PROFESSOR NICHOL'S HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

[SECOND NOTICE.]

THE limits which were imposed upon Professor Nichol by the extent and variety of his subject compelled him to compress

into a single chapter of forty pages—that on History, Romance, and Criticism, 1800-1850—his account of a period which con- tains, among others, Bancroft, Prescott, and Motley, Irving, Cooper, and Poe. Under such conditions, it is the hard fate of an historian that the greater the interest of the brief sketches he can give, the louder is the complaint of the reader that they are not more extensive. If, therefore, we are inclined to find fault with a long history of American literature in which Prescott and Motley together occupy only eight pages, Washington Irving only five, and Fenimore Cooper only three, our complaint must be attributed in part to the success of the author in making his brief sketches so interesting. Professor Nichol endeavours to make up in point what he loses in ex- tent, and with considerable success, as, for instance, in his epigrammatic verdict upon Prescott :—" Boys read his

Mexico and Peru as they read the Arabian Nights. Critics can point to few flaws in the accuracy of his judgment." Poe receives more adequate treatment, eight pages being devoted to his prose alone, of which an excellent analysis is given. Pro- fessor Nichol throws much light upon a perplexing subject by a suggestive classification of Poe's tales, showing that signifi- cance and instruction exist where we are apt to see only horror and the workings of a diseased imagination. The treatment of Poe's poetry is too short to be satisfactory. It contains, how- ever, a brilliant simile. Speaking of the parity of Poe's verses in contrast with the disorder of his life, the author says : —" They are like nuns in the convent of a riotous city."

Professor Nichol finds that Bryant " stands on a high level," but that he exhibits the one-sided spirit of exclusive nature-

worship. The author's arguments, however, in support of this claim for a high rank for Bryant seem to us inadequate. The " nature-worship " of the latter is too often a mere inventory of scenery, the natural procedure of a man whose life was passed " amid the jostling crowd " of the office of a daily newspaper.

There stand the purple hills, above them the blue and arching sky, the rippling brooks beneath ; the air is filled with the sweet melody of birds,—and so on ; picturesque and wholesome, but not poetry of high rank. Or, lest we are accused of misrepre- sentation, here it is in his own words :— " The thick roof

Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds, that sing and sport In wantonness of spirit ; while below, The squirrel, with raised paws and form erect, Chirps merrily. Throngs of insects in the shade Try their thin wings and dance in the warm beam That waked them into life. Even the green trees Partake the deep contentment ; as they bend To the soft winds, the sun from the blue sky Looks in and sheds a blessing on the scene.

. . . . . . The mossy rocks themselves, And the old and ponderous trunks of prostrate trees That lead from knoll to knoll a causeway rude Or bridge the sunken brook, and their dark roots,

* American Literature : an Historical &Ash, 1620-1890. By John Niobol, LL.D., Protes'or of Baglish Literature in the University of Glasgow. Edin- burgh: Adam and Charles Black.

With all their earth upon them, twisting high, Breathe fixed tranquillity. The rivulet "

—but we spare our readers the rivulet. Bryant's nature-worship. does not reach to the insight which gives us in a word the key to the union of mind and scene. He transfers Nature accurately enough ; he never transmutes it. We are surprised that Pro- fessor Nichol does not mention Bryant's translations of the Iliad and Odyssey ; he makes a singular mistake, too, in quoting as "the concluding lines of the poem that William Wordsworth had learnt by heart," the passage ending with the words "yet the dead are there," which in the original are followed by &- colon, and are some thirty lines from the end.

Longfellow is clearly the author's favourite, and he writes of him with affection and delicate insight, as in the following passages :—

" In the New World, but not wholly of it, he dwells with almost wearisome fondness on the World ' Old: Volumes of old days, old associations that we cannot buy with gold, quaint old cities—N urem- burg, Bruges, and Prague—old poets and painters—Becerra and Bassalin, Albert Dfirer and Hans Sachs, the cobbler bard—sweet old songs, old haunted houses, the gray old manse, Nature the dear old nurse, dear old England,—on phrases and thoughts like these his fancy broods." "His favourite virtues are endurance, calm ; his confidants, gentle hearts ; his pet themes, the praise and love of children." "There is nothing startling or outré, or 'wild and wondrous,' " in Longfellow's lyrics," but, in a degree only inferior to the songs of Burns, they enhance our joys, soften our sorrows, and mix like music with our toil, floating upwards in storm and calm."

