Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
mastery of English idiom that sets him widely apart from most other
contemporary Americans. In easy outpouring of picturesque speech, of
the lithe and muscular idiom of the older literature, he was without
a rival in his generation. Many an old Elizabethan phrase lingered
in the southern backwoods, and many an indigenous turn of speech had
sprung from homely new-world experience. All such Simms seized upon
with the relish of a gourmand, stirring them into the great pot from
which he ladled such generous spoonfuls. Later critics have been
singularly obtuse in their failure to do justice to his rich linguistic
equipment. Quite too much comment has been devoted to his careless
slips in rhetorical construction, and quite too little to his command
of masculine English prose. It is absurd to couple him with Cooper in
sinning against good writing. They are as unlike as two men could well
be. Simms is incomparably the greater master of racy prose, as he is
much the richer nature. The only contemporary indeed who approaches him
is Melville in _Moby Dick_. He is careless and slovenly enough in all
conscience; when he goes on a rampage he mouths his lines like any town
crier. But though he keeps a sharp eye on the groundlings, though he is
often preposterous, he is rarely wooden, never feeble.
The Elizabethan influence comes out strikingly in the character of
Lieutenant Porgy, the spoilt child of his imagination, who runs through
the Revolutionary romances as a sort of comic chorus. Despite Professor
Trent’s opinion to the contrary, Porgy is a South Carolinian Falstaff,
quite evidently done with a close eye to the original. He is a very
mountain of a fellow, with huge paunch and spindling shanks from too
much sitting at the table and in the saddle--the most amusing and
substantial comic character in our early fiction. As a South Carolina
gentleman, Porgy of course was no liar or coward or woman cheater. In
battle he is an avalanche of patriotic valor, and in his deference to
the weak and dependent, in his free-handed generosity that encumbers
him with penniless hangers-on, he is model of southern chivalry. But
in the far greater matters of the belly, he is strikingly Falstaffian.
He is not so much a valiant trencherman, as an artist in food and
drink. He lived to eat and he ate to speculate on the virtues of a
good dinner. “He took philosophy with him to the table, and grew wise
over his wine” (_Woodcraft_, Chapter XVIII). He is an epicure in
words, a gourmand of wit. The copious stream of his speech runs on in
an endless flow, sometimes roily but never stagnant. A pat aphorism
or a picturesque phrase is as succulent to him as Carolina terrapin.
When philosophy fails he stoops to horseplay, but his practical jokes
are carried off with theatrical splendor, with colossal assurance.
Like Falstaff he is fond of practicing his wit on his followers. His
Bardolph is a certain Geordie Dennison, the swamp poet of the troop;
and Porgy honors him as one artist honors the craft of another.
But the most satisfying comradeship lies between Porgy and Black Tom,
fellow practitioners of the gentle art of cookery, sworn liegemen to
roasts and soups and stews. Together they make the swamp commissariat
bloom like a Covent Garden market. They are master foragers untroubled
by an overnice conscience. “Do as much stealing in an honest way as
you can,” the lieutenant remarks to Tom. “D--n the patriotism that
can’t eat stolen fruit!” At a pinch the native resources of the swamp
are boldly commandeered. The creative masterpiece of the valiant Porgy
was a notable banquet which he proffered General Greene and his staff
in their swamp quarters. His infinite resourcefulness in this great
affair, his huge inventiveness, elevate the dinner to the rank of a
culinary epic. The swamp frogs that he speared by moonlight, and the
young alligators that he took by subtle stratagem, were transmogrified
into delectable dishes served to his guests under the alluring names
of _alerta_ and _lagarta_.[412] The scene is done with a gusto that
only the worshiper of fleshpots could achieve. Simms delighted in
Porgy because he was himself something of a Porgy. There is good fare
for those who sit at table with the fat humorist of _The Forayers_;
the ready talk does not lack the salt of wit. The later Porgy of
_Woodcraft_ scarcely comes up to the earlier. His debts weigh too
heavily on his spirits for the easy play of his fancy; he is less
redoubtable as a wooer than as a warrior; nevertheless there is
excellent humor to be enjoyed at Glen Eberle, and some extraordinary
pranks.
The two major themes with which his romances deal, as has been
often pointed out, are the frontier and the Revolution; but the
intimate connection between them has not been so commonly remarked.
In much of his better work the two themes blend into one. The
conditions of civil war in the South thrust into sharp relief the
cultural and psychological frontier that clung to the outskirts of
the plantations--the ragged edges of a society that kept the poor
whites submerged and bred a numerous progeny of coarse and primitive
creatures, little better than social outcasts. Not the least of the
curses of slavery--as Helper pointed out--was its blighting effect
on the less prosperous whites who environed every plantation with
its special frontier. With his strong bias towards realism Simms
refused to romanticize what was inherently unlovely. Like Baldwin
in his _Flush Times of Mississippi and Alabama_, he discovered an
ample supply of blackguards and sharpers in the no man’s land beyond
the settlements. The log cabins of the swamp country harbored their
motley crew in no wise different from their fellows of the farther
frontier along the Mississippi; and these precious rascals he drags
from their lurking-places to exhibit in the light of day. The frontier
in consequence is rarely absent from his stories, and it is this
picaresque interpretation that sets him so sharply off from Cooper.
