Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
impulse generous and manly, he fought the battles of the peculiar
institution as stoutly as if he had been born to his three hundred
slaves; and he suffered in consequence the loss of pretty nearly
everything, including his art. After his death, his friend Paul Hayne
wrote of him: “Simms’s genius _never had fair play!_ Circumstances
hampered him!” The judgment is just. Parochial Charleston brought about
his literary undoing.
In taste and temperament Simms was a pronounced realist, but his
career took shape from a generation given to every romantic excess.
His genius, in consequence, was always at cross purposes with the
popular taste. His realism turned naturally to low-life adventure;
his upper-class romance became stilted and posturing, and his love
of action degenerated into swashbuckling. That he survived such
mishaps at all, suggests the enormous vitality of the man. If there
had only been a little more of the intellectual in him, if he could
have detached himself as an artist from the immediate and present,
he might have risen superior to his unfortunate environment. But he
was constitutionally incapable of aloofness, and hence incapable of
criticism. To analyze, compare and judge was impossible to so ardent a
nature. He must be partisan to a people and a cause, rather than to his
art. The South that he loved was romantic, and he would appeal to the
world as a Southerner. He wore his sectional prejudices as the southern
politician wears his rumpled Prince Albert coat, broad-brimmed hat and
black string tie. He never realized what a clutter of useless luggage
he carried into his study. It is a pity that he constricted himself to
the shell of an outworn order, instead of realizing that social orders
and institutions are significant to the novelist only as he stands
apart from them, observing their ways and considering their interplay
in the lives of men and women. It was a major loss to American letters
that he should not have striven to be an artist first, and a southern
romantic only at a later and more convenient season. If he had served
his art more jealously, if he had learned from Poe to refuse the
demands of inconsequential things, he would have viewed his beloved
Charleston with keener eyes and portrayed it more adequately.
But he would not serve his art alone. Unhappily he conceived that
he owed an imperative duty to his native commonwealth, and in
fulfillment of that duty he frittered away his enormous vitality in
delivering patriotic orations and occasional addresses, serving in
the Legislature, pottering over politics, lecturing upon literature,
founding and editing magazines and essaying to bring culture to
Charleston by fiery impetuosity of appeal. He struggled as few other
Americans have done to further the cause of letters in a desperate
environment; but creative literature could neither be cajoled nor
coerced to take up an abode in the indolent little city, and Simms wore
himself out in a fruitless undertaking. Our literature has suffered
few greater losses than this wasting of the genius of Gilmore Simms
in trumpery fields that belong to the literary dray horse. It was the
inevitable outcome of the conflict between the creative artist and the
citizen of South Carolina.
Little as he is known to later readers Simms is by far the most virile
and interesting figure of the Old South. He was built on a generous
plan. He was endowed with a rich and prodigal nature, vigorous,
spontaneous, creative. There was in him much of Whitman’s largeness
and coarseness, much of his delight in the good things of earth. He
wrote with extraordinary gusto, and his fine strong face suggests that
he lived with equal gusto. As a professional man of letters he turned
out an incredible amount of work, by ordinary two tales a year--solid
works of five hundred pages each--together with poems and plays and
pot-boiling stuff to tax the capacity of two or three hack writers. He
poured out his material copiously, lavishly, with overrunning measure.
His stories flow as generously as his Jamaica rum. He is a veritable
geyser of invention, an abundant sea of salty speech. He has no sense
of restraint; he does not stop to prune the tangle of his imagination;
he refuses to strip the plot of extraneous incident to hasten its
action. He is as episodic as Dickens at his worst, piling up action
and multiplying threads till the story bogs down. The major plot is
always struggling from hummock to hummock in the endless swamp where
his characters slip in and out, rarely getting to firm ground, yet
never quite submerged. Prodigal of adventure and loving action, clumsy
as the natural man when confronted with sentiment, he is an American
Fielding with a dash of Smollett. He is at ease only out of doors, in
the fields and swamps and highways; there his speech becomes racy, and
there the rich poetry of his nature, which somehow rarely got into his
verse, comes to abundant and spontaneous expression. When he enters the
drawing-room his stilted language betrays his lack of ease. He writes
with his pen and not with his heart. The plantation tradition has him
in its grip and his fine ladies and gentlemen are done up with much
literary starch. But let him come upon a happy-go-lucky blackguard
and he loves him as Fielding would have loved him. The amusing scene
in which Lieutenant Porgy heaves a pot of hot hominy in the face of a
Scotch dragoon is quite evidently reminiscent of Parson Adams’ recourse
to a dish of hog’s blood in a certain tavern brawl.[411] Like Fielding
also is his criterion of morality. A frank and generous nature is his
infallible test of worth, and if his patriotism led him to bestow a
large share of generosity on the patriots, and a correspondingly meager
share on the Loyalists and British, he was but exercising an ancient
prerogative of the romancer.
