jta 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS ON AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS ON 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 FRED LEWIS PATTEE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1922 
 
Copyright, 1922, by 
 THE CENTUBY Co. 
 
 PBINTBD IN U. 0. A. 
 
TO 
 
 WILLIAM AVEBSTER ELLSWORTH 
 
 Lover of good books, loyal friend, and 
 
 generous Maecenas to many struggling authors, 
 
 this book is affectionately dedicated 
 
 50 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE AGE OF O. HENRY 3 
 
 A CRITIC IN C MAJOR 56 
 
 THE PROPHET OF THE LAST FRONTIER ... 98 
 THE EPIC OF NEW ENGLAND 161 
 
 ON THE TERMINAL MORAINE OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 PURITANISM 175 
 
 THE SHADOW OF LONGFELLOW 210 
 
 THE MODERNNESS OF PHILIP FRENEAU . . . 250 
 
 THE CENTENARY OF BRYANT S POETRY . . . 293 
 
 POE S "ULALUME" 327 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS ON AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS ON AMERICAN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 THE AGE OF O. HENRY 
 
 i 
 
 THE apparition of O. Henry is the most extraor 
 dinary literary phenomenon of the new century. 
 He and Jack London emerged almost at the same 
 moment, unheralded, full-grown, sudden : few ar 
 rivals in all literature have been so startling. 
 Hardly had we learned his real name before he was 
 rilling the whole sky. He was William Sydney 
 Porter, we were told, a native of North Carolina 
 who had had wild experiences as a cow-boy on the 
 ranches of the Southwest. He had been adventurer, 
 we gathered, tramp, knight-errant of the chaparral 
 in the roughest areas of that wildest West so swiftly 
 passing into tradition, and now he had sent East 
 stirring tales of adventure: another Bret Harte, up 
 to date, breezy, original. And his earliest specimens 
 in the magazines seemed to bear out the report. 
 Then quickly had come a new sensation : this West 
 ern cow-boy had lived in New Orleans, had vaga 
 bonded through Honduras and South America, 
 and he was bringing what no one had brought be- 
 
 3 
 
4 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 fore, wild exotic atmospheres and exciting adven 
 ture from uncharted realms to the west and the 
 south of the Caribbean. At once he was hailed as 
 Harte had been hailed and as Kipling, and as quickly 
 Jack London was to be hailed, as a new sensation in 
 a jaded age. 
 
 That was in 1902. Then had come a sensation 
 as startling as the first apparition : suddenly we heard 
 that this cow-boy, this vagabond from South Amer 
 ica, had become amazing metamorphosis ! the in 
 terpreter of New York City; the Scheherazade of 
 "Bagdad on the Hudson" ; total stranger in New 
 York, yet vouched for as doing for that world of a 
 city what had been done for London by Dickens, 
 who had spent his life there and who knew nothing 
 else. "McClure s Magazine" had discovered him; a 
 dozen other periodicals fought for his wares and 
 secured them with loud trumpetings ; the New York 
 "World" named a figure that mortgaged for months 
 his whole future product : a story a week, for its 
 Sunday supplement, just as a generation before "The 
 Atlantic Monthly" had purchased for a year the 
 pen of Bret Harte. Then at the height of his 
 powers suddenly he vanished : dead at forty-eight. 
 He had come like a comet; he had filled the whole 
 sky ; he had disappeared like a comet. 
 
 That was in 1910. But the paradox of O. Henry 
 had hardly begun. Stories written for the Sunday 
 
The Age of O. Henry 5 
 
 supplement are as ephemeral as the comic section 
 which they neighbor, but these ephemerae were to 
 outlast even the classics of the "Atlantic." Some 
 volumes of them were collected even during the 
 headlong six years of his productiveness, but with 
 his unexpected death there came a scramble to 
 secure every scrap of his product for a subscription 
 set. He had been enormously creative. During the 
 two years following "Cabbages and Kings" he had 
 produced 115 stories, and his total product, almost 
 all of it the work of six years, was 250 pieces, 
 not counting the scraps in a thirteenth volume of his 
 set. 
 
 And now came the second stage of O. Henry, 
 O. Henry as a subscription set advertised with all 
 the latest enginery of the art like a soap or a 
 breakfast-food, guaranteed creations of a genuine 
 "Yankee Maupassant," books with "stories that will 
 live as long as speech" : "England has her Dickens, 
 France her Hugo, and America her O. Henry." 
 When the sales began to slacken a set of Kipling 
 was thrown in free, and later still, after another lull, 
 a set of E. Phillips Oppenheim, seven quivering 
 volumes, with an offer of $500 in prizes for the 
 buyers writing the best letters descriptive of the 
 thrills in a "collection of thrills unparalleled in 
 literature." And the public responded is even yet 
 responding to a degree that staggers the imagina- 
 
6 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 tion. In 1919 his publishers announced that "Up 
 to the present time about four millions, one hun 
 dred thousand of O. Henry s books have gone to 
 the public," or about one to every twenty-five of our 
 population. Since then the market has been more 
 difficult to follow and the publishers will venture 
 no figures, but the sale, they declare, has gone steadily 
 on as from the first. The conclusion is inevitable : 
 the people would not have bought these volumes 
 had they not wanted them, had they not craved just 
 those things the advertising sheets so vividly prom 
 ised; the reading public of America undeniably 
 wants O. Henry. With such figures and facts be 
 fore us, is it too much to say that the last two 
 decades in America have been the age of O. Henry, 
 and that we are still befogged within it and with 
 little promise of emergence? 
 
 O. Henry is paradox; at every point you touch 
 him, paradox. Four years after his death the city 
 of Raleigh, North Carolina, erected a memorial 
 to him to this columnist of a Sunday supplement 
 and the orator of the day was the Poe professor 
 of English at the University of Virginia, a scholar 
 of distinction. Then with an acclaim that was na 
 tional and international came the O. Henry Hotel 
 dedication in a Southern city and another burst of 
 superlatives. Then just as calm was settling again 
 and it seemed to the conservative that Time was 
 
The Age of O. Henry 7 
 
 preparing her inevitable verdict, there came the 
 Smith biography. Amazing paradox! The man 
 never had been a cow-boy at all, at least not a rider 
 of horses. During his eleven years in Texas he 
 had been for the most of the time a newspaper re 
 porter and a clerk, his last clerkship in a bank. 
 Accused of too great freedom with the bank funds, 
 he had made a plunge into South America by 
 way of New Orleans. For months he had vaga 
 bonded "with Momus beneath the tropic stars where 
 Melpomene once stalked austere/ but returning at 
 last to Texas he had been arrested, convicted of em 
 bezzlement, and condemned to prison, where he had 
 spent four years. It was in prison that he had taken 
 to writing, and from his cell, with an assumed 
 name necessarily (for was he not a convict?), had 
 actually marketed those stories which first had 
 brought him into notice. When "Whistling Dick s 
 Christmas Stocking" appeared in "McClure s," its 
 author had two and a half more years to serve on 
 his prison sentence. Sensational, surely! The au 
 thor of the biography was stormed with abuse be 
 cause he had refused to conceal the truth. De 
 licious irony ! The public should not know too much 
 about its idols. The South is chivalrous: de mor- 
 tuis nil nisi bonum; the good fellows who had 
 helped shorten his days were chivalrous; he was a 
 good fellow; he was dead, therefore he should be 
 
8 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 canonized. Concerning the quality of his work, 
 all this made no difference either way, but it is 
 interesting. 
 
 That was in 1916. Could these fastidious critics 
 North and South, have seen 1921 and its Through 
 the Shadows with O. Henry" with its prison cover- 
 design, its jacket puff of "an amazing revelation, 
 with a thrill in every chapter," and its author, Al 
 Jennings, reformed desperado and convict described 
 by O. Henry himself as "pickpocket, supper man, 
 second-story man, yeggman, box man, all-round 
 burglar, card-sharp and slickest con man west of the 
 Twenty-third Street ferry landing," and, he might 
 have added, murderer and gun-man and thug and 
 boon companion during the South American experi 
 ence, and general model for the desperadoes and bad 
 men of most of his picaresque stories of the South 
 west and of South America had this revelation 
 appeared in 1916 what would have been the sensa 
 tion? American literature of late is becoming pic 
 turesque in its personalities. 
 
 So much for the paradox of O. Henry himself: 
 what of the 250 tales in the twelve volumes of his 
 literary remains? 
 
 Conservative criticism has been inclined to with 
 hold its verdict and wait. A comet, be it ever so 
 brilliant, fades if you give it time, but in the case 
 of O. Henry the critic has not been allowed to 
 
The Age of O. Henry 9 
 
 wait. He has been forced to render judgment. It 
 has become impossible to ignore the voices that have 
 poured upon him from barber-shop and university, 
 from home and public library, from club and pulpit, 
 from reviews in popular journals and critiques in 
 quarterlies and solemn volumes. And the volume 
 of praise seems to be increasing. Editors of col 
 lege texts have admitted him among the time-tried 
 classics. A recent book of selections from "the 
 world s greatest short story writers/ made by a 
 sober critic, includes five Americans : Irving, Haw 
 thorne, Poe, Bunner, O. Henry. Dr. C. Alphonso 
 Smith, the breadth of whose scholarship no one 
 questions, sent forth rfis biography with the dictum : 
 "O. Henry s work remains the most solid fact to 
 be reckoned with in the history of twentieth century 
 literature." This same critic at the dedication of the 
 Raleigh memorial had added the man to the great 
 American four : Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, and 
 Harte. "O. Henry," he declared, "has given the 
 American short story a new reach and a widened 
 social content ... he has socialized the short story." 
 The Canadian humorist and critic, Stephen Leacock, 
 has published an essay entitled "The Amazing Genius 
 of O. Henry," and in it he has dared to use words 
 like these: "The time is coming, let us hope, 
 when the whole English-speaking world will recog 
 nize in him one of the great masters of modern 
 
10 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 literature." Some of the most discriminating of 
 scholars both in America and abroad have found 
 joy in him : the late William James, we are told, had 
 read his every story. University men everywhere, 
 and conservative critics even, have turned to him 
 for relaxation and have praised him in superlatives. 
 Few authors, indeed, have ever so completely cap 
 tured the high and the low of their generation. 
 
 In view, then, of this no uncertain verdict of his 
 era, his work becomes important. To study it is 
 to study an epoch, for a people and a generation are 
 to be judged by what they read and enjoy, by what 
 they teach in their schools and crown in their acade 
 mies. A success like O. Henry s means imitators, 
 a literary school, a standard of values. And what 
 are these values to be? What of the age of O. 
 Henry ? 
 
 n 
 
 Before one may crown O. Henry or dismiss O. 
 Henry one must read him, all of him, thirteen 
 volumes : it goes without saying. But let the reader 
 keep his balance : the mixture is intoxicating ; it 
 blunts after a time all the critical faculties. One 
 emerges from the thirteenth volume of this strange 
 harlequin epic completely upset, unable for a time 
 rightly to evaluate anything, condemning, yet at 
 
The Age of O. Henry 11 
 
 the same time inclined to praise one hardly knows 
 why or what. Surely one has been diverted. Where 
 else in all literature is there such a melange 
 stories bedeviled and poured into bombshells ; traves 
 ties of all things holy and unholy; sermons in 
 motley and the ten commandments of yeggdom; 
 pure fun and again barbarous farce as vulgarly 
 primitive as the comic supplement ; short stories vio 
 lating every canon of the text-books, yet so brilliant 
 as to set one forming a new canon of the art; 
 sketches ending in xart-wheel capers, philosophiz- 
 ings through a hofcgp-collar, burlesques hilarious. 
 Everywhere everything too much. What spirits! 
 what abandon! what zest in life! what curiosity! 
 what boyish delight in the human show ! One must 
 go back to the adolescent Dickens to match it the 
 Dickens of the "Sketches by Boz" and "Pickwick." 
 Not a dull page, not a paragraph that does not re 
 bound upon you like a peal of laughter, or startle 
 you, or challenge you, or prod you unawares, and 
 roar at your surprise. No repose in these books: 
 they are peppered and deviled meat for jaded palates. 
 .One goes not to these for delicate flavors, or subtle 
 spiceries, or refined and exaggerated nuances of 
 style. The tones are loud, the humor is grotesque 
 and boisterous, the situations are extremes, the char 
 acters are as artificial and as exaggerated as those 
 of Dickens. It is pitched, all of it, for men, for 
 
12 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 healthy elemental men: men of the bar-room and 
 the club foyer and the barracks. In no writings 
 since Dickens does liquor flow so freely : "drink shall 
 swell the theme and be set forth in abundance/ 
 shrills "The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball." "The 
 Fourth In Salvador" is the most besotted tale 
 in all literature. And yet for all that, and not 
 withstanding the fact that the stories many of them 
 record life on isolated masculine ranches, in vice- 
 reeking tropic towns, and in unspeakable areas of 
 New York City, at every point that touches the 
 feminine paradox again! the work is as chaste 
 as Emerson. 
 
 Before one has spent an hour with the books one 
 is aware of a strange duality about them, one 
 that must have had its origin in the man himself. 
 It is as if a Hawthorne had sold his pen to Momus. 
 There are pages where the style attains a distinc 
 tion that is rare indeed. One might cull extracts 
 that would imply marvelous wholes. We realize 
 before we have finished a single tale that we are 
 dealing with no uncouth ranchman who has literary 
 aspirations, who writes in slang because slang is the 
 only language he knows. We are in the hands, 
 we feel, of one who has read widely and well; 
 his quotations and allusions cover an area that is 
 surprising. His vocabulary also is extraordinary, 
 and I do not refer to the a-mazing nature of his 
 
The Age of O. Henry 13 
 
 slang. He is as accurate in his choice of words and 
 as rich in his variants as a professional stylist like 
 James. His biographer records that for years the 
 dictionary was his favorite reading, that he pored 
 over it as one pores over romance ; and the reader of 
 his stories may well believe it. One professor of 
 literature has confessed that he is drawn to O. 
 Henry simply because of his vocabulary, because 
 of the exquisite ability* he has to capture the one 
 fleeting word of all fleeting words for his purpose. 
 Take a paragraph like this, a paragraph as piquant 
 and as uniquely individual in style as if it were 
 penned by Charles Lamb: 
 
 In the restaurant of El Refugio are served com 
 pounds delightful to the palate of the man from Capri 
 corn or Cancer. Altruism must halt the story thus 
 long. Oh, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges 
 of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There 
 only will you find a fish bluefish, shad or pompano 
 from the Gulf baked after the Spanish method. 
 Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili 
 Colorado bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; 
 unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and 
 but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence. 
 Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity but 
 never in it hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so 
 rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psy 
 chical Research could note its origin. Do not say 
 that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not 
 
14 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, 
 has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley- 
 crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in life, "by 
 hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others." 
 And then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a 
 plate of brown frijoles and a carafe of wine that has 
 never stood still between Oporto and El Refugio 
 ah, Dios! 
 
 And here is a tropical sunset: 
 
 The day -died in the lagoons and in the shadowed 
 banana groves and in the mangrove swamps, where 
 the great blue crabs were beginning to crawl to land 
 for their nightly ramble. And it died, at last, upon 
 the highest peaks. Then the brief twilight, ephemeral 
 as the flight of a moth, came and went; the Southern 
 Cross peeped with its topmost eye above a row of 
 palms, and the fireflies heralded with their torches the 
 approach of soft-footed night. 
 
 At times in his earlier South American sketches he 
 caught the very soul of the tropics, "the fetterless, 
 idyllic round of enchanted days; the life among 
 this indolent romantic people a life full of music, 
 flowers, and low laughter; the influence of the im 
 manent sea and mountains, and the many shapes 
 of love and magic and beauty that bloom in the 
 white tropic nights." Note a sentence like this 
 describing the head-hunters of Mindanao: 
 
 Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, 
 
The Age of O. Henry 15 
 
 but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror 
 of their concealed presence, parallelling the trail of 
 their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous 
 mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into unin 
 habitable jungles, always near with the invisible hand 
 of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such 
 signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might 
 make a twig crackling in the awful sweat-soaked 
 night, a drench of dew showering from the screening 
 foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the 
 rushes of a water-level a hint of death for every 
 mile and every hour they amused me greatly, those 
 little fellows of one idea. 
 
 But one catches only fitful glimpses of this more 
 serious O. Henry. The Momus who ruled his pen 
 nodded seldom more than a moment at a time. The 
 sentence or the paragraph that starts in serious tone 
 ends most often with a sudden pigeonwing. Note 
 for instance the Emersonian opening and the harle 
 quin close of this paragraph from "Squaring the 
 Circle": 
 
 Nature moves in circles ; Art in straight lines. The 
 natural is rounded ; the artificial is made up of angles. 
 A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, 
 in perfect circles; the city man s feet, denaturalized 
 by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever away 
 from himself. The round eyes of childhood typify 
 innocence ; the narrowed line of the flirt s optic proves 
 the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark 
 
16 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 of determined cunning; who has not read Nature s 
 most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid 
 kiss? Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is 
 its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchant 
 ing golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the 
 huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the 
 ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks. 
 
 Never can we trust him. His tale of Southern 
 life, "The Guardian of the Accolade," beguiles us. 
 It rings true ; it is exquisitely told. Uncle Bushrod 
 is as feelingly and convincingly drawn as any before- 
 the-war negro in recent literature. The feeling 
 grows as we read that we have discovered a classic : 
 at last from O. Henry a work of serious art with 
 no harlequin tricks and no vaudeville capers. Then 
 comes the final sentence. Ah! it is all a trick: 
 the master was not absconding with the bank 
 funds after all; the faithful old negro had not, 
 as he so proudly supposed, rescued the family from 
 the gulf of dishonor: all he had done had been 
 to prevent his master from taking with him on a fish 
 ing trip his favorite satchel, and that satchel of stolen 
 bonds, as the negro supposed when he had returned 
 it with such care to the bank "there was two quarts 
 of the finest old silk-velvet Bourbon in that satchel 
 you ever wet your lips with." We have been trifled 
 with. We no longer think of the piece as an exquis 
 ite tale of the old South : the author has prostituted 
 
The Age of O. Henry 17 
 
 his art, he has been watching the reader and grinning 
 in his sleeve all the while. He has deliberately 
 fabricated the whole story for no other purpose than 
 to serve as an ambush for this single vulgar mo 
 ment of surprise. One begins the next piece, how 
 ever fine its opening, with little of enjoyment. We 
 have been trifled with : this is not a maker of litera 
 ture, it is a boy with a bean-shooter who is waiting 
 for you to get into range; it is an impish practical 
 joker, who is never really serious. Everywhere the 
 cap and bells. In "The Door of Unrest" we have a 
 central idea worthy of Hawthorne, but it is em 
 broidered with cheapness. It is pure linen edged 
 with bunting. 
 
 in 
 
 Before one has finished even the first volume of 
 the set, and no matter which volume one has chosen, 
 one has discovered that primarily and almost solely 
 O. Henry was a humorist, a professional harlequin, 
 an inheritor of the tradition of John Phoenix and 
 Artemus Ward. To consider him seriously from 
 any other point of view is to be confronted swiftly 
 with a non sequitur. He had been trained pre 
 cisely as Phoenix had been trained and Artemus 
 Ward and Mark Twain and all the others of the 
 distinctively American group of literary comedians, 
 
18 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 To create such a writer there must be schooling on 
 the frontier, in some remote area of America where 
 individualism is religion and where men are living 
 under primitive conditions in the rush and excite 
 ment of some moving enterprise. Before he was 
 twenty-one O. Henry had observed for some months, 
 never, however, as an active participator, the rough 
 life of a sheep ranch in the heart of the Southwest, 
 and he had learned among other things how the 
 primitive man laughs. Then for twelve years he 
 had lived in Texas cities Austin, Houston sur 
 rounded by men who had been a part of the early 
 lawless days of the State. Western breeziness there 
 was in these little cities, boundless spirits, hilarious 
 optimism, sentiment in abundance. To the young 
 O. Henry, by nature as sensitive to the incongruous 
 as was even Artemus Ward, it was school and 
 college. 
 
 He was a comedian born; as a boy he was con 
 sidered a wag and a practical joker; during all of 
 his Western period his companions were on the 
 broad grin at the very sight of him : he was a mimic, 
 a caricaturist, a punster; he moved always in a 
 gale of laughter. It pointed the way he was to 
 go. As early as 1887 he was contributing his 
 regular budget of jokes to the "Detroit Free Press," 
 and by 1895 he was editor and proprietor of a 
 humorous journal of his own, "The Rolling Stone/ 
 
The Age of O. Henry 19 
 
 "out for the moss," one dollar and fifty cents a 
 year, with the special inducement to new subscribers 
 that during one month all who would bring two 
 dollars would be given on the spot a premium of 
 fifty cents, a brand of humor that a generation 
 before had been made familiar to all Americans 
 by Artemus Ward. A year it was before "The 
 Rolling Stone" ceased to roll, and then its editor 
 transferred himself to the "Houston Daily Post," 
 where, as a variant to his work as bank teller, he 
 filled a Eugene-Field-like column entitled "Tales 
 of the Town." There he might have remained 
 until he died, pouring his newspaper-column comedy 
 into the bottomless pit of a Texan daily, had not 
 sudden good fortune in the form of seemingly 
 annihilating disgrace overtaken him and sent him 
 flying from an environment that had all but swal 
 lowed him. Until he was thirty-five O. Henry was 
 a professional newspaper columnist of the later 
 American type with Texas extravagance, and so far 
 as literature is concerned he was nothing else. 
 
 It was the humor of O. Henry that gave him his 
 first readers. The entire body of his work may 
 be classed as humor. It is significant that when in 
 1903 the Harpers accepted his genre story "The 
 Whirligig of Time," a story written unquestionably 
 for the body of the magazine, they printed it in 
 "The Editor s Drawer." And his humor is all of 
 
20 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 it uniquely American humor, as indigenous to the 
 American soil as the early Mark Twain. His point 
 of view, his materials, his methods, his characters, 
 and the language they used are American or they 
 are nothing. His comparisons and allusions and 
 figures of speech are so ingrained with American 
 life and expression that translation into other lan 
 guages must be difficult, if not impossible. For 
 examples one may open literally at random : 
 
 They re as full of apathy as a territorial delegate 
 during the chaplain s prayer. 
 
 They became inebriated with attention, like an At 
 lanta Colonel listening to "Marching through Georgia." 
 
 The common people walked around in barefooted 
 bunches, puffing stogies that a Pittsburgh millionaire 
 would n t have chewed for a dry smoke on Ladies 
 Day at his club. 
 
 He first saw the light of day in New York at three 
 years of age. He was born in Pittsburgh, but his 
 parents moved East the third summer afterward. 
 
 Every trust bears in its own bosom the seeds of 
 its destruction like a rooster that crows near a Geor 
 gia colored Methodist camp meeting, or a Republican 
 announcing himself a candidate for governor of Texas. 
 
 Original as he was, however, he added few de 
 vices to those already associated with distinctively 
 American humor. He used exaggeration as out- 
 
The Age of O. Henry 21 
 
 rageously as did John Phoenix or Mark Twain. 
 No one, indeed, has ever pressed this device to 
 deeper abysses of absurdity. After a political 
 gathering many cigar-stubs undoubtedly may be 
 found scattered in the vicinity, but when O. Henry 
 tells the story the cigar-stubs are knee-deep for 
 a quarter of a mile about. A man has chills and 
 fever : "He had n t smiled in eight years. His 
 face was three feet long, and it never moved except 
 to take in quinine." A man with the rheumatism, 
 asked if he had ever rubbed the affected part with 
 rattlesnake-oil, replies: "If all the snakes I have 
 used the oil of was strung out in a row they would 
 reach eight times as far as Saturn and the rattles 
 could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back. 
 And of a casual doctor in one of his tales: 
 
 If Doc Millikin had your case, he made the terrors 
 of death seem like an invitation to a donkey party. 
 He had the bedside manners of a Piute medicine-man 
 and the soothing presence of a dray loaded with iron 
 bridge-girders. He was built like a shad, and his 
 eyebrows was black, and his white whiskers trickled 
 down from his chin like milk coming out of a sprin 
 kling pot. He had a nigger boy along carrying an old 
 tomato-can full of calomel, and a saw. 
 
 In the originality of his exaggerations no humor 
 ist has ever excelled him. His comparisons are 
 
22 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 unique. There is not a hackneyed expression in 
 all his volumes. One might quote indefinitely : 
 
 She had hair the color of the back of a twenty- 
 dollar gold certificate, blue eyes, and a system of 
 beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a 
 July magazine look like the cook on a Monongahela 
 coal barge. 
 
 He was the red-hottest Southerner that ever smelled 
 mint. He made Stonewall Jackson and R. E. Lee 
 look like abolitionists. 
 
 Her eyes were as big and startling as bunions. 
 He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis. 
 
 Ten minutes afterward the Captain arrived at the 
 rendezvous, windy and thunderous as a dog-day in 
 Kansas. 
 
 He loosened up like a Marcel wave in the surf of 
 Coney. 
 
 Fate tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine 
 opened by an unfeed waiter. 
 
 The mark of O. Henry is upon such work as 
 peculiarly and exclusively as is the mark of Ar- 
 temus Ward on the speeches of the genial show 
 man. He has, too, the American fondness for 
 aphorism, and at times is as pregnant with quaint 
 philosophy as Josh Billings. It is an O. Henry 
 philosophy, however. 
 
The Age of O. Henry 23 
 
 A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a 
 mosquito: it bores you, and then injects a stinging 
 drop to irritate your conscience. 
 