With all Professor Nichol's admiration for Hiawatha, he cannot•

help misspelling several of its outlandish names ; and although he makes some learned remarks about the poem, he omits the most important fact, viz., that it is, in almost every respect, a repro- duction of the Finnish Kalewala. Professor Nichol's regard for Longfellow's genius has led him into an unpleasant denuncia- tion of what he is pleased to term " the half-scornful, half- -olarnorous conspiracy against Longfellow." He says

" Miss Margaret Fuller, in The Dial, leads the attaok by a notice, in which she openly professes her dislike of Aristides ; she has been followed, on both sides of the Atlantic, by the new school of critics,. who have determined that nothing is to be accepted as poetry which ie not either unintelligible or disgusting. These very clever people do not want a guide to direct, or an artist to charm, or a musician to lull them to repose amid the tumult of the time disconsolate.' They seek a phenomenon to stare at, an enigma to unravel, an ugly subject to dissect, a double lock to pick, something on which to show their own skill as intellectual conjurors or mental funambalists."

Now, in the first place, Margaret Fuller's severe criticism of Longfellow's poems did not appear in The Dial, if we remember aright, but was written for Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune; in the second place, it was forgotten years ago, and no one pays much attention to it now, any more than to Poe's

jealous insinuations ; thirdly, Professor Nichol can hardly have read the American reviews for the past year, or he would, have known that hostile criticism of Longfellow's poetry is almost entirely confined to this side of the Atlantic ; and finally, although it is true that " unintelligible and disgusting " verse seems lately to have become precious to many people, the state- ment that we have a "new school of critics' who will accept nothing as poetry which is not either the one or the other, and that this school has organised a "half-scornful, half-clamorous conspiracy against Longfellow," seems to us extravagant, and,. so far as regards Longfellow, ridiculous. The truth is that the- recent disparagement of his poetry has come, not from the "fleshly " school, but from the strictly intellectual school of critics, and has been provoked in great part by the unfortunate efforts of his admirers to secure for him a foremost place for qualities other than those which constituted his chief merit.

In spite, however, of the temptation to follow Professor Nichol_ step by step through his attractive volume, with much agree- ment, and only here and there dissent, we must confine ourselves= toa few words about the remainder, and then pass on to the- critic's special duties. In his account of Walt Whitman he treats a difficult subject with great discrimination ; it is an admirable piece of literary criticism, and the description of the- imaginary scene when Whitman bursts in upon a meeting of the Boston Saturday Club, which is basking in the serenity of Emerson and the " mellow sunshine " of Longfellow's presence,. is one of the best bits in the book.

We can hardly speak too highly of Professor Nichol's essays- upon Emerson and Hawthorne ; the latter, especially, and the• comparison of Emerson with Carlyle, is both profound and brilliant. His account of Thoreau, too, is admirable, and- perhaps the most complete and satisfactory sketch in the book, but we fancy some readers will catch their breath when they come to the expression " a stoico-epicurean adiaphorist." The author's attitude toward so-called "American humour" may be judged from the following remark (one of the caustic

passages to which we have alluded) :— " As the names of those who supply mental garbage (a species of food in great and increasing demand) should be left to sink in the oblivion from which they have unfortunately emerged, I shall refer to some of the worst of these caterers to a corrupted and corrupting taste by their self-assumed titles."

Professor Nichol's book bears the marks—we say it with regret, but without hesitation—of great carelessness. We have noted no fewer than a hundred inaccuracies of various kinds, of which we cannot, of course, give a complete list ; first, typographical errors, misspellings, and misquotations ; -then, errors due to a want of familiarity with American life ; and third, inaccuracies of statement. The first of these three classes comprises half of the entire number, and is due wholly to carelessness. For instance, gymastical, penetential, chesnut, Massachusets ; on page 76 a word omitted; storey for story, 1819 for 1619 (p. 33), gleam, for glean (p. 149), betise for Wise, approchments, denote- ment, unbarreable for unbarrelable—making nonsense of a sentence of Emerson (p. 297), and demoniac love for Emer- son's daemonic love (p. 299), &c. A still worse case is where he says (p. 139) :—" The moment Garrison was out "[of jail], he went on printing, with the declaration, I will

not recede an inch, and I shall be heard.' Such a voice

-could not be stifled." We are inclined to think that such a voice would easily have been stifled. What Garrison really said— and, if we remember aright, it was when he began the publica- tion of the Liberator—was :—" I am in earnest,—I will not equivocate,—I will not excuse,—I will not retreat a single inch, —and I will be heard,"—a very different thing from Professor

Nichol's milk-and-water version. The most misleading in-

accuracy occurs, however, in the quotation (p. 301) of Emerson's Brahma. Professor Nichol announces it as a "transcendental enigma," and challenges his readers to unravel it; and then— by way, we suppose, of putting their wits to a more severe test —he omits the word not from the third line of the first stanza.