Contemporary romanticism engrafted on a nature fundamentally realistic
developed a pronounced strain in his work which, for lack of an exacter
word, we may call picaresque. This comes out at its worst in the crude
border tales of _Richard Hurdis_ and _Border Beagles_, stories marked
by the coarseness of the eighteenth century, backwoods versions of
_Jonathan Wild_. At its best it created a goodly company of blackguards
that are an asset to American literature. Simms dearly loved a rogue,
and the more picturesque the latter’s knavery the more he loved him. A
gentleman villain turns to a thing of wood in his hands, but a low-born
rascal he creates out of living flesh and blood. A surprising number
of low figures, both rogues and honest men, enliven his cluttered
pages, individual, racy, often poetic. Realistic in speech and action,
they are men of special gifts, nimble of wit and rich in imagination,
sometimes fallen to base uses and sometimes ennobled by affection for
their superiors. Thumbscrew, Supple Jack Bannister, and Joe Ballou, the
partisan scouts; Isaac Muggs, mine host of the Black Riders; Goggle
the half-breed; Hell Fire Dick of Tophet, the blackguard converted by
_Pilgrim’s Progress_; Sam Bostwick the Squatter--these are admirable
figures, done with inimitable spirit, the choicest collection of
homespun in American literature. They impart life and drama to Simms’s
tales. Remove them, and his romances are only a welter of stilted
language and starchy situations. The scene, for example, between Jack
Bannister and Isaac Muggs, in which the latter is converted to true
republican principles by appeal to a backwoods ordeal by battle, is
magnificent in its broad humor, and it is a pity that Simms did not
give freer rein to his genius for such work. It is incomprehensible
that a man who could put into the mouth of Thumbscrew such language as
the following could have stooped to scribble the love scenes between
Ernest Mellichampe and Janet Berkeley:
When it so happens that the things a man’s got to love gits fewer
and smaller, they gits more valuable, Airnest, in his sight; for
he knows mighty well, if he loses them, that he’s jist like an old
bird that comes back to the tree when the blossoms and the flowers
have all dropped off, and are rotting under it. It’s mighty nigh to
winter in his heart then, Airnest--mighty nigh--and the sooner he
begins to look out a place to sleep in, the wiser man you may take
him to be. (_Mellichampe_, Chapter IX.)
But Simms was too inveterately episodical to construct a pretty plot,
and too careless in his generous southern hospitality to discriminate
between guests at his board. He throws a huge miscellany on the table
from which each may choose what pleases his taste.
Here again romanticism did him an evil turn. Southern taste was too
aristocratic to like coarse fare. Gentlemen must dine like gentlemen
even though black rascals served as waiters. Common fellows were well
enough in the background, but they must not presume to crowd their
betters from the table. In such matters Simms was constrained to follow
the orthodox literary tradition. From Shakespeare to Scott the notion
prevailed that legitimate romance must be conceived of as a flitch of
bacon, the lean of vulgarity alternating with the fat of gentility.
Hence Simms was forced to keep a weather eye on the popular taste
lest it be offended by too free an offering of the low. His negroes,
such as Scipio and Bram and Benny Bowlegs, are more worth while than
their masters, and his swamp-suckers are done with more gusto than
the officers; but when the plot demands the appearance of the gentry
he sends his black-bottle rapscallions about their business. Except
in occasional instances, as in the case of old Colonel Sinclair,
the Carolinian baron--a testy old gentleman done in the best gouty
manner--Simms does the “quality” badly and the canny reader soon learns
to skip the genteel passages in order to visit with Lieutenant Porgy or
follow the adventures of Hell Fire Dick or Supple Jack Bannister. There
is ample fare at his generous board, but one must pick and choose.
The critics have made quite too much of the Gothic extravagancies
that mar so many of his pages. It is true that Simms was a generous
purveyor of “blood-pudding” romance with its gory exploitation of
crime and mystery. Nothing can excuse or extenuate such folly in
the abstract; but it is easily comprehensible. It was a part of the
price which the professional man of letters had to pay as caterer to
a provincial reading public. After the surprising success of _Guy
Rivers_, Simms deliberately tested the taste of his readers by sending
forth _Richard Hurdis_ under a pen name; and the equal success of the
latter convinced him that American readers liked such fare. He had a
living to make; the market was limited, and he resolved to give the
public what it wanted. This accounts for his major sins. An enormous
number of chapters, together with whole volumes such as _Charlemont_
and _Beauchampe_--preposterous accounts of a notorious murder case in
Kentucky--deserve no better fate than the rubbish heap. They are in no
sense literature; yet unfortunately the very great powers of Simms are
too commonly measured by such trash, instead of by his Revolutionary
tales.
Simms was a loving student of older English literature and drew much
of his water from excellent wells. A happy instinct led him back to
the robust time of Elizabeth and those masculine playwrights whose
ample natures were so like his own. Shakespeare may be reckoned his
particular master--especially the prose of Shakespeare with its
Cheapside colloquialisms and racy idiomatic rhythms. No better training
school could be desired, and his loving apprenticeship to the older
vernacular serves to explain the source of Simms’s greatest literary
virtue. From long familiarity with the Elizabethans he derived his