 A straw vote only shows which way the hot air 
 blows. 
 
 What a woman wants is what you re out of. 
 
 The lover smiles when he thinks he has won; the 
 woman who loves ceases to smile with victory. He 
 ends a battle; she begins hers. 
 
 There ain t a sorrow in the chorus that a lobster 
 cannot heal. 
 
 Words are as wax in his hands : 
 
 Annette Fletcherized large numbers of romantic 
 novels. 
 
 The stage curtain, blushing pink at the name "As 
 bestos" inscribed upon it, came down with a slow 
 midsummer movement. The audience trickled lei 
 surely down the elevator and stairs. 
 
 We laugh often at the very freshness and newness 
 of his phrases. He hits at times the nail on the 
 head precisely. One feels the glow that only the 
 perfect can give when one comes upon felicities like 
 these : 
 
 She was as tidy as a cherry blossom. 
 
 At length he reached the flimsy, fluttering little soul 
 of the shop-girl. Tremblingly, awfully her moth 
 
24 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 wings closed and she seemed about to settle on the 
 flower of love. 
 
 Her uplifted happy eyes, as bright and clear as the 
 water in trout pools. 
 
 Something mushy and heavily soft like raised dough 
 leaned against Jim s leg and chewed his trousers with 
 a yeasty growl. [This of a pug dog.] 
 
 No device for raising a laugh but he has used 
 it to the utmost, and for the most part with a zest 
 that is primitive in its emphasis. Open him any 
 where, at random: outrageous non sequiturs, most 
 hideous coinages, malaproprieties, deliberate mis 
 quotations, slang exaggerated to the limit of endur 
 ance nowhere outside of the comic supplement 
 can you find a wilder hodgepodge of incongruity. 
 Not even John Phoenix has made such startling use 
 of irreverence. To him nothing is sacred: "Be 
 considerable moanin of the bars when I put out to 
 sea/ soliloquizes the Toledo man while he is dying 
 of consumption ; "I ve patronized em pretty freely." 
 He delights in biblical exegesis. This is his version 
 of the Samson story : 
 
 She gave her old man a hair cut, and everybody 
 knows what a man s head looks like after a woman 
 cuts his hair. And then when the Pharisees came 
 round to guy him, he was so ashamed he went to 
 work and kicked the whole house down on top of the 
 whole outfit. 
 
The Age of O. Henry 25 
 
 But the most prominent humorous mannerism 
 of O. Henry, the one that runs like a falsetto motif 
 through all his work, is a variety of euphemism, 
 the translating of simple words and phrases into 
 resounding and inflated circumlocutions. So com 
 pletely did this trick take possession of him that 
 one may denominate it a literary cliche, the trade 
 mark of O. Henry. All his characters make use 
 of it as a dialect. Sometimes it is even funny. 
 A waiter is not a waiter but "a friendly devil 
 in a cabbage-scented hell"; a tramp becomes a 
 "knight on a restless tour of the cities" ; a remark 
 about the weather becomes "a pleasant reference 
 to meteorological conditions." Mr. Brunelli does 
 not fall in love with Katy : "Mr. Brunelli, being 
 impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the 
 verb amare with Katy in the objective case." John 
 Hopkins buys not a cheap cigar but a "bunch of 
 spinach, car-fare grade. * A reasonable amount 
 of this, when at its best, is tolerable, perhaps, but 
 O. Henry wears the device threadbare. Constantly 
 he seems straining for bizarre effect, for outrageous 
 circumlocutions, for unheard-of methods of not 
 calling a spade a spade. A plain statement like "the 
 woman looked at him, hoping he would invite her 
 to a champagne supper," becomes with O. Henry 
 "She turned languishing eyes upon him as a hope 
 ful source of lobsters and the delectable, ascend- 
 
26 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 ant globules of effervescence." It is too much. 
 And at this point lies O. Henry s chief failure as 
 a humorist. Mark Twain was laughable even when 
 he was trying to be serious. He was born with a 
 drawl both in his voice and his pen. Humor with 
 him was a spontaneous thing. It was so with 
 Artemus Ward. But the humor of O. Henry is 
 a manufactured humor, the humor of a man who is 
 brilliant rather than droll. The artificiality of it 
 at times is painfully obvious. One of his manner 
 isms, for instance, is the use of incongruous mix 
 tures, of a series of threes for the last unexpected 
 and outrageous ingredient of which the reader 
 feels he must have strained hard. Such compounds 
 as these are deliberately concocted, and the laugh 
 that follows is of the variety that follows a pun : 
 
 He seems to me to be a sort of mixture of Maltese 
 kitten, sensitive plant, and a member of a stranded 
 "Two Orphans" company. 
 
 He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City 
 detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of 
 Baton Rouge. 
 
 Another of his overworked devices, laughable at 
 first but distressingly artificial and tiresome after one 
 reads long in his books, is incongruous association. 
 
 His hair was opalescent and his conversation frag 
 mentary. 
 
The Age of O. Henry 27 
 
 She possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic 
 heart. 
 
 He had gout very bad in one foot, a house near 
 Gramercy Park, half a million dollars, and a daughter. 
 
 They took me by surprise and my horse by the 
 bridle. 
 
 O. Henry is a humorist, a John Phoenix up to 
 date and beyond, an entertainer of the journalistic 
 school, a wood-pulp comedian whose sketches should 
 be illustrated by the creator of Mutt and Jeff and, 
 if dramatized, should be acted by Charlie Chaplin. 
 That his work has in it oases of beauty, that he 
 has moments when he shows himself possessed of 
 surprising powers, that he is original even to a 
 startling degree, only emphasizes the tragedy of his 
 literary career. His undoubted powers he sur 
 rendered deliberately to Momus; instead of making 
 himself, as undoubtedly he might, the Cervantes 
 or the Mark Twain of his generation, he expended 
 himself in impish capers and jocosities for "the 
 groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of 
 nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise." 
 
 IV 
 
 If his admirers would but accept him simply 
 as a humorist, a literary comedian, the latest member 
 of the John Phoenix, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, 
 
28 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Bill Nye school, one might go with them at times 
 even to superlatives, but to label him simply as 
 a humorist is not enough : he must be classified 
 with Poe and Hawthorne and Maupassant ; he must 
 be added to the great short story writers of the 
 world; he must be credited with having given to 
 the form a new social content. And the voices 
 that demand this are voices not to be disregarded. 
 What of O. Henry as a writer of fiction? 
 
 With the recent biography has come a document 
 of peculiar value for our study: the author s own 
 list of his first twelve stories in the order he wrote 
 them during the years 1898-1901 while he was in 
 the Ohio State prison. "Whistling Dick s Christ 
 mas Stocking," it would seem, was his first attempt 
 at the short story, and as we read it we feel that it 
 was by no accident that it was accepted and published 
 by the first standard magazine to reduce its sub 
 scription price and popularize deliberately its literary 
 content. 
 
 Beginning with the closing years of the century 
 had come a demand for the unusual, for realistic 
 and exciting fiction made by writers who had been 
 a part of what they told. Jack London with his 
 vivid tales of the Alaska winter was coming into 
 focus; Richard Harding Davis, reporter extraor 
 dinary, who had been everywhere and had seen the 
 feet of clay of all idols, was in the center of the 
 
The Age of O. Henry 29 
 
 literary stage. The epoch of historical romance 
 was passing. A story writer to be read now must 
 have had an experience, 
 
 Quaeque ipsi miserrima vidi, 
 Et quorum pars magna fui. 
 
 The new tale with the strange signature "O. Henry" 
 gained at once a hearing from the clientele of 
 "McClure s" because of the strangeness and fresh 
 ness of its content. It dealt with the winter exodus 
 of tramps from the North toward New Orleans, 
 and it was told apparently by one who had himself 
 been a tramp, who knew all the ritual and all the 
 argot of the order, and who spoke with authority. 
 This initial story, as we study it now, knowing its 
 origin, reveals much. The transition from Sydney 
 Porter, the Texan newspaper columnist, to O. 
 Henry, the short story writer, came through Bret 
 Harte. It is a story of sentiment, theatric rather 
 than realistic, theatric indeed to the point of melo 
 drama and falseness to life. The central incident 
 is clearly impossible: one stocking from a newly- 
 puchased pair are not new stockings fastened to 
 gether or at least rolled together? works out of 
 the bundle of Christmas goods lying at the bottom 
 of the wagon and falls at the feet of a tramp who 
 is trudging wearily along the highway. A little 
 later this same stocking with a stone and a note 
 
30 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 in it is hurled at least a quarter of a mile as the 
 story is told it cannot be less straight through a 
 window to fall exactly at the feet of its owner. The 
 central character is clearly manufactured and not 
 true. As with so much of the work of Harte, the 
 tale is a dramatized paradox with lay figures : a 
 besotted tramp, after years of vagrancy, becomes 
 a man again because a little girl by a happy im 
 pulse wishes him "Merry Christmas" ; then second 
 paradox when a permanent home is offered him 
 as a reward for saving the house, he awakes and 
 flees in utter terror into his old life of vagrancy. 
 Even the style reveals the influence of Harte. 
 "Ther bloomin little skeezicks !" says Whistling 
 Dick reminiscently, as he looks at the stocking; 
 "The d d little cuss!" says Kentuck, as he looks 
 at the thumb the baby had grasped. 
 
 Precisely the same attitude toward life and ma 
 terial we find in "An Afternoon Miracle," "The 
 Sphynx Apple," "Christmas by Injunction," and in 
 deed in all his stories of the Southwest. All were 
 molded by Harte, as Harte was molded by Dickens. 
 The West is used as startling and picturesque back 
 ground; the characters are the conventional types 
 of Western melodrama : desperadoes, cow-boys, 
 train-robbers, sheep-men, miners all of them redo 
 lent of the paint-box and resplendent from the 
 costume-room. Like Harte, the writer had no 
 
The Age of O. Henry 31 
 
 real love for the West, and like Harte again, he never 
 worked with conviction and with sympathy to show 
 the real soul of it. A few times the glow of in 
 sight and sympathy hovers over the fifteen studies 
 he made of his native South by all means the best 
 part of his fiction but rarely does one find it in 
 the rest of his work; certainly not at all in the 
 fifty-seven tales that deal with the Southwest. There 
 is nothing about them fundamentally Western. By 
 a change of two hundred words or so any one of 
 them could be transferred to the East, and even to 
 New York City, and lose not at all by the transfer. 
 Simply by changing half a dozen proper names, 
 "The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson" could 
 be laid in Hoboken, New Jersey, and gain there 
 by. Johnson could just as well be a milk-man from 
 Geneva, New York. Try it. Yet it is for its 
 wild Western setting that most readers find it 
 attractive. 
 
 The external manner of Harte he outgrew, but 
 never did he free himself from the less obvious 
 faults that make the work of both men inferior 
 when compared with those absolute standards that 
 time has decreed a work of art must have if it is 
 at all to endure : neither of the men had a philosophy 
 of life, and neither of them presented humanity as 
 humanity actually is or as sane idealists dream that 
 humanity should be. Neither of them told the 
 
32 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 truth. Of the two Harte is by far the greater, for 
 Harte s work is single never does he give us the 
 serious mixed with buffoonery and Harte once or 
 twice in all his work did succeed in making us feel 
 an individual human soul. 
 
 In the second group of O. Henry s stories fall the 
 South American sketches and "The Gentle Grafter" 
 studies that fill up two entire volumes and overflow 
 into other volumes of the set. Despite much splen 
 did description and here and there marvelous skill 
 in reproducing the atmosphere and the spirit of the 
 tropics, they are literature at its worst. Without 
 a doubt the Gentle Grafter had an actual prototype. 
 The stories may have had their basis in actual hap 
 penings as related by a voluble convict in the Ohio 
 iprison; all his material for his tales of bank- 
 robbers and train-robbers and fugitives from justice 
 probably was from evidence gathered at first hand. 
 Al Jennings s amazing book throws much light here, 
 but, for all that, the tales are false. This is not 
 life: it is opera bouffe. The characters are no 
 more flesh and blood than Punch and Judy. They 
 talk a dialect unknown outside the comic theater. 
 Sophomores at dinner sometimes use circumlocution 
 in the excess of high spirits, and "drive up the cow" 
 takes the place of "pass the milk" : but here every 
 body is sophomoric and super-sophomoric ; here the 
 veriest yokel converses in vocables sesquipedalian, 
 
The Age of O. Henry 33 
 
 Just a common Indiana hotel-keeper is asked casually 
 concerning the ownership of a house: 
 
 "That," says he, "is the domicile and the arboreal, 
 terrestrial, and horticultural accessories of Partner 
 Ezra Plunkett." 
 
 Andy Tucker and Jeff Peters, the confidence men, 
 talk always in this amazing strain : 
 
 It does seem kind of hard on one s professional 
 pride to lope off with a bearded pard s competency, 
 especially after he has nominated you custodian of 
 .his bundle in the sappy insouciance of his urban in 
 discrimination. 
 
 An Irishman in the wilderness bids a stranger 
 to dismount in terms like these : 
 
 Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quad 
 ruped. 
 
 The sheep-herder Paisley Fish and his companion 
 talk always at this astounding altitude : 
 
 "I reckon you understand," says Paisley, "that I Ve 
 made up my mind to accrue that widow woman as 
 part and parcel in and to my hereditaments forever, 
 both domestic, sociable, legal, and otherwise, until 
 death us do part. The smiles of womanv" goes on 
 Paisley, "is the whirlpool of Squills and Chalybeates, 
 into which vortex the good ship Friendship is often 
 drawn and dismembered." 
 
 This is not an occasional pleasantry for humorous 
 
34 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 effect : it is the every-day speech of all the char 
 acters. They talk nothing else from the beginning 
 of "The Gentle Grafter" volume to the end of "The 
 Heart of the West" collection, and not one of the 
 characters in the other volumes is entirely free 
 from it. George Ade wrote in slang; but this is 
 not slang, for slang is the actual words of actual 
 men; and since the world began no human being, 
 even in Texas, ever used language like this, save 
 as he manufactured it deliberately for the burlesque 
 stage. 
 
 Art is truth, truth to facts, truth to actual human 
 nature; and art also is truth to the presumption, 
 fundamental at least in civilized lands, that truth is 
 superior to falsehood, that right is superior to 
 wrong, and that actual crime is never to be con 
 doned. Despite the freedom of his pages from 
 salacious stain, O. Henry must be classed as an 
 immoral writer; not immoral because he used vul 
 garly picaresque material or because he recorded the 
 success of villainy, or dealt with areas of life 
 "where there are n t no ten commandments," but be 
 cause he sided with his law-breakers, laughed at 
 their crimes, and condoned their schemes for duping 
 the unwary. It does not excuse Jeff Peters to ex 
 plain that he fleeces only those who have fleece to 
 spare, or those rich ones who enjoy an occasional 
 fleecing because it affords them a new sensation. 
 
The Age of O. Henry 35 
 
 One needs not be a Puritan or a blue-law maker to 
 assert with all emphasis that where honesty ceases 
 to be fundamental there civilization lapses and the 
 jungle begins to enter. "The Gentle Grafter" 
 stories are cloth of the same loom that wove "Raf 
 fles" and "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford," and all 
 the others on that shelf of books which are the 
 shame of American literature. 
 
 V 
 
 The last period in O. Henry s life began in 1904 
 when the New York "World" engaged him to 
 furnish a story a week for its Sunday supplement. 
 He had been in the city two years, and had supported 
 himself by writing for the magazines his stories of 
 life in the Southwest and in South America. He 
 had studied the demands of the time from the New 
 York point of view. Moreover he had discovered 
 Maupassant. His biographer records that during 
 his later years he kept the work of the great conte- 
 writer always within reach; we should have known 
 it had he not told us. His style began to change: 
 he was gaining in ease, in structural art, in brilliancy 
 of diction. He had discovered the possibilities of 
 finesse, of carefully balanced climaxes, and of unex 
 pected denouement. Now it was, at the opening 
 of his "World" supplement period, that there was 
 
36 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 born what many of his readers consider the real 
 O. Henry. Seldom now did he attempt regular plot 
 stories of the type of "A Blackjack Bargainer" and 
 "Georgia s Ruling." The greater number of his 
 137 or more New York "World" pieces cannot be 
 called short stories at all. They are familiar nar 
 rative sketches, expanded anecdotes told by a ra 
 conteur who expects an explosion of laughter at 
 the proper moment : they are humorous "stories", 
 in the newspaper sense of the word. 
 
 The "newspaper": the word brings illumination. 
 When asked his profession in the Ohio prison, he 
 replied "newspaper reporter." With the exception 
 of a single story in "Harper s Magazine" and one in 
 "The Century" "The Missing Chord," June, 1904 
 all his work was first of all published on wood- 
 pulp paper in the daily press or in the ten-cent 
 magazine. His "World" stories make up more than 
 one third of his entire product. What the paper 
 really did was to engage him as a reporter a highly 
 privileged reporter at large, told to roam the city 
 for material and to bring in one entertaining "story" 
 each week. 
 
 The requirements of the newspaper "story" are 
 exacting. It must be vivid, unusual, unhackneyed, 
 and it must have in it the modern quality of "go." 
 It is usually an improvisation by one who through 
 long practice has gained the mastery of his pen, 
 
The Age of O. Henry 37 
 
 and by one, moreover, who has been living in con 
 tact with that which he would portray. It is written 
 in heat, excitedly, to be read with excitement and 
 thrown away. There must be no waste material 
 no "lumber," no "blue-pencil stuff," and there 
 must be a "punch in every line," a constant bidding 
 for attention. After the Devil s Island explosion 
 in New York, a friend sent me the "story" of the 
 tragedy that one of the city dailies published not 
 many minutes after the event, and demanded where 
 in classic literature I could find a more vivid piece 
 of composition. Yet it had been dashed off in head 
 long haste to be read in headlong haste and then 
 thrown away. It was a brilliant tour de force 
 called forth by the demand of the time for sensation, 
 for utter newness, for fresh new devices to gain, if 
 only for an instant, the jaded attention of a public 
 supersaturated with sensation. 
 
 The complaint has come that one does not re 
 member the stories of O. Henry. Neither does one 
 remember the newspaper "stories" he reads from 
 morning to morning, brilliant though they may be. 
 The difficulty comes from the fact that the writer is 
 concerned solely with his reader. The dominating 
 canon of his art is, Anything to catch the reader. 
 He is catering, he knows, to the blase, he is mixing 
 condiments for palates gross with sensation. If the 
 "story" is to be printed as fiction, wider latitude 
 
38 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 is allowable. Humor is the surest device with which 
 to catch Americans, but it must be American humor, 
 grossly strong, stingingly piquant, sensationally new. 
 The soul of the Sunday supplement is the unex 
 pected; its style is an exploitation of the startling. 
 Everywhere paradox, incongruity, electric flash 
 lights, "go" New York City, jazz bands, Coney 
 Island, the Follies, Charlie Chaplin, the colored 
 monstrosities of Boob McNut, twentieth century 
 America in maddest career. 
 
 O. Henry lacks repose, and art is serene. He does 
 not lift us. He moves us tremendously at times, 
 but so does a narcotic. Even in his brief moments 
 of seriousness we cannot take him seriously. How 
 can we approach in the spirit of art, serious art that 
 is worth living with, a story with the title "Psyche 
 and the Psky scraper," or one that opens like 
 this: 
 
 The poet Longfellow or was it Confucius, the in 
 ventor of Wisdom? remarked: 
 
 "Life is real, life is earnest; 
 And things are not what they seem." 
 
 As mathematics are or is : thanks, old subscriber ! 
 the only just rule by which the questions of life can 
 be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to 
 the straight edge and the balanced column of the great 
 goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. 
 
The Age of O. Henry 39 
 
 If readers would only be content to use O. Henry 
 as a condiment, exhilarating >at times and highly 
 stimulating, but never to be used as a food, if they 
 would place him where he belongs as vaudeville 
 brilliant, humorous, stimulatingly original for the 
 beguiling of an empty hour, even the most old- 
 fashioned of critics would have no complaint, but 
 to rate him as the army of copy-readers and re 
 viewers, even professors of literature, have rated 
 him, as a maker of classics, as the great master of 
 modern literature, as the creator who has socialized 
 the short story, as the equal of Poe and Hawthorne 
 and Harte on their own ground, is deplorable. To 
 make him the recommended reading of the rising 
 generation, to teach him in the schools, to give him 
 to the new rising group of young authors as a model 
 until the O. Henry manner and methods have be 
 come a dominating force in the fiction of the day, 
 is to teach that literature is frivolity, that it is 
 not necessarily to be based on truth or on the funda 
 mentals that underlie human life, and that it is to 
 be created for no other purpose than to give a mo 
 mentary titillation, a beguiling thing to be taken up 
 with the pipe and the cigar in moments of relaxation 
 and to be brushed out with the ashes. If this be the 
 ideal, then the civilization of our day is written on 
 wood-pulp fiber with water. 
 
 O. Henry is not a writer of literature in the sense 
 
40 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 that the word literature has been used by all the 
 generations up to our own ; he is not a model to be 
 studied by any writer save the professional news 
 paper humorist. The daily columnist may give his 
 days and nights to O. Henry and profit thereby, 
 but not the writer who is writing for publication 
 on really durable material. Always is he in altitu- 
 dissimo; the music is always at full orchestra with 
 the traps in furious action. It is keyed to the jazz 
 note, to hilarious familiarity, to end-man high spirits. 
 The author slaps his reader on the back and laughs 
 loudly as if he were in a bar-room. Never the finer 
 subtleties of suggested effect, never the unsuspected 
 though real and moving moral background; seldom 
 the softer tones that touch the deeper life and move 
 the soul, rare indeed the moments when the reader 
 feels a sudden tightening of the throat and a quick 
 ening of the pulse. It is the humor again I say 
 it of the comic journalist, an enormously clever 
 and original journalist to be sure, rather than the 
 insight of a serious portrayer of human life; it is 
 the day s work of an experienced special reporter 
 eager that his "stories" shall please his unpleasable 
 chief and his capricious readers long ago outwearied 
 with being pleased. 
 
The Age of O. Henri/ 41 
 
 VI 
 
 On the mechanical side of short story construction 
 O. Henry was skilful indeed. He had the unusual 
 power of gripping his reader s attention and compel 
 ling him to go on and on to the end. Moreover, 
 he was possessed of an extraordinary originality, 
 finesse, brilliancy of style and diction, and that 
 sense of form which can turn every element of the 
 seemingly careless narrative to a single startling 
 focus. It is this architectonic quality of the work 
 of O. Henry that has endeared him to the makers of 
 handbooks and correspondence courses. It was this 
 in addition to the freshness and originality of his 
 humor and his diction that has given him as his 
 most enthusiastic admirers that most difficult of all 
 groups to please, the manuscript readers for pub 
 lishing houses and the professional reviewers of 
 books. Amid the dead mass of material that con 
 stituted their day s work O. Henry shone like a star. 
 His technique is peculiar. He began at the end of 
 his story always and worked backward. With him 
 it was primarily an intellectual problem : the reader 
 and his psychological processes were constantly be 
 fore him. A typical O. Henry tale begins with 
 seemingly random remarks of a facetiously philo 
 sophical nature illustrated at length with an ex- 
 
42 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 ample seemingly taken on the impulse of the moment. 
 The example widens into a rather unusual situation. 
 The reader becomes interested as to the solution of 
 the increasingly complex problem, finds that ma 
 terials have been given in abundance, sees clearly 
 at length how it is going to end, is about to throw 
 the tale aside as not worth pursuing further then 
 suddenly is given an absolutely other solution 
 that comes like a jet of water in the face. Study 
 the mechanism of such tales as "Girl," "The Pen 
 dulum," "The Marry Month of May," and the like. 
 One may detect instantly the germ of the story, 
 the sole cause why it was written. A whole nar 
 rative is built up carefully to bring this sentence 
 into startling focus at the end: "At last I have 
 found something that will not bag at the knees," or 
 this " Oh, Andy/ she sighed, this is great ! Sure 
 I 11 marry wid ye. But why did n t ye tell me ye was 
 the cook? I was near turnin ye down for bein 
 one of thim foreign counts/ 
 
 Intellectually brilliant as all this may be, however, 
 one must not forget that it concerns only the ex 
 ternals of short story art. The failures were at 
 vital points. A short story must have characteriza 
 tion, and O. Henry s pen turned automatically to 
 caricature. We seldom see his characters: we see 
 only the externals of costumes, masks and make-ups, 
 and exaggerated physical peculiarity. He gives us 
 
The Age of O. Henri/ 43 
 
 types, not individuals, and often he describes them 
 in terms of types. Here is the wife of one of his 
 heroes : 
 
 Mrs. Hopkins was like a thousand others. The 
 auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sun 
 day afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the deli 
 catessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for 
 department store marked-down sales, the feeling of 
 superiority to the lady in the third-floor front who 
 wore genuine ostrich tips and had two names over her 
 bell, the mucilaginous hours during which she re 
 mained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoid 
 ance of the instalment man, the tireless patronage of 
 the acoustics of the dumb-waiter shaft all the attri 
 butes of the Gotham flat-dweller were hers. 
 
 One never sees in his stories a shop-girl ; it is always 
 the shop-girl, described in generalities like this : 
 
 She was a wonder. Small and half-way pretty, 
 and as much at her ease in that cheap cafe as though 
 she were only in the Palmer House, Chicago, with a 
 souvenir spoon already hidden in her shirt waist. 
 She was natural. Two things I noticed about her 
 especially. Her belt buckle was exactly in the middle 
 of her back, and she didn t tell us that a large man 
 with a ruby stick-pin had followed her up all the way 
 from Fourteenth Street. 
 
