Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
southern genius, and the work languished. Facile writers were fewer in
Charleston than in Boston.
But despite any shortcomings in the way of letters, to members of its
polite circles Charleston was the most delightful of American cities,
and its society the most distinguished. “I have never, since I could
form an opinion on such matters,” wrote Legaré from Brussels, where
he mingled with the most cultivated society, “doubted of the immense
superiority of Carolina society over all others on that continent, and
now feel it more than ever” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 218). It was a
common opinion of southern gentlemen, who, with their English notions
of a landed aristocracy, believed that “fixed landed property is of
the essence of civil society, properly so called.” It embodied the
planter ideal of a social capital, uncorrupted by a vulgar plutocracy.
Its highways ran out to the plantations; the free citizen of the Greek
democracy drew his wealth from the soil; the slave labored while the
master rode to and fro from the city. Law and politics were regarded
as respectable vocations for sons of gentlemen, but the ideal life was
acknowledged to be that of the planter, with his three thousand acres,
his three hundred negroes, his ricks of rice and bales of tobacco and
cotton. The profits that came from the law were certain to be invested
in land, and the young attorney dreamed of retiring in middle life to a
well-stocked plantation. To become a member of the ruling squirearchy
was an ambition that filled and satisfied the Charleston imagination.
II • William Crafts • Charleston Wit
The slightness of literary achievement in the Charleston of 1825 is
sufficiently attested by the considerable local fame that rewarded the
efforts of the volatile William Crafts. Born in Charleston in 1789,
the son of a well-to-do Yankee father and a southern mother, he was
sent to Harvard to complete his education, distinguished himself in the
classics and in declamation, achieved a gownsman’s fame for the brisk
informality of a Latin oration, and carried back to Charleston a great
reputation as a wit and scholar. He went into the law but burnt too few
candles at the shrine of Blackstone; was seized with political ambition
and proposed to make a great name for himself as a statesman, but his
politics were not agreeable to his constituents and his career failed
to arrive. He was a graceful orator in the florid southern style, an
agreeable fellow with a pleasant wit, who loved society, dabbled in
prose and verse, but proved to be unstable. He spread too much canvas
to the uncertain winds and his unballasted bark came to grief. He died
at the age of thirty-seven, leaving his writings to be gathered up and
published by his family--a miscellany that brought down upon it the
severe judgment of Hugh Legaré.
William Crafts was a transplanted Bostonian who essayed to domesticate
Harvard culture among the polite circles of Charleston. As an
undergraduate he admired the graceful preaching of Buckminster and the
acrid eloquence of Fisher Ames. The latter he seems to have adopted as
his political godfather, and from him he accepted a decadent Federalism
that got him into trouble when later he entered politics. But the chief
model on whom he shaped his life seems to have been Robert Treat Paine,
in the declining sun of whose fame the young Harvard undergraduate
warmed himself. With a less pregnant wit, a less trenchant prose style,
a less masculine oratory, he succeeded in becoming a smaller edition of
a petty master. The parallelism in the lives of the two apostles of wit
is striking. They were both dabblers, but Crafts possessed less skill
and dabbled less felicitously. They both broke with the rigid decorum
of their circles, but Paine achieved a more tragic shipwreck. They both
marked the last ebbing of the eighteenth century before the wit ideal
was submerged by the incoming tide of romanticism, and the reputations
of both have been forgotten.
In Crafts’ case, certainly, no injustice has been done. Such literary
wealth as he displayed would seem notable only in an indigent society.
His prose is vapid and feeble in the essay, and stilted and artificial
in the oration. His verse is insignificant in quantity--two formal
poems and a handful of occasional pieces--and wanting in distinction
of phrase or imagery. It is the work of a graceful imitator of doubtful
models. He wrote at the moment when the long supremacy of Pope was
yielding to the popularity of Moore, and his verse wavered between
the old loyalty and the new love. _Sullivan’s Island_, a carefully
elaborated descriptive poem, applies the structure and method of
_Windsor Forest_ to a local theme, following the original so closely as
to imitate the detail. His skill in the grand manner may be judged by a
single passage that phrases feebly what Pope had done vigorously:
When cooler gales foretell departing day,
The plaintive curlew homeward wings his way--
Now stoops, then soars, and fearing danger nigh,
To guardian heaven pours forth its piteous cry.
Alas! in vain. The fowler’s fond reply,
Still deemed its own, but tells it where to die.
_The Raciad_ is less crudely imitative. It is a brisk and rather
amusing account of the outpouring of Charleston society to the races,
the great event of the year in the gay southern capital. It is done
with some sprightliness, it is an amiable historical document, but it
is not important. When Crafts died in 1826 Charleston had done little
in the way of creative literature, but the stirring of the waters was
beginning. The following year a young apothecary just admitted to the
bar published a volume entitled _Lyrical and Other Poems_, first fruits
of the colossal labors of Gilmore Simms. In 1828 Hugh Legaré got _The
Southern Review_ on its feet, a substantial magazine that aspired to be
the mouthpiece of southern culture. With the beginning of the thirties
the Charleston renaissance was under way.
