Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
that gave promise of excellent work later. He has lightness, grace,
refinement, an eye sensitive to picturesque effects, delight in line
and texture and color, an agreeable wit and playful sentiment, a relish
for English idiom and the literary colloquial. In _Horseshoe Robinson_,
written three years later, he abandoned the essay-sketch and turned
to the school of historical romance then in full swing. The story is
done in the orthodox manner of the thirties; it is compounded of equal
parts gentry and commoners, the former providing respectability and the
latter dramatic interest, the whole garnished with a few historical
figures. There is quite obvious concern for authentic reality. The
title-hero, a shrewd homespun scout, is carefully drawn from life; the
background of bushwhackings and forays and onsets, and the numerous
company of blackguards and honest folk, are painted in skillfully;
and the whole conducts to a dramatic finale in the battle of King’s
Mountain. It is an excellent tale, quite worth reading today, but
scarcely comparable in vividness and brisk action--in picaresque
realism which any true war story must embody--with _The Partisan_
of Gilmore Simms, written in the same year of 1835. Realism was not
Kennedy’s forte and after _Horseshoe Robinson_ he abandoned the field
of the Revolution which offered so rich an opportunity for the robuster
genius of the Charleston romancer.
In _Rob of the Bowl_ Kennedy opened a promising vein that he never
adequately explored--the vein of the cavalier romantic. Temperamentally
he was ill fitted to deal with rollicking action or picaresque
adventure; he preferred the leisurely, discursive romantic, subdued
to gentle raillery or humorous tenderness. One trembles to think what
Simms would have made of the materials that Kennedy brought together
in this tale of old St. Mary’s in the days of Charles II. Here is the
raw stuff of a true bloody-bones thriller: a gentlemanly blackguard
with the stumps of his legs bound in a huge rocking trencher and moving
about with the help of crutches, who is deep in the contraband trade;
a swaggering young pirate, a Brother of the Bloody Coast, who falls
in love with the daughter of the Collector of the Port and kidnaps
her from her father’s house; a romantic lover, slender and clerkly,
but skillful with the rapier, who turns out to be the son of Rob; a
haunted house that covers the smuggling operations of Rob and Captain
Cocklescraft; and all this set against a background of partisan
struggle between Roundhead and Cavalier, Protestant and Catholic, in
the early days of the Maryland settlement.
But in the handling the story is far removed from a bloody-bones tale.
The action is deliberately subdued to the humoresque; atmosphere is
studiously created; adventure is held in strict subjection to the
whimsical; and a mellow old-time flavor is imprisoned in the leisurely
pages. Kennedy had an appreciative eye for picturesque characters, and
in _Rob of the Bowl_ he has gathered a choice group, limned--as he
would choose to say--with a partial hand. Garret Weasel, the garrulous
pot-valiant innkeeper, and Dorothy his termagant spouse; Captain Jasper
Dauntless, the cogging, wheedling swordsman who twists Dame Dorothy
about his fingers and inveigles his host into undue commerce with
his cups--these to be sure are stock characters, but they are done
with excellent vivacity. Their abundant talk is well seasoned, and
if the action sometimes drags, the company is good and the drinking
is a sufficient end in itself. All the while he is writing Kennedy
keeps half an eye on Elizabethan literature to assure himself of the
exact turn of phrase. His vocabulary is saturated with the homely old
speech, and his characters talk as if they had culled all the simples
of English cottage gardens to garnish the staple of their wit. He has a
keener delight than Simms in the picturesque archaic. He far surpasses
Irving in easy mastery of the old-fashioned colloquial, as indeed he
surpasses all our early novelists. He delights in the courtly wit of
the Cavalier equally with the humors of Dogberry and Falstaff and
Captain Bobadil, and he quite evidently is seeking to cross the sparkle
of Congreve with the robustness of the Elizabethans. The result may
sometimes appear a bit self-conscious; his phrases too often seem to
be on dress parade; but he can plead his precedents in justification.
In its fondness for the literary colloquial his prose style almost
suggests Thackeray, and it is this suggestion, perhaps, that gave rise
to the tradition that Kennedy wrote for the former a certain chapter
of _The Virginians_. That he supplied Thackeray with materials for his
Virginia backgrounds may be accepted as true, but the indebtedness
probably went no further.
_Rob of the Bowl_ is certainly Kennedy’s best work, as it is one of
the most finished and delightful of our earlier romances. Although it
ran to six editions, the latest in 1907, it has scarcely received the
recognition its lightness of touch deserves. But instead of opening
the vein further he turned away to venture in new fields. _Quodlibet_,
written in 1840,[401] is a surprising successor to _Rob_--a satire on
Jacksonian democracy, done with a light touch and great good humor.
In those acrimonious days when Old Hickory’s attack on the Bank so
embittered its Whig partisans, Kennedy kept his temper, tipped his
shafts with laughter and sent them neatly between the joints of the
Democratic armor. Against such amusing satire fustian is helpless.
The book is keen, vivacious, sparkling. The supposed follies of
Jacksonianism--its deification of the majority vote, its cant of the
sovereign people, its hatred of all aristocrats, its demagoguery and
bluster and sheer buncombe--are hit off with exuberant raillery. The
story professes to be an account of the rise to prosperity of the
Borough of Quodlibet, under the beneficent smile of Democratic finance.
