A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.* THE first century of the
American Republic, which, as Mr. Smith's preface reminds us, came to a close last year, though it cannot boast a single imaginative writer of colossal propor- tions, has undoubtedly been one of prodigious literary activity ; and in the domains of poetry and fiction there are some half- dozen brilliant names, at least, whose renown it would not be rash to pronounce imperishable, even if it be admitted, as captious critics say, that much of their lustre is rather borrowed or reflected than native. From a nation mostly of the same race and speaking the same language with our- selves, a literature absolutely original and unique was not, indeed, to have been expected ; the Anglo-Saxon element must necessarily be strongest in it, as it is in the character of the people ; and that severance from English traditions which some have vainly hoped and others have as vainly striven for, was not to be had without entirely forgetting or ignoring them,—an obvious impossibility while the old language itself, the creation, in part, of the very writers whose methods were to be discarded, was still retained. The accent of the best American authors is naturally, therefore, hardly distinguishable from that of the writers of England, and it is not surprising that there should seem to be much that is directly or indirectly imitative even in the most vital portions of the literature of America, which ought rather to be prized as a valuable adjunct to our own than depreciated as not being wholly alien. One or two poets have, indeed, attempted entirely new departures, but with very dubious success. Walt Whitman, who imagines that he has freed himself more completely than any other from the trammels of European literary convention, has really no message to deliver which had not previously been delivered in better terms by writers like Carlyle, Emerson, and Thoreau, and the style of the Leaves of Grass seems oftenest a mere burlesque of that of the Proverbial Philosophy, while whatever of genuine poetry or resonant phrase there may be in some of the better rhapsodies, such as " A Voice out of the Sea," and " President Lincoln's Funeral Hymn," is far less individual and peculiar in kind and quality than their author or his admirers suppose. Perhaps the most original element in American literature is its humour (of which Whitman has nothing) ; and even this, though certainly not inseparable from the quaint dialect to which it has hitherto been wisely confined by the best native humorists, would probably appear far less unique in character if its vehicle were ordinary • d Century of American Literature : Benjamin Franklin to James Russell Lowell. Selections from a Hundred Authors. Chown and Arranged by Huntington Smith. London Trabner and Co.
English. The quiet humour which we find occasionally in the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James seems to us at least as much English as American; nor is this any disparagement.
We will briefly glance at the chief writers who have flourished during the century, and who, along with a host of " illustrious obscure," are very inadequately represented in Mr. Smith's lamentable book of extracts. As the highest success has pro- bably been in the novel, it may be as well to begin with the novelists. The pioneer in this class of literature was Charles Brockden Brown. His novels, having been long out of print, are practically unknown to the present generation of English readers; but there is considerable constructive skill, and much strength of imagination of the gloomy kind, in the best of them, and as a purely sensational story, we doubt if even in these days Wieland has any equal : it holds us spell-bound from the first page to the last, and The Moonstone and The Woman in White seem almost dull in comparison. Unlike the prose of most sensationalists, Brown's sentences are always carefully and often happily constructed, after the manner of Caleb Williams and Saint Leon, and he had a surer literary instinct than his more popular successor, Cooper, whose Indian tales may have owed their genesis to Brown's Edgar Huntly, the first fiction in which the " Redskins " played a prominent part. There is a wider sweep of vision and more picturesque variety in the stories of Cooper than in those of his precursor, though the style is, in general, more slovenly and inartistic; and were it not for one great creation, we should have to pronounce Cooper as unsuccessful in the delineation of character as Brown always was. Leather-Stocking is, indeed, a most memorable and heroic yet pathetic figure, as living and impressive almost as any we know, and we should be sorry to believe that the world will ever willingly let die the delightful books which tell of his battles, his friend- ships, his unhappy love, his integrity and grand simplicity of character, his ungrudging sacrifices for others, his touching isolation, and his death on the lonely prairie. American fiction has no other such character. Notwithstanding this, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer some years younger than Cooper, and much later in securing general recognition, is beyond all doubt not only a greater novelist than either Brown or Cooper, but the greatest his country has yet produced. His stories are often, indeed, vague and slight, and tantalising by their in- completeness and apparent capriciousness ; but when he has a really good subject, as in The Scarlet Letter, Transformation, or The Great Stone Pace, he handles his narrative with masterly skill, and his manner of telling it is unsurpassable. In mere style, it would hardly be too much to say that he is superior not only to all American, but to all English novelists. Poe comes near to him in some of his brief stories and "prose poems," such as " The Descent of the Maelstrom " and " Eiros and Charmion ;" but his taste is worse, and his sentences are permeated with even less of feeling than Hawthorne's, which some have censured as too cold and metallic. The scene in The Scarlet Letter, in which Mr. Dimmesdale stands at night with Hester and little Pearl on the scaffold where his mistress had formerly stood alone in penance for their mutual sin, is superb in conception and execution, and leaves an indelible impression on the mind of the reader. It is of itself sufficient to prove the great creative power of the author, and his mastery of prose style. Of Hawthorne's successors, Henry James is probably the most notable. In purely literary quality, his novels are superior to those of any of his pre- decessors, except the author of The Scarlet Letter ; but they are often prolix, and are sadly deficient in incident. Perhaps they are chiefly remarkable for their careful studies of female character. The Verena Tarrant of The Bostonians is a charming if somewhat too impressionable and yielding heroine, nor are the other feminine philanthropists in the book less happily delineated. The author's male characters do not strike us as being equally successful. Of Mrs. Stowe and her really great book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is unnecessary to say anything here, and want of space must be our excuse for leaving unmentioned other writers of high—if not the highest—distinction in the field of fiction.
