Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
that has been properly educated by experience calmly selects its
agents, and coolly sets to work to adopt a set of principles to
form its fundamental law or constitution, the machine is on the
right track, and will work well enough so long as it is kept there;
but this running off and altering the fundamental principles every
time a political faction has need of recruits, is introducing
tyranny in its worst form--a tyranny that is just as dangerous to
real liberty as hypocrisy is to religion. (Chapter XIII.)
Some observers pretend that ... respect for law is gradually
decreasing among us [he argued in _The Chainbearer_] and that
in its place is sensibly growing up a disposition to substitute
the opinions, wishes, and interests of local majorities, making
the country subject to men instead of principles. The last are
eternal and immutable; and coming of God, men, however unanimous
in sentiment, have no more right to attempt to change them, than
to blaspheme His holy name. All that the most exalted and largest
political liberty can ever beneficially effect is to apply these
principles to the good of the human race, in the management of
their daily affairs; but when they attempt to substitute for these
pure and just rules of right, laws conceived in selfishness and
executed by the power of numbers, they merely exhibit tyranny
in its popular form, instead of in its old aspect of kingly and
aristocratic abuses. It is a fatal mistake to fancy that freedom
is gained by the mere achievement of a right to govern, unless the
manner in which that right is to be both understood and practised
is closely incorporated with all popular notions of what has been
obtained. The right to govern means no more than the right of the
people to avail themselves of the power thus acquired to apply the
great principles of justice to their own benefit, and from the
possession of which they had hitherto been excluded. It confers
no power to do that which is inherently wrong, under any pretense
whatever. (Chapter XXVIII.)
Like Hugh Henry Brackenridge before him, Cooper was a democrat who
criticized the ways of a reputed democracy because of his love for
an ideal republic. Too few of his kind have arisen in America; too
few who dare to speak their minds unterrified by public opinion. An
individualist of the old English breed, he could not be intimidated
or coerced in the matter of his rights by any clamor, whether of
newspapers or mobs. He had his shortcomings in plenty, both as
romancer and critic. Testy, opinionated, tactless, forever lugging
in disagreeable truths by the ears, he said many wise things so
blunderingly as to make truth doubly offensive, and he hewed at his art
so awkwardly as well-nigh to destroy the beauty of his romance. Yet the
more intimately one comes to know him, the more one comes to respect
his honest, manly nature that loved justice and decency more than
popularity. His daily life became a long warfare with his fellows, who
exacted of him a great price for his idealism; but later generations
should love him none the less for the battles he fought. That America
has been so tardy in coming to know him as a man and a democrat, as
well as a romancer, is a reflection upon its critical acumen.
Footnotes
[425] See the Preface to _The Redskins_.
Chapter V • Some Contributions of New England
It was the good fortune of New York to draw to the bustling city some
of the best and most vigorous minds of New England. If the sons of
Yankees flocked thither, the sons of Puritans came likewise, and the
contributions of these latter to the idealism of a society rather too
fond of material progress must not be overlooked. The literature of
New York in particular was heavily indebted to New England. One need
only run over a list of writers who came from New England to realize
how great was its total contribution to the production of the New York
group. Bryant and Halleck and Willis and Greeley and Beecher and Curtis
and Tuckerman and Parke Benjamin and Stedman and Stoddard and even, in
a sense, Melville, were products of that more serious-minded world that
was to create transcendentalism and issue in strange projects of social
reform; they were men who would easily share the ethical enthusiasm of
their Puritan fellows, and create a literature concerned with other
than aesthetic values. Not all of them were Puritan in ideals; Halleck
and Willis quite evidently not; nevertheless the severe idealism of
their work sets it apart from the productions of the Knickerbocker
school. Perhaps not above, but certainly apart; and this unlikeness
calls for some special consideration. Over against Irving and Paulding
and Cooper may be set Bryant and Greeley and Melville, and the sharp
contrast between them will serve to differentiate the native mind of
New York from that of New England.
I • William Cullen Bryant • Puritan Liberal
For upwards of half a century now too much of Bryant has been
obscured by the brightness of his early fame. Since his death a
serious injustice has been done him by the critics, who have dwelt
too exclusively on his work in the field of verse to the neglect of
other work in fields perhaps quite as significant. The journalist
has been forgotten in the poet, the later democrat who spoke for
American liberalism has been displaced by the youthful versifier who
described American scenery. For this our bellettristic historians, who
are impatient of any incursions into matter of fact, are to blame.
Yet to ignore so much of Bryant results in underestimating him, and
this serves to explain the thin and shadowy quality of his present
reputation. He was a much larger man and more significant than the
critics have made him out to be. His active and many-sided life is very
inadequately expressed in the slender volume of his verse, excellent
as much of that is. The journalist and critic who for fifty years sat
in judgment on matters political and economic as well as cultural,
who reflected in the _Evening Post_ a refinement of taste and dignity
of character before unequaled in American journalism, was of service
to America quite apart from his contribution to our incipient poetry.