 Or this : 
 
 Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted blonde, 
 
44 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter cakes 
 in a window. She stood behind her counter in the 
 Biggest Store; and as you closed your hand over the 
 tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe ; 
 and as you looked again you wondered how she had 
 come by Minerva s eyes. 
 
 But generally he is not so specific even as this. 
 How shall one visualize a character described in 
 these terms: 
 
 She was looking like a bulbul, a gazelle, and a tea 
 rose, and her eyes were as soft and bright as two 
 quarts of cream skimmed off the Milky Way. 
 
 Or a hero like this : 
 
 He had a face like a picture of a knight like one 
 of that Round Table bunch and a voice like a cello 
 solo. And his manners ! Lynn, if you d take John 
 Drew in his best drawing-room scene and compare 
 the two, you d have John arrested for disturbing 
 the peace. 
 
 Again, to speak only of fundamentals, a short 
 story should have dialogue that is natural and 
 inevitable. The characters should talk as such peo 
 ple in life would actually talk. In his sketch "The 
 World and the Door," O. Henry makes this perti 
 nent remark: "I read in a purely fictional story 
 the other day the line : Be it so, said the policeman. 
 Nothing so strange has yet cropped out in Truth," 
 
The Age of O. Henry 45 
 
 and yet in the same volume he makes a college pro 
 fessor talk like this: "You wind-jammers who 
 apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical 
 syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin into 
 the infinitesimal ragbag." 
 
 And I wonder if there ever was a man in the 
 world who, chosen at random at night from the 
 bread-line in New York and given a dinner by a 
 whimsical millionaire who has sent a servant out to 
 secure some one to dine with him, would greet his 
 host whom he has never seen with these preliminary 
 words : 
 
 Good! Going to be in courses, is it? All right, 
 my jovial ruler of Bagdad. I m your Scheherazade 
 all the way to the toothpicks. You re the- first Caliph 
 with a general Oriental flavor I Ve struck since frost. 
 What luck! And I was forty-third in line. 
 
 Again, a short story should be true, and exaggera 
 tion is not truth. A short story should leave sharp 
 and indelible the impress of a vital moment in the 
 history of a human soul. It should, as O. Henry 
 himself has expressed it, "take you by the throat like 
 a quinsy," and not because of a situation and not 
 because of a skilfully prepared moment of surprise, 
 but because of a glimpse into the depths of a human 
 heart. To deal with types the shop-girl, the 
 grafter, the border desperado or with the stock 
 
46 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 figures of comedy the mother-in-law, the fat man, 
 the maiden lady is to work with abstractions and 
 not with an individual soul, and the short story by 
 its very nature is restricted to the individual. To 
 treat of types is the province of exposition. 
 
 But his shop-girls are they not individuals? 
 O. Henry himself confesses that they are not. In 
 describing Nancy he realizes that he is giving only 
 the characteristics peculiar to the clan, and tries to 
 shift the responsibility upon the reader. 
 
 Nancy you would call a shop-girl because you 
 have the habit. There is no type, but a perverse 
 generation is always seeking a type ; so this is what 
 the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompa 
 dour, and the exaggerated straight front. Her skirt 
 is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect 
 her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her 
 short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were 
 Persian lamb ! On her face and in her eyes, remorse 
 less type-seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. 
 It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against 
 cheated womanhood ; of sad prophecy of the vengeance 
 to come. When she laughs her loudest the look is 
 still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of 
 Russian peasants ; and those of us left will see it some 
 day on Gabriel s face when he comes to blow us up. 
 It is a look that should wither and abash a man; but 
 he has been known to smirk at it and offer flowers 
 with a string tied to them. 
 
The Age of O. Henry 47 
 
 Had he wished to avoid "the remorseless type- 
 seeker," why did he not take an individual and seek 
 for differences rather than for similarities? Mau 
 passant looked at things which were seemingly alike 
 until he saw startling unlikenesses. That was his 
 art. O. Henry writes expositions upon typical 
 wrongs done the shop-girl class in American cities, 
 and it is exposition by means of a single test case. 
 The problem is worked out with a and b which are 
 fixed constants. Maupassant avoids the type and 
 shows the unique soul. O. Henry in a sermon like 
 "An Unfinished Story," dealing with the pernicious 
 system that creates the type, or in "Elsie in New 
 York," a jibe at reformers and nothing else, may 
 succeed in moving his reader to anger against an 
 evil, but he leaves no single person for us to love or 
 hate or pity. "A Harlem Tragedy" is not at all a 
 study of New York tenement life : it is a clever exer 
 cise in paradox, and it is not true. His atmosphere 
 is too artificial for real emotion; the construction 
 over-balances the material. "A Lickpenny Lover" is 
 brilliant technique, but it is not fundamentally the 
 story of a shop-girl, and it is based upon an un 
 truth. The form of the lover s proposal had to be 
 managed with care to make possible that final sen 
 tence which is the cause of the tale, and no in 
 telligent lover as ardent in his love as here repre 
 sented would have failed to make himself perfectly 
 
48 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 clear. It smells of the footlights; it was deliberately 
 manufactured to cause a moment of laughter at 
 the end. 
 
 Much of his later work impresses us as stories 
 from the lips of a skilful raconteur in a hotel lobby 
 or a club room. One feels almost the physical 
 presence of the man as one reads an opening like 
 this: "Suppose you should be walking down 
 Broadway after dinner, with ten minutes allotted to 
 the consummation of your cigar while you are 
 choosing between a diverting tragedy and something 
 serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand 
 is laid on your arm," or this : "I don t suppose it 
 will knock any of you people off your perch to read 
 a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and 
 a good many others have demonstrated the fact that 
 animals can express themselves in remunerative 
 English/ One has the impression of a man blink 
 ing over his cigar in after-dinner reminiscence and 
 story-telling hilarity. The tales are brief 2500 
 words the later ones average and they follow 
 each other in rapid-fire order like a round of good 
 ones at a commercial travelers convention. He is 
 familiar with his reader, asks his advice on points 
 of diction and grammar, winks jovially, slaps him 
 on the back, and laughs aloud: There now! 
 it s over. Hardly had time to yawn, did you?" 
 "Young lady, you would have liked that grocer s 
 
The Age of O. Henry 49 
 
 young man yourself"; "It began way up in Sullivan 
 County, where so many rivers and so much trouble 
 begins or begin; how would you say that?" And 
 how he rambles : 
 
 Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed 
 under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm of Gilead Act of 
 the Year of the Fall of Adam. She was a fruit-stand 
 blonde strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her eyes 
 were wide apart, and she possessed the calm of the 
 storm that never comes. But it seems to me that 
 words (at any rate per) are wasted in an effort to de 
 scribe the beautiful. Like fancy it is engendered in 
 the eyes. There are three kinds of beauties I was 
 foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a 
 story. The first is the freckled faced, snub-nosed girl 
 whom you like. The second is Maude Adams. The 
 third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau s paintings. 
 Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. 
 
 He opens a story like a responder to a toast at 
 a banquet, with a theory or an attitude toward a 
 phase of life; then he illustrates it with a special 
 case, holding the "point" carefully to the end, to 
 bring it out with dramatic suddenness as he takes 
 his seat amid applause. 
 
 Never a writer so whimsical. Who else would 
 dare to write a short story with these rules : "Let 
 the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the 
 Non Sequitur Limited, if it will; first, you must 
 
50 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 take your seat in the observation car Raison d etre* 
 for one moment. ... It is for no longer than to con 
 sider a brief essay on the subject let us call it: 
 What s Around the Corner. " "Cabbages and 
 Kings," to use his own words, is "tropical vaude 
 ville," and the book is not widely different from all 
 he wrote. A few times he tried to break away from 
 the method that made him and that ruined him, as 
 in "Roads of Destiny" with its Hawthorne sugges 
 tion, and the delightful "The Church with the Over 
 shot Wheel," but it was not often. "The Enchanted 
 Kiss," an absinthe dream with parts as lurid and as 
 brilliant as De Quincey, shows what he might have 
 done had he given himself completely to such effort, 
 but the ephemeral press had laid its hands upon him 
 and he rendered it its full demands. 
 
 VII 
 
 The influence of O. Henry upon the short story 
 of the decade after his death has been alarming. He 
 more than any one else helped to turn the tide of 
 this popular form toward the present all-tyranniz 
 ing demand for manner. The ghost of O. Henry 
 flits now over even the standard magazines, and it 
 all but dominates some of the more popular journals 
 like "The Saturday Evening Post." It has been 
 remarked many times that it is hard to remember 
 
The Age of O. Henri/ 51 
 
 O. Henry titles and to locate quotations from his 
 stories. Let the O. Henry specialist try his skill 
 at these typical passages: 
 
 He was unhappy. As he consumed his sensitive 
 luncheon of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, French 
 fried potatoes and deep-dish apple pie, he occasionally 
 roared at his wife, who had limousine upholstery on a 
 fliver chassis. "What is it, dear? Do you feel the 
 sadness of things?" inquired Mrs. J. Bolivar Whipple. 
 
 He slipped from the expression of a man who wants 
 that check to that of a man presented with a cocktail 
 at a dinner he had expected to be dry. 
 
 Sylvester Lehigh Pennyworth Tibbie landed in 
 New York City in the dark of the moon, with the left 
 hind foot of a graveyard rabbit dangling from his 
 watch chain, and starting at the foot of Liberty Street, 
 where he stepped off the ferry-boat, began his assault 
 upon the Fortress of Fortune, an attack of which the 
 harrowing details shall form the warp and woof of 
 this chronicle. 
 
 The neck-torturing office buildings of the lower city 
 did not catch up the vibrations of S. L. P. Tibbie s 
 firm tread upon the cobblestones of West Street. 
 Little old N York did not noticeably notice Sylvester. 
 
 I went on to the Eagle Bird, to get something for 
 the nerve strain I d been suffering from, owing to me 
 having got a necktie that was made by a lady who 
 had lost her husband a few years back and did n t 
 think she d ever get used to not having a man round 
 
52 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the house. Having got about three fingers of relief I 
 went over to the faro table and sat down, and pretty 
 soon Simmy come in and we got to talking about 
 church socials. I allowed that they was a low form 
 of recreation, with all the dangers to an unmarried 
 man that there was at a dance and none of the fun, 
 etc. 
 
 "I m commonly known as Aps, " says the little 
 man. "I m a darling and a daisy and a killaloo bird," 
 he says, mighty boastful. "Luck s my pup and fol 
 lows me around," he says. "Any man that does me 
 a favor wears diamonds in the near future, and the 
 man who bucks my game is a prey to bitter and un 
 availing regrets shortly subsequent. I m cold pizen 
 with no known anecdote, or I m milk and honey blest 
 according as you want to take me. I ve jumped 
 your coal claim." 
 
 If there were a hundred men in a crowd and Chester 
 K. Pilkins was there he would be the hundredth man. 
 I like that introduction, etc. 
 
 The city of Anneburg, situate some distance south 
 of Mason and Dixon s line at the point where the To 
 bacco Belt and the Cotton Belt, fusing imperceptibly 
 together, mingle the nitrogenous weed and the boiled 
 staple in the same patchwork strip of fertile loam lands, 
 was large enough to enjoy a Carnegie Library, a mu 
 nicipal graft scandal, and a reunion of the Confeder 
 ate Veterans Association. 
 
 These were picked almost at random from the first 
 
The Age of O. Henry 53 
 
 miscellaneous collection of copies of "The Saturday 
 Evening Post" some twelve numbers there hap 
 pened to be altogether that I could lay my hands 
 upon. The quotations are from Sinclair Lewis, 
 Henry Pason Dowst, Kennett Harris, and Irvin 
 Cobb. 
 
 The Society of Arts and Sciences at a dinner in 
 honor of the genius of William Sydney Porter in 
 April, 1918, voted to award a prize of $250 a year 
 for the best short story published the following year. 
 Two O. Henry Memorial Award volumes, contain 
 ing the crowned short stories of 1919 and 1920, have 
 been given to the public. Instead of characterizing 
 the general content of the latest of these volumes 
 myself, let me quote a very recent review of the 
 book by Vera Gordon : 
 
 On the whole it is manner and not matter, treatment 
 and not theme that counts. Realistic handling and a 
 vivid, semi-slangy, pseudo-epigrammatic style will ex 
 cuse any theme, however slight. . . . There is every 
 thing in this remarkable book: slap-stick farce, sob 
 stuff, melodrama, coincidence, and Grand Guignol 
 horrors. There are also three or four good stories. 
 The collection has only one thing in common good 
 craftsmanship. 
 
 This is the legacy, then, which O. Henry has left 
 to the short story. 
 
54 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 VIII 
 
 He admitted his failure. In the last weeks of 
 his life, the power of wizard expression gone for 
 ever, the physical sinking into collapse when it should 
 have borne him through thirty years more of crea 
 tive effort, came his pathetic cry: "I want to get 
 at something bigger. What I have done is child s 
 play to what I can do, to what I know it is in me 
 to do." And again in connection with "The 
 Dream," that last story of his, never finished: "I 
 want to show the public I can write something new 
 new for me, I mean a story without slang, a 
 straightforward dramatic plot treated in a way that 
 will come nearer my ideal of real story-writing. " 
 He was planning a novel, "The story of a man 
 an individual, not a type," as he expressed it. It 
 was too late. What he had written he had written. 
 
 We may explain him best perhaps in the terms 
 of his story "The Lost Blend" : a flask of Western 
 humor John Phoenix, Artemus Ward ; a full meas 
 ure of Bret Harte sentiment, theatricality, melo 
 drama; a drop of Maupassant constructive art, 
 brilliancy of diction, finesse; a dash of journalistic 
 flashiness and after-dinner anecdote; and then in 
 sipid indeed all the blend without this two bottles 
 of the Apollinaris of O. Henry s peculiar soul, 
 
The Age of O. Henry 55 
 
 and lo! the exhilarating blend that is intoxicating a 
 generation "elixir of battle, money, and high life." 
 
 Exhilarating indeed, but a dangerous beverage 
 for steady consumption. Sadly does it distort the 
 perspective and befuddle the heart and the soul. 
 It begets dislike of mental effort, and dependence 
 solely upon thrill and picturesque movement. It 
 is akin to the moving pictures which, seen too often, 
 do to death all thought and all imagination. A 
 college president complained to me recently of the 
 difficulty of finding chapel speakers who would hold 
 the attention of the students. "There must be 
 nothing abstract/ he said; "everything must be in 
 the concrete. The preacher must be hot from some 
 battle where he has grappled with stirring problems 
 at first hand, and he must present graphic pictures 
 in breathless succession." 
 
 We need not complete the connection. Are we 
 arriving at a period when all literary art is ephemeral, 
 a shallow period without philosophy of life or moral 
 background, a period where manner shall rule and 
 not matter, and brilliancy is all in all, a period, in 
 short, where O. Henry is the crowned literary 
 classic ? 
 
A CRITIC IN C MAJOR 
 
 To live in the age of O. Henry is to be aware 
 sooner or later of the enfant terrible of its latest 
 phase, the author of "Prejudices." Opinions of 
 this phenomenon run as widely asunder as men 
 ever drift. To some he is a diabolical boy with a 
 bean-shooter, amazingly accurate of aim; to others 
 he is Demogorgon straight from hell with Orcus 
 and Ades whose name is Nathan; to still others 
 he is a smart Aleck mouthing the argot of the tribe 
 shall not the editor of "The Smart Set" be smart? 
 But there is a minority very respectable to whom 
 he is a genuine critic, the voice of his era. A re 
 cent London "Athenaeum" reviewer has him "rapidly 
 becoming the most important critic in America." 
 That the "literati of New York" and beyond are 
 fearfully aware of this high-vocabularied new censor 
 of art and morals, ducking nervously at his very 
 shadow, is ludicrously evident. The New York 
 "Literary Review," for instance, with a critic of 
 distinction for editor, has mentioned him or al 
 luded to him on its editorial pages more often than 
 
 56 
 
A Critic in C Major 57 
 
 any other contemporary. Is Mencken the typical 
 critic of the O. Henry age, the type of critic that 
 journalism is evolving the critic of the future ? 
 
 The man is so recent an arrival that few can 
 honestly say they have read him, save in fragments. 
 My own experience, perhaps, has been typical. 
 There was a time not so long ago when the name 
 Mencken called up for me only certain smashing 
 reviews, O. Henry-like in their general effect. I 
 smiled over them as work keyed to "The Smart 
 Set" smart. But the man was not to be dismissed. 
 I found myself one day with "Pre faces" in my 
 hand, and opening by chance my eye fell on this: 
 "Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depress 
 ing intellectual slum." I opened again : "0 Doc- 
 tor admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus ! Need 
 less to say the universities have not overlooked this 
 geyser of buttermilk : he is an honourary A. M. of 
 Yale" this concerning one Krehbiel. Who would 
 lay down a book as piquant as that promised to be ? 
 I finished it with gusto, though its ram s-horn 
 roared against every wall I had ever stood upon. I 
 am of the Puritans for six generations, I am a 
 Methodist, I am a college professor : imagine the 
 massacre of this book in a future number of "The 
 Smart Set" ! At the end of a furious charge upon 
 a woolly little lamb of a publication this reviewer 
 once worked himself up to this thunderous climax: 
 
58 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the United States "is the Billy Sunday among the 
 nations." I was inclined after "Prefaces" to say, 
 "Yes, and H. L. Mencken is the Billy Sunday among 
 her critics." He defends the negative thunderously; 
 he can out-Billy Billy himself. His vocabulary 
 is richer. Consider such tremendous pulpit-thrash 
 ings as these : 
 
 The American people, taking them by and large, are 
 the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious 
 mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under 
 one flag in Christendom since the fall of the Eastern 
 Empire. 
 
 In the presence of the Methodist clergy, it is difficult 
 to avoid giving away to the weakness of indignation. 
 What one observes is a horde of uneducated and in 
 flammatory dunderheads, eager for power, intolerant 
 of opposition and full of a childish vanity a mob of 
 holy clerks but little raised, in intelligence and dignity, 
 above the forlorn half wits whose souls they chronically 
 rack. In the whole United States there is scarcely one 
 among them who stands forth as a man of sense and 
 information. Illiterate in all save the elementals, un 
 touched by the larger currents of thought, drunk with 
 their power over dolts, crazed by their immunity to 
 challenge by their betters, they carry over into the pro 
 fessional class of the country the spirit of the most 
 stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the estate of 
 an idiotic phobia. There is not a village in America 
 
A Critic in C Major 59 
 
 in which some such preposterous jackass is not in ir 
 ruption. 
 
 The man puzzled me. Was he not perhaps a 
 phenomenon of the war period? I thought so 
 once ; his most destructive eruptions have been since 
 1914. A world conflict waged long without quarter 
 drives every man to extremes of speech, very often 
 to phobia. Here was a young man undoubtedly 
 running amuck. He attacked indiscriminately, it 
 seemed to me, like a typhoon in a jungle. He did 
 nothing but destroy. After me the deluge ! Every 
 cherished ideal, every hero, every idol, every sweet 
 delusion, our whole America, "a nation of third- 
 class men" he damned with a crackle of superla 
 tives. Note the range and execution of his guns : 
 This of Virginia, the mother of Southern States : 
 
 Her education has sunk to the Baptist seminary 
 level ; not a single contribution to human knowledge 
 has come out of her colleges in twenty-five years ; she 
 spends less than half upon her common schools, per 
 capita, than any northern state spends. In brief, an 
 intellectual Gobi or Lapland. Urbanity, politesse, 
 chivalry ? Go to ! It was in Virginia that they in 
 vented the device of searching for contraband whisky 
 in women s underwear. 
 
 This of Roosevelt, and written in the period of 
 laudation just, following his death ; 
 
60 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 A glorified longshoreman engaged eternally in clean 
 ing out bar-rooms and not too proud to gouge when 
 the inspiration came to him, or to bite in the clinches, 
 or to oppose the relatively fragile brass knuckles of 
 the code with chair-legs, bung-starters, cuspidors, demi u 
 johns, and ice-picks. 
 
 Are you a Puritan? Read this: 
 
 The Puritan, for all his pretensions, is the worst of 
 materialists. Passed though his sordid and unimagina 
 tive mind, even the stupendous romance of sex is re 
 duced to a disgusting transaction in physiology. As 
 artist he is thus hopeless ; as well expect an auctioneer 
 to qualify for the Sistine Chapel choir. All he ever 
 achieves, taking pen or brush in hand, is a feeble 
 burlesque of his betters, all of whom, by his hog s 
 theology, are doomed to hell. 
 
 And did you ever review a book, or enjoy a book 
 review ? Behold yourself : 
 
 Consider the solemn ponderosities of the pious old 
 maids, male and female, who write book reviews for 
 the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pretension to 
 culture, a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteous 
 ness but of sound aesthetic understanding, of alert 
 ness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. The normal 
 American book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, 
 a superstitious bluestocking, an apostle of Vassar 
 Kultur; and her customary attitude of mind is one of 
 fascinated horror. (The Hamilton Wright Mabie 
 complex! The "white list" of novels!) 
 
A Critic in C Major 61 
 
 Let us turn to a more universal theme, the poet s 
 dream of romantic love: 
 
 The business of poetry, remember, is to set up a 
 sweet denial of the harsh facts that confront all of 
 us to soothe us in our agonies with emollient words 
 in brief, to lie sonorously and reassuringly. Well, 
 what is the worst curse of life? Answer; the abomin 
 able magnetism that draws unlikes and incompatibles 
 into delirious and intolerable conjunction the kinetic 
 over-stimulation called love. 
 
 And again: 
 
 The lover sees with an eye that is both opaque and 
 out of focus. Thus he begins the familiar process of 
 editing and improving his girl. Features and char 
 acteristics that, observed in cold blood, might have 
 quickly aroused his most active disgust are now seen 
 through a rose-tinted fog, like drabs in a musical 
 comedy. The lover ends by being almost anaesthetic 
 to disgust. While the spell lasts his lady could shave 
 her head or take to rubbing snuff, or scratch her leg 
 at a communion service, or smear her hair with bear s 
 grease, and yet not disgust him. Here the paralysis of 
 the faculties is again chiefly physical a matter of ob 
 scure secretions, of shifting pressure, of metabolism. 
 Nature is at her tricks. The fever of love is upon 
 its victim. His guard down, he is little more than a 
 pathetic automaton. 
 
 And when it comes to marriage : 
 
62 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 A man, when his marriage enters upon the stage of 
 regularity and safety, gets used to his wife as he might 
 get used to a tannery next door, and vice versa. . . . 
 Who are happy in marriage? Those with so little, 
 imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and 
 those so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hope 
 less rebellion. 
 
 Even the Ten Commandments are not immune : 
 
 They [Shaw s platitudes] are as bullet-proof in es 
 sence as the multiplication table, and vastly more bul 
 let-proof than the Ten Commandments or the Con 
 stitution of the United States. 
 
 But it is the condition of American art and litera 
 ture that especially infuriates him. This at random : 
 
 Find me a second-rate American in any of the arts 
 and I ll find you his master and prototype among third, 
 fourth, or fifth-rate Englishmen. 
 
 America is for him a land cursed with third-rate- 
 ness, with morals, with sentimentalism, with uplift 
 mania, with Pollyannaism. Of Henry Sydnor Har 
 rison, "merchant of mush" : 
 
 He is touched by the delusion that he has a mission 
 to make life sweeter, to preach the Finer Things, to 
 radiate Gladness. What! More gladness? Another 
 volt or two and all civilized adults will join the Italians 
 and Jugo-Slavs in their headlong hegira. A few more 
 amperes, and the land will be abandoned to the Jews, 
 the ex-Confederates, and the Bolsheviki. 
 
A Critic in C Major 63 
 
 These are but a half-dozen of his bloody angles : 
 one might with small searching find yet extremer 
 damnations of the regime of the democratic hive. 
 He has prodded every hornet in the American 
 swarm. One of the "belligerent young generation/ 
 diagnoses Professor Sherman, and that was my own 
 classification once. To every new generation the 
 fundamentals of forty years before seem inadequate : 
 that is an axiom. When the baton of the dead 
 master falls into the hands of the new young leader 
 he at once changes the balance of saxophones and 
 trombones and banjos. Periods in literature are 
 but generations. The hymns of the fathers are al 
 ways "pennyroyal" to the sons; jazz is always the 
 music of the future and vers libre its poetry. The 
 cry of adolescence and later adolescence is always 
 revolutionary. Who so "pennyroyal" now as 
 Wordsworth? Yet the "Lyrical Ballads" to the 
 thoughtful inheritors of the eighteenth century tra 
 ditions were the extreme of intolerable jazz. Shelley 
 to the critics born before the French Revolution 
 wrote "drivelling idiocy run mad." He was eight 
 een when he produced his "The Necessity of Athe 
 ism" : he was not much older when he wrote his 
 "Defense of Poetry." New periods in literature 
 always, from Sydney s day to Frank Norris s, have 
 been ushered in with defenses of new literary creeds 
 and appeals for a return to true art, as Preraphael- 
 
64 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 ism was supposed to be a return to the naturalism 
 that prevailed before Raphael had cast it into mold 
 that had become classic. And these blasts invar 
 iably have been blown by men under thirty. The 
 theory is good : it explains Mencken. 
 
