Stedman's Poets of America

IT is so seldom that a comprehensive subject finds the best equipped author to treat it that when the happy conjunction occurs in the case of a topic so leading and delicate as American poetry, as it does in this volume,¹ the guild should be free with its plaudits. The guild certainly, which has its share, men think, of human weakness, should he highly pleased ; there are few of its members, living or dead, who will not find their shadowy names in this New World Pantheon. Not to he mentioned here argues one’s self unknown indeed. This metropolitan acquaintance, this urban welcome, is a distinguishing trait of excellence in the work; there is a pleasurableness, too, in the ease and grace of it, in the delightful tolerance with which the author stands in the vestibule of that Temple of Fame, whose structure, alas, is most familiar to childish eyes, and greets the Manes of the departed as readily as a professional nomenclator, and passes them on with deft dispatch to find their niches within, until at the end of the half-hour audience he withdraws to the inner hall where the feast is spread for the Di Majores ; and when all is over, and he goes out at the gate, his familiarity is not less wide nor his kindly recognition less frequent among the crowding aspirants who are waiting for news from within that Venerable Edifice. This long-drawn simile hardly does justice to the long-drawn procession of the defunct who are, or are to be; but it serves to indicate a prime quality of the author, and one most beneficial to his study,— his catholicity. Nor is it the catholicity of a literary dictionary; it is penetrative and enlightening as well as inclusive. The days of magisterial criticism have gone by. Our author is by no manner of means a Rhadamanthus of judgment, but a host who is anxious to discover and bring out the good qualities of his visitors, and cares more for their particular faculty of entertainment, however narrow, than for their possibly multitudinous powers of boredom ; he means that no guest shall hide his one talent in his napkin. Mr. Stedman not only tolerates all comers, but he sets to work to understand them ; and readers who may take pains to hunt up some of the single poems on whose obscurity he flashes the ray of his praise will materially increase their stock of old-fashioned poetic gems. This discrimination saves his catholicity from the tedium in which it would have involved most writers, and allows him to give the body of literature, if we may say so, without its bulk. Thus both among the minor and greater authors he keeps to his aim, which was to present American poetry, in a sense, universally. A more rigid exclusion of weaklings, a less conscientious appreciation of undistinguished excellence, would have injured the completeness of the view. After all, though the poetasters fill the side-scenes of the background, and a few like Halleck or Dana serve as the walking gentlemen, the real dramatis personœ occupy the stage, and their characters make up the story,— Bryant, Whittier, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, Holmes, Lowell, Whitman, and Taylor. Thus Mr. Stedman solves the difficulty of the critical presentation of a literary period in the only way in which criticism is really a practicable mode of history, by dealing with persons directly and separately, and by employing in his inquiry a purely inductive method.

As was to be expected, he does not get far before he encounters the old bugbear that guards the entrance to our Parnassian preserves. Is there an American poetry ? Have we done only what Longfellow in his youth averred he was content to do ? Have we merely continued English literature, or are there a genuine nationality, an indigenous growth, an aboriginal quality, in our production hitherto? It is well enough to let the mind wander, after a Spencerian fashion, over the distant future, when from the attrition of our immigrant races a new people shall result, with a literature of its own ; but, in that, posterity has the principal interest. Such speculation may fill a paragraph; it is not the theme of the chapter. There is an abundance of literary fossils in our past, and from the study of them it appears that there was great effort at one time to breed a genus Americanum to browse on the pasturage of Pegasus. Here are relics of epic, pastoral, and lyric which belong to the period of the Red-Skin. The mass of our inspired writing about the Indians and their myths was extraordinarily voluminous, and it seems to have sprung from the notion that for our poetry to be original it must be aboriginal. A national literature, however, needed some other voucher than the trick of local color could give. It was as if Swinburne should claim admittance to Greek anthologies on the score of Atalanta or Erechtheus, or Shakespeare seek some Latin apotheosis for his Roman plays. This attempt of our earlier poets to develop a native literature by experimental variation was abortive. The effort merely to be different leads usually only to affectation, and so it was with those who were overanxious for the coming of a poetry as original as the very Bind o’ Fredum. The error of method is illustrated by a contrast with The Biglow Papers. Mr. Lowell found a living dialect which was a natural channel of sense and quick, brief tenderness, of grit and humor and shrewdness very near to sarcasm ; and he, as the poet does, in making it the mould of his own kindred spirit, illuminated it. The Biglow Papers are American in a narrower than the national sense ; they are Yankee, hut the “ new birth of our new soil” beyond all cavil. Those who, on the other hand, strove to make the Indian character a means of imaginative expression lacked power to subdue it, finding it altogether too alien ; with all their efforts, the work they left of this kind is decaying fungus. Doubtless it is true that Longfellow, in his Hiawatha, was obeying the same motive so far as his choice of a subject was concerned. That poem remains the single success in its class; but it is as little national in itself as is Thackeray’s Virginians.

