Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 7

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The effect of the war upon American literature has been variously estimated. Stedman has been quoted often: "The Civil War was a general absorbent at the crisis when a second group of poets began to form. The conflict not only checked the rise of a new school, but was followed by a time of languor in which the songs of Apollo seemed trivial to those who had listened to the shout of Mars."[5] It was Richardson's opinion that "little that was notable was added to the literature of the country by the Civil War of 1861. … The creative powers of our best authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though books and readers multiplied between 1861 and 1865."[6] And Greenough White dismisses the matter with the remark that "after the war, Bryant, Longfellow, and Taylor, as if their power of original production was exhausted, turned to translation."[7]

All this lacks perspective. Stedman views the matter from the true mid-century standpoint. Poetry to Stedman and Stoddard and Hayne and Aldrich and Taylor was an esoteric, beautiful thing to be worshiped and followed for itself alone like a goddess, a being from another sphere than ours, to devote one's soul to, "like the lady of Shalott," to quote Stevenson, "peering into a mirror with her back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality." Keats had been the father of this group of poets which had been broken in upon rudely by the war, and it had been the message of Keats that life with its wretchedness and commonplaceness and struggle was to be escaped from by means of Poesy:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

But poetry is the voice of life; it is not an avenue by which to escape from life's problems. The poet springs from his times and voices his era because he must. If his era smothers him, then so much the less poet he. No war can check the rise of a new school of poets if the soul of that new age is one to be expressed in poetry.

What Stedman and the others failed to see was the new American soul which had been created by the war and which the new school, trained in the old conceptions of poetry, was powerless to voice. If the creative powers of the leading authors were numbed, if Bryant and Longfellow and Taylor felt that their power of original production was exhausted and so turned to translation, it was because they felt themselves powerless to take wing in the new atmosphere.

The North before the war had been aristocratic in its intellectual life, just as the South had been aristocratic in its social régime. Literature and oratory and scholarship had been accomplishments of the few. J. G. Holland estimated in 1870 that the lecturers in the widespread lyceum system when it was at its highest point, "those men who made the platform popular and useful and apparently indispensable, did not number more than twenty-five." The whole New England period was dominated by a handful of men. The Saturday Club, which contained the most of them, had, according to Barrett Wendell, twenty-six members "all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance." Howells characterizes it as a "real aristocracy of intellect. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest." It is significant that these were all Harvard men. The period was dominated by college men. In addition to the names mentioned by Howells, there might be added from the New England colleges, Webster, Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Parker, Clarke, Phillips, Sumner, Thoreau, Parsons, and Hale. Excepting Poe, who for a time was a student at the University of Virginia and at West Point, and Whittier, who was self-educated, and two women, Margaret Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, who lived in the period when colleges were open only for men, the list contains all the leading authors of the mid-period in America.

With few exceptions these names come from what Holmes denominates "the Brahmin caste of New England," a term which he uses to distinguish them from what he called "the homespun class"—"a few chosen families against the great multitude." "Their family names are always on some college catalogue or other." From 1830 to 1870 the creation of literature was very little in the hands of the masses; it was in the hands of these scholars, of this small and provincial "aristocracy of intellect." Holmes, who gloried in the fact that he lived in Boston, "the hub of the universe," on Beacon Street, "the sunny street that holds the sifted few," may be taken as a type of this aristocracy. It was a period of the limited circle of producers, and of mutual admiration within the circumference of that circle. Each member of the group took himself with great seriousness and was taken at his own valuation by the others. When the new democratic, after-the-war America, in the person of Mark Twain, came into the circle and in the true Western style made free with sacred personalities, he was received with frozen silence.

The school, on the whole, stood aloof from the civil and religious activities of its period. With the exception of Whittier, who was not a Brahmin, the larger figures of the era took interest in the great issues of their generation only when these issues had been forced into the field of their emotions. They were bookish men, and they were prone to look not into their hearts or into the heart of their epoch, but into their libraries. In 1856, when America was smoldering with what so soon was to burst out into a maelstrom of fire, Longfellow wrote in his journal, "Dined with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others. I was amused and annoyed to see how soon the conversation drifted off into politics. It was not till after dinner in the library that we got upon anything really interesting."[8] The houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly translated. Even Lowell, the most democratic American of the group, save Whittier, wrote from Paris in 1873, "In certain ways this side is more agreeable to my tastes than the other." And again the next year he wrote from Florence: "America is too busy, too troubled about many things, and Martha is only good to make puddings."