He was the father of nineteenth-century American journalism as well
as the father of nineteenth-century American poetry. In the columns
of the _Evening Post_ the best liberalism of the times found a place,
inspired and guided by Bryant’s clear intelligence. The lucidity of his
comment and the keenness of his humanitarian criticism set the editor
apart from shriller contemporaries, and made him a power for sanity in
a scurrilous generation. But with his death the evanescent character of
even the highest journalism asserted itself, and with the fading of his
journalistic reputation the earlier Bryant of _Thanatopsis_ shouldered
aside the Bryant of the _Evening Post_, and an unconscious distortion
of his career began, a distortion made easier by the fact that no
outstanding work of the later period remained to restore the balance.
In this he is like Jefferson. He is scattered piecemeal through his
occasional writings as the latter through his letters, and the task of
piecing him together and visualizing his work as a whole has not yet
been done.
It will not prove an easy task. The narrow but real genius of Bryant
is peculiarly elusive. His was essentially a self-pollenizing nature
that needed few contacts with other minds. He lived within himself,
little swayed by modes of thought, slowly maturing the native fruit of
his speculation. The very tenacity and persistence of his intellectual
life, the rigid integrity of his thinking, suggest the confidence of
one who drew his nourishment from within, whose life was an organic
growth. It is impossible to mistake his origins. The roots go down
to deep substrata of Puritan seriousness and Puritan austerity, and
the fruits which they nourish--somewhat scanty it may be but of firm
texture and good keeping qualities--possess the slightly acrid flavor
of old Puritan orchards where the care of the husbandman is pitted
against harsh seasons and a meager soil. There is no pagan luxuriance,
no riot of color or scent. The ethical idealism of New England is
given stately form if not rendered altogether lovely; the passion for
righteousness is held in restraint but it retains much of its tempered
acidity. Happily there was little of the schools in Bryant, and nothing
of the intellectual play-boy. His early life in the Berkshire hills, on
his father’s farm, as student at Williams College for a few months, and
as a country lawyer, threw him upon his own intellectual resources and
made possible a normal unfolding of his mind. He was fortunately spared
a much-coveted life at Yale, where the narrow classicism and ungenerous
dogmatisms could have done him little good. From Timothy Dwight the
young Bryant could have got little to enrich his mind, and he might
have got some disastrous checks. Left to himself he appropriated such
nourishment as fell in his way and went forward on the path of a sober
liberalism.
That he went forward at all is sufficient testimony to his native
integrity of character. In 1825 when he removed to New York, the
intellectual renaissance of Boston was just at the beginning, and in
his new environment he never quite kept pace with the transcendental
enthusiasms that so stimulated the New England radicals. At Great
Barrington where he had been growing more discontented with his
“shabby” profession of the law, he discovered little to encourage
an independent liberalism. Bred up in an environment of intolerant
Federalism and an equally intolerant Calvinism, he had much to outgrow
and little to feed on. Few innovating ideas penetrated to the Berkshire
hills where he was brooding on life and poetry, and the training of
his youth was strong upon him. As a mere boy he had expostulated
with President Jefferson in shrill heroic couplets, declaiming on
the latter’s reputed moral lapses and inviting him to resign his
high office. He had summoned Napoleon to the bar of Cummington
respectability and adjudged him guilty of high crimes against humanity;
but such rhetorical outbursts were only echoes of a narrow world he
was soon to outgrow. The blight of the tie-wig school of Fisher Ames
did not fasten itself deeply on him, and by the time he had reached his
twenties he was moving towards the twin goals towards which liberal
New England was moving--the Unitarianism of Channing and the democracy
of Jefferson. It was far more difficult for a Berkshire man to think
his way through to such revolutionary goals than for a Concord; yet
the unschooled Bryant who had never visited Boston till he went there
in his twenty-seventh year to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa
society at Harvard had already outstripped the Cambridge scholastics
in the great work of setting his mind free. The stages through which
he passed cannot easily be traced, but the fact of his decisive break
with the dogmas of his youthful world is plain enough. During the last
years at Great Barrington he put himself upon a course of reading and
thinking, and from that provocative experience emerged the Bryant that
we know. Calvinism and Federalism he put away, and he went up to New
York completely new-outfitted in a fashion he never afterwards saw
reason to change. In politics and religion, as in poetry, he was a man
of few ideas, but those ideas were creative, and determined all his
thinking.
For this change that was unconsciously preparing him for his later work
on the _Evening Post_, Bryant owed something to his father, who had
turned moderate Unitarian, but very much more to the Berkshire family