 And then I found that Mencken is forty-two years 
 old he was born in 1880: it gave me a sensation 
 when I saw that on the jacket of a book. It scat 
 tered my theories like an old letter discovered by a 
 biographer. Then I did what I should have done 
 at the start: I read Mencken, all the Mencken I 
 could procure, and when I had read him I under 
 stood. I am clear now. In the presence of all 
 his work the workman stands revealed. 
 
 ii 
 
 The man began as a lyrist. At twenty-one he 
 was Henry Louis Mencken, author of a single 
 book, a dilettante little volume with youth writ 
 large on every page, including the title-page, which 
 ran: "Ventures into Verse, Being Various Bal 
 lads, Ballades, Rondeaux, Triolets, Songs, Qua 
 trains, Odes and Roundels all rescued from the 
 Potters Field, of Old Files and here Given Decent 
 Burial [Peace to Their Ashes], by Henry Louis 
 Mencken with Illustrations & Other Things By 
 Charles S. Gordon & John Siegel. . . . First (and 
 
A Critic in C Major 65 
 
 Last) Edition." At the very opening of the vol 
 ume there is a 
 
 PRELIMINARY REBUKE 
 
 Don t shoot the pianist; he s doing his best. 
 Gesundheit ! Knockers ! have your fling ! 
 Unto an Anvilfest you re bid ; 
 It took a lot of hammering, 
 To build Old Cheops Pyramid! 
 
 The first third of the book is made up of ballads in 
 the vein of Kipling: 
 
 Prophet of brawn and bravery ! 
 Bard of the fighting man! 
 
 It is good work: it catches to the full the spirit 
 of the master : Kipling himself might have writ 
 ten the ringing anthems that fill a dozen pages. 
 Mingled with his "ballads of the fleet" they might 
 deceive the pundits. 
 
 The rest of the book is prevailing in lighter vein, 
 vers de societe, French forms lightly fingered, love 
 lyrics in adolescent moods. The technique for the 
 most part is exquisite. Bunner for instance never 
 wrote a more sparkling bit than this "Frivolous 
 Rondeau" : 
 
 A lyric verse 1 11 make for you, 
 Fair damsel that the many woo, 
 Twill be a sonnet on your fan 
 
66 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 That aid to love from quaint Japan 
 And "true" will rime with "eyes of blue." 
 
 Ah! me, if you but only knew 
 The toil of setting out to hew 
 
 From words as I shall try to do 
 A lyric verse. 
 
 Fleet metric ghosts I must pursue, 
 
 And dim rime apparitions, too 
 But yet, t is joyfully I scan, 
 And reckon rimes and think and plan 
 
 For there s no cheaper present than 
 A lyric verse. 
 
 Some of the "Songs of the City" are richly original, 
 but in view of the later Mencken the lyric "II Pen- 
 seroso" is more significant : 
 
 Love s song is sung in ragtime now 
 
 And kisses sweet are syncopated joys, 
 
 The tender sigh, the melancholy moan, 
 
 The soft reproach and yearning up-turned gaze 
 
 Have passed into the caves without the gates, 
 
 And in their place, to serve love s purposes, 
 
 Bold profanations from the music halls 
 
 Are working overtime. 
 
 The poet of twenty-one already was passing into 
 the sear and yellow leaf. Romantic love was made 
 in knightly fashion once with stately vows and tall 
 vocabulary, but now, alas, 
 
A Critic in C Major 67 
 
 Now to his girl the ragtime lover says, 
 
 The while he strums his marked-down mandolin, 
 
 "Is you ma lady love?" and she, his girl, 
 
 Makes answer thus: "Ah is!" 
 
 Gadzooks ! it makes me sad ! 
 
 That any one except me, and that recently 
 ever read a line of the book there is no evidence. 
 Evidently it is still considered valuable in certain 
 quarters : the only copy in New York City, so far 
 as I could discover, was stolen from the public 
 library a year ago. The book is extinct, almost to 
 tally extinct. When it was issued it made no more 
 impression upon the reading public than if it were 
 a schoolgirl s yearnings published by Badger. The 
 title was effeminate and timid ; apologetic even. 
 Had it been, say, "Hell after 8 115," some poor devil 
 of a newspaper reviewer might have glimpsed it in 
 the heap, but "Ventures into Verse" it is to be 
 rated in literary statistics as still-born. Yet show 
 me a more promising bit of poetic workmanship put 
 to press that year by an American. 
 
 Even the poet must live. Henry Louis Mencken 
 became, of all things, a reporter on a city daily; 
 a Baltimore daily. The muse drooped and faded 
 and disappeared. Journalism is the antonym of 
 poetry, as completely as city is the antonym of 
 country. To set a young lyric poet to gathering 
 gutter-sweepings and offal for the maw of the 
 
68 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 "Gomorrah Gazette" of to-day is like harnessing an 
 aeroplane to a swill-cart. Imagine a poet, say Swin 
 burne, put to slavery under an American city editor 
 whose ideal of a perfect paper is a front page 
 covered, half of it, Jwith red block letters , and 
 screamers. Send him out for material, say to the 
 East Side. Contrast if you can what he might 
 bring back with this recent picture of Swinburne by 
 Max Beerbohm : "He spoke to us of his walk ; 
 spoke not in the strain of a man who had been tak 
 ing his daily exercise on Putney Heath, but rather 
 in that of a Peri who had at long last been suffered 
 to pass through Paradise. And rather than that he 
 spoke, would I say that he cooingly and flutingly 
 sang of his experience. The wonders of this 
 morning s wind and sun and clouds were expressed 
 in a flow of words so right and sentences so per 
 fectly balanced that they would have seemed pedantic 
 had they not been clearly as spontaneous as the 
 wordless notes of a bird in song." Swinburne was 
 a poet and not a journalist. 
 
 Though a reporter Mencken was still a poet, but 
 he was in protest now, in plaintive protest. At 
 twenty-one, despite the newspaper game, he was still 
 not wholly disillusioned. Kipling he called "Mas 
 ter," but he bemoaned his lapse into twentieth- 
 centuryism. The poet of his dream was turning 
 into "poetaster," but perhaps it was not too late to 
 
A Critic in C Major 69 
 
 recall him. He voiced his disappointment in a 
 "Ballade of Protest." I wish I had space for it 
 all: 
 
 Sing us again in rhymes that ring, 
 In Master- Voice that lives and thrills; 
 
 Sing us again of wind and wing, 
 Of temple bells and jungle trills : 
 And if your Pegasus ever wills 
 
 To lead you down some other way, 
 Go bind him in his older thills 
 
 Sing us again of Mandalay. 
 
 Master, regard the plaint we bring, 
 And hearken to our prayer, we pray, 
 
 Lay down your law and sermoning 
 Sing us again of Mandalay. 
 
 The newspaper game is as swiftly changing in 
 its players and their positions as collegiate foot-ball. 
 Youngsters are continually dropping from the line 
 up, or soaring after intense periods into specialized 
 leadership. After four years young Mencken was 
 city editor this in his native Baltimore and a 
 year later he was dramatic critic. No more poetry ; 
 criticism now, criticism for the theater pages : actors, 
 actresses, first nights, new plays. But the young 
 critic reporter s ambition soared above the news 
 paper column. In 1905 he was twenty-five then 
 and sensitive for revolt he essayed a volume of 
 
70 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 dramatic criticism, a study of the new Heliogabalus 
 of the British Parnassus, Bernard Shaw, the first 
 full-length picture to be drawn of the man. Bril 
 liant work for a youngster, but it was mild of tone 
 and it was received mildly. Its neglect set its au 
 thor to thinking, and the final result was revolution 
 ary. Henry Louis Mencken became H. L. Men 
 cken. In a moment of confession, rare indeed for 
 the man, he has told us of the evolution: "As 
 piring, toward the end of my nonage, to the black 
 robes of a dramatic critic, I took counsel of an an 
 cient whose service went back to the days of Our 
 American Cousin, asking him what qualities were 
 chiefly demanded by the craft," and the ancient 
 told him above all things else to be interesting: 
 "all else is dross." It would do him, he conceded, 
 no real harm to read the books of the great critics or 
 even the works of masters like Shakspere, 
 
 "But, unless you can make people read your criti 
 cisms, you may as well shut up your shop. And the 
 only way to make them read you is to give them some 
 thing exciting." 
 
 "You suggest, then," I ventured, "a certain feroc 
 ity?" 
 
 "I do," replied my venerable friend. "Read George 
 Henry Lewes, and see how he did it sometimes with 
 a bladder on a string, usually with a meat-ax. Knock 
 somebody in the head every day if not an actor, then 
 
A Critic in C Major 71 
 
 the author, and if not the author, then the manager. 
 And if the play and the performance are perfect, then 
 excoriate someone who does n t think so a fellow 
 critic, a rival manager, the unappreciative public. But 
 make it hearty; make it hot! the public would rather 
 be the butt itself than to have no butt in the ring. That 
 is rule No. i of American psychology and of English 
 too, but more especially of American. You must give 
 a good show to get a crowd, and a good show means 
 one with slaughter in it.". . . The advice of my an 
 cient counselor kept turning over and over in my 
 memory, and as chance offered I began to act upon it, 
 and whenever I acted upon it I found that it worked. 
 
 This is illuminating, but it explains only in part. 
 The later Mencken unquestionably lays about him 
 as ferociously as even his ancient friend could have 
 desired, but the reader of all of him is impressed 
 with the fact that his onslaughts are not yellow- 
 journalistic, not indiscriminate and made for mere 
 sensational advertisement. He is not a typhoon 
 boxing the compass with his fury and tearing the 
 whole jungle in brainless rage or assumed rage. 
 His blasts are all in the same direction trade winds, 
 furious at times, but always to the westward. To 
 read him is to discover that after he had finished 
 with Shaw Shaw the windy, cock-sure, icono 
 clastic, with eye to the box-office, perfect type of 
 the critic described by the ancient who dated from 
 
72 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 "Our American Cousin" he next discovered (most 
 unthespianic of discoveries) that devil s Messiah, 
 the prophet Nietzsche, of the German Empire that 
 once was. And he read Nietzsche in the bare Ger 
 man, and absorbed Nietzsche, and then in two di 
 verse volumes he translated Nietzsche and explained 
 him and rhapsodized him to an America which, 
 save for a few scattered PH. D. s made in Bonn 
 and Baesl, had never heard his name even, when 
 indeed even the general run of the German people 
 knew no more about him than, to quote Mencken s 
 own words, "they knew about sanitary plumbing or 
 the theory of least squares/ And he did it bril 
 liantly, comprehendingly I know of no treatment 
 more illuminating. But no man in the twenties 
 ever plunges into that maelstrom of dogma that has 
 swallowed empires, to emerge the man he was. 
 After Nietzsche, no longer was Mencken poet, no 
 longer was he critic: he was a prophet like his 
 master, a prophet with an evangel that the "mob," 
 the "rabble," "the proletariat," the "plain people" 
 shall never understand, shall shudder at indeed al 
 ways, and hoot at, and brand with "Antichrist." 
 
 Whatever else Professor Nietzsche may have been, 
 critic he certainly was not; and however rhapsodic 
 he may have been at times, and dithyrambic and 
 seer-like of tone, he certainly was not a poet. He 
 was a prophet (whether devil-inspired or not is an- 
 
A Critic in C Major 73 
 
 other question; whether sound at philosophic base 
 or not is a theme for another variety of investiga 
 tion) he was a prophet, a voice, a speaker-out to 
 his generation. Prophets have always excoriated 
 and seared their contemporaries. Consider the tor 
 rent poured out by Amos : "Hear this, O you cows, 
 O you women of Bashan, who live softly upon the 
 toil of the poor. . . . You shall be driven straight 
 out through the breaches in the wall, every cow of 
 you. . . ." And there was the Baptist "O genera 
 tion of vipers," and, to come nearer home, there was 
 Carlyle voices in the wilderness thundering aloud, 
 The day of the Lord is here! The methods of 
 Nietzsche were the methods of all prophets of wrath. 
 Thus Mencken describes his arraignment of his own 
 Germany : 
 
 No epithet was too outrageous, no charge was too 
 far-fetched, no manipulation or interpretation of evi 
 dence was too daring, to enter into his ferocious indict 
 ment. He accused the Germans of stupidity, super- 
 stitiousness, and silliness; of a chronic weakness for 
 dodging issues, a fatuous barn-yard" and "green-graz 
 ing" contentment ; of yielding supinely to the commands 
 and exactions of a clumsy and unintelligent govern 
 ment; of degrading education to the low level of mere 
 cramming and examination-passing ; of a congenital in 
 ability to understand and absorb the culture of other 
 peoples, and particularly the culture of the French ; of 
 
74 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 a boorish bumptiousness and an ignorant, ostrich-like 
 complacency; of a systematic hostility to men of gen 
 ius, whether in art, science, or philosophy (so that 
 Schopenhauer, dead in 1860, remained "the last Ger 
 man who was a European event") ; of a slavish de 
 votion to "the two great European narcotics, alcohol 
 and Christianity"; of a profound beeriness, a spiritual 
 dyspepsia, a puerile mysticism, an old-womanish pet 
 tiness, and ineradicable liking for "the obscure, evolv 
 ing, crepuscular, damp and shrouded." 
 
 Whether it was written in hate of Germany or 
 in love, all this torrent of vituperation had with 
 Nietzsche one single direction : every word was a 
 blow at what he considered German weaknesses. 
 Again in the words of Mencken: 
 
 Even its ["Thus Spake Zarathustra s] lingering 
 sneers at the Germans strike at weakness which the 
 more thoughtful Germans were themselves beginning 
 to admit, combat, and remedy. It is a riotous affirma 
 tion of race-efficiency, a magnificent defiance of destiny, 
 a sublime celebration of ambition. 
 
 We are on the right track now: the problem of 
 H. L. Mencken is the problem of a Nietzschean in 
 the heart of the American democracy. What weak 
 nesses will he find from the point of view of "blood 
 and iron," "be hard," "death to the under dog," "not 
 virtue, but efficiency," "the weak and the botched 
 
A Critic in C Major 75 
 
 must perish, they should be helped to perish" what 
 will he find milk-and-waterish in this paradise of 
 the proletariat? Answer: Read "Prejudices." 
 These fulminJations seemingly against all things 
 American are not random shots, diabolical bombs 
 thrown by an enemy of the republic: they are 
 prophet blasts, irritating, maddening, arousing the 
 thoughtful, perhaps, to a conception of the America 
 to be. The very too-muchness of his protesting 
 classifies him: his very violence is "a sublime cele 
 bration of ambition." Those who in rage reply to 
 him from sheltered corners of his continent-broad 
 battle-field miss his whole meaning. To rush ex 
 citedly to the aid of Roosevelt assaulted by this 
 most honest of Rooseveltians, to cry out in horror 
 that the altars of puritanism have been defiled by 
 this most jealous of all Puritans, to shriek "Anti 
 christ" at one who sneers only at un-Christlikeness 
 (in all of his writings I have ever read I have found 
 no innuendo directed at Christ himself), to stone 
 him as a vandal when he breaks open whited sepul- 
 chers and discloses corruption in the heart that had 
 vaunted itself holy rebuttal like this is really con 
 fession. I picture that inner padded den of the 
 Baltimore Carlyle as a place of sardonic laughter. 
 One does not reply with logic and with therefores 
 when one s mother or one s wife is defamed by the 
 prurient-souled, neither does one defend the Ten 
 
76 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Commandments or the moral laws that have made 
 civilization imperfect though it be as yet superior 
 to life under jungle codes wherever that jungle 
 may be. In his heat the Nietzschean hurler of 
 taunts goes too far; always he is too strong one 
 may wonder at times what the Menckenian "News 
 From Nowhere" will really be like when he ceases 
 to be merely destructive and formulates his creed 
 but at present the totality of his blasts disturbs 
 little save weaknesses. 
 
 in 
 
 But Mencken has been branded with the herd- 
 mark "critic" literary critic. All the reviews I 
 have ever read of him, some of them European, 
 classify him only as a critic. And critic he cer 
 tainly is not. To add him to the number of the 
 real critics not book reviewers; not book journal 
 ists; not literary muck-rakers would require the 
 same major treatment that were necessary if O. 
 Henry were to be admitted to the company of the 
 short story writers: the rules would need to be 
 rewritten. That he has the apparatus for criti 
 cism, a dazzling knowledge of books and writers 
 and movements and technique, no man may deny; 
 that he has a brilliancy of style when he wills, an 
 O. Henry-like originality of phrase and illustra- 
 
A Critic in C Major 77 
 
 tion and diction, a remarkable precision and range 
 in the use of words, is evident even to sophomores; 
 that he is curiously learned in many arts and many 
 literatures, saturated especially with all that has 
 poured from the presses of America for two decades, 
 is as true as it is exceptional. I know of no man 
 to-day more brilliantly equipped for critical ex 
 pression. 
 
 But his defects are so radical and his whole at 
 titude toward literary art so uncritical that he must 
 be ruled out as a critic if one is to be governed at 
 all by any of those canons which have been held 
 axiomatic since Aristotle. He has given us at 
 full length his own conception of the critic. It is 
 the proper approach to this side of H. L. Mencken. 
 Let us examine it. 
 
 It is impossible for the true critic to be a gentle 
 man. I use the word in its common meaning, to wit, 
 a man who avoids offence against punctilio, who is 
 averse to an indulgence in personalities, who is ready 
 to sacrifice truth to good manners and good form, and 
 who has respect and sympathy for the feelings of his 
 inferiors. Criticism is intrinsically and inevitably a 
 boorish art. Its practitioner takes color from it, and 
 his gentlemanliness if he has any promptly becomes 
 lost in its interpretative labyrinths. The critic who 
 is a gentleman is no critic. He is merely the dancing 
 master of an art. 
 
78 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Strange astigmatism this, the flippant definition 
 of a reviewer whose life has been spent in the muddy 
 roil of current books. To him a blast in "The 
 Smart Set" aimed at an effusion not yet dry in 
 its ink is actually criticism. Substitute "news 
 paper book reviewer" for "critic" and there is a 
 grain of truth in this definition even a freshman 
 knows that criticism should be fearless and honest 
 whether aimed at a book or a foot-ball coach but 
 with this single reservation the thing is puerile. 
 It is enlightening, however: it illumines its author. 
 But who is Mencken that he should be lighted up 
 for our inspection? Were this not larger than 
 Mencken the thing might be hooted at and thrown 
 forever into the rubbish, but the man is a type : 
 in studying him, as in studying O. Henry and Jack 
 London, we are studying a period, we are studying 
 our own times. 
 
 There is a strange duality in Mencken just as 
 there was in O. Henry: good material, but warped 
 somehow beyond all straightening; sharp eyes be 
 yond the average of sharpness often, but strabismic 
 even to ludicrousness. The disease of Mencken, 
 the disease of a growing area of our writing gener 
 ation, might be diagnosed from this definition of 
 "critic" alone: obsession by contemporaneousness. 
 It is a city disease gendered by the lack of moral 
 and intellectual sanitation in journalistic centers and 
 
A Critic in C Major 79 
 
 by the steady diet of one thing never varied. It is 
 a disease that lays hold inevitably upon the news 
 paper worker who remains for any length of time in 
 the miasma of this most deadly of all extra-hazardous 
 trades. The phosphorus of it eats into the bones 
 and turns all the sky to mucus. The name of it? 
 Call it the "yellows." The blight that is upon our 
 literature to-day comes from the fact that the greater 
 number of its practitioners have at one time or 
 another been gassed in this deadly area and ren 
 dered unbalanced, unable thereafter to see life 
 steadily or to see it whole. 
 
 The veteran reporter sneers at life. He has seen 
 the feet of clay of all our idols, he has dined with 
 the valets of all our heroes, he has learned the 
 price of all our statesmen, he has viewed from with 
 in the ropes the totality of human sordidness and 
 criminality and bestialness, he has visited the side 
 shows of all the Vanity Fairs, and found Beelzebub 
 supreme. He has seen everything, he has been 
 everywhere : he is disillusioned, he is blase, he is 
 cock-sure, he is stripped of belief in anything human 
 or divine he sneers. If he writes a book he 
 entitles it, as did Mencken, "Damn!" life for 
 him becomes a hunt for synonyms for "Damn!" 
 He is not a pessimist, for a pessimist is an honest 
 philosopher who has examined all the sides of life, 
 has weighed coldly both the good and the bad, 
 
80 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 and has found the evil the weightier : he is not a 
 pessimist, he is a man who has lost his shadow, he 
 is an apoplectic victim, one side abnormally devel 
 oped, keen even to the miraculous; the other side 
 shriveled into nothingness. To such a man the 
 world is out of balance. To the jaundiced the whole 
 world is yellow. 
 
 Imagine a journalist writing criticism; imagine 
 Babe Ruth writing epics. His whole training has 
 been centered in the contemporaneous, and criticism 
 demands perspective; he has practised only upon 
 the loud trumpets and the megaphone, and criticism 
 is a thing of subtle blendings and rare shadings; 
 he has been trained to search only for the excep 
 tional, the instantly arresting, the sensational, and 
 criticism demands as its very soul the entire truth. 
 Criticism that deals with contemporaries, ruled 
 Jules Lemaitre, is not criticism at all : it is conversa 
 tion. Conversation about one s contemporaries, if 
 one is a boor, is inevitably boorish : it makes enemies, 
 in certain regions it makes duels. But criticism 
 makes not enemies. Criticism is a science and science 
 is calm, science is gentlemanly in the sense that the 
 word "gentleman" is used outside of newspaper 
 offices and Soviets. To say that it is impossible 
 for a true critic to be a gentleman is to classify one s 
 self. Is the surgeon who cuts cruelly in order to 
 save, is he a boor? May not a diagnostician tell 
 
A Critic in C Major 81 
 
 in perfect calmness and in all gentleness facts about 
 your physical condition that will bring you even 
 thoughts of suicide? Is the chemist who makes an 
 analysis that may drive a fertilizer factory out of 
 business a boor while he is doing his work? Is 
 the scientist inevitably a boor? And is not the 
 critic a scientist? If one writes of the art of 
 Shelley or of Rossetti can not one still have re 
 spect and sympathy for the feelings of one s supe 
 riors ? 
 
 Unscientific, an impressionist ruled by his preju 
 dices, Mencken is not a critic at all. He is a bull in 
 the literary china-shop, he is the champion of the 
 literary off-side : let a book be damned by the prudes 
 and he rushes blindly and furiously to gore its ene 
 mies. He is the leading champion of his fellow- 
 journalist Dreiser, defending him because the prud 
 ish condemned him. "I became involved in Drei 
 ser s cause," he says, "largely because of the efforts 
 of the Comstocks to work up a case against him." 
 He is to be classed not with the critics but with the 
 literary free-lances with high-powered vocabularies, 
 with the newspaper columnists, with the monthly ap 
 praisers of the real estate of Parnassus up to date 
 to the minute, cock-sure, definitive, though the ink 
 still is smeary on the book under the knife the 
 criticism of the age of O. Henry. Is this too 
 strong? Let us examine. Criticism, to some ex- 
 
82 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 tent at least, is a science and obeys certain laws. 
 
 First law of all, a critic should approach his 
 problem with honesty, with open mind, seeking 
 truth; but the very titles of two of Mr. Mencken s 
 most typical books bear State s evidence against him. 
 Prejudice prae-judicium a judgment arrived at 
 before evidence has been heard. Prejudice reads 
 a book, not to be led to a conclusion, but to be 
 confirmed in its own preconceptions; it picks and 
 chooses those points that give poignancy to the al 
 ready formulated verdict. It is oblivious of all 
 else. William Dean Howells could not possibly 
 write a book that would have merit for the author 
 of "Prejudices," nor could Sarah Orne Jewett, nor 
 Mary E. Wilkins. He has made his dogma and 
 it is as inflexible as the rulings of Torquemada. 
 Criticism with him is an exploiting of his own pre 
 conceptions and aversions, not an honest following 
 of the truth, lead where it may. I challenge, there 
 fore, the author of "Prejudices" when he presents 
 himself as juryman who shall weigh evidence and 
 pass judgment. 
 
 Again, criticism is not written in superlatives, 
 in "C Major" a Menckenian term; criticism does 
 not roar in Rooseveltian strenuousness, nor raise a 
 plain x to x* nor, in the very face of the evidence, 
 to .*r 10 . One need not linger here long : read "Preju 
 dices" or "Prefaces" : 
 
A Critic in C Major 83 
 
 I myself am surely no disciple of the Polish tube 
 rose [Chopin] his sweetness, in fact, gags me, and I 
 turn even to Moszkowski for relief. 
 
 One ploughs through "Innocents Abroad" and 
 through parts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous 
 amazement. 
 
 All we have in the way of Civil War literature is a 
 few conventional melodramas, a few half -forgotten 
 short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, 
 and a half-dozen idiotic popular songs in the manner 
 of Randall s "Maryland, My Maryland." 
 
 No sound art, in fact, could possibly be democratic. 
 Tolstoi wrote a whole book to prove the contrary, and 
 only succeeded in making his case absurd. The only 
 art that is capable of reaching the Homo Boobus is 
 art that is already debased and polluted band music, 
 official sculpture, Pears Soap painting, the popular 
 novel. 
 
 The italics, in every (case except the "Homo 
 Boobus/ are mine. 
 
 A critic is humble in the presence of the universe 
 of things he can never know about his subject, toil 
 hard as he may. Seldom may he be sophomorically 
 final or autocratically dogmatic in his generaliza 
 tion, but in "Prejudices" and beyond it "a campus 
 cock-sureness" I thank thee Shylock, for that 
 word an ipse dixit assertiveness that is as if the 
 
84 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Thunderer himself had descended to deliver the 
 verdict. One may open at random : 
 
 Beethoven suffered more during the composition of 
 the Fifth symphony than all the judges of the supreme 
 benches of the world have suffered jointly since the 
 time of the Gerousia. 
 