III • Hugh Swinton Legaré • Charleston Intellectual
A far solider nature than the ebullient Crafts was Hugh Swinton Legaré.
Of distinguished social position, the most cultivated mind in the South
before the Civil War, and one of the most cultivated in America, he was
an embodiment of the serious Charleston that served as counterweight
to the gayer. In Legaré the moral earnestness of the South came to its
most attractive expression. The repository of two streams of ethical
idealism, he was as Puritan as Calhoun. Natively aristocratic,
with a high sense of personal integrity and civic responsibility, a
profound student of law and letters, with the Charleston parochialism
brushed away by wide travel and intimate acquaintance with old-world
civilizations and classical cultures, he represented the excellent
seriousness that came to flower on the Carolina plantation as well as
in the New England meetinghouse. Southern Puritanism might be less
ungainly than that of Massachusetts, but it was equally introspective,
given to melancholy; and Hugh Legaré found his life as serious an
affair, and as laborious, as any New England Calvinist discovered his
to be. It is no holiday business to serve righteousness; wisdom does
not flower in the primrose path of dalliance; and this Charleston
gentleman emerged from a prolonged and arduous self-discipline as
complete a Puritan as Theodore Parker.
Descended in the fifth generation from a Huguenot ancestor who settled
in Charleston about 1695, he was French in name and by cherished family
tradition, but in little else. Through successive intermarriages,
the original French strain was pretty much diluted by the Scotch and
English, and few Gallic traits came down to him. In temperament and
sympathies he was the child of his mother, Mary Swinton, of Scotch
Covenanter blood. The native seriousness that came to him by right
of inheritance was intensified by fate. Inoculated for the smallpox
in his fourth year, the poison lingered in his system, keeping him
sickly for years and permanently stunting the lower half of his body.
Thus set apart from active life, he turned to books and entered upon
the career of a scholar. At the time of his death in 1842, at the
age of forty-five, he was perhaps the best linguist and the most
widely read man in America. A mature student of the classics, he
was intimately acquainted with French, Spanish, Italian and German,
and had added Romaic as a help to his Greek. This may seem a meager
list in comparison with Theodore Parker’s nineteen languages, but
the substantial acquisitions he gathered from the several bodies of
literature were far from meager.
Yet immense as were those acquisitions they were only supplementary to
his professional studies. The Charleston Puritan gave to the study of
law the same intensity that the Boston Puritan gave to theology. Not
content with a three years’ reading course in a law office, he went to
Europe to pursue his studies more comprehensively. At the University
of Edinburgh he plunged into an investigation of the Roman and Civil
Law, which henceforth was to be his major intellectual interest.
He found in the continental systems, he believed, a body of legal
principles more comprehensive and philosophical than the English Common
Law, and the ambition grew upon him to ingraft certain features of the
Civil Law upon American practice. After two years’ intense study he
came home, engaged in active practice of his profession, and ten years
later, at the age of thirty-five, was appointed _chargé d’affaires_ at
Brussels, where he spent four rich years. His diplomatic and social
life was subordinated to his studies, into which he threw himself
with the keenest zest, enlarging his knowledge of modern letters and
adding to his encyclopedic knowledge of legal systems. In 1841 he was
appointed Attorney-General of the United States in the cabinet of
President Tyler, and upon Webster’s retirement was given the additional
portfolio of Secretary of State _ad interim_. While on a visit to
Boston with President Tyler to assist in the Bunker Hill Monument
celebration, he was taken suddenly ill and died at the home of his
friend Professor Ticknor.
The man thus prematurely cut down was a nature of vast solidity.
Profoundly serious, inclined to the blackest melancholy, as pessimistic
as Fisher Ames, with no leaven of humor, no romance, no careless
idling, he was a hard taskmaster to his days. He toiled prodigiously at
his self-appointed tasks. His standards were severe, whether in letters
or law or politics or morals. As a critic he dealt with substantial
subjects: _The Constitutional History of Greece_; _The Origin,
History and Influence of Roman Legislation_; _Early Spanish Ballads_;
_Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians_; _Lord Byron’s Character and
Writings_--solid dissertations done with German thoroughness--reviews
of huge compass that provided opportunity for independent treatises.
As a lawyer he was rather a philosophical historian than a special
pleader. He was far more given to exploring the labyrinths of ancient
codes than to arguing cases. His legal erudition appalls the layman.
He had sat at the feet of black-letter philosophers; he had been
instructed by sages long since forgotten. His mind was an ample
storehouse of archaic legal maxims. He delighted in the crabbed law
Latin--its sententious phrases worn to the quick, the residuum and
repository of the wisdom bequeathed by past generations. Richer in
poetry than any verses of Byron were the Latin words _habeas corpus_
to one who, like this scholar, understood how packed they were with
English history, how rich in suggestion to all who love English
freedom. From this immense erudition came his love for old books and
venerable authorities. Blackstone he looked upon as a modern--“a