Our readers may judge of the effect this is likely to have upon 'the " unravelling " process :-

" If the red slayer think be slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain, They know [not] well the subtle ways I keep, and pans, and tarn again."

In most poetry, the fault of metre would rouse the reader's -suspicions, but Emerson is frequently irregular, so there is -nothing to betray the blunder. Many of the poetical extracts in the volume—e.g., Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of .the Republic, Whittier's Maud Muller, Emerson's Brahma, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Leland's Hans Breitmann's Barty, —are garbled or badly mispnnctnated. Finally, in the index alone there are nearly a dozen mistakes.

Of the second class of errors, those arising from an imperfect -acquaintance with America, we will specify only Newhaven for New Haven (p. 49), Van-Buren for Van Buren (p. 114), the name of the (1) B K Society wrongly written with hyphens be- tween the words (p. 357), Empress City for Empire City—New York (p. 193), and Pennsylvanian, Philadelphian, and similar forms wrongly used as adjectives, instead of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, &c.

A large number of names of American writers are given incorrectly, as follows :—Dred Scot for Dred Scott, R. C. White for Richard Grant White, Halliburton for Haliburton, Gustapon for Gustafson, Nora Percy for Nora Perry, H. B. Dana for Richard H. Dana, W. G. Curtis for George William Curtis, C. C. Leland for Charles G. Leland, Faucett for Fawcett, Phmbe Carey for Cary, Miss Whitney for Mrs. Whitney, Gale Hamilton for Gail Hamilton, Brookes for Preston S. Brooks, the assailant of Charles Sumner, and in Mr. James's Portrait of a Lady the hero is Ralph Teuchett, not Roger Touch,ett. Professor Nichol speaks (p. 174) of Irving as at home "among the slopes of Sleepy Hollow, by which he built his New England home." This is also a mistake : Sunnyside, Irving's little home in the Sleepy Hollow region, was not in New England, but in the State of New York, near Tarrytown, on the Hudson. The date of Cooper's Pioneers was 1822, not 1823, as Professor Nichol gives it (p. 175). Long- fellow's Kavanagh is called (p. 178) " a perfect prose idyll [sic] of a, schoolhouse in the West." The scene of Kavanagh is laid in New England, as may be seen from the beginning of chapter Mitt. The well-known song My Maryland is wrongly included

among the "anonymous ballad literature of the war" (p. 239) ; it was written by James R. Randall. The date of the death of Theodore Winthrop was June 10th, 1861, not April 10th, as given by Professor Nichol (p. 371), and the name of the battle in which he fell was Big Bethel, not Great Bethel.

We cannot refrain from an allusion to the style of this book. What can the learned and brilliant author mean by allowing himself to write such sentences as "the, to him, face-haunted waters," or "this long anonymous and yet undeservedly- obscure romance," or " but, in both cases, a purely disinterested, was invoked by antagonism to a merely selfish, intolerance," or "a highly creditable, because frequently imaginative though sometimes rough, translation ;" or, worst of all, " the most famous of whom had she never met it would have been well for both " ? They sound more like extracts from Mark Twain's chapter on " The Awful German Language," than the deliberate writing of a Professor of English Literature, and the author of a. Primer of English Composition.

In conclusion, we would suggest to Professor Nichol that the value of his book would be much increased by the addition of chronological tables of the writers of the different periods, and especially of a chronological table to the chapter on " American Politics and Oratory ;" that a short bibliography of American literature would be very welcome in the appendix ; and that since the book is a "sketch " only, and he disclaims all inten- tion of making it a catalogue, he would do well to omit several long lists of names. In one place (pp. 185-6), he gives forty names on a page, and in the addendum, among novelists who " seem to have attained considerable celebrity," veteran authors like Edward Everett Hale and T. W. Higginson are classed with Robert Grant, whose only book, The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl, is the worthless scribble of a man just out of college ; and among " American poetesses " to whom the author pays a sarcastic "tribute of imperfect knowledge, bat implicit belief," Mrs. Lydia Maria Child is mentioned with half-a-dozen young ladies who have contributed occasionally to Harpers' or Scribner's magazine. This is mere cataloguing, and is unworthy of a place in such a work.

As we have criticised this volume at considerable length—a task which devolved upon us the more, since the three of our learned contemporaries which have already reviewed it have made no allusion to its inaccuracies, an omission which would hardly have occurred in the case of any literature except that of America—we recur with satisfaction to the author's prefatory statement that he will " be only grateful for corrections or suggestions, whether to omit or to add, that— friendly or otherwise—may proceed from any well-informed source." He will have seen already that we belong to the friendly class, and we congratulate him again upon the produc- tion of a timely, valuable, and very interesting work.