Howells in his novel, A Woman's Reason, has given us a view of this American worship of Europe during this period. Says Lord Rainford, who has been only in Boston and Newport: "I find your people—your best people, I suppose they are—very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant—only talk about Europe. They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in their own country. I can't make it out. … They always seem to have been reading the Fortnightly, and the Saturday Review, and the Spectator, and the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the last French and English books. It's very odd."

Europe colors the whole epoch. Following Irving's Sketch Book, a small library was written by eager souls to whom Europe was a wonderland and a dream. Longfellow's Outre Mer and Hyperion, Tuckerman's Italian Sketch Book, Willis's Pencillings by the Way, Cooper's Gleanings in Europe, Sanderson's Sketches of Paris, Sprague's Letters from Europe, Colton's Four Years in Great Britain, Taylor's Views Afoot, Bryant's Letters of a Traveller, Curtis's Nile Notes of a Howadji, Greeley's Glances at Europe, Mrs. Stowe's Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Norton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, Hawthorne's Our Old Home, Calvert's Scenes and Thoughts in Europe, and, after the war, Howells's Venetian Life, and Hay's Castilian Days are only the better-known books of the list. "Our people," complained Emerson, "have their intellectual culture from one country and their duties from another," and it was so until after the Civil War had given to America a vision of her own self. Innocents Abroad was the first American book about Europe that stood squarely on its own feet and told what it saw without sentimentality or romantic colorings or yieldings to the conventional. After Innocents Abroad there were no more rhapsodies of Europe.

America was a new land with a new message and new problems and a new hope for mankind—a hope as great as that which had fired the imagination of Europe during the years of the French Revolution, yet American writers of the mid-century were content to look into their books and echo worn old themes of other lands. The Holmes who in his youth had written Old Ironsides was content now with vers de société,

I'm a florist in verse, and what would people say If I came to a banquet without my bouquet?

And with the thrill and rush of a new nation all about him, Stoddard could sit in his study turning out pretty Herrick-like trifles like this:

Why are red roses red?

For roses once were white,

Because the loving nightingales

Sang on their thorns all night—

Sang till the blood they shed

Had dyed the roses red.

It was a period when both Europe and America were too much dominated by what Boyesen called "the parlor poet," "who stands aloof from life, retiring into the close-curtained privacy of his study to ponder upon some abstract, bloodless, and sexless theme for the edification of a blasé, over-refined public with nerves that can no longer relish the soul-stirring passions and emotions of a healthy and active humanity." In Europe, the reaction from this type of work came with Millet, the peasant painter of France, with Tolstoy and the Russian realists, with Balzac and Flaubert in France, with Hardy in England, with Ibsen and Björnson in Norway, workers with whom art was life itself.

America especially had been given to softness and sentimentalism. During the mid-century era, the period of Longfellow, the lusty new nation, which was developing a new hope for all mankind, had asked for bread and it had been given all too often "lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon." The oratory had been eloquent, sometimes grandiloquent. The prose, great areas of it, had been affected, embellished with a certain florid youngmanishness, a honey-gathering of phrases even to the point of bad taste, as when Lowell wrote of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic honey." It was the time when ornateness of figure and poeticalness of diction were regarded as essentials of style.

To understand what the Civil War destroyed and what it created, at least in the field of prose style, one should read the two orations delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battle-field. Here was the moment of transition between the old American literature and the new. Everett, the eloquent voice of New England, correct, polished, fervid, massing perfect periods to a climax, scholarly, sonorous of diction, studied of movement, finished, left the platform after his long effort, satisfied. The eyes of the few who could judge of oratory as a finished work of art had been upon him and he had stood the test. Then had come for a single moment the Man of the West, the plain man of the people, retiring, ungainly, untrained in the smooth school of art, voicing in simple words a simple message, wrung not from books but from the depths of a soul deeply stirred, and now, fifty years later, the oration of Everett can be found only by reference librarians, while the message of Lincoln is declaimed by every school-boy.

The half-century since the war has stood for the rise of nationalism and of populism, not in the narrower political meanings of these words, but in the generic sense. The older group of writers had been narrowly provincial. Hawthorne wrote to Bridge shortly before the war: "At present we have no country. … The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is really as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in."[9] The war shook America awake, it destroyed sectionalism, and revealed the nation to itself. It was satisfied no longer with theatrical effects without real feeling. After the tremendous reality of the war, it demanded genuineness and the truth of life. A new spirit—social, dramatic, intense—took the place of the old dreaming and sentiment and sadness. The people had awakened. The intellectual life of the nation no longer was to be in the hands of the aristocratic, scholarly few. Even while the war was in progress a bill had passed Congress appropriating vast areas of the public lands for the establishment in every State of a college for the people "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," and it is significant that Lincoln, the first great President of the people, signed the bill.