A recent student, in commenting on the contrast between the frontier
of Cooper and Simms, suggests that “perhaps the earlier frontier had
been intrinsically more dignified than that which Simms had observed;
perhaps the difference is that Cooper’s had lain deeper under the
softening shadow of the past” (Van Doren, _The American Novel_, p.
65). But this is quite to miss the point, both of Cooper and Simms.
The real explanation is to be sought in the different interpretations
of the romantic and the realist. Cooper’s frontier existed only in his
imagination. When he came face to face with the reality, as in the
case of old Aaron Thousandacres and his lawless brood, he hated it
too frankly to portray it justly. The stern Puritan squatter and his
fiercer wife are magnificent caricatures, drawn to serve a partisan
purpose. They provide a romantic contrast to the honest Chainbearer,
spokesman of the psychology of the settlements; but set beside Simon
Suggs, master of the frontier technic of easy money, as depicted by
Joseph Baldwin, they are as romantic as Cooper’s Indians.
The picaresque note is frankly emphasized in Simms’ Revolutionary
tales. All the swamp-suckers and rapscallions found their heaven-sent
opportunity in the disorders of civil war. No realist could write about
the Revolution in South Carolina without noting the flocks of buzzards
gathering to fall upon the carrion. War is not a heroic thing in
these stirring pages. It invites debauchery and encourages brutality.
Blackguards put a black stain on military glory. In the preface to _The
Scout_, Simms remarks:
To burn and slay were not the simple performances of this reckless
period and ravaged country. To burn in wantonness and to murder
in cold blood, and by the cruellest tortures, were the familiar
achievements of the time: ... The face of the country was overrun
by outlaws. Detached bands of ruffians, formed upon the frontiers
of Georgia, and in the wilds of Florida--refugees from all the
colonies--availed themselves of the absence of civil authority to
effect a lodgment in the swamps, the forests, and the mountains.
These, mounted on swift horses, traversed the state with the wind;
now here, now there; one moment operating on the Savannah, the next
on the Peedee; sometimes descending within sight of the smokes of
the metropolis; and anon, building their own fires on the lofty
summits of the Appalachian ridge.
Now and then in his pages war flashes out in romantic or heroic
episodes, but for the most part it is mean and degrading, a thing to
be hated. Simms loved action too keenly not to make the most of the
countless onsets and forays, the ambushing of Hessians and the cutting
off of wagon trains; he found in them material for many a brisk page
and stirring adventure; but in the end it is the brutality of it all,
the unhappy loosing of evil passions, that gives him most concern. It
was a hard world, and the soft-hearted Jack Bannister, speaking with
the tongue of Simms, could find comfort only in stoicism. “A man ought
not to be too soft about the heart, in a world like this, so full of
rascals that need the knockings of a hard and heavy hand.”
It is this strong seasoning of the picaresque, perhaps, that accounts
for the neglect that has befallen the work of Simms. Many blackguards
and generous potations of Jamaica rum consorted ill with the genteel
tradition in letters that grew up in the days following the Civil
War; and romantic memories of a lost cause threw an idyllic haze over
earlier times. The Revolutionary War lay too far in the past for a
generation suffering from a great tragedy to concern itself with, and
the vivid and vital work of Simms scarcely outlived its creator. The
Revolutionary tales have been largely forgotten, and from his abundant
work only _The Yemassee_ has survived in popular affection, and this
partly from the vogue of Cooper. The winnowing has been severe and
scarcely just. The best of Simms is not in _The Yemassee_, but in those
stirring tales of Marion’s men who carried on a bushwhacking campaign
under the hot sun of the dog days. _The Partisan_ and _The Forayers_
and _Woodcraft_ deserve a better fate than has befallen them. The ghost
of Cooper does not haunt their pages to challenge comparison, as it
does _The Yemassee_, and bring into question their relative merits.
There Simms is at home, in the swamps and fields and villages, with men
whose ways he knew and loved, and his generous nature followed its own
impulses.
But in dealing with the Indians he entered a domain preëmpted by the
romantic, and his picaresque realism suffered a disastrous rivalry.
Like Robert Montgomery Bird’s _Nick of the Woods, The Yemassee_
is heavily marked by the frontier psychology. It was unfortunate,
perhaps, that Simms did not follow Cooper’s example and plunge into
the wilderness, leaving behind him the squatter and settler with their
sordid prose. Instead, his Indians are encompassed by a dark background
of civilization, and their tragic destiny is poignantly dramatized in
the fate of young Occonestoga, besotted with the white man’s rum, and
doomed to a destruction far less poetic than befalls Uncas fighting
his hereditary foes. Nevertheless a wealth of romantic material is
crowded into the volume, enough to serve Cooper for half a dozen tales.
In simplifying his plots to the uncomplicated problem of flight and
pursuit, the latter gains in dramatic swiftness of movement, but he
loses in abundance of accompanying action--the sense of cross purposes
and many-sided activities, which _The Yemassee_ so richly suggests.
The latter is an elaborately carved and heavily freighted Spanish bark
that is left far astern by the trim Yankee clipper ship; yet its cargo