Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
cause has woven itself into the older romance and endowed the tradition
with an added sanction. It has long since spread beyond the confines of
Virginia and become a national possession. North as well as South is
so firmly convinced of its authenticity that realism has never had the
temerity to meddle with it.[400]
It was a romanticizing age, and in Virginia congenial materials were
ready to hand. The distinction of a plantation aristocracy set in the
midst of a bucolic republican society, with its genial hospitality,
its individuality, its sharp contrasts of whites and blacks, its
clutter of cabins for background to the pillared mansion, its wide
neighborhood interests, its outdoor life, its patriarchal spirit, was
a distinction that no romantic could overlook, the most individual and
native picturesque in all America. Life on the plantation was uncramped
by the drab routine and skimpy meanness of the New England farm; it was
unsoiled by the coarseness and vulgarity of the frontier; it had none
of the sordidness of the middle-class town. It might be wasteful, but
it was good material for literature; and hence the Virginia romantic
had no need to seek the picturesque in England and Spain, as Irving
had done. He had only to pick and choose from the familiar stuff lying
all about him, emphasizing the agreeable, overlooking the unpleasant,
fashioning his figures and action to suit the ideal of a golden age
of plantation society. Yet the result, it must be confessed, is not
wholly adequate. Virginia has suffered gravely from the want of a sober
realism. It is not so much that the worst did not get into the romantic
tradition--shortcomings in Virginia life which even Wirt hints at--as
that the best did not get in. The plantation master of the romantics
falls grossly short of the reality that Virginia provided. The simple
dignity of John Taylor, the ingrained Puritanism of Lee and Jackson,
the catholic culture and fine integrity of George Wythe, have been
left out of the tradition. The Virginian created by the romantics is
absurdly inferior to such men, who by any standard were as admirable a
group of gentlemen as America has ever bred. A little honest realism
would have corrected the picture, to the advantage of the Old Dominion.
At the time when the romantics were beginning their work of
constructing the plantation tradition the intellectual renaissance
of Virginia was passing. With the fading of the French influence
after 1820 came increasing isolation and a conscious sectionalism.
Intellectual discipline and catholic tastes became rarer. Virginia
had no share in the revolutionary enthusiasms of the Utopian thirties
and forties, when New England expected the Promised Land to appear at
the next turn in the road; it received no stimulus from the expansive
systems of thought that were setting all Europe in ferment. The new
Germany seems to have made no impression on the Virginia mind, neither
its philosophical idealism nor its provocative higher criticism.
The new interest in social speculation and experiment that arose in
Massachusetts with the beginnings of industrialism awakened no response
in Virginia. Plantation society was static, and social speculation was
unwelcome. The theories of Comte, of Fourier, of Owen were unknown;
Utopian experiments were untried. If Virginia escaped the curse of
industrialism it lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to New
England with the rise of the textile mills. Social unrest bred no
protests against the plantation order. The revolutionary mood was gone,
and after 1820 the stimulus to intellectual life grew weaker. English
romanticism as exemplified in the work of Scott and Tom Moore was the
single foreign influence that spread amongst the plantations, and the
new literature accepted the cult of the picturesque romantic. With the
passing of the great age of Virginia the tradition of her greatness
remained to be gathered up and preserved.
II • William Wirt
To Virginia gentlemen of the old school it must have seemed a bit
ironical that William Wirt should have come to be accepted as the
literary representative of the Old Dominion in the days of John
Randolph of Roanoke. Born in Maryland in 1772 of Swiss parentage,
Wirt belonged to Virginia only by adoption, and although on terms of
intimacy with the plantation gentry he embodied few of the traits that
went to the making of the plantation tradition. In temperament he was
far removed from the easy-going planter. A certain canny thrift marked
him, a pronounced desire to rise in the world and cut a distinguished
figure. He was careful to make a good investment of his talents,
attentive to profitable undertakings, whether in law or eloquence or
speculation. His mature life ran a singularly prosperous and dignified
course. He gathered property and reputation and office, and in every
position he acquitted himself honorably. To do less than well in any
undertaking he would have accounted a stain upon his reputation. In
every company he made himself liked. There was none of the aggressive
individualism of John Randolph, in wait for an opportunity to send
home a shaft of rankling wit, but always a studious concern to please.
He was troubled that anyone should think his criticism severe in _The
British Spy_, and he hesitated long before publishing his _Patrick
Henry_ for fear offense would be taken at the few blemishes he
discovered in his hero. An honest man and a capable, sterling after
his kind but not notably intellectual, not creative, he owed his
advancement to very practical qualities: an engaging personality and
genial wit, a knack at formal oratory, a graceful pen, a persevering
pursuit of his profession, the cultivation of desirable friendships.
An excellent lawyer, he never turned aside from the law to meddle with
politics; yet he was on good terms with the politicians, and he reached
the top of his ambition by appointment to the Attorney-Generalship of
the United States, a post which he held for upwards of twelve years.
