ferguson, the former office-boy of the "Literary Messenger," judged this man of letters with an office-boy's firm and experienced eye: "Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times everyone liked him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met." "I am sorry for him," wrote C. F. Briggs to Lowell. "He has some good points, but taken altogether, he is badly made up." "Badly made up," no doubt, both in body and mind, but all respectable and prosperous Pharisees should be reminded that Poe did not make himself; or rather, that he could not make himself over. Very few men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote to Lowell in 1844: "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been WHIM--impulse--pa.s.sion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all things present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the pathetic confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen a.n.a.lyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and superst.i.tions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror and strange crime, should have wrought structures of imperishable beauty.

Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but pleasure--the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes, with some variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as "To Helen," "Israfel," "The Haunted Palace," "Annabel Lee," the theme, the tone, the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to a lute-player in a dream.

That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In "The Bells"

and "The Raven" we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though such juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In "Ulalume" and other showpieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering tinsel fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the technical temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human feeling.

Poe's theory of the art of the short story is now familiar enough.

The power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its unity, its harmony of effect. This is ill.u.s.trated in all of his finest stories. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" the theme is Fear; the opening sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the climax. In the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one end in view. The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the somber chamber frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is an index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim phantom Fear and awaiting the c.u.mulative horror of the final moment.

In "Ligeia," which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the theme is the ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of the beloved and departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the workmans.h.i.+p consummate. So with the theme of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado," the theme of mysterious intrigue in "The a.s.signation." In Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to call them, he takes to pieces for our amus.e.m.e.nt a puzzle which he has cunningly put together. "The Gold Bug" is the best known of these, "The Purloined Letter" the most perfect, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator loves to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid thought." And there are tales of conscience, of which "The Black Cat"

is the most fearful and "William Wilson" the most subtle; and there are landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor stuff.

It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and n.o.bler, he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to his hearthstone, the America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish that the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land, with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded with such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his imagination dealt less often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of our race. Yet when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism into primal savagery and shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was caged in by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised themselves against his prison.

Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of workmans.h.i.+p and his critical precepts have been of great service to his careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they brought back the glory and the cash.

I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him.

George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that man before, in "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows." All of them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe--what would he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at this table." And he does.

Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet,"

offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no interest in American history or in American ideas; he was a timeless, placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman had a pa.s.sion for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent much of his mature life in brooding over the question, "What, after all, is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?" It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen of "these states." His personality is unique. In many respects he still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of his countrymen without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic interest in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever foreign critics may a.s.sert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast majority of American men and women "good old Walt" is still an outsider.

Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kins.h.i.+p and glory of all created things. It is this pa.s.sion of wors.h.i.+p which inspired St.

Francis of a.s.sisi's "Canticle to the Sun." It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!"

That is the real motto for Whitman's "Leaves of Gra.s.s." Like St.

Francis, and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he a.s.serts them.

Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants "I know I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it.

In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Th.o.r.eau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the a.s.sertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out."

Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.

So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life.

It must here be told in the briefest fas.h.i.+on, for Whitman's own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot.

Whitman's father was a carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There were many children. When little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn.

The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried typesetting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island.

He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible.

The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnis.h.i.+ng short stories to the "Democratic Review," a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Th.o.r.eau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, "mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall," and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on "The Brooklyn Eagle" and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his father, and brooded over a book--"a book of new things."