The century, if not prolific in great poets, has certainly not been barren of good ones. Bryant, one of the earliest, excels in chastity of diction and calm dignity of utterance, and there is a solemn pensiveness in some of his lyric and blank-verse productions which, combined with their smooth melody and grace of form, should secure them an honourable place in the affections of all true lovers of poetry. Longfellow's poems are too well known to characterise here, but it may be remarked that, as a narrative poet at least, he is more successful, on the whole, than any of his compeers, and any poet might have been proud to write Hiawatha or Evangeline. Poe has been generally regarded as the chief of American singers, and his lyrics are undoubtedly more exquisitely perfect in workman- ship, and have a richer, fuller, and more haunting music, than those of any of his brother-poets. The command of language they display, and their glowing and magnificent imagery, seem to the present writer nothing less than marvellous. " The Raven " and " The Bells " are the most widely popular ; but " Annabel Lee " and " For Annie " —the last especially—are even more ethereal in texture and "beautiful exceedingly," with a penetrating melancholy, and a strange weirdness, utterly unlike anything in the poems of others, Shelley's, perhaps, excepted. Whittier is one of the chief of American poets, both in the quantity and quality of his verse, which, if sometimes rugged, is yet often exquisitely moulded, and is always pervaded by strong and manly or tender feeling. For fervid and indignant rhetoric, some of his ballads, of which " Cassandra Southwick " is a good example, are unsurpassed : his moral purpose, though always clear, is seldom obtrusive, his anger is without rancour, and the gentler mood is as frequent with him as the sterner or harsher, and expressed with equal mastery in his verse. He has the grand merit of being always in earnest. Emotional as his poetry is, it is by no means lacking in what the late D. G. Rossetti called "fundamental brain-power," and his "Questions of Life" sufficiently attest how deeply he has pondered on the great problems which disturb and perplex all the finer spirits of the age. "Snow-Bound" may also be mentioned as one of his most felicitous productions. Mr. Lowell ranks high aniong the poets of the century ; but his graver verse—admirable as it is for its purely intellectual qualities, its rhetorical brilliance, and its descriptive power— lacks something of direct inspiration, and though it often shines, it seldom flows and sings. Hence his chief successes as a serious poet have been in those forms of poetry in which elaboration and deliberate thought are indispensable requisites to the highest excellence, and spontaneity and fluidity are hardly to be looked for,—the sonnet and more complicated ode, of both of which he has given us some really fine examples. He is most at his ease, however, in humorous or witty poetry. The justly famous Biglow Papers belong, of course, chiefly to the former class ; but the author's wit seems to us of a still rarer order than his humour, and when this is combined with his wonderful critical faculty, as in A Fable for Critics, fluency and rapidity of movement are no longer denied to him, and the result is a masterpiece which leaves nothing to be desired by the most exacting reader. Joaquin Miller, though a somewhat unequal writer, who can scarcely be said to have quite fulfilled the high promise of his earlier volumes, strikes occasionally, in his best poems, a deeper note of passion than any of his contemporaries or pre- decessors : his style, when not marred by mannerisms and affectations, as it too frequently is, is singularly fascinating and brilliant, and the teeming life and luxuriant vegetation of his native wilds are described with extreme vividness and fidelity in his gorgeous yet not tawdry verse. The concluding stanzas of " Arizonian," and the narrative poem, "With Walker in Nicaragua," are good examples of his peculiar power.
Among American historians, the century can boast such names as Prescott, Bancroft, and Motley, and there is a whole host of essayists and critical and philosophical writers of ex- ceptional merit, but on whose characteristics we have no space to dwell. It may be sufficient to mention Franklin, Irving, Ticknor, Emerson, Thoreau—a most wayward genius, in whose writings the attractive and repellent forces are about equal— Holmes, and, greatest of all American critics, Mr. Lowell. These are the acknowledged chiefs ; but the barest justice requires us, we think, to add the name of Whipple, a writer not nearly so well known as he deserves to be, whose essays on the Elizabethan dramatists are well worth reading, even after Lamb and Hazlitt, and whose criticisms of English poets, particularly Wordsworth and Shelley, display great sagacity, acuteness, and delicacy of perception.
In this brief survey of American literature, we have referred but little to Mr. Smith's volume of extracts. There is not, we fear, much to be said in its favour. Almost as scanty space is allotted to the greater as to the smaller writers, and the selections from the former are ludicrously inadequate. In giving us, however, one charming little poem by Read, entitled " The Stranger on the Sill," which is not, we believe, known to many readers, he is not without some claim to our gratitude.
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