 We have produced thus far but one genuine wit 
 Ambrose Bierce. 
 
 New England has never shown the slightest sign of 
 a genuine enthusiam for ideas. 
 
 Observe Virginia to-day. It is years since a first- 
 rate man, save only Cabell, has come out of it; it is 
 years since an idea has come out of it. 
 
 To wade through the books of such characteristic 
 American fictioners as Frances Hodgson Burnett, 
 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice 
 Brown, James Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen 
 Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and Sarah Orne Jewett 
 is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible. 
 The flow of words is completely purged of ideas. 
 
 Phelps cites in particular an ass named Professor 
 Richardson, whose "American Literature," it appears, 
 "is still a standard work" and "a deservedly high 
 authority" apparently in colleges. In the 1892 edi 
 tion of this magnum opus, Mark [Twain] is dismissed 
 with less than four lines, and ranked below Irving, 
 Holmes and Lowell. . . . Mark is dismissed by this 
 
A Critic in C Major 85 
 
 professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon. . . . 
 College professors, alas, never learn anything. 
 
 Again the italics are mine. 
 
 Let the last serve as the type. Richardson s 
 history, Volume I, from which the offending judg 
 ment comes, was written in 1885, and the publishers 
 finally bound up the original two parts of the work 
 as a single volume in 1892. Is a man "an ass," a 
 "professor Balderdash," who with the perspective 
 of 1885, a full generation ago, when Mr. Mencken 
 was five years old, placed Mark Twain below Irving, 
 and Holmes and Lowell? If so, then Poe was an 
 ass, and all other critics have been asses who have 
 ventured upon a final rating of contemporaries. 
 He proves the asininity of Richardson apparently 
 from this single case. I think it was Emerson who 
 once defined genius as the ability to generalize from 
 a single example. 
 
 Mencken s undoubtedly is the most raucous and 
 the most arresting voice that has been raised to pro 
 test against the weaknesses of the Age of O. Henry, 
 yet in all his tones and methods he is himself of the 
 O. Henry school. The journalist must "put his stuff 
 across" or fail miserably, and Mr. Mencken pre 
 eminently is a journalist, with the journalist s per 
 spective and the journalist s point of view. He 
 knows only the city, the sophisticated set, the snob- 
 
86 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 bishly intellectual, the perpetually bored; and to 
 gain their attention he must be smartly original, 
 brilliant, violent, arresting. The most certain sol 
 vent of boredom, he realizes, is humor; the O. Henry 
 type of humor completely up to date and smash- 
 ingly original. And he is master of the humor that 
 is requisite ; a humor more effective indeed than O. 
 Henry s, since it is less obviously a straining for 
 effect. Seldom have I laughed audibly over a page 
 of O. Henry s, never over one of Irvin Cobb s, 
 but I chuckled aloud the first time I read this: 
 
 The finish of a civilian in a luxurious hospital, with 
 trained nurses fluttering over him and his pastor 
 whooping and heaving for him at the foot of the bed, 
 is often quite as terrible as any form of exitus wit 
 nessed in war. 
 
 The O. Henry likeness is largely a matter of style 
 and expression, a disregard for exactness and truth ; 
 journalistic cleverness, vulgar sensation. One may 
 open at random now : note the O. Henry paradox, 
 the O. Henry triplets, the O. Henry smartness: 
 
 A Scotch Presbyterian with a soaring soul is as 
 cruelly beset as a wolf with fleas, or a zebra with the 
 botts. Let a spark of the divine fire spring to life in 
 that arid corpse, and it must fight its way to flame 
 through a drum fire of wet sponges. A humming bird 
 immersed in kartoffelsuppc. Walter Pater writing for 
 the London Daily Mail. Lucullus travelling steerage. 
 
A Critic in C Major 87 
 
 He [Shaw] founded, in England the superstition 
 that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist a 
 sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst and 
 the syndics of the Sex Hygiene Society. 
 
 Here we have a situation in comedy almost exactly 
 parallel to that in which a colored bishop whoops "On 
 ward, Christian Soldiers !" like a calliope in order to 
 drown out the crowing of the rooster concealed be 
 neath his chasuble. 
 
 Down there [in Dixie] a poet is now almost as rare 
 as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysi 
 cian. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a 
 vacuity. 
 
 Good health in man, indeed, is almost invariably a 
 function of inferiority. A professionally healthy man, 
 e. g. f an acrobat, an osteopath or an ice-wagon driver, 
 is always stupid. 
 
 If that time ever comes, the manufacture of artists 
 will become a feasible procedure, like the present manu 
 facture of soldiers, capons, right-thinkers and doctors 
 of philosophy. 
 
 The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the tran 
 sition stage between Christian Endeavor and civilization. 
 
 One by searching may find still smarter examples: 
 
 One would not be surprised to hear that, until he 
 [George Ade] went off to his freshwater college, he 
 slept in his underwear and read the Epworth Herald. 
 
88 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Oppenheim . . . stands, as to one leg, on the shoul 
 ders of Walt Whitman, and, as to the other, on a stack 
 of Old Testaments. 
 
 It is a sort of college town Weltanschauung that one 
 finds in him [Howells] ; he is an Agnes Repplier in 
 pantaloons. 
 
 Here [in Bennett s novels] we have a sweet com 
 mingling of virtuous conformity and complacent op 
 timism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty here, 
 in brief, we have the philosophy of the English middle 
 classes and here, by the same token, we have the sort 
 of guff that the half-educated of our own country 
 understand. It is the calm, superior numskullery that 
 was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of Hannah 
 More. 
 
 And this last from the author who finds in Poe 
 "congenital vulgarity of taste" : 
 
 This man, for all his grand dreams, had a shoddy 
 soul ; he belonged authentically to the era of cuspidors, 
 "females," and Sons of Temperance. 
 
 It is unnecessary to comment. To some, perhaps, 
 this is literary criticism. Perhaps. 
 
 IV 
 
 The professor is nothing if not a maker of card in 
 dexes; he must classify or be damned. His master- 
 
A Critic in C Major 80 
 
 piece is the dictum that "it is excellent, but it is not 
 a play." 
 
 Yes, I am listening. But what if it is not ex 
 cellent? what if it is labeled a play on its yellow 
 jacket and made emphatic by adjectives in the 
 superlative? What if it is sold as a play, and 
 whooped up as a play on all the bill-boards, and 
 reviewed as a play by all the reviewers, and 
 what if it is not a play at all, but a mere 
 vaudeville stunt? The whole transaction becomes 
 then a sign of the times. It is f jelony under 
 the pure food laws to brand a package "Cali 
 fornia honey" when it is Missouri corn syrup, even 
 though the corn syrup is excellent. Am I concerned 
 only with the name, only with niceties of technique, 
 with manner and traditions? If that were all then 
 I would deserve all the sarcasm that the tribe of 
 Mencken has heaped upon my profession. The very 
 foundations are in question. Criticism should be 
 rulings of a supreme court of literature. What 
 ever else is extreme and impassioned, criticism 
 should be serene ; whatever else is distorted, criticism 
 should be the truth. And Mencken, touch him where 
 you will, is extreme and distorted. He leaves sacri 
 fice and service out of his philosophy of life and thus 
 reduces it to a mere zero. He is the Nietzsche of our 
 literature, and of Nietzsche, as we have already 
 
90 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 quoted, "no charge was too far-fetched, no manipula 
 tion or interpretation of evidence was too daring, to 
 enter into his ferocious indictment." He was not 
 seeking the truth: he was hurling his dogmas. 
 
 Mencken is a journalist, and the curse of the jour 
 nalist, as already we have seen, is that he has lost his 
 horizon. His work he pitches ever to the almighty 
 Now. He must be heard instantly: he must bring 
 methods and materials startlingly new or see his 
 work drop dead from the press. When he speaks 
 he must speak in falsetto; when he means three he 
 must say nine. When Mark Twain a journalist 
 to his finger tips wished to convey the fact that 
 the characters in Cooper s novels are stiff and 
 wooden, he expressed it this way : it is impossible to 
 tell in his novels the living people from the corpses 
 save that the corpses are more lively. It is not 
 true : it is farce, pure and simple, and not criticism, 
 but "it is what you must write if you are to be 
 read in these days." The journalist is prone to 
 forget that the history of literature is the history of 
 a long evolution, that there are fashions in literature 
 as surely as there are fashions in dress, and that the 
 fashions of 1850 are no more asinine than the fash 
 ions of 1922. Shall one call one s grandfather an 
 ass because he enjoyed literature that to-day would 
 not be accepted by "The Smart Set"? Mencken 
 damns George William Curtis as a "shoddy medi- 
 
A Critic in C Major 91 
 
 ocrity," but a generation ago Curtis was the 
 Mencken of his time, the leader of the Mugwumps, 
 champion stone-slinger at the Elaine Goliath. 
 
 The man, then, is a literary Nietzsche who has 
 been evolved from American journalism during 
 the age of O. Henry. I write of his failures not 
 to try to reform him that would be like preaching 
 to Eugene Field in the presence of Nye and Riley: 
 he would be pinning a tail on the solemn old ass 
 and winking from behind his hand I simply 
 describe a literary disease of the times. H. L. 
 Mencken at forty is training a surprisingly large 
 group of youngsters, who should be the future 
 makers of American criticism, into a kind of 
 literary jazz band. Their writings confront one 
 everywhere. Pick up the latest assessment of our 
 literature, "Letters on Contemporary American 
 Authors," by MacCollough Mencken and water. 
 Follow it through the newer reviews. Just as the 
 trail of O. Henry has been beaten into a highway 
 through the jungle of the American short story, so 
 the sensational vogue of Mencken is creating a new 
 type of criticism. Is it to endure and become the 
 type of the criticism of the next literary period? 
 Is it to dominate the picture, or are we to-day simply 
 living through a rag-time interlude? 
 
 Muck-raking may endure for a night, but the 
 morning comes always swiftly. Destructive crit- 
 
92 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 icism is the most ephemeral of all literary things. 
 It is narrowly limited by its very nature. It must 
 have quick results or cease. The muck-rake era of 
 twenty years ago, with its "shame of the cities" 
 and "corrupt and contented," endured not long and 
 is to-day forgotten. Undoubtedly it accomplished 
 some good. An eruption of superlatives will rout 
 certain classes of criminals often as effectively as 
 a machine-gun. According to Mencken, it is the 
 only way some intrenched lawbreakers may be 
 reached. In an "Atlantic Monthly" paper he 
 defends the fierce vice-scourgings and the furious 
 boss-baitings periodically indulged in by the daily 
 papers because of the positive results that often are 
 achieved. 
 
 The white-slave agitation of a year or so ago was 
 ludicrously extravagant and emotional, but its net 
 effect is a better conscience, a new alertness. The 
 newspapers discharged broadsides of 12-inch guns to 
 bring down a flock of buzzards but they brought 
 down the buzzards. They have libeled and lynched 
 the police but the police are the better for it. They 
 have represented salicylic as an elder brother to bi 
 chloride of mercury but we are poisoned less than we 
 used to be. They have lifted the plain people to 
 frenzies of senseless terror over drinking-cups and 
 neighbors with coughs but the death-rate from tuber 
 culosis declines. They have railroaded men to prison, 
 
A Critic in C Major 93 
 
 denying them all the common rights but fewer male 
 factors escape to-day than yesterday. 
 
 Agreed! It is like a Methodist sermon. But 
 what do these methods accomplish when applied to 
 the literary field? It is not a felony punishable 
 under State or Federal statutes to write a "mushy" 
 book. Harold Bell Wright or Henry Sydnor Har 
 rison or Gene Stratton Porter cannot be convicted, 
 after a newspaper hue and cry, and sent to prison 
 for feeding literary "Peruna" to the willing mul 
 titude. There is no law on any of the statute- 
 books to convict Robert W. Chambers of literary 
 boot-legging and send him to the reformatory. No 
 depths of denunciation, no machine-gun crackle of 
 adjectives however hot and original, no expression 
 of contempt of the twaddle-swallowing multitude 
 however withering, no threatenings of hell how 
 ever sulphurous will ever send these authors to the 
 Menckenian mourners benches, not at least while 
 the multitude pays for their creations in figures 
 that would delight a "patent" medicine manufac 
 turer. 
 
 But what of the mass itself, the abysmal brain 
 less monster that battens on Wright and Chambers 
 and "Pollyanna" books can this be reformed by 
 our new literary Amos? Not in the slightest. 
 The people, "the proletariat," "the masses," do 
 
94 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 not read him; they could not were it to save their 
 lives read a line of him. I lent "Prefaces" to a 
 sophomore, and he said it certainly "stumped him" : 
 he could not find, he said, all the words even in the 
 dictionary. "Prefaces" is for the few, not for the 
 herd. 
 
 And what of the few, the "saving remnant," "the 
 forlorn intelligentsia/ some of them professors, 
 many of them book reviewers, some of them pub 
 lishers readers, some of them decayed old "Atlan 
 tic" Brahmans? What can he accomplish by har 
 rying this bedeviled little forlorn hope? The herd 
 can be stampeded into violence of many kinds, but 
 it cannot be driven with a rush to higher literary 
 levels. America is paying the penalty inseparable 
 from democracy. To compel all the people of a 
 nation to attend school until into their teens, their 
 late teens in some States, to lift the totality of the 
 mass all of it up toward the reading level, 
 means inevitably the bringing down of the lit 
 erature of that nation toward this average plane. 
 Literature until democratic times, until yesterday 
 in fact, was an aristocratic thing, made by the 
 inspired few for the civilized few who could enjoy 
 and comprehend it. Mencken, so far as literature 
 is concerned, has never been democratized. Read 
 his "Men versus the Man." His contempt for the 
 literary crudeness of the democratic mass, and for 
 
A Critic in C Major 95 
 
 those who prostitute their powers in order to fatten 
 upon its demands, is the source of much of his 
 sarcasm. But American democracy is what it is. 
 Shall we ignore the mass, have a distinctive litera 
 ture worthy of the civilized few, and be as oblivious 
 of what the "Homo Boobus" reads as we are of 
 what he eats? Who will have the powers and the 
 sacrificing soul to write it? Literature has become 
 a commercial product. When prepared for the mass 
 which has learned to read in our schools and col 
 leges, it means for its creator motor-cars, and win 
 ters in Florida, and country estates, but when made 
 on the high classic levels of beauty and art it means 
 the attic and celibacy, and, if fame finally, then 
 posthumous fame. To raise the mass to the appre 
 ciation of real art requires time : it is a matter of 
 evolution. It cannot be done by shouting and 
 reviling or arguing. To stand and damn a mud- 
 turtle will not make him a sprinter. Only remove 
 the obstructions that hinder him, and be patient; 
 he will get there in time. 
 
 Why then all this sound and fury? It accom 
 plishes nothing worth the accomplishing. It fur 
 nishes entertainment to a few sophisticated souls 
 who have exhausted the round of sensations, and 
 it provokes a few devil-ridden professors to retort, 
 but that is all. It is a tempest in a Volstead beer- 
 mug; it is a wicked new home-brew, strangely 
 
96 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 exhilarating at first, but requiring, like a narcotic, 
 ever a stronger and stronger dose. X must be 
 raised to or 2 , then to ^ 9 , and then to x*. There is 
 small variety in the Mencken box of tricks, as small 
 as in Irvin Cobb s, and the show is beginning to 
 tire one by its monotony. Like O. Henry s work it 
 deadens its readers for the more subtle tones of 
 art. Moreover, it creates nothing: its whole 
 course is destructive. At the close of his "Yale 
 Review" diagnosis of the ailments afflicting our 
 "National Letters" he can bring only this consola 
 tion to the patient: "I have described the disease. 
 Let me say at once that I have no remedy to offer." 
 He has revealed to the astounded sufferer that he 
 has cholera infantum, rubeola, pink-eye, and cerebral 
 peritonitis, but he refuses to prescribe even a pallia 
 tive, and he will not suggest to the patient even that 
 he smile serenely and say at frequent intervals, 
 "I am in perfect health." 
 
 At forty comes the philosophic mind. Is it too 
 much to hope that a Sainte Beuve may be lurking 
 under this vulgar and furiously erupting Stromboli ? 
 Is it stretching credulity too far to believe that real 
 meat may at last come out of this ferocious eater 
 of men even "Causeries du Lundi," penetrating, 
 brilliant, constructive ? May we not even hope that 
 the fires of romance, genuine romance, still smolder 
 ing, we believe, smokily in this crematory furnace, 
 
A Critic in C Major 97 
 
 may yet flame up clear and produce for us creative 
 work, rather than destructive work unworthy of 
 his undoubted powers? And may we not address 
 him even as he addressed the wavering Kipling 
 when he also was hovering about forty : 
 
 Unsung the East lies glimmering, 
 Unsung the palm-trees toss their frills, 
 Unsung the seas their splendours fling 
 
 The while you prate of laws and tills. 
 
 Each man his destiny fulfils : 
 Can it be yours to loose and stray, 
 
 In sophist garb to wash your quills 
 Sing us again of Mandalay. ^ 
 
 Master, regard the plaint we bring 
 
 And hearken to the prayer we pray. 
 Lay down your law and sermoning, 
 
 Sing us again of Mandalay. 
 
THE PROPHET OF THE LAST 
 FRONTIER * 
 
 FROM the first year of the new century, when he 
 burst upon the consciousness of the reading world, 
 until the year before America entered the World 
 War, when he as suddenly disappeared, for sixteen 
 years Jack London, like an unheralded comet, 
 shocked and horrified and thrilled the American 
 people. That the majority of them liked to be 
 shocked and thrilled and horrified is shown by the 
 demand for his work. A stream of checks from 
 more than eighty different magazines poured in 
 upon him; six of the foremost publishing houses 
 of America were eager to gamble on the financial 
 coup that might come from his next book, and he 
 gave them forty-eight chances ; forty-eight books in 
 sixteen years, some of them heading the list of the 
 best sellers of their period. The sixteen years were 
 his. He was the startling figure in that loud-voiced, 
 Kipling-swayed fin de siecle decade before the war; 
 the voice crying in the wilderness, "Make ready for 
 the reign of the brute" ; the ax laid at the foot of 
 
 1 Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa of Ohio Wesleyan 
 University, March 16, 1922. 
 
 98 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 99 
 
 the tree of sickly sentiment and effeminate swash 
 buckling romance and the "mollycoddle" life. He 
 learned his art of Kipling and of Gogol, and he 
 wrote in the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in 
 the era of the strenuous life. From Jack London 
 learn of Jack Londonism, learn the spirit of the 
 epoch that could make him possible. No other 
 American writer has had a career more representa 
 tive of his time; none certainly has had one that 
 is more remarkable. 
 
 To study Jack London is to be impressed first 
 of all with his { Americanism^ He was as indige- 
 nous as Mark Twain; the culmination of a century 
 and a half on American soil, a figure impossible 
 save in the California of the opening decade of the 
 twentieth century. His family, both sides of it, 
 was of old American stock : English adventurers 
 with a dash of Puritanism, Welsh settlers in New 
 Jersey, Teutonic refugees in Pennsylvania, the most 
 restless souls of a restless age. They fought in 
 all the wars, they surged westward with the settle 
 ment, they lived in emigrant trains, they were mas 
 sacred by Indians, they were in all the perils of that 
 century-long march across the continent. One of 
 them, "Priest" Jones, tarried behind in Ohio as a 
 circuit-rider through regions where physical prowess 
 was the chief prerequisite for spreading the Gospel, 
 and he became the grandfather of our novelist. By 
 
100 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the time of the Civil War both branches of the 
 family had reached the Gold Coast, but they had got 
 no gold. With empires all about them to be had 
 for the taking, they were pressing excitedly on for 
 something better. 
 
 In more than one of his books London has pic 
 tured this iron race from which he sprang. "The 
 f tfr e Mann" is the epic of the descendants of 
 
 the Argonauts halted in their westward march by 
 the Pacific, too restless to settle down, and al 
 lowing their hard-won prize to be taken from them 
 by the more patient tribes of toilers and grubbers 
 for jwhom they had broken the y&y. And the 
 race had degenerated into dreamers, revolutionists, 
 bolshevists, aimless adventurers. The father of 
 Jack London, instead of settling upon lands that 
 easily would have brought him wealth, had turned 
 northward from the westward march and had spent 
 his young manhood as a trapper and adventurer 
 in the Canadian wilds. London s super-man Jacob 
 Wilse in "A Daughter of the Snows" is an idealized 
 picture of him. 
 
 The trapper father had come out of the sturdy 
 Welsh stock which had trickled into early Ohio out 
 of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadic 
 daughter of the Irish emigrant settlers of Ontario. 
 From both sides came the wanderlust of the blood, the 
 
The Prophet of the Last frontier 101 
 
 fever to be moving, to be pushing on to the edge of 
 things. 
 
 In 1873 he was in San Francisco, a member of 
 the police force, and here it was that three years 
 later, January 12, 3:876, was born his tenth child. 
 Jack_London, the most restless soul of all his rest 
 less line. He was reared in a nursery for rest 
 lessness : his first years were a perpetual moving- 
 day. When he was four, the family was living on 
 a truck farm in Alameda; three years later they 
 were on a desolate ranch in San Mateo County, 
 south of San Francisco. The squalid moving scene 
 burned itself into the lad s memory: "We had 
 horses and a farm wagon," he tells us, "and onto 
 this we piled all our household belo.ngings, all 
 hands climbing up on the top of the load, and with 
 the cow tied on behind." A desolate region at best, 
 to the solitary boy it was lonely beyond description. 
 "Ours was the only American family. I had no 
 companions." A year later the scene changed to a 
 truck farm at Livermore. "I was very much alone. 
 Had I been as other children, blessed with brothers 
 and sisters and plenty of playmates, I should have 
 been mentally occupied, grown up as the rest of 
 my class grew, become a laborer and been content. 
 But I was alone, very much so. This fostered 
 contemplation." 
 
102 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Until his eleventh year there was nothing in his 
 life to refine him or to quicken his powers. No 
 childhood could have been more squalid : "I never 
 had toys nor playthings like other children. My 
 first memories of life were pinched by poverty." 
 Forced to a round of labor that he hated, driven in 
 upon himself, he became dwarfed in all save the 
 physical, but this, as if to compensate, became at 
 length perfect. Everything in his life watered and 
 fertilized the wild individualism that was his birth 
 right : it bred day-dreaming and discontent, an 
 Indian-like impatience of control, and that wild 
 sense of freedom to work his solitary will which 
 is the heritage of the border-born. Of the religious 
 and the moral in his early training there was noth 
 ing and worse than nothing. He was reared in 
 an atmosphere of coarseness : "All the inconceiv 
 able filth a child running at large in a primitive 
 country-side may hear men utter was mine." A 
 little schooling there was, ludicrously narrow and 
 crude, and a few books: "dime novels borrowed 
 from the hired men," Irving s "Alhambra," a life 
 of Garfield, du Chaillu s African travels that was 
 all. At eight he chanced upon a mutilated copy of 
 Ouida s novel "Signa" and was thrilled and set 
 to day-dreaming by its opening sentence : "It was 
 only a little lad, but he had dreams of becoming a 
 great musician, and having all Europe at his feet." 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 103 
 
 When he was .tn came the final move of the 
 family, this time to J2aklandc- a vei "i ta ble new 
 world for the starved lad. Now he could (at 
 tend the public schools and draw books from the 
 city library. At first he plunged into an orgy 
 of reading, but without knowledge of books or 
 guidance. "Nobody at home bothered their heads 
 over what I read. I was an eager, thirsty, hungry 
 little kid." Juveniles he passed in contempt. He 
 wanted books telling of life in the world of action 
 of which he had dreamed. He read books like 
 Prescott s "Conquest of Peru"; and records of 
 voyages into the great ocean that lay beyond the 
 Golden Gate. 
 
 But time for reading grew ever more and more 
 limited. The family poverty had flung him liter 
 ally into the streets, and in hours out of school, on 
 Saturdays and Sundays, he worked as he could 
 find jobs; setting up pins in bowling-alleys, assisting 
 on ice-wagons, sweeping out saloons, and selling 
 newspapers. When he was eleven he was given 
 a newspagej^rcjute along the water-front of the city, 
 then as now the Tenderloin of Oakland. Here his 
 education moved rapidly. He became a member, 
 then leader of a boys gang, and then the most 
 notorious fighter in his district: his fight with 
 the slum gamin "Cheese Face," as narrated in 
 "Martin Eden," was as primitive and as ferocious 
 
104 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 as even the dog-fight in " White Fang." Soon he 
 grew to be precodoiisl^^wjfe in the lore of street 
 and saloon; he knew the dives of the water-front, 
 in Oakland and San Francisco, the last frontier in 
 the march across the continent, where, halted by the 
 Pacific, so many of the Argonauts had abandoned 
 their dreams and had settled down to rottenness 
 and despair or else had turned their restlessness 
 into lawlessness and piracy on the bay. 
 
 Upon completing the work of the grammar grade, 
 he considered his school days over. He had en 
 larged the field of his restlessness. "When I was 
 fourteen," to quote his own words, "my head filled 
 with the tales of the old voyagers, my visions with 
 tropic isles and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small 
 centerboard skiff around San Francisco Bay and on 
 the Oakland estuary. I wanted to go to sea. I 
 wan/ted to get away from monotony and the 
 commonplace. I was in the flower of my adoles 
 cence, a-thrill with romance and adventure, dream 
 ing of wild life in the wild man-world. . . . And 
 the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate 
 sloops up and down San Francisco Bay, from 
 raided oyster beds and fights at night on shoal 
 and flat, to markets in the morning against city 
 wharves where peddlers and saloon-keepers came 
 down to buy." 
 