Mr. Stedman thinks it is best that poets should take their topics from their own land, but he sets forth very emphatically his opinion that nationality is something that goes far below such surface matter as the theme. The youthful artifice of young America in war paint and feathers has passed into contempt. But without any special or conscious intention, did not our poets prove, after all, compatriots ? There is a farreaching truth in the doctrine that the test of a poem’s worth is the extent to which the nation absorbs it. There are poets’ poets, of course, — verses for the “ fit audience, though few ; ” but, to leave the question of intrinsic excellence and the finer qualities of elect spirits, it is certainly an indication of some national characteristic in a poem if the people absorb it by preference. Now, with the exception of a few, the American poets whom Mr. Stedman has selected for detailed examination have been thus absorbed by the reading class at large, and, intellectually speaking, that means the nation. Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier are popularly felt to be our own, not by birth only, but by a consanguinity of thought and character; and in a less degree the same is true of the others. With Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, and possibly Scott, left out of the account, no English poets come home to our people as do our own. Wordsworth has a literary, Shelley a poetic, constituency ; even Tennyson has only a half-hearted vogue; but with the exception of the three great names which have been mentioned, we believe that to our country to-day the word poetry means, in real knowledge, care, and affection, American poetry. Nor is this choice of the American branch of poetic literature one determined by a pseudopatriotism, or merely by nearness to a home market. There is a real community between the commonalty and the poets in what is corning to be recognized as specifically American character, in certain preferred modes of looking at things and in certain established moral values. But here we touch upon a further general aim of Mr. Stedman’s treatise.

The ultimate purpose of the author in this study was the same as in his earlier work on the Victorian Poets: not a history, a biography, nor a critical disquisition, though it becomes all these in changing phases, but an illustration of the poetic art. The motive of the whole is æsthetic. He takes up each author, and submits his productions to the inductive inquiry, without demanding anything beforehand as prerequisite, but merely seeking wherein was the success, and then asking by virtue of what it was a success ; and as he goes through the names upon our roll of honor in this fashion, he continually finds the old canons sound, — as, for instance, that simplicity, directness, sobriety, are the cardinal virtues of our Muse. But the influence of the subject as an element in our achievement, to which he gives much attention, must first be glanced at. A rational difference, not self-conscious, as in the singers of Indian legend and heroism, but inevitable, did show itself, by which our poetry is distinguished from any contemporary English verse. The earliest variation was in the region of landscape, and was manifest in Bryant, the Nestor of the band. The aspect of nature in this country, if not new, has novel features, and these made themselves felt at once in a poet who was true to his own impressions. It was a skillful touch in the critic to suggest the parallel history of American painting, characterized in its pioneer days by the qualities of the landscape which poetically is Bryant’s. It is worthy of passing remark that our scenery has affected our imaginative literature to a less degree than might have been anticipated. Of the success of Alfred Street as its delineator, to whom high praise is here ascribed, it is impossible for the present writer to speak, as he gave up the study of geography before the blast of this poet’s fame reached him ; but so far as landscape can be employed by the imagination, it is fair to say that in no other poet besides Bryant, with the single exception of Joaquin Miller, does it count as a constant and powerful factor. In addition to this source of originality, in the region of subject matter, there have been our civic life, which in its antislavery passion was expressed by Whittier, and in its more distinctly political and patriotic phase by Lowell ; our religious instinct, working for the most part in the softening of the older Puritanism, and finding literary form through the mild faith of the Quaker poet or the more ethereal spirituality of Emerson ; and our home affections, which as a factor of popular life have been so absorbed by Longfellow’s genius as to make him their distinctive representative. The other masters, Whitman, Poe, Holmes, and Taylor, touch the national themes too seldom to obtain the audience of the people to the same extent as the rest. American democracy is not yet red-shifted, and Whitman remains to the public mainly a curiosity ; Poe, we cannot help thinking, is for the most part a reminiscence of school-days, — the American boy’s delight, it may be, but a matter of indifference to the man ; Holmes, who is loved and venerated and felt to be an American of the Americans, is at our breakfast tables still the Autocrat; and Taylor was unfortunately too often touched by that literariness of theme which is fatal to one who would be a people’s poet. In this rapid survey reference is had only to the public view of our poetic literature ; and in this view the popular judgment has truly been determined by a nearness in the subject, the real proximity of the landscape, politics, morals, spiritual insights, and ideal affections, to the thousands of silent readers who have accepted the work because it had intimate relations with the contemporary life actually going on, and expressed it. It may be doubted, however, whether the substance of what is fairly to be called national thought and feeling in our more popular poetry has had more weight in getting it received than has the style itself.