In training and culture Wirt was of the sound eighteenth-century
tradition. He was bred in the classics, English literature, and the
common law. When he set up in his profession his library consisted
of Blackstone, _Don Quixote_, and _Tristram Shandy_. His literary
taste was formed by the later writers of the eighteenth century, by
Gray, Hervey, Young, Ossian, Burke, Sterne, rather than by Pope and
Dryden. In _The British Spy_ he praises Bacon highly and lavishes
commendation upon Addison, regretting that the _Spectator_ “should be
thrown by, and almost entirely forgotten, while the gilded blasphemies
of infidels, and the ‘noontide trances’ of pernicious theorists, are
hailed with rapture, and echoed around the world” (_Letter X_). Yet the
determining influence in his own writings, it is clear, came from the
sentimentalists and from Burke. From the former he caught the note of
polite emotion, and from the latter the strain of sonorous eloquence.
His well-bred sensibilities were constantly in the service of his pen
or tongue, to lend pathos to an affecting bit of description or to
transport his hearers by a melting appeal. A look, a gesture, a pose,
was nicely calculated to bring sympathetic tears to the eyes of his
auditors. To touch the emotions he considered the triumph of art,
and to conduct through the emotions to a sound morality, its sole
justification.
As a member of the Virginia bar Wirt took pride in the tradition
of sober culture that had grown up amongst its distinguished
practitioners. The members of that bar were gentlemen as well as
lawyers, who would rather go wrong in their legal authorities than in
their classical embellishments; they were orators as well, careful of
their diction and meticulous in rounding a period. In these excellent
qualities Wirt early distinguished himself. He had read more than
most, and apposite quotations from the classics came easily to his
pen to grace the pellucid flow of his English. One of the signal
triumphs of his life was when in an elaborate legal argument before
the Supreme Court at Washington, he retorted a passage of the _Aeneid_
upon his opponent, to provide a text for a burst of the exuberant
rhetoric that so delighted his generation (_The British Spy_, 1855, pp.
88-90). His love of ornate speech seems to us curiously old-fashioned,
yet it was the manner of the times, and he gave himself to it with
enthusiasm--_vivo gurgite exundans_, as he would have chosen to
say. The chief interest of his life was oratory, and how skillful a
practitioner he was adjudged by his own generation is revealed in the
comment of a contemporary who often admired “the blaze of his reasoning
and declamation”:
The march of his mind is direct to its object, the evolutions by
which he attains it, are so new and beautiful, and apparently
necessary to the occasion, that your admiration is kept alive, your
fancy delighted, and your judgment convinced, through every stage
of the process.... There is no weak point in his array, no chink
in the whole line of his extended works. Then the sweet melody
of voice, the beautiful decorations of fancy, the easy play of
a powerful reason, by which all this is accomplished, amaze and
delight. His pathos is natural and impressive; there is a pastoral
simplicity and tenderness in his pictures of distress, when he
describes female innocence, helplessness, and beauty, which the
husband on whom she smiled should have guarded from even the winds
of heaven which might visit it too roughly, “shivering at midnight
on the winter banks of the Ohio, and mingling her tears with the
torrent, which froze as they fell;” it is not a theatrical trick,
to move a fleeting pity, but a deep and impressive appeal to the
dignified charities of our nature. (_Ibid._, pp. 84-85.)
Wirt’s literary reputation rests chiefly upon _The British Spy_
and _Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry_, both of
which may be characterized in the admirable phrase above quoted,
as studies in “the dignified charities of our nature.” The former
was done hastily at the age of thirty, the latter was toiled over
for years and appeared when he was forty-five. They were received
with vast approval and set him quite in the front rank of American
literary fame. Yet the contemporary popularity of _The British Spy_
is inexplicable to us today. It is astonishing that so slight a thing
should have achieved so great a reputation, and it suggests the depths
of literary poverty in which the Virginia of 1803 was sunk. The work
is a miscellany--hodgepodge perhaps is a juster term--of character
sketches, geology, description, rhapsody, moralizing, with the faintest
suggestion of criticism. The sketch which achieved the greatest
celebrity, the description of the blind preacher (_Letter VII_,
pp. 195-202), is elaborately artificial and sentimental, done from
Sterne. The sketches of contemporary politicians, and in particular
that of Jefferson, contributed much to current appeal, and the casual
criticism aroused a mild remonstrance. There is a certain grace of
style after the late eighteenth-century manner, abundant sentiment and
little wit. Perhaps the happiest touch is the title; only a British
spy could discover material for criticism in the excellent life and
ideal institutions of Virginia, or insinuate that the commonwealth was
lacking in public spirit--that its roads were as bad as its schools,
and that the “one object throughout the state” was “to grow rich.” But
it was a very moral spy who was troubled that “the noxious weed of
infidelity had struck a deep, a fatal root, and spread its pestilential
branches far around”; and who lamented that “our eccentric and fanciful