 For a time he found work in a salmon cannery 
 
****- , A J 
 
 t 1 - tS& 
 
 T/z Prophet of the Last Frontier 105 
 
 but his blood revolted at the drudgery. There 
 was no withstanding the restless desire within him 
 to be off and away, and impulsively, with the sav 
 ings of his black mammy gladly lent to him, he 
 bought himself a slojDp, the Razzle-Dazzle, hired 
 a crew of one man, "Spider Healey," "a black- 
 whiskered wharf-rat of twenty," and joined the 
 poachers who lived by night raids upon the oyster- 
 beds of the lower bay. No longer would he live 
 at home : he slept in the cabin of his sloop like other 
 pirates and was at home upon the bay. Again his 
 progress was rapid. By his skill and ingenuity 
 and dare-devil fearlessness he became in true dime- 
 novel fashion leader of the gang: "When I was 
 sixteen I had earned the title of Prince, 1 but this 
 title was given me by a gang of cutthroats and 
 thieves, by whom I was called The Prince of the 
 Oyster Pirates/ He was sailing partner now of 
 the heroes of the bay : "Clam" and "Young Scratch 
 Nelson." "Clam was a dare-devil, but Nelson was 
 a reckless maniac. He was twenty years old with 
 the body of a Hercules. When he was shot in 
 Bernicia a couple of years later, the coroner said 
 he was the greatest-shouldered man he had ever 
 laid on a slab." It was fame to be accounted the 
 equal and the superior of men like these. After 
 a mad exploit he was invited to the bar by the 
 father of "Young Scratch" himself. Fame indeed! 
 
106 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 " Old Scratch was a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, raw- 
 boned Viking, big-bodied and strong-muscled de 
 spite his age. And he had sailed the seas in ships 
 of all nations in the old savage sailing days. . . . 
 His nickname Scratch arose from a Berserker 
 trick of his, in fighting, of tearing off his opponent s 
 face." To get the full madness of the period one 
 must read "John Barleycorn." His wild exploits 
 are still remembered. "Along the Oakland water 
 front," writes one who knew him at that period, 
 "the old salts will even now be recounting ripping 
 tales of the young dare-devil London who could 
 drink any man down at the bar, and knock any two 
 of them down at once who had the temerity to 
 refuse his invitation to line-up. 
 
 At seventeen, to use his own words, he was "a 
 drunken bum." "I practically lived in saloons, be 
 came a bar-room loafer and worse. For weeks at 
 a time I did not draw a sober breath." And all 
 this because of the heritage of his race, because of 
 his starved boyhood, and his eagerness to live what 
 he conceived to be the life of a man. "I was just 
 human, and I was taking the path in the world that 
 men took men whom I admired if you please: 
 full-blooded men, lusty, breedy, chesty men, free 
 spirits, and anything but niggard in the way they 
 foamed life away." His philosophy at this period 
 is the philosophy of the water-front saloon : "Better 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 107 
 
 to reign among booze-fighters, a prince, than to toil 
 twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an 
 hour. There are no purple passages in machine 
 toil, but if the spending of $180 in two hours is n t 
 a purple passage, then I d like to know what is." 
 
 The road is a short one. All that saved him was 
 that very restlessness of his race which had brought 
 him into the danger, and that thrill of romance in 
 his blood which had come from a century and a 
 half of wandering toward the west, for that winter 
 there came to the Oakland saloons "the skippers, 
 mates, hunters, boat-steerers, and boat-pullers of 
 the sealing fleet wintering in San Francisco Bay." 
 Their tales of adventure fired his besotted imagina 
 tion until in January, 1893, when he was seventeen, 
 he signed for a voyage in the three-topmast sealing 
 schooner Sophe^ Sutherland to the North Pacific 
 and Japan. It was a turning-point in his career. 
 Coming back in August, the liquor driven from 
 his system by the seven months cruise, he was hor 
 rified to find that most of his boon companions 
 were either dead or in prison. Impulsively he found 
 a job, resolved to listen to his mother s advice and 
 consider his wild oats sown. The winter he spent 
 first in a jute mill, and then in a boiler-room as 
 a coal-heaver, but the work became steadily more 
 intolerable, until one day when the springtime was 
 opening he dropped everything by a sudden impulse 
 
108 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 and boarded a freight-car with Coxey s army bound 
 for the East. "I became a tramp, begging my way 
 from door to door, wandering over the United 
 States and Canada sweating bloody sweats in slums 
 and prisons. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human 
 cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our 
 civilization." He went not at all to study sociology 
 as did Josiah Flint. "I became a tramp," he ex 
 plains, because of the life that was in me, of the 
 wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest; 
 because I could not keep away from it." 
 
 The Jack London that the world knows dates 
 from this experience; it was while tramping with 
 tramps that Jack London awoke. He was in his 
 nineteenth year; his whole life had contained noth 
 ing that had not fed his rampant individualism. "I 
 could see myself only raging through life without 
 end like one of Nietzsche s blond beasts, lustfully 
 roving and conquering by sheer superiority and 
 strength." But suddenly he found himself in a 
 world of which he had never dreamed. "On rods 
 and blind baggages I fought my way from the open 
 West where men bucked big and the job hunted the 
 man, to the congested labor centres of the East 
 where men were small potatoes and hunted the job 
 for all they were worth. On this new blond beast 
 adventure I found myself looking upon life from a 
 new and totally different angle." He was con- 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 109 
 
 verted "reborn" as he has expressed it to the 
 doctrine of socialism, which to him in those early 
 days meant simply a square deal for the under dog. 
 In his contacts with worn-out laborers on city 
 benches, men who had once been just as "blond 
 beastly" as he and who now were mere rubbish 
 on the dumps of a city, he made the discovery 
 that the rewards of the world go, not to the muscle- 
 workers, but to the brain-worker. It stirred his 
 imagination-: something awoke within him. "I 
 resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a 
 vender of brains. Then began a frantic pursuit of 
 knowledge. I returned to California and opened 
 the books." 
 
 For a year he was a student in the Oakland High 
 School, paying his way by working as janitor and 
 spending all of his Spare time reading or else 
 preaching in the parks his new gospel of socialism. 
 The slow pace of the school disgusted him: it 
 would be two years more before he could enter the 
 University of California, and characteristically he 
 wanted to enter at once. To think was to act. "I 
 gritted my teeth and started to cram myself. 
 There were three months yet before the university 
 entrance examinations. Without laboratories, with 
 out coaching, sitting in my bed-room, I proceeded 
 to compress that two years* work into three months 
 and to keep reviewed on the previous year s work. 
 
110 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Nineteen hours a day I studied. For three months 
 I kept this pace, only breaking it on several occa 
 sions." And he passed the examinations. Some 
 have declared that the swift, super-man-like prog 
 ress of London s hero Martin Eden was an im 
 possible feat, but London swept away all such ob 
 jections by the single statement : "I was Martin 
 Eden. At the end of three working years, two 
 of which were spent in high school and university, 
 and all three in studying intensely and immensely, 
 I was publishing stories in magazines such as The 
 Atlantic Monthly/ was correcting proofs of my 
 first book, issued by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and 
 selling sociological articles to the Cosmopolitan and 
 McClure sV 
 
 He remained in the university a little more than 
 a semester, leaving in January, 1897. "The pres 
 sure from lack of money, plus a conviction that the 
 university was not giving me all that I wanted in the 
 time that I could spare for it, forced me to leave." 
 He had determined to make a writer of himself, 
 and with characteristic impetuosity he sought the 
 nearest way. His comments on university methods 
 are enlightening : 
 
 I had to unlearn about everything the teachers and 
 professors of literature of the high school and uni 
 versity had taught me. I was very indignant about 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier ill 
 
 this at the time ; though now I can understand it. 
 They did not know the trick of successful writing in 
 the years of 1895 an( ^ 1896. They knew all about 
 Snow-Bound and Sartor Resartus ; but the Amer 
 ican editors of 1899 did not want such truck. They 
 wanted the 1899 truck, and offered to pay so well for 
 it that the teachers and professors of literature 
 would have quit their jobs could they have supplied it. 
 
 By sheer main force he would teach himself the 
 writing art and would enter the literary profession 
 as he had entered the university perchance in three 
 months. He would take the kingdom of letters 
 by storm.- "Heavens, how I wrote! The way I 
 worked was enough to soften my brain and send me 
 to a mad-house. I wrote, I wrote everything 
 ponderous essays, scientific and sociological, short 
 stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from trio 
 lets and sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephan 
 tine epics in Spenserian stanzas." His manuscripts 
 were returned as regularly as they were sent out, 
 but like Martin Eden he toiled on. 
 
 In the midst of these efforts there came, like a 
 repetition of the days of 49, sudden news of a 
 gold strike in the Klondike region of Alaska, and 
 as impulsively as he had joined Coxey s army, he 
 was off with the first wave of adventurers. A 
 year later, compelled by an attack of scurvy, he 
 
112 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 fought his way out in an open boat, a iQOomile 
 trip down the Yukon made in nineteen days. Ar 
 riving in Oakland, he found that his father had 
 died and that the care of the family had shifted to 
 his shoulders. Work was scarce; in desperation 
 he turned again to literary efforts and during the 
 following three or four years he fought the battle 
 for recognition that he has described, undoubtedly 
 in heightened terms, in "Martin Eden." Whatever 
 one may think of his literary product, one can but ad 
 mire the pluck and the perseverance that brought 
 his final success. No one ever succeeded with heav 
 ier odds, and no one with more of toil. His first 
 recognition came in January, 1899, when "The 
 Overland Monthly" of San Francisco published his 
 first story "The Man on Trail," following it dur 
 ing the year with seven other Alaska stories. Then 
 "The Atlantic Monthly," repeating the Bret Harte 
 episode of thirty years before, Accepted his story, 
 "An Odyssey of the North," and early in 1900 is 
 sued the nine tales under the title, "The Son of the 
 Wolf." Success, however, was far from won: his 
 first five books were issued by five different pub 
 lishing houses. It was not until 1903, with his 
 sixth book, "The Call of the Wild," that he may 
 be said fairly to have arrived as a writer of fiction. 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 113 
 
 With this introduction one is prepared in a meas 
 ure for the after career of the man, the career that 
 made picturesque the opening years of the new 
 century, the swift era before the German explosion. 
 Such a nature must have constant stimulus, adven 
 ture, movement. Now he is in the slums of London 
 in rags and without money to study the conditions 
 of the underworld of the modern Babylon. He 
 emerged with pictures so extreme that they out 
 raged the sensibilities of all who read them. 
 
 Strange vagrant odors come drifting along the 
 greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like 
 grease than water from heaven. The very cobble 
 stones are scummed with grease. 
 
 . . . We went up the narrow gravelled walk. On 
 the benches on either side was arrayed a mass of 
 miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which 
 would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights 
 of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was 
 a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome 
 skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency 
 leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill raw 
 wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there 
 in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to 
 sleep. 
 
114 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 When the season for picking hops comes around 
 for two or three weeks all the slum dwellers who 
 can possibly get loose from London, "their guts 
 a-reek with pavement offal," flock like vultures into 
 Kent: 
 
 Out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call 
 of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure- 
 lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them 
 forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and 
 ghetto are undiminished. They overrun the country 
 like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want 
 them. They are out of place. As they drag their 
 squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and by 
 ways, they resemble some vile spawn from under 
 ground. Their very presence, the fact of their exist 
 ence, is an outrage to the fresh bright sun and the 
 green and growing things. The clean, up-standing 
 trees cry shame upon them and their withered crook 
 edness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of 
 the sweetness and purity of nature. 
 
 His life was a succession of rapid changes : every 
 thing, like his pictures of the People of the Abyss, 
 always in extreme. Now he is in the Far East as 
 war correspondent; now he is in Mexico. He will 
 make a journey around the world in his own boat 
 especially made after his own specifications, and to 
 pay for it he will pour out feverishly story after 
 story. He will have a ranch that is a veritable 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 115 
 
 kingdom: there shall be planted thirty thousand 
 eucalyptus-trees, there shall be a big house, and 
 there shall be great herds of choicest stock, and 
 again the feverish writing of stories and magazine 
 articles and letters hot-footed to his publishers for 
 advances upon royalties. The mere quantity of 
 his work is staggering. In the sixteen years of his 
 literary life he wrote nineteen complete novels, 
 eighteen short story collections with a total of 152 
 stories, three plays, and eight other books, auto 
 biographical or sociological. forty-eight volumes 
 already in print, besides six or eight others to be 
 collected from the periodicals or from unpublished 
 manuscripts. 
 
 After the quantity one is next surprised by the 
 heterogeneousness of his output, its unevenness of 
 texture and of content, its vagaries, its wide domain 
 of subject. To read Jack London straight through 
 is to emerge in confusion: a swift-running film of 
 vignette-like pictures; hobbies furiously ridden; 
 headlong narrative; wild snapshots of jungle and 
 borealis, of naked head-hunters arid fur-muffled 
 dog. drivers. Everywhere superlatives and extremes ; 
 everywhere antithesis: soap-box shrillness and har 
 monious music; poverty of style and sonorous or- 
 nateness ; vulgarity, sublimity ; realism, romanticism ; 
 brutality and humanitarianism ; always superlatives 
 and exaggerations in wild riot the astonishing 
 
116 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 hodgepodge we call Jack London s writings. 
 If we do not understand the man it is not because 
 he has not put himself upon record. His con 
 fessions bewilder us by their quantity and by their 
 brutal frankness. How dare one open one s soul as 
 he has done in "John Barleycorn" and The Road"? 
 He does not apologize, he does not qualify the 
 record wtth extenuation, he does not even present 
 the story as a warning to others. "The Road," for 
 instance, is an amazing book : the point of view from 
 cover to cover is that of the hobo. Organized so 
 ciety is a thing to be preyed upon with as clear a 
 conscience as one would have in preying upon the 
 wild forest for its fruits and its game. He goes into 
 detail about the web of lies unblushingly told kind- 
 hearted old ladies who pitied him, lies told the 
 police, lies told along every mile of ten thousand 
 miles of road, and he does it with the air of one 
 who expects to be applauded for his smartness. 
 He can even hold up his hobo period with com 
 mendation as a seminar in which he learned the art 
 of fiction. "Art is only consummate artfulness," he 
 says, and by artfulness he means lying with imagina 
 tion and artistic detail. And he illustrates the point 
 with the story of how he escaped from the police 
 court in Winnipeg, by telling on the impulse of the 
 moment a detailed and realistic story of his escape 
 from the hell-ship Glenmore. So adroitly and crea- 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 117 
 
 tively did he lie, he declares, that a veteran sailor 
 who was called in as an expert to cross-examine 
 him could find no flaws. "The successful hobo 
 must be an artist. He must create spontaneously 
 and instantaneously and not upon a theme selected 
 from the plenitude of his own imagination, but 
 upon the theme he reads in the face of the person 
 who opens the door, be it man, woman, or child, 
 sweet or crabbed, generous or miserly." 
 
 To read any of London s work is to be in the 
 presence of his own biography: few authors have 
 drawn so freely upon their own experiences for 
 literary material. We know every phase of his 
 life: "Martin Eden/ "The Game," "The Valley 
 of the Moon," "The Little Lady of the Big House" 
 are autobiographical in thair revelations. He was as 
 egocentric as Byron. All his characters Jacob 
 Wilse, Wolf Larsen, Martin Eden, Burning Day 
 light, Billy Roberts, Dick Forest are Jack London 
 in masquerade, or Jack London as he dreamed 
 of himself. Like Byron s, his imagination was 
 kindled only by life translated into his own ex 
 perience. 
 
 His confessions help us to classify him. We 
 know that he was not a genius driven to creation 
 by fires within him: he was a journalist. He se 
 lected literature deliberately as a profession and 
 learned it as one learns a trade. Speaking of him- 
 
118 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 self as Martin Eden, he discloses the method of his 
 training : 
 
 Reading the books of men who had arrived, he noted 
 every result achieved by them, and worked out the 
 tricks by which they had been achieved the tricks 
 of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view, 
 the contrasts, the epigrams ; and of all of these he made 
 lists for study. He did not ape : he sought principles. 
 He drew up lists of effective and fetching manner 
 isms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, 
 he was able to educe the general principles of man 
 nerism, and, thus equipped, he cast about for new and 
 original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure 
 and appraise them properly. 
 
 And so on and on. Thus in cold blood he learned 
 his trade, and as he learned it he tested and studied 
 his market, like a manufacturer of collars or a 
 maker of break fast- foods. What did the literary 
 market demand in 1898? Listen to Max Irwin in 
 London s story, "Amateur Night" : 
 
 Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of 
 it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence 
 of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it mean? 
 Find out what it means. That s what you re there 
 for. That s what the readers of the "Sunday Intelli 
 gencer" want to know. Be terse in style, vigorous of 
 phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid 
 commonplaces and platitudes. Exercise selection. 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 119 
 
 Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you 
 have pictures. Paint these pictures in words the 
 "Intelligencer" will have you. Put a snapper at the 
 end, so if they are crowded for space they can cut off 
 your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the 
 story will still retain form. 
 
 Thus did Jack London, vagabond and adventurer, 
 make himself into a literary artist. 
 
 in 
 
 It was his Alaska stories that gave him his first 
 hearing. He had the good fortune to speak at the 
 one moment when all would listen. In 1898 the 
 imagination of the world had been stirred by the 
 Klondike gold strike, and everywhere there was 
 demand for material that was concrete, circum 
 stantial, hot from first-hand observation. Of Lon 
 don s first six books all save one, a juvenile in "St. 
 Nicholas," were tales of the Alaska gold fields, 
 vivid with pictures, breathing everywhere actual 
 ity; and it is upon these five The Son of the 
 Wolf," "The God of His Fathers," "A Daughter of 
 the Snows," "Children of the Frost," and "The 
 Call of the Wild," the last issued in 1903 that 
 his ultimate fame must rest. All are of short story 
 texture: even the novel "A Daughter of the Snows" 
 
120 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 is a series of episodes, and "The Call of the Wild" 
 might have for its sub-title "Seven Episodes in the 
 Life of the Dog Buck." 
 
 His method was the method of Kipling, as Kip 
 ling s had been that of Bret Harte. He would pre 
 sent a field new to literature by means of startling 
 pictures; swift scenes flashed upon a screen with 
 emphasis, even to exaggeration, upon the unique and 
 unusual. Everywhere Bret Harte paradoxes : 
 Hay Stockard is accused by the missionary of 
 breaking all the commandments, and he is a blas 
 phemer until "From the slipping of a snow-shoe 
 thong to the forefront of sudden death his Indian 
 wife would gauge the occasion by the pitch and 
 volume of his blasphemy," and yet he dies rather 
 than renounce the God of his Puritan fathers. In 
 all this early fiction the rush of the narrative is 
 compelling and the seeming fidelity to nature in the 
 background convincing. For instance the opening 
 chapters of "A Daughter of the Snows," picturing 
 the landing in Alaska of Frona Wilse, the baggage- 
 strewn beach, the excited mob gathering for the 
 march, the horrors of the long trail, the discarded 
 dunnage and crippled victims strewn along the 
 miles, the squalid night camps, and over it all the 
 madness and lure of the goal that stripped men to 
 the primitive elements of character all this the 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 121 
 
 reader accepts without question as a living document 
 in the history of a vanished era. 
 
 We are won at the start by the positiveness of 
 the author. We must take him on faith: few of 
 us know how civilized men behave in the areas be 
 yond the bounds of civilization, how men die of 
 starvation, how dogs deport themselves in the 
 Arctic night. He tells us in minute detail, with 
 Defoe-like concreteness of touch upon touch. But 
 are we certain it is the truth? We are not. He is 
 no more a realist than was Harte. Like Harte he 
 is writing from memory and imagination the story 
 of a vanished period, a brief and picturesque day 
 in a new environment, where youth is supreme and 
 alone, and his fancy hovers over it fondly, and 
 paints it and exaggerates it and idealizes it even to 
 romance. 
 
 It was a weird scene ; an anachronism. To the south 
 the nineteenth century was reeling off the few years of 
 its last decade; here flourished man primeval, a shade 
 removed from the prehistoric cave-dweller, a forgotten 
 fragment of the Elder World. The tawny wolf-dogs 
 sat between their skin-clad masters or fought for room, 
 the firelight cast backward from their red eyes and 
 slavered fangs. The woods in ghostly shroud, slept on 
 unheeding. The White Silence, for the moment driven 
 to the rimming forest, seemed ever crushing inward ; 
 
122 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the stars danced with great leaps, as is their wont in 
 the time of the Great Cold; while the Spirits of the 
 Pole trailed their robes of glory athwart the heavens. 
 
 His characters are not actual men whom he has 
 himself seen and known: they are demigods, the 
 unsung heroes of a heroic age now put into epic 
 setting. For all of them might be inscribed the 
 epithet given to one: "So, many an unsung wan 
 derer fought his last and died under the cold fires of 
 the Aurora, as did his brothers in burning sands and 
 reeking jungles, and as they shall continue to do 
 till the fulness of time and the destiny of their race 
 be achieved." 
 
 Moreover, he adds to this the romance of a 
 fading race. He dates The God of His Fathers" 
 at "the moment when the stone age was drawing 
 to a close." His Indian women are a remarkable 
 group: Ruth, wife of Mason, in "The White 
 Silence" ; Madeline in "An Odyssey of the North" ; 
 Unga in "The Wife of a King"; Passuk, wife of 
 Sitka Charley; Zarniska, wife of Scruff Mackenzie; 
 Sipsu, the Chief s daughter, in "Where the Trail 
 Forks"; and Killisnoo, wife of Tomm, introduced 
 with the remark : "Takes a woman to breed a man. 
 Takes a she-cat not a cow to mother a tiger." By 
 no means are they realistic studies. They are 
 drawn from imagination rather than from notes 
 made after observation; they are the type of primi- 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 123 
 
 live super-woman their author s imagination de 
 lighted in Jees Uck for instance, with her great 
 blazing black eyes the half-caste eye, round, full- 
 orbed, and sensuous," or Winapie, the Koyokuk girl, 
 whom Philip Payne married and was true to even 
 when the San Francisco belle, once his fiancee, 
 came to Alaska to find him : 
 
 Eyes piercing black and large, with a traditionary 
 hint of obliqueness, looked forth from under clear- 
 stencilled, clean-arching brows. Without suggesting 
 cadaverousness, though high-boned and prominent, the 
 cheeks fell away and met in a mouth, thin-lipped and 
 softly strong. It was a face which advertised the 
 dimmest trace of ancient Mongol blood, after long 
 centuries of wandering, to the parent stem. This effect 
 was heightened by the delicately aquiline nose with its 
 thin trembling nostrils, and by the general air of eagle 
 wildness which seemed to characterize not only the 
 face, but the creature herself. She was in fact, the 
 Tartar type modified to idealization, and the tribe of 
 Red Indian is lucky that breeds such a unique body 
 once in a score of generations. 
 
 Romanticized and overdrawn as unquestionably 
 they are, nevertheless these women are the most 
 vital and convincing of all Jack London s characters. 
 They are his only additions to the gallery of original 
 characters in American fiction. Their doglike fidel 
 ity and honesty, their loyalty and self-sacrifice, their 
 primitive resourcefulness in danger and privation, 
 
124 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 excite unconsciously our admiration and our pity. 
 It is not too sweeping to say that the primary 
 purpose of all London s early fiction was pictorial. 
 He would reproduce for us the Whife~""frorth. 
 Everywhere pictures, flash-lights not only upon the 
 surfaces of the scene but into the heart and mean 
 ing of it. One might fill a book with vignettes as 
 sharply cut as figures in a frieze : 
 
 It was midday. To the south, just clearing the 
 bleak Henderson Divide, poised the cold-disked sun. 
 On either hand the sun-dogs blazed. The air was a 
 gossamer of glittering frost. In the foreground, be 
 side the trail, a wolf-dog, bristling with frost, thrust 
 a long snout heavenward and moaned. 
 
 Or again: 
 
 Overhead, the Aurora, a gorgeous wanton, flaunted 
 miracles of color, beneath lay the sleeping town. Far 
 below, a solitary dog gave tongue. The king again be 
 gan to speak, but the Kid pressed his hand for silence. 
 The sound multiplied. Dog after dog took up the 
 strain till the full-throated chorus swayed the night. 
 To him who hears for the first time this weird song, 
 is told the first and greatest secret of the Northland; 
 to him who has heard it often, it is the solemn knell of 
 lost endeavor. It is the plaint of tortured souls, 
 for in it is invested the heritage of the North, 
 the sufferings of countless generations- the warn 
 ing and the requiem to the world s estrays. 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 125 
 
 And this voice of the wild he has tried to interpret. 
 He would, like Thoreau, peer behind the scene and 
 catch a glimpse of the sources of it. 
 
 With the Aurora Borealis flaming coldly overhead, 
 or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the 
 land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, 
 this song of the huskies might have been the 
 defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, 
 with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more 
 the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. 
 It was an old song, old as the breed itself one of the 
 first songs of the younger world in a day when songs 
 were sad. It was invested with the woe of un 
 numbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was 
 so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, 
 it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain 
 of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the 
 cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. 
 And that he should be stirred by it marked the com 
 pleteness with which he harked back through the ages 
 of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the 
 howling ages. 
 
 His affinity is with Conrad; with him he might 
 have said, "My task which I am trying to achieve 
 is, by the power of the written word, to make you 
 hear, to make you feel it is, before all, to make 
 you see." 
 