Mean and insignificant before the coming of Jackson, with the removal
of the “Deposites,” “like Jeshurun, it waxed fat,” with its rows
of brick shops built on speculation and its Patriotic Copper-Plate
Bank that issued an unlimited supply of beautifully engraved notes
as a stimulus to enterprise. To be sure the bank broke and the
cashier absconded with his family to Europe, but its untoward end was
attributed by all Jacksonian New Lights to the vile machinations of the
Whigs. It was certainly Nick Biddle and the Barings, with their hatred
of Old Bullion Benton’s democratic gold coinage, that were the devil in
the pot to spill the people’s porridge.
Yet even in its laughter Kennedy’s political bias is sharply and
narrowly partisan. The satire is a capitalistic counter to the agrarian
attack on the rising money power, and it is colored by the chagrin of
gentlemen who find themselves displaced by plebeians. Something of the
old aristocratic contempt for the plain man functioning as a political
animal lingers in its pages, which the bubbling humor does not wholly
conceal. In Jackson’s onslaught on the Bank, Kennedy discovers only an
impudent demagoguery; it is selfish and stupid, turmoiling the country
for partisan ends and seeking to cover its petty spite with the mantle
of patriotism. The Old Hero cuts a sorry figure in these brisk pages,
and Van Buren a still sorrier one. The satire sparkles amusingly, but
it is drawn from the old Federalist vintage and it preserves the flavor
of a time when gentlemen frankly resented the rule of the unwashed
majority. For that very reason _Quodlibet_ is an unusually interesting
document. It is the most vivacious criticism of Jacksonianism in our
political library, one of our few distinguished political satires, and
it deserves a better fate than to gather dust on old shelves.
After _Quodlibet_ Kennedy did little else. The last twenty years of his
life were largely wasted. His dignified life of William Wirt, published
in 1849, seems to have met with approval, for it ran to six editions.
Our grandfathers liked stately narrative that portrayed their subjects
in full dress; and Kennedy gave them an impeccably respectable work in
which all the rugosities of character were ironed out neatly and a fine
starchy effect achieved. It is hard to understand how a writer so keen
to detect the whimsical should have drawn so lifeless a picture of the
genial Attorney-General. Perhaps the memory of Wirt’s reputed greatness
rested too heavily upon him; or it may have been that a lawyer in
old Virginia lived as colorless a life as the narrative suggests; at
any rate the novelist who never had failed to breathe life into the
characters of his fiction, somehow failed in depicting this excellent
gentleman of the old school. During the Civil War Kennedy contributed
to the northern cause his _Letters of Mr. Paul Ambrose on the Great
Rebellion in the United States_, in which he again showed that he
could keep his temper and argue calmly. It was a difficult theme for
which he was inadequately equipped. His constitutional argument is not
impressive and it makes an ill showing when set over against Alexander
H. Stephens’ _Constitutional View of the War between the States_. He
was a man of letters rather than a lawyer, and if he had eschewed
politics and law and stuck to his pen our literature would have been
greatly in his debt. Few Americans of his day were so generously
gifted; none possessed a lighter touch. He has been somewhat carelessly
forgotten even by our literary historians who can plead no excuse for
so grave a blunder.
III • Edgar Allan Poe • Romantic
It is from this slovenly background of aristocratic Virginia, with
its liberalisms and conservatisms running at cross purposes, that the
enigmatical figure of Poe emerged to vex the northern critics. In so
far as any particular environment determined his highly individual and
creative nature, it was the indolent life of the planter gentry, shot
through with a pugnacious pride of locality, with a strong dislike of
alien ways, with haughtiness, dissipation, wastefulness, chivalry.
In his proud, irascible individualism that went out of its way to
pick a quarrel, there is something of the spirit of John Randolph of
Roanoke, but pied and streaked with unfortunate qualities that to
many observers seemed the marks of the mere charlatan. As a southern
gentleman he imbibed the common dislike of New England, and this
dislike was aggravated by its diverse conception of the functions of
art, and by the misfortunes that attended his literary career. An
aesthete and a craftsman, the first American writer to be concerned
with beauty alone, his ideals ran counter to every major interest
of the New England renaissance: the mystical, optimistic element in
transcendentalism; the social conscience that would make the world
over in accordance with French idealism, and that meddled with its
neighbor’s affairs in applying its equalitarianism to the negro; the
pervasive moralism that would accept no other criteria by which to
judge life and letters--these things could not fail to irritate a
nature too easily ruffled. The Yankee parochialisms rubbed across his
Virginia parochialisms; and when to these was added a Yankee preëmption
of the field of literary criticism, when a little clique engaged in the
business of mutual admiration puffed New England mediocrities at his
expense, the provocation was enough to arouse in a sensitive southern
mind an antagonism that rivaled Beverley Tucker’s. In his unhappy
pilgrimage through life Poe was his own worst enemy, but he took
comfort in charging his ill fortune upon the malignancy of others.
Southern though he was in the deep prejudices of a suspicious nature,
his aloofness from his own Virginia world was complete. Aside from his