Thereare many good reasons why we should celebrate the one hundredth birthday of William Cullen Bryant.[34]Not the least of them is this, that in bringing him our tribute we also commemorate the birthday of American poetry. He was our earliest poet, and “Thanatopsis” our earliest poem. Through him, therefore, we make festival to the Muse who has taught many since him to sing.
[34]First printed inThe Review of Reviews, New York, October, 1894.
[34]First printed inThe Review of Reviews, New York, October, 1894.
Older than Bryant were three single-poem men,—Francis Scott Key, Joseph Hopkinson, and John Howard Payne; yet, so far as I can learn, their three poems were written later than “Thanatopsis,” and, after all, neither “The Star Spangled Banner,” nor “Hail Columbia,” nor “Home, Sweet Home,” would rank high as poetry. Likewise, though Fitz-Greene Halleck was older than Bryant by four years, and once enjoyed a considerable vogue, his verse is now obsolescent, if not obsolete. In the anthologies—those presses of faded poetical flowers—you will still find someof his pieces; but which of us now regards “Marco Bozzaris” as the “finest martial poem in the language”?
Bryant’s priority among his immediate contemporaries is thus clearly established; furthermore, a considerable interval separated him from that group of American poets who rose to eminence in the two decades before the civil war. Bryant was born in 1794, Emerson in 1803, Longfellow and Whittier in 1807, Holmes and Poe in 1809, Lowell and Whitman in 1819. An almost unexampled precocity also set Bryant’s pioneership beyond dispute.
But when we call Bryant the earliest American poet, and “Thanatopsis” the earliest American poem, we must not suppose that both had not had many ineffectual predecessors. Versifiers, like milliners, flourish from age to age, and their works are forgotten in favor of a later fashion. Who the forgotten predecessors of Bryant were, he himself will tell us. Being asked in February, 1818, to write an article on American poetry for theNorth American Reviewhe replied:—
“Most of the American poets of much note, I believe, I have read,—Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, Humphreys, Honeywood, Clifton, Paine. The works of Hopkins I have never met with. I have seen Philip Freneau’s writings, and some things byFrancis Hopkinson. There was a Dr. Ladd, if I am not mistaken in the name, of Rhode Island, who, it seems, was much celebrated in his time for his poetical talent, of whom I have seen hardly anything; and another, Dr. Church, a Tory at the beginning of the Revolution, who was compelled to leave the country, and some of whose satirical verses which I have heard recited possess considerable merit as specimens of forcible and glowing invective. I have read most of Mrs. Morton’s poems, and turned over a volume of stale and senseless rhymes by Mrs. Warren. Before the time of these writers, some of whom are still alive, and the rest belong to the generation which has just passed away, I imagine that we could hardly be said to have any poetry of our own; and indeed it seems to me that American poetry, such as it is, may justly enough be said to have had its rise with that knot of Connecticut poets, Trumbull and others, most of whose works appeared about the time of the Revolution.”[35]
[35]A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, by Parke Godwin, i, 154.
[35]A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, by Parke Godwin, i, 154.
Bryant’s list contains the name of not one poet whose works are read to-day. All these volumes belong tofossil literature,—literature, that is, which may be dug up and studied for the light it may throw on the customs of a time, or its intellectualdevelopment, but which, so far as its own vitality is concerned, has passed away beyond hope of resuscitation. The historical student of American poetry may read Barlow’s “Columbiad” as a matter of duty; but those of us to whom poetry is the breath of life will not seek it in that literary graveyard. Reverently, rather, will we read the titles on the tombstones and pass on.
Almost coeval with American independence itself was the notion that there ought to be an independent American literature. The Revolution had resulted in the formation of a republic new in pattern, in opportunities, in ideals; a republic which, having broken forever with the political system of Britain, would gladly have been freed from all obligations—including intellectual and æsthetic obligations—to her. We hardly realize how acute was the sensitiveness of our great-grandfathers on this point. The satisfaction they took in recalling the victories of Bennington and Yorktown vanished when they were reminded—and there was always some candid foreigner at hand to remind them—that a nation’s real greatness is measured, not by the size of its crops, nor by its millions of square miles of surface, nor by the rapidity with which its population doubles, nor even by its ability to whip King George the Third’s armies, but by its contributions to philosophy,to literature, to art, to religion. “What have you to show intheselines?” we imagine the candid foreigner to have been perpetually asking; and the patriotic American to have winced, as he had to reply, “Nothing;” unless, indeed, he happened to have Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical poise. To the slur of Abbé Raynal, that “America had not produced a single man of genius,” Jefferson replied: “When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded that the other countries of Europe and other quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name of ours on the roll of poets.”
Very few Americans, however, could bear with Jeffersonian equanimity the imputation of inferiority. All were well aware that they had just achieved a revolution without parallel in history; they were honestly proud of it; and they could not help feeling touchy when their critics, ignoring this stupendous achievement, censured them for failure in fields they had never entered. A few, like Jefferson, would respond, “Give us time;” the majority either masked their irritation under pretended contempt for the opinion of foreigners,or silently admitted the impeachment. There grew up, on the one hand, “spread-eagleism,”—brag over our material and political bigness,—and, on the other, an impatient desire to produce masterpieces which should not fear comparison with the best the world could show. The Hebrew patriarchs, whose faith Jehovah tested by denying them children till the old age of their wives, were not less troubled at the postponement of their dearest wishes than were those eager watchers for the advent of American genius. Long before Bryant’s little volume was published, in 1821, those watchers had begun to speculate as to the sort of work in which that genius would manifest itself, and then was conjured up that bogy, “The American Spirit,” which has flitted up and down through our college lecture-rooms and fluttered the minds of immature critics ever since. It was generally agreed that the question to be asked about each new book should be, “Has it The American Spirit?” and not, “Is it excellent?” Nobody knew how to define that spirit, but everybody had a teasing conviction that, unless it were conspicuous, the offspring of American genius could not prove their legitimacy. Foreigners, especially the English, encouraged this conviction. They expected something strange and uncouth; they would accept nothing else as genuine. Hence, years afterward,when Whitman, with cowboy gait, came swaggering up Parnassus, shouting nicknames at the Muses and ready to slap Apollo on the back, our perspicacious English cousins exclaimed, “There! there! that’s American! At last we’ve found a poet with The American Spirit!” For quite other reasons Whitman deserves serious attention; not for those extravagances which he deluded himself and his unrestrained admirers into thinking were most precious manifestations of The American Spirit. This bogy has now been pretty thoroughly exorcised, its followers being chiefly the writers of bad grammar, bad spelling, and slang,—which pass for dialect stories,—and an occasional student of literature, who finds very little of the American product that could not have been produced elsewhere. We may dismiss The American Spirit, bidding it seek its spectral companion, The Great American Novel, but we must remember that, even before Bryant began to write, it was worrying the minds of our literary folk.
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 sawwith 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 ofrhymesterswho 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, thoughwell 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 theNorth 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 theReviewfor 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 theReview, 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 theglory 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 theirtransience, 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 astheAmerican poet. Even the professional critics—those sapient fellows whoseobtuseness 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 theonlyAmerican poet that it was naturally assumed that he would always be thebest. 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 datefrom,—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 himselfin 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.
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’stitle 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 asto 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 suddenlyprefer 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 rightin 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 therégimeof 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.
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