 He achieved this end most fully in "The Call of 
 the Wild," the crowning work of his first period 
 
126 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 and indeed of his whole career. His zest of life 
 is in it and the undiminished enthusiasm of youth. 
 It is his most perfect balance between the realistic 
 and the romantic, j There are no digressions ; there 
 is no social philosophy protuberant and no propa 
 ganda. One who reads it surrenders to the romance 
 of the North as completely as one surrenders to the 
 romance of medievalism when one reads Scott. Its 
 success was instantaneous as it should have been ; 
 from the moment it first appeared its author s liter 
 ary place was secure in all the English-speaking 
 world. Jack London had arrived : and yet, even as we 
 say this, we must add that the very year of his arrival 
 is the date of the beginning of his literary decline. 
 The causes of this decline lay in the author s 
 temperament and in the nature of his literary field. 
 In reality, after the first five books, he exhausted his 
 Alaska claim; his lode petered out. Harte and 
 even Kipling had discovered that to confine oneself 
 to the recording of a primitive society is soon to run 
 out of material. London had added nothing to 
 Harte s outfit save a new set of drop scenery, a 
 new fresh vigor of treatment, and a Gogol-like 
 gruesomeness of detail, and these now had grown 
 familiar. But the enormous vogue of "The Call of 
 the Wild * gave him at once new latitude. He 
 cleared his desk of early material "The Faith of 
 Men," "The War of the Classes," "Moon Face," 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 127 
 
 and the like and then began to write as he pleased : 
 his market allowed it. By nature and training he 
 was an extreme idealist ; a revolutionist, indeed. 
 The blood of "Priest" Jones, the circuit-rider, was 
 in his veins. He, too, was a preacher, though not 
 of conventional religion, which to him was anath 
 ema, but of an individualistic brand of social philos 
 ophy. From this time on he was constantly astride 
 of hobbies, some of which he rode furiously. He 
 had discovered in his tumultuous reading the evolu 
 tionary theory, the recapitulation theory, Gogol, 
 Spencer, Karl Marx, Nietzsche. At the time of 
 his death he was, to quote his wife s words, "enor 
 mously interested in psychoanalysis," and had he 
 lived would have written a series of novels con 
 cerned with "research into the primitive, into the 
 noumenon of things, in order to understand the 
 becoming of what man is to-day," novels un 
 doubtedly of the type of "The Star Rover." 
 
 He rode his theories into the fiction of this period 
 with the unction of the novitiate who has discovered 
 what to him is a new world. He would entertain 
 his readers, but he would teach them at the same 
 time; he would reform the world while it believed 
 it was playing. He has explained his theory in 
 "Martin Eden" : 
 
 Apparently it was to be a rattling sea story, a tale of 
 
128 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 .twentieth century adventure and romance, handling 
 real characters, in a real world, under real conditions. 
 But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be 
 something else something that the superficial reader 
 would never discern and which, on the other hand, 
 would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoy 
 ment for such a reader. It was this, and not the mere 
 story, that impelled Martin to write it. 
 
 His theory is wrong. To realize how wrong it 
 is one needs but to read "The Sea Wolf." The 
 story begins tremendously: the opening chapters 
 are as moving as anything in American fiction, but 
 before it has reached its middle point its failure 
 is so apparent that it is used in college classes as 
 one of the best examples to be found of extreme 
 faultiness in novel construction. It was so with 
 all his later novels. "Burning Daylight," for ex 
 ample, brilliant as it occasionally is in episode, is 
 a mass of materials for fiction rather than a novel. 
 The first half of it might be called "Miscellaneous 
 Adventures in the Life of a Super-man" : his way 
 of celebrating his birthday, his record trip with the 
 Yukon Mail, his fight with starvation, his discovery 
 of Klondike gold, his adventure with the stock 
 market, his sensational hold-up of the New York 
 brokers, etc. The heroine, as in "The Sea Wolf," 
 is not introduced until the story is half told, and she 
 seems to be necessary then only to teach the super- 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 129 
 
 man in long lectures the elements of socialism. 
 The last half of the book is propaganda. "The 
 Valley of the Moon" is three stories : how Billy 
 Roberts, prize-fighter, wooed and married Saxon, 
 the laundry worker excellent; the story of the 
 Oakwood Strike and the brutalization of Billy; 
 and the flight from the city and the idealization of 
 the country nauseatingly sweet. The second part 
 is painted black to serve as the foil to the third part. 
 As with "The Little Lady of the Big House," the 
 book is not a novel but propaganda. Even "White 
 Fang," his second dog book, is a tract in disguise. 
 Unquestionably he was not a novelist: he was 
 too impatient, too headlong, to round out a large 
 plan. He had not the patience to revise; he re 
 fused to read his earlier chapters day by day as he 
 proceeded. As a result, the novels grew by ac 
 cretions, and became, like "The Little Lady of the 
 Big House," masses of loosely-bound material for 
 novels. Had patience been granted him, and re 
 straint, he might, perhaps, have enlarged his vig 
 nettes into careful wholes; into novels even. One 
 cannot deny power to an artist who can cut a cameo 
 like this: 
 
 And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on the foul 
 plaster-wall appeared a vision. He stood in front of a 
 gloomy tenement house. It was night-time, in the 
 East End of London, and before him stood Margey, a 
 
130 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 little factory girl of fifteen. He had seen her home 
 after the bean-feast. She lived in that gloomy tene 
 ment, a place not fit for swine. His hand was going 
 out to hers as he said good night. She had put her lips 
 up to be kissed, but he was n t going to kiss her. 
 Somehow he was afraid of her. And then her hand 
 closed on his and pressed feverishly. He felt her 
 callouses grind and grate on his, and a great wave of 
 pity welled over him. He saw her yearning, hungry 
 eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been 
 rushed into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then 
 he put his arms about her in large tolerance and stooped 
 and kissed her on the lips. Her glad little cry rang in 
 his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a cat. 
 Poor little starveling! He continued to stare at the 
 vision of what had happened in the long ago. His flesh 
 was crawling as it crawled that night when she clung to 
 him, and his heart was warm with pity. It was a gray 
 scene, greasy gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the 
 pavement stones. And then a radiant glory shone on 
 the wall, and up through the other vision, displacing it, 
 glimmered Her pale face under its crown of golden 
 hair, remote and inaccessible as a star. 
 
 His range, however, is small. Of one whole rich 
 area of human society he knew only the surface. 
 The sordid misery of his childhood had warped 
 his sense of values and narrowed the circle of 
 human characters that he knew intimately enough 
 to portray as a novelist should portray characters. 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 131 
 
 His world, therefore, is lopsided and misleading. 
 His socialism, unrelieved as it is by humor, is often 
 ludicrous. His gospel, as one finds it in The Sea 
 Wolf," for instance, and "Martin Eden," is frankly 
 and outspokenly materialistic, and materialism is 
 the antipodes of all that we denominate art. 
 
 Moreover, within his own chosen field he is limited 
 of range. After the voyage of the Snark he added 
 the South Seas to his literary area and tried to do 
 for them what he had done for Alaska, but it was 
 only a changing of scenery. Instead of intense 
 cold, intense heat; instead of the aurora, the glamour 
 of the tropic night. The novel "Adventure" is 
 "A Daughter of the Snows" transferred to the 
 Solomon Islands, and Frona Wilse changes her 
 name to Joan Lackland. Smoke Bellew becomes 
 the David Grief of "A Son of the Sun." But 
 there is a falling off in zest and vision. The South 
 Sea tales do not leave so wholesome an impression 
 as the earlier tales of the Arctic. He has chosen 
 only the loathsome, the sensational, the unique ; and 
 one feels that he has chosen them simply to make 
 salable copy. There is an excess of glamour and 
 color expressed by a profusion of hyphenated ad 
 jectives: 
 
 Aloft at giddy mast-heads oscillating above the decks 
 of ships, I have gazed on sun-flashed water where coral 
 
132 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 growths iridesced from profounds of turquoise deeps, 
 and conned the ships into safety of mirrored lagoons 
 where the anchor rumbled down close to palm-fronded 
 beaches of sea-pointed coral rock, etc. 
 
 Or this from "A Son of the Sun": 
 
 But over and beyond was his love of all the other 
 things that go to make up a South Seas rover s life 
 the smell of the reef ; the infinite exquisiteness of the 
 shoals of living coral in the mirror-surfaced lagoons; 
 the crashing sunrises of raw colors spread with lawless 
 cunning ; the palm-tufted islets set in turquoise deeps ; 
 the tonic wine of the trade-winds ; the heave and send 
 of the orderly crested seas; the moving deck beneath 
 his feet, the straining canvas overhead; the flower- 
 garlanded, golden-glowing men and maids of Polynesia, 
 half children and half gods; and even the howling 
 savages of Melanesia, head-hunters and man-eaters, 
 half -devil and all the beast. 
 
 Or again : 
 
 I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic- 
 warmed and sun-scented night, where black slaves 
 fanned the sultry air with peacock plumes, while from 
 afar, across the palms and fountains, drifted the roar 
 ing of lions and the cries of jackals. 
 
 His sea tales are contemporary with Conrad s 
 and at many points there is parallelism. Both 
 deal largely with outcasts; both exalt their leading 
 characters into super-men Captain MacWhir in 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 133 
 
 "Typhoon," Rasumov with his "men like us leave 
 no posterity" ; both tell graphically of typhoon and 
 violence; both are sonorous and gorgeous of diction. 
 But Conrad is objective and London is prevailingly 
 subjective; Conrad knows the sea better and he 
 loves it with his whole soul. And he is more 
 human. To him sailors are "an unorganized 
 brotherhood" : in such work as "The Nigger of the 
 Narcissus" there is almost a grotesque display of 
 tenderness. London could never close a novel or a 
 short story with a passage like this : "Good by, 
 brothers ! You were a good crowd. As good a 
 crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating 
 canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisi 
 ble in the night, gave back yell for yell to a 
 westerly gale." The reason, perhaps, lies in Con 
 rad s own dictum : "Failing the resolution to hold 
 our peace, we can talk only about ourselves." 
 
 IV 
 
 The final literary style of Jack London and 
 doubtless it is true of all men was the product of 
 his own temperament. He was too individualistic, 
 too impatient long to follow the lead of other 
 men. Directed as he was at first by Kipling and 
 Gogol and O. Henry, he soon divested himself of 
 their mannerisms and voiced only himself. He 
 
134 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 was writing now furiously for money and only for 
 money. In an interview published with his sanc 
 tion at the height of his career, he declared that he 
 did not write because he loved writing. He hated 
 it. 
 
 Every story that I write is for the money that will 
 come to me. I always write what the editors want, not 
 what I d like to write. I grind out what the Capitalist 
 editors want, and the editors buy only what the business 
 and editorial departments permit. The editors are 
 not interested in the truth. 
 
 Everything in his life during the last decade 
 of his work called aloud for money, and his only 
 source of income was his pen. For a man of his 
 temperament there could be but one result: one 
 finds almost nothing in his writings that has been 
 brooded over, that, like ripened wine, has body 
 to it and bouquet. One thousand words a day, 
 every day in the week, without vacation or rest, 
 excited work unrevised and unreturned to, is jour 
 nalism, the ephemerae of the Sunday supplement. 
 
 His temperament is everywhere visible. His 
 sentences are short, often mere members of a sen 
 tence the unit of measure of one excitable and 
 headlong. There is no reserve, no restraint : every 
 where exaggeration, superlatives; everything in ex 
 treme. In his later work he used the adjective 
 
The Prophet of the *Last Frontier 135 
 
 "abysmal" until it became a mannerism that could 
 even creep into one of his titles; The Abysmal 
 Brute." His hero catches a mountain trout: 
 
 He hooked a monster steelhead, standing to his neck 
 in the ice-cold water of the Roque and righting for 
 forty minutes, with screaming reel, ere he drew his 
 finny prize to the bank, and with the scalp yell of a Co- 
 manche jumped and clutched it by the gills. 
 
 Everything at this intense pitch. Is he in the Arc 
 tic? "It was very warm, barely ten below zero." 
 "It was a clear cold night, not over cold not 
 over forty below." "It was the land where whiskey 
 freezes solid and may be used as a paper-weight 
 the greater part of the year." Does he need a 
 central figure for his tale? He must have a super 
 man, a Burning Daylight or a Wolf Larsen. The 
 Wolf is wholly unschooled; he has lived his whole 
 life among ignorant and brutal seamen on sailing 
 vessels; he is muscled like a gorilla and has the 
 gorilla s code of ethics; yet he is an authority on 
 the Bible and he has Herbert Spencer at his tongue s 
 end. Even on literary topics he can render tongue- 
 tied and silent Humphrey Van Weyden, "the Dean 
 of American Letters the Second," Van Weyden "the 
 cold-blooded fish, the emotionless monster, the 
 analytical demon." Are we convinced? On the 
 contrary we begin to doubt the accuracy even of his 
 
136 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 autobiographical confessions. Can this man tell 
 the truth? Will his imagination and melodramatic 
 impulses permit him, even if he tries? Can we be 
 lieve, for example, that a healthy country boy not 
 a De Quincey under the influence of drugs can 
 have dreams as extreme and as circumstantial as 
 those he describes in the autobiographical parts of 
 "Before Adam"? 
 
 That London devoutly believed that he was a 
 realist and that his extreme pictures came only from 
 his thoroughness, there can be no doubt. In 
 "Martin Eden" he has said : "Realism is imperative 
 to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. 
 The bourgeois is cowardly. It is afraid of life." 
 But realism is science, and scientist London was 
 not. Surely his is not the realism of the French 
 school that filled endless note-books with careful 
 observations before it began to write. He has 
 been on the spot, to be sure, and the reader is never 
 allowed for a moment to lose sight of the fact, but 
 
 ! 
 
 he works not from scientifically collected data. He 
 
 can weave a glorious web of impressions of an era 
 over which time is throwing a mellowing haze, he 
 can heighten its picturesque places and exaggerate 
 its lights and shades, but this is not realism. 
 Wherever he touches the things that we know, we 
 are likely to find him even grotesquely unrealistic. 
 His dialogue seldom rings true, never, indeed in his 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 137 
 
 later novels. David Grief in "Feathers of the 
 Sun" is met by a trader and accosted in this O. 
 Henry-like manner : "You 11 have to pay your 
 legitimate import duties same as any other trader 
 with mind intent on robbing the gentle Polynesian 
 savage on coral isles implanted." The half-breed 
 Sitka Charley talks dialect through the first half of 
 the tale and then at the climax launches out in 
 Addisonian balances like these : "Brothers, my 
 blood is red with Siwash, but my heart is white. 
 To the faults of my fathers I owe the one, to the 
 virtue of my friends the other. When I speak 
 harshly to one of your own kind, I know you will 
 not take it amiss," and so on to the end of the 
 speech. It is London in his study, not Sitka 
 Charley. The costume may deceive us, but the 
 voice is the voice of London. 
 
 We may make the same observation upon his 
 feminine characters : they are not nature ; they are 
 Jack London. A single illustration will suffice. 
 The novel is "A Daughter of the Snows." It is 
 in the middle of the Arctic night. The spirit 
 thermometer registers sixty-five degrees below zero, 
 and Frona Wilse from sheer excess of vitality has 
 harnessed her dogs and taken an eight-mile run at 
 top speed. Out in the frozen waste across the 
 river from Dawson she happens by pure luck to 
 stumble upon Lucile, a fallen woman, a professional 
 
138 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 dancer in saloons, a former vaudeville performer, 
 sitting alone and disconsolate in the snow, presum 
 ably lost. One would suppose that the finding of 
 a feminine cabaret stranger lost in the snow, away 
 in the Arctic waste, the thermometer sixty-five 
 below, would arouse in the finder curiosity or at 
 least instantly-expressed emotion of some kind. 
 But Frona Wilse is not conventional. She simply 
 stops her dogs and asks the forlorn stranger in the 
 snow the mercury still at sixty-five a question 
 in esthetics. Is "stern" or "somber" the proper 
 adjective to apply to the landscape they see about 
 them? They differ instantly in their opinions and, 
 the girl not rising from the snow, they begin their 
 debate. 
 
 "That is because the lines of our lives have been laid 
 in different places," the other ventured reflectively. 
 "It is not what the landscape is, but what we are. If 
 we were not, the landscape would remain, but without 
 human significance. That is what we invest it with, 
 
 " Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
 From outward things, whatever you may believe/ " 
 
 Frona s eyes brightened, and she went on to complete 
 the passage: 
 
 "Where truth abides in fulness, and around 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 
 "And and how does it go? I have forgotten." 
 
The Propliet of the Last Frontier 13 
 " Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in. " 
 
 The woman ceased abruptly, her voice trilling off into 
 silvery laughter with a certain bitter recklessness 
 which made Frona inwardly shudder. 
 
 In all his stories, whenever a woman goes away to 
 school, even for a brief period, she comes back 
 quoting Browning and Bergson and Ibsen and talk 
 ing of the decadence of the French symbolists. He 
 lacked humor, and he knew no more of the social 
 realm in which Thackeray, for instance, lived, than 
 did Dickens. 
 
 In the field of action, however, especially action 
 in the primitive areas of life, he stands with the 
 masters// Few have surpassed him in power to 
 present vivid moving-pictures : records of fights 
 dog-fights, prize-fights, bull-fights, the fight of a bull 
 moose with a wolf pack, the battle of a Scruff 
 Mackenzie with a whole Indian tribe, the over-pow 
 ering single-handed of a mutinous crew by a Wolf 
 Larsen, the stand of a band of island lepers against 
 the authorities. Scenes of battle and tempest 
 arouse his imagination as nothing else : typhoons 
 in the Solomon Islands, races with the Yukon mail, 
 mutinies at sea, Arctic heroes conquering single- 
 handed a whole firm of Wall Street sharpers. 
 Chapter XXXVIII of "The Mutiny of the Elsi- 
 nore," where Pike single-handed fights the ship off 
 
 
140 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the Horn, is as stirring a bit of adventure as there 
 is in the literature of the sea. 
 
 In his own estimation London was never a hap 
 hazard worker. It was a part of his literary creed, 
 learned in the days of his laborious apprenticeship 
 and strengthened by the socialism that became his 
 religion, that behind all art which is worthy of the 
 name must lie something more than appears on the 
 surface. "There must be the major motif he 
 says, "the big underrunning motif, the cosmic and 
 universal thing. I tried to make it keep time to 
 the story itself. " This cosmic theme underlies the 
 work of all the great artists. "There must be a 
 cosmic quality to what they sing. They must seize 
 upon and press into enduring art forms the vital 
 facts of our existence. They must tell why we have 
 lived. * Applying his test to Kipling, he says he 
 has sung "the sweat and blood and toil of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race, and back of it the genius of the race. 
 And this is the cosmic quality." Of his own 
 work he says: 
 
 It was the apotheosis of adventure not the adven 
 ture of the story books, but of real adventure: the 
 savage task-master, awful of punishment and awful 
 of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding ter 
 rible patience and heartbreaking days and nights of 
 toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death 
 at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 141 
 
 and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through 
 blood and sweat and stinging insects, leading up by 
 long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to royal 
 culminations and lordly achievements. 
 
 And again: 
 
 ^s s ^ 
 
 He felt the stress and strain of life, its fears and 
 sweats and wild insurgencies surely this was the 
 stuff to write about. He wanted to glorify the leaders 
 of forlorn hopes, the mad lovers, the giants that 
 fought unde- stress and strain, amid terror and tragedy, 
 making life crackle with the strength of their en 
 deavor. And yet the magazine short stories seemed 
 intent on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sor 
 did dollar-chasers, and the commonplace little 
 love affairs of commonplace little men and women. 
 
 At one time about 1903 it was O. Henry 
 threw his influence over London s short stories, 
 notably those in "The Faith of Men" and "Moon 
 Face," but between London and O. Henry there 
 is this fundamental difference: London was pas 
 sionately in earnest; he wrote without humorous 
 intent; he wrote with a motif, and this he never 
 forgot even in his most headlong moments of copy x 
 production. Behind his work was a principle that \ \ 
 he fought for, a conviction that was Puritanic in 
 its intensity. O. Henry, and also Bret Harte, lacked 
 this element, and lacking it, they are in danger, 
 despite their literary cleverness and their humor, 
 
142 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 of falling among the mere entertainers, useful peo 
 ple but not a class to be placed high in the major 
 scale of values. 
 
 Were it not for this cosmic quality in London s 
 work, we might dismiss "Kim at this point or even de 
 clare it not worth while to consider him at all 
 save as a picturesque incident in the history of 
 American literature, but, like Mark Twain, he is 
 the interpreter of a region. In his underrunning 
 motifs we find the underrunning motifs of 
 a whole new ej:^ofj^r^^e^gjai.iiyilkatiQn. He 
 was not an entertainer merely any more than Mark 
 Twain was a humorist merely : he wflft p voir. p , 
 the voice of the new 
 
 Rockies, the fjrst rea11y_ jT^ljfQrruAn w*4*er 
 , for Harte and his circle were 
 
 Easterners who were temporarily in the .West. 
 London was indigenous, a voice Calif ornian and 
 only Calif ornian. He_ was_Jrom the jDicjns ajid 
 the Argonauts, the blond race in the first van of 
 the march into the unknown beyond the horizon, 
 and with them he lifted his voice decrying the de 
 cadent days that had followed the age of the heroes. 
 It was the same voice that coined the phrase "the 
 effete East," the old voice of the northern blond 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 143 
 
 beasts who had smitten in contempt the softness 
 and effeminacy of declining Rome. 
 
 He voiced the romance of California, its feetj 
 amid the ruins of the stately Spaniards, its face j 
 turned to the Golden Gate and the Pacific. Still on 
 its horizon lay the frontier the new Eldorado to 
 the north, and beyond the sea-rim the islands of 
 the South Seas, the last domain of mystery, the 
 last unconquered bits of the primitive world. 
 
 Moreover, London voiced the recklessness and the 
 headlong venturesomeness that came as a heritage 
 from the Argonauts. These early Titans had 
 gambled with the horizon. "The Valley nf jhe 
 Moon" is a sermon with this text: 
 
 Whenever a man lost his stake, all he had to do 
 was to chase the frontier west a few miles and get 
 another stake. They moved over the face of the land 
 like so many locusts. They destroyed everything 
 the Indians, the soil, the forests, just as they had 
 destroyed the buffalo and the passenger pigeon. Their 
 morality in business and politics was gambler moral 
 ity the loser chased the frontier for fresh stakes. 
 The winner of to-day, broke to-morrow, on the day 
 following might be riding his luck to royal flushes on 
 five-card draws. So they gobbled and gambled from 
 the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
 
 In all that he wrote was the spirit. of _thijiew empire 
 of the Padgc; its magnificent distances, its reck- 
 
144 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 lessness and exaggeration, its adolescent dreams. 
 It was the spirit of his own biography: "What 
 we want," says his heroine Saxon, really his wife 
 Charmian, "is a valley of the moon-, and we ll just 
 keep on looking till we find it." 
 
 In atmospheres like this are born the giants of the 
 race. London s super-~men--are pnly 
 
 ayT^lifomiRns drea -of^m^n- They came from 
 h^ \Vfstej-n_expansiveness, his life in camp and 
 forecastle where the masculine predominated, and 
 from the romance of the border that creates from 
 the material about it its own mythology. On the 
 westward-looking borders always iconoclasm, al 
 ways fierce individjialisrn^tliat fr^rt g sHfzgjjg 11 * 
 intp__a_religion. Note the philosophy of Jacob Wilse: 
 
 Conventions are worthless for such as we. They 
 are for the swine who without them would wallow 
 deeper. The weak must obey or be crushed! not so 
 with the strong. The mass is nothing; the individual 
 everything; and it is the individual always that rules 
 the mass and gives the law. A fig for what the world 
 says. 
 
 All of London s leading characters are of this 
 type: super-men, super- women, dreams of their 
 creator, half real, half mythical. All of them are 
 blonds even to the golden degree. They have blue 
 or gray eyes and bodies that are perfect. His men 
 have muscles that creep and knot like living things, 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 145 
 
 and skins like silk. We think of Wolf Larsen, of 
 Burning Daylight who had "that super-strength that 
 is the dower of but one human in millions/ of 
 Axel Gunderson : 
 
 In the making of Axel Gunderson the gods had 
 remembered their old-time cunning, and cast him after 
 the manner of men who were born when the world 
 was young. Full seven feet, he towered in his 
 picturesque costume which marked a kingj)fjldorado . 
 His chest, neck, and limbs were those of a giant. To 
 bear his three hundred pounds of bone and muscle, 
 his snowshoes were greater by a generous yard than 
 those of other men. Rough-hewn, with rugged brow 
 and massive jaw and unflinching eyes of palest blue, 
 his face told the tale, of one who knew but the jaw 
 of_might. Of the yellow of ripe corn silk, his frost- 
 incrusted hair swept like day across the night, and 
 fell far down his coat of bearskin. 
 
 tiis women ajf mates, for his men : super-women 
 of the border type, the half-mythical idealizations 
 of a young man whose life has been passed largely 
 in masculine society. Miss Caruthers in "Under 
 the Deck Awnings" could stay under water two 
 minutes, could gather forty-seven coins before com 
 ing up, and do other physical feats as extraordinary. 
 And besides this, "Men were as wax in her hands. 
 She melted them, or subtly molded them, or in 
 cinerated them, as she pleased. ... As a man- 
 
146 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 conqueror she was supreme. jShe iwas a wjiip- 
 lasjh. a sting, a flame, an electric spark. At times 
 there were flashes of will that scorched through 
 her beauty and seduction and smote a victim into 
 blank and shivering idiocy and fear." To one who 
 objects to the picture, or to other super-women like 
 Maud Songster or foan Lackland, their creator 
 would say in the words of Frona Wilse, who 
 would voice both herself and the virile new land 
 of which she was a part : "You are unused to 
 consistent, natural women; because more like you 
 are only familiar with the hot-house breeds pretty, 
 helpless, well-rounded, stall-fatted little things, bliss 
 fully innocent and criminally ignorant. They are 
 not natural or strong; nor can they mother the 
 natural or strong." 
 