To this matter of style, here better called poetic form, Mr. Stedman incessantly recurs. To show what it is and what its value is seems the part of his purpose which is dearest to him. It is more observed by him, perhaps, because his generation is contemporaneous with that effort after art in literature of which Poe was the pioneer, and to which we partly owe the technical perfection of our current types, whether in verse or prose. The necessity for attention to art, the general principle that the form is as essential as the matter in work of the highest order, he insists upon with emphasis, and not only by precept. The limitation which restricts the reception of Emerson’s verses or of Whitman’s is the same; the crudity which prevents their absorption by the people is one of art, of the form in which they are cast, the way in which they are put, — and this crudity may be the result equally of culture or its lack. Generally speaking, if the same test of the popular appreciation be applied here, it will be found that the most simple, direct, spontaneous style has gone the farthest. Mr. Stedman, it is to be noted, does not altogether assent to the validity of the decisions of universal suffrage in matters of poetry. He frequently depreciates the every-day rhymes, if one may call them so, of Longfellow or of Whittier, and seems to suspect in them the fallacies that are usually found in applause from the galleries. It is not enough for him that the people assert the poem’s worth; he desiderates the countersign of the finished critic, also. But this does not really make any difference. He finds that the canons of the most cultivated taste coincide with those of popular instinct in requiring a simple, direct, and spontaneous style ; there is only this to be inserted on the part of culture, that it requires a certain elevation which the people can often do without. Any form of affectation, any merely intricate play of thought or rhyme, any obscurity or circumlocution or too exquisite choiceness of word or phrase, is reprehended ; and in particular the danger which besets our literature to-day — the danger of style degenerating, as it tends to do, from structure into decoration, from mass into detail — is repeatedly dwelt upon, and in no hesitating way. It is a rare thing to find a critic who cares so much for art in composition, and has so sane and unfaltering a sense of its limitations. He understands, it is plain, that the mastery of a simple style — of such a one, to take a common example, as is shown in Longfellow’s birthday verses to Agassiz — is the ultimate of poetic effort; that the perfection of art is the perfection of nature in the modus loquendi, the " recapture ” of the “ first fine careless rapture : ” and it is on this coincidence of the demands of the people with the canons of perfected taste that genius builds its poetic work for any race or nation. In an eminent degree our people possess and cultivate in all departments of life this simplicity of manner and directness and genuineness of thought, feeling, and word. One who writes for them cannot be deeply touched by the fashion of a coterie or the affectations of a literary school; they will leave him unread, if his native vigor does not keep him as simple as themselves. Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, and portions of Lowell and Emerson, are read, however: they have not only topics near to the people, but the style of the people. In our view, this implies a tone in their art which denotes the republic quite as plainly as if all their work were in an Ionic dialect of English.

In thus developing our belief that this volume displays a body of literature which has proceeded from our living interests in its matter, and been moulded by our character in its style, and is consequently national in all essentials, the more important features of this study of our first American period have been incidentally touched upon. By the nature of our inquiry attention has been restricted to what is distinctly the people’s part of our literature, and that portion of it which makes its appeal to the more refined susceptibilities of a cultivated class has been thrown into the background. Of this there is a considerable quantity, and under metropolitan influences it is increasing. It is in itself evidence that our education in art is carried far enough; that style cannot fail to be considered by our accomplished poets, and enter into all competent critical estimates of their work. What is now needed is substance, and if there were more signs of its presence in our younger writers the passages in which our author prophesies a new and noble flight of American song would be more cheerful to those who know the difference between dawn and rose-color. Nevertheless, Mr. Stedman’s acquaintance with the field and the penetration he displays in criticism justify him in maintaining an individual opinion, which is that of an expert in his subject; nor will we despair of the republic because the Muse seems to be, as Shelley would say, “ in her interlunar swoon.” However it may turn out, it is as certain as anything that rests on human conviction that the way out of our twilight is in the direction of those poetic canons which have been here so admirably laid down, commented upon, and illustrated.

In closing our review we feel that we have done scanty justice to the variety, vigor, and incisiveness of a volume which is as noticeable for its fineness and multiplicity of detail as for its broad, clear, and easily managed general principles. This is the history of American poetry ; it is conceived and executed in the grand style of literary criticism, and it does not fall below its promise. It contains the facts of the case, and is especially valuable for the tact and completeness of its survey of minor literature, in itself a very difficult task ; and we suspect that it contains also the substance of the final verdict upon the greater authors whom it discusses individually. Mr. Stedman has put his hand upon the really noteworthy quality in each, and he has observed proportion in his dealing with them taken altogether. If there be an error, it is that of the scale of the arc which they at last will fill; but, granting the scale as he places it, the measures within it are not likely to be much disturbed. To say that the volume stands entirely by itself in the criticism of our poetic literature would be superfluous. It will long be the standard work on this subject. In such circumstances it is a pleasure to observe the temper of kindness, of cordiality, of anxiety to do justice to excellence rather than pounce upon obvious defects, which pervades it.