 Everywhere in his work the Western. 
 
 vitality enthusiasm, expansiveness, the abilily *** 
 see_things and Hojhings. in the big", in the world of 
 the impossible made possible by super-energy and 
 self-reliance. His super-men are not all in the 
 realms of savagery and frontier squalor. - /^rfc. 
 Forest in The Little Lady of the Big Hoiye" is a 
 business super-man, master, of a super-ranch^ in the 
 Valley of the Moon London s own ranch and 
 London s own self as he dreamed and planned in 
 his study. The despatching of a train-load of 
 pedigreed stallions and three hundred registered bulls 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 147 
 
 to South America is but one episode of a single 
 day. Thousands of men are employed, each group 
 superintended by the world s leading expert and 
 these experts instructed and directed by Forest. He 
 is supreme master of the masters of every branch 
 of knowledge required upon the ranch. 
 
 A manager, at the end of a five or ten minute ses 
 sion, often emerged sweating, limp and frazzled. 
 Yet for a swift hour, at high tension, Forest met all 
 comers, with a master s grip handling them and all 
 the multifarious details of their various departments. 
 He told Thompson the machinist, in four flashing 
 minutes, where the fault lay in the dynamo of the 
 Big House refrigerator. 
 
 And in the same way he went down the whole line 
 of his super-specialists. Is it enough? He does 
 this by working one hour a day. The rest of the day 
 he spends as a bronco-buster, marksman, swimmer, 
 defeater of the champion diver of the whole South 
 Seas, composer of music and poetry, and quoter 
 of Browning and Bergson. 
 
 Youth is the J^e^jte-it-all. In the glorious youth 
 of mWftttfe region he was an adolescent, driven, 
 as he has said of one of his own heroes, by the 
 urge of life healthy and strong, unaware of frailty 
 and decay, drunk with sublime complacence, ego- 
 mad, enchanted by his own mighty optimism." 
 When he died at forty he was still, like his Cali- 
 
148 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 fornia, in the flower of his adolescence, still dream 
 ing over the vision that had glorified his squalid 
 boyhood: "It was only a little lad, but he had 
 dreams of becoming a great musician and having 
 all Europe at his feet." It put the thrill of romance 
 into all that he wrote, a thrill like that in the climax 
 of "The Call of the Wild" : 
 
 When the long winter nights come on and the wolves 
 follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be 
 seen running at the head of the pack through the 
 pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic 
 above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings 
 a song of the younger world, which is the song of the 
 pack. 
 
 It is the Saul of Western individualism, the^pirif 
 of thegroung, f i_JiVesL_aL our America. 
 
 That London should have been a socialist was 
 inevitable : iconoclasm and rgyek were in_tb^-^air 
 h^breathed, as also that extreme individualism that 
 chafed under authority from any source whatever. 
 The point of view in his sea stories is that of the 
 forecastle to which authority is synonymous with 
 tyranny; in "The Road" it is that of the hobo to 
 whom all organized society is tyrannical, and in 
 "The Iron Heel" it is that of the modern bolshevist 
 who would destroy everything in authority and be 
 gin anew. "The Iron Heel" is the "Newi from 
 Nowhere," just as "Martin Eden" is the "Alton 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 149 
 
 Locke" of later socialistic literature, with this dif 
 ference, however : Morris could bring his reader 
 into the sunshine beyond the revolution, but London 
 could offer only failure and suicide. The very 
 violence of his emotions and the radicalness of his 
 remedies left him powerless to close otherwise. 
 His own life and his later novels offer his only 
 solution that is not merely destructive: flee away 
 from the cities and the gathering-places of men, he 
 says, and in a Valley of the Moon create an empire 
 of your own over which you can rule supreme. 
 
 All this reveals to us much. To read Jack Lon 
 don is to understand, perhaps for the first time, the 
 soul of the great Northwestern empire on the Pa 
 cific, that bred the I. W. W., that has turned the 
 tide of Presidential elections, that single-handed em-* 
 broils the nation with Japan, and that ever must: 
 be reckoned with in all national councils; and also 
 it is to feel in vivid reality the power and the 
 vitality of that Western tide that is bound to over 
 flow to the enrichment of all areas of our American; 
 life. 
 
 VI 
 
 But not only was London the embodiment of 
 the spirit of a vibrant locality, he was during a 
 brief period a voice that was national and inter 
 national. The war has thrown the nineteenth cen- 
 
150 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 tury into new perspective. The years before 1914 
 already seem to belong to a bygone era. No one 
 smiles now when we speak of "the remarkable 
 Tightness of RUdyard Kipling," or even when 
 we pronounce Jack London the most widely repre- 
 sensative American literary figure, the more arrest 
 ing literary voice during the decade preceding the 
 war. 
 
 London was swept into notice upon the crest of 
 the Kipling wave, that protest of the nineties 
 against Tennysonian sentiment, Preraphaelitism, 
 Oscar Wildeism, Aubrey Beardsleyism. In 1903, 
 while he was still fighting for recognition, London 
 reviewed Kipling who was then under his first eclipse, 
 taking as his text the pronouncement of a Chicago 
 reviewer that Rudyard Kipling, "prophet of blood 
 and vulgarity, prince of the ephemerals, and idol 
 of the non-elect," was dead. London hailed him as 
 the most living writer of the nineteenth century: 
 "When the future centuries quest back to the nine 
 teenth century to find what manner of century 
 it was, to find not what the people of the nineteenth 
 century thought they thought, but what they really 
 thought; not what they thought they ought to do, 
 but what they really did do, then a certain man, 
 Kipling, will be read and read with understanding." 
 
 It was inevitable that he should have tr.ken his 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 151 
 
 own stand with prophets of blood and vulgarity : 
 his birth and his training had fitted him for nothing 
 else. Moreover, it was his good fortune that the 
 time was ripe for such prophets. Roosevelt, ranch 
 man of the Northwest, wilderness hunter, rough- 
 rider, apostle of the free air and the out of doors, 
 was in the fierce light of the Presidency. A genera 
 tion of young men excited by the call of war and 
 then thwarted of their desire by the quick collapse 
 of the foe was on the scene. To gratify their 
 heroic desire they turned perforce to swash-buck 
 ling romance thin food and soon intolerable. A 
 reaction such as Kipling headed in the eighties was 
 inevitable. From the White House flew Jack- 
 London-like phrases : "mollycoddle," "race suicide," 
 "the strenuous life," "red-blooded men." The 
 "muck-rake" and "Ananias Club" schools of criti 
 cism arose and flourished; the out-of-doors move 
 ment changed overnight from a fad to a religion; 
 Seton s "Wild Animals I Have Known" started 
 a whole group of writers. Frederick Remington 
 published "Men with the Bark On"; the title is 
 redolent of the times. It was the period of Stephen 
 Crane and "The Red Badge of Courage/ of Frank 
 Norris and "The Pit," of Elbert Hubbard and the 
 "Message to Garcia," of Davis and "Soldiers of 
 Fortune," of Sinclair s "The Jungle," and like a 
 
152 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 sudden jazz note the short stories of O. Henry: 
 surely no period in our literary history was ever 
 more various or more sensational. ( * O^L;. 
 
 And it was into this excited group of young 
 men of the nineties of the dying Victorian period, 
 who had come down upon th ef literary metropolis 
 like the wild university group upon London in the 
 nineties of the Elizabethan age, that Jack London 
 projected himself, and, at the one moment in our 
 history when it would have been possible, he seized 
 the baton and led the orchestra. And it was a 
 leadership no man may call conventional. A con 
 temporary English critic characterized him as a 
 literary runner amuck. 
 
 It was as if he foresaw the reign of savagery that 
 was to come with the German uprising. His cry 
 was: Face the truth. Why refuse to see what 
 is straight before your eyes? Soft-living peoples 
 have always been awakened by blond beasts of the 
 North. Civilization is not to be depended upon; 
 it is but a veneer that hides the abysmal brute. 
 Pathurst, the esthetic club man, gone to sea because 
 of ennui, becomes a man of the viking age when he 
 awakes one day to find himself in command of a 
 mutiny-stricken ship. Instantly he becomes blood 
 and iron, knocks men right and left, shoots mutineers 
 in cold blood, rules with brutality a crew that is 
 "the sweepings of hell," and single-handed brings 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 153 
 
 his ship to port. And the motif of the book is 
 this : Pathnrst is you. The blond beast of Niet 
 zsche lies only skin-deep within you and needs but 
 circumstances to set it free. Like Smoke Bellew, 
 the veriest mollycoddle has it in him to be in 
 the right environment a sea-wolf and a trampler 
 upon all save the strong. 
 
 From the first London had to fight against the 
 contention that his pictures were too strong and 
 brutal. Eight years before the rape of Belgium 
 he wrote in anger his essay "The Somnambulists. 1 
 What is the matter with the world? he cried. It 
 is asleep. 
 
 Civilization has spread a veneer over the surface 
 of the soft-shelled animal known as man. It is a 
 very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man con 
 stituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and 
 believes he is garbed in armor-plate. . . . Yet man to 
 day is the same man that drank from his enemy s 
 skull in the dark German forests, that sacked cities, 
 and stole his women from neighboring clans like any 
 howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood body of man 
 has not changed in the last several thousand years. 
 Nor has his mind changed. . . . Starve him, let him 
 miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the 
 hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him 
 and the female of his kind upon whom his mating 
 instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like any angry 
 cat s, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, 
 
154 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 and watch his fists clench like an orang-outang s. 
 Maybe he will even beat his chest. Touch his silly 
 vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding pride, call 
 him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes 
 a hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a 
 tiger s claw, or an eagle s talon, incarnate with desire 
 to rip and tear. 
 
 The same rule applied to nations: 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a 
 sea robber. Underneath his thin coating of culture, 
 he is what he was in Morgan s time, in Drake s time, 
 in William s time, in Alfred s time. The blood and 
 the tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins. 
 In battle he is subject to the blood lusts of the Ber 
 serkers of old. Plunder and booty fascinate him 
 immeasurably. 
 
 And so on and on. We called him brutal when he 
 wrote this in the serene days before the war; we 
 called him gruesome disciple of Gogol, parader of 
 horrors that civilization had outgrown. We are 
 not so sure now. And his point of view was the 
 German point of view. Over and over again in all 
 his volumes he proclaimed shrilly his soap-box 
 doctrine that the world belongs to the strong. 
 Martin Eden proclaims it in every chapter. 
 
 Nietzsche was right. jThe world belongs to the 
 strong to the strong who are noble as well and who 
 do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade and 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 1, 
 
 exchange. The world belongs to the true noblemen, 
 to the great blond beasts, to the non-compromisers, 
 to the "yes-sayers." And they will eat you up, you 
 socialists who are afraid of socialism and who think 
 yourselves individualists. Your slave morality of the 
 weak and lowly will never save you. 
 
 And again: 
 
 In the struggle for existence the strong and the 
 progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak 
 and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to 
 perish. The result is that the strong and the progeny 
 of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle 
 obtains, the strength of each generation increases. 
 That is development. But you slaves dream of a 
 society where the law of development will be annulled, 
 where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where 
 every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat 
 as many times a day as he desires, and where all will 
 marry and have progeny the weak as well as the 
 strong. . . . 
 
 Your society of slaves of, by, and for slaves must 
 inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which 
 composes it weakens and goes to pieces. I am 
 enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. . . . 
 
 To Jacob Wilse 
 
 Battle was the law and the way of progress. The 
 world was made for the strong and only the strong 
 inherited it and through it all there ran an equity. To 
 
156 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 be honest was to be strong. To sin was to weaken. 
 To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff 
 a bluffer was to smite with the steel of justice. The 
 primitive strength was in the arm ; the modern strength 
 in the brain. Though it had shifted ground, the 
 struggle was the same old struggle^ 
 
 And all this in the days long before the war in 
 books eagerly republished in Sweden and Germany 
 and Russia. 
 
 London out-Kiplinged Kipling for the reason that 
 he knew more than Kipling. The author of the 
 "Plain Tales" is as brutal and bloody and vulgar 
 as the life that he saw and described, but London 
 saw depths of brutality that Kipling was ignorant 
 of. Like Martin Eden, "he had sighted the whole 
 sea of life s Hastiness that he had known and voy 
 aged over and through. . . ." When Kipling would 
 write "Captains Courageous/ he went to Gloucester 
 and studied the fishing fleet and interviewed the sail 
 ors ; but when London wrote of the sea he drew his 
 material from his own blood and sweat in the 
 forecastle of a grimy seal-oil-soaked schooner 
 in Arctic waters. He had himself known the 
 lowest depths to which drunkenness and va 
 grancy bring men. He had seen the naked brute, 
 he had seen what men become when the re 
 straints of civilization are relaxed, and he 
 told his generation, in words as strong as his genera- 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 157 
 
 tion would bear, the naked truth. And to the last 
 he complained that he was not allowed to tell the 
 whole truth. Even when he was at the height 
 of his fame he had stories rejected by magazines 
 because the editors considered them too brutal for 
 their readers to bear. We can imagine his sardonic 
 chuckle when the "abysmal brute" broke loose in 
 Belgium and his squeamish countrymen shuddered in 
 such ghastly horror. For ten years he had been 
 telling them of the blond beast. More even than 
 Kipling was he the "prophet of blood and vulgarity" 
 in the smug epoch before the outburst of the war. 
 
 VII 
 
 The popularity of London in Europe during his 
 decade cannot be overlooked. In Sweden transla 
 tions of twenty- four of his books were sold to the 
 number of 230,000 in nine years. Many editions 
 were taken by Russia, especially of his later social 
 istic books. When he died in 1916 more space was 
 devoted to him in the European papers than to 
 the Emperor Francis Joseph, who died at the same 
 time. His socialism undoubtedly was taken more 
 seriously in eastern Europe than at home. We 
 tolerated his pictures of the burning and rape of 
 Chicago in The Iron Heel" and of the blotting out 
 of American civilization in "The Scarlet Plague" 
 
158 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 as graphic bits of fiction, but bolshevist Europe ac 
 cepted them as solemn prophecy and as all but ac 
 complished fact. For London, when he defined his 
 position and his program, spoke with no uncertain 
 voice. To him socialism meant war to the limit : 
 "It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all 
 capitalistic institutions of present-day society." And 
 only shortly before his death he resigned from the 
 Socialistic party in disgust "because of its lack of 
 fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class 
 struggle." 
 
 Richard Henry Little, who was with the Russians 
 during the period after the fall of Germany when 
 the Red army was coming into power, has given 
 a glimpse of the influence of Jack London upon 
 the Russian people : 
 
 I was n t left long in doubt as to who the Russians 
 considered the greatest living American. It was 
 "Yakclunnen." For the life of me I could n t figure 
 out for a while just who Yakclunnen was, although 
 I eagerly agreed that he was the greatest American 
 of them all. Then they brought out a great many 
 treasured and tattered volumes, and I realized they 
 were talking of Jack London. 
 
 Never was an author so idolized as Jack London 
 is among the Russians. Apparently all of his works 
 have been translated into Russian, and I found them 
 everywhere. Officers passed them around from one 
 
The Prophet of the Last Frontier 159 
 
 to another, and often I have seen little groups of 
 soldiers sitting in the woods, while the man who could 
 read was doing so aloud to the eager delight of the 
 awestruck group around him. At every mess the 
 officers wanted me to tell them all I knew about Jack 
 London. 
 
 I wanted to talk about Lenin and Trotzky, but they 
 wanted to talk about "Yakclunnen." 
 
 To what extent his voice is still directing the great 
 soviet uprising we may not say. 
 
 We do know, however, that he can be but a tem 
 porary disturbance. His philosophy was material 
 istic, based upon the Nietzschean omnipotence of 
 force, and the World War, if nothing else, has 
 shown its fallacy. Beyond "The Sea Wolf" ma 
 terialism cannot go, and that "Martin Eden," which 
 purports to trace the evolution of a life under the 
 workings of this philosophy, could be ended only by 
 suicide, reveals its fatal weakness. The thunder 
 and the earthquake were all this Calif ornian Niet 
 zsche could understand : of the philosophy of the 
 still small voice he knew nothing at all. He could 
 run away from the problem and fancy he had found 
 a solution in his unsocialistic Valley of the Moon 
 experiment, but of the meaning of life expressed 
 in terms of sacrifice he was as ignorant as his 
 Alaskan savages. 
 
 Undoubtedly he will be rated as a picturesque in- 
 
160 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 cident in the decade that closed an era. . His social 
 philosophy and his pseudo-science will disappear 
 early. If anything of his writings is to survive its 
 day, it will be a few fragments from his novels, 
 a dozen or two of his short stories that are wholly 
 American in scene and spirit, and "The Call of the 
 Wild," which has in it not only the freshness and 
 the realism of the living North, but the atmosphere 
 and the thrill of romance, which is the eternal spirit 
 of youth. 
 
THE EPIC OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 A TERCENTENARY REVERIE 
 
 SOME day the history of New England will be 
 written as an epic. 
 
 I hesitate to confess it, for I am New England 
 born, but the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers 
 and Plymouth Rock do not move me as once they 
 did. Niagara stuns and terrifies one at first, but at 
 length it lulls one to sleep. It is time perhaps 
 to change the subject, and yet there is one thing 
 about the episode that holds me against my will: 
 there once lived men so fearfully in earnest that 
 they could take their wives and children straight off 
 the map into the blank vault of the west and with 
 out a thought of ever returning. They sought 
 no port, no definite land : they sailed simply into the 
 west and the first landfall they made was to be their 
 home. They headed only for America three thous- 
 sand miles away. 
 
 And here I pause. When you aim at random 
 at America you have a wide mark. After weeks 
 and weeks of zigzagging and uncertainty, headed 
 this way and that by contrary winds, swept leagues 
 
 161 
 
162 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 to the south or the north by fierce tempests, blown 
 out of all reckoning for days, at the mercy of a 
 sailing-master eager only to land his cargo at the 
 earliest possible moment, he cared not where, why of 
 all points should New England have been the land 
 fall? Why not Newfoundland? Why not Flor 
 ida? Any one of a thousand chances would have 
 veered them away from the New England coast. 
 We say to-day that sheer chance flung them there. 
 The Pilgrim said k was the hand of God on the 
 tiller. 
 
 But whether it were chance or Providence, one 
 thing is certain : that landfall decreed the settlement 
 of a region as inhuman as any that ever engaged 
 the powers of man. Had those Pilgrims possessed 
 an accurate chart and had they known what we 
 know in these later times, that landing never would 
 have been. Indeed, had the seventeenth century 
 known the real facts about the Atlantic coast and 
 the territory inland, whole great areas of New 
 England would have remained unsettled to this day. 
 Where else in the world, save in Scotland, perhaps, 
 or Switzerland, can one find under cultivation an 
 area to match it? Mazes of boulders and glacial 
 drift tilled with all seriousness as farms; dizzy 
 hillsides jagged thick with rocks turned into corn 
 fields; veritable sloughs bottomed with polypod and 
 sweet-flag made into meadows; vast stretches of 
 
The Epic of New England 163 
 
 granite ledges snarled with hardback turned into 
 pastures; wrenched from nature with incredible 
 toil, fenced with heavy stone walls that called for 
 the labor of Titans; winters Arctic cold with snow 
 often for six months; roads eternally up and down 
 at sharp angles, buried under great drifts in winter 
 and washed into ragged trenches by the cloudbursts 
 of summer where else will one find a farming 
 region like that? 
 
 The old Puritan hive, those earliest-settled towns 
 near the mouths of the larger rivers and along the 
 sea, sent out its first swarm during the mid-years 
 of the eighteenth century. It was that sturdy brood 
 that fought the Seven Years War and the Revolu 
 tion; a restless, free-born race, full-lunged and 
 mighty-limbed, that crashed into the northern 
 woods far up into Maine, New Hampshire, and 
 Vermont, founded towns by every water-power, 
 surveyed the land into lots, and carved out the first 
 farms along the flats and river-courses. For forty 
 years the wilderness rang with their axes, the crash 
 of their old-growth pines, their mighty bonfires, 
 and their shouts to their toiling oxen. Clearings 
 became farms; trails were plowed into roads; wild 
 mountain torrents were turned upon saws and mill 
 stones. That was the first generation of the New 
 England hill lands; demigods who did each the 
 work of five ; who toiled every moment of the day- 
 
164 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 light and far beyond, a generation that wrestled 
 barehanded with brute nature in her strongest fast 
 nesses and won. And the women did no less than 
 the men. They it was who under sternest condi 
 tions and amid elemental surroundings bore and 
 reared those families of twelve and fifteen children, 
 washed and baked and mended, prepared the great 
 meals, spun the yarn, wove the cloth, made the gar 
 ments, did the thousand little chores which a farm 
 and a household demand, and died at last worn out, 
 their work all undone lying in heaps about them. 
 
 The great families swiftly outgrew the home 
 farm and scattered into the hills and the farther 
 valleys to clear other land. This second generation 
 completed the organization of the hill towns, pulled 
 out the last stumps in the earlier meadows, built 
 the great farmhouses with enormous chimneys and 
 wainscoting of clear pine boards four feet in width, 
 and completed the early highways, running them 
 without thought of compromise straight over the 
 steepest hills, oblivious of the fact, not discovered 
 until a century later, that "the kettle bail is no longer 
 when it lies down than when it stands erect." 
 They multiplied the settled land by ten and they 
 made of the northern hills a neighborhood with 
 growing villages and fast improving farms. 
 
 The third generation, which came upon the scene 
 in the early years of the new century, completed 
 
The Epic of New England 165 
 
 the expansion. When they had done their work, 
 every acre of land that could by human effort be 
 wrung from nature had been taken. All the steep 
 hillsides were dotted now with farmhouses. 
 Everywhere were little neighborhoods : far in the 
 mountain fastnesses, deep in the back valleys, high 
 on the wild north slopes where the winter sun 
 scarcely ever shone after mid-afternoon, or clustered 
 like Swiss villages about the very bases of the bare 
 peaks sometimes ten and fifteen miles from post- 
 office and store. It was this generation that 
 completed the stone walls, running them for miles 
 over hills and through forest, surrounding every 
 field with a barricade like the outworks of a fortress, 
 and heaping up rock heaps that to-day stand like 
 the pyramids, imperishable monuments to a race 
 forever gone. 
 
 Again great families of twelve and even eighteen 
 children, that marvelous fourth generation about 
 which our epic centers. Born in the thirties and 
 forties, they saw New England in its prime. Dur 
 ing their childhood the hills swarmed with life. 
 Nowhere was place so remote that one might not find 
 there a neighborhood with fifty and even seventy 
 pupils in its red schoolhouse. Sprung from gen 
 erations of hill-born men, toilers in the open air, 
 feeders upon the wholesome fruits of the soil, lovers 
 of the woods and the hills over which they scurried 
 
166 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 like the red foxes, reared in the great farmhouses 
 where sleeping rooms were unheated and abun 
 dantly ventilated, this generation was as sturdy a 
 race as the earth ever produced. They were as free 
 as the hill winds they breathed; they looked one 
 straight in the eye ; they depended solely upon their 
 own brain and muscle and will; they were self- 
 confident and undismayed by difficulties ; they could 
 adapt themselves to circumstances and improvise 
 new methods; and they had in them a love of work 
 that had been ground into their very bones. 
 
 Those were the days when the little back towns 
 which to-day number scarce two hundred souls 
 numbered twelve and fifteen hundred, and sent 
 often two representatives each to the General Court 
 of the State. Then it was that a town-meeting day 
 at the Center was the event of the year. The 
 whole town was there; hoary old grandsires of the 
 second generation bent and feeble who chattered of 
 the strength of their youth and told tales of their 
 childhood in the forests, the third generation in its 
 prime talking of cattle and corn and the coming 
 spring s work, and lastly, flocking by itself, the cen 
 ter of it all, the young men under twenty-one, a hun 
 dred of them with massive shoulders and mighty 
 limbs, clad in coarse and strong garments, and with 
 heavy cowhide boots with tops that reached almost 
 to the knees. What a magazine of stored-up en- 
 
The Epic of New England 167 
 
 ergy! They are not still a moment; crowding and 
 pushing each other, boasting, fighting, wrestling, 
 laughing boisterously at rough jokes, jumping, lift 
 ing each other by the heels with main strength, 
 massing together to crash down the inner partition 
 of the town hall; a "rough lot," a band of young 
 Titans, with energy enough and self-confidence 
 enough to shake the very foundations of the re 
 public. What outlet was there to be for all this 
 pent-up power? 
 
 It was time for New England to swarm again; 
 the hive was full to bursting. Had there been no 
 vent beyond the home domain it is hard to imagine 
 what might have been. Land already was being 
 worked against the very protest of nature, and this 
 new brood would have had to turn the ledges and 
 the very pastures into farms and expend itself in 
 making into a garden what nature had intended for 
 a golf-links and a quarry. 
 
 The first overflow consisted of the older girls 
 who found work in the cotton mills of Lowell and 
 Fall River, and of the older boys who found 
 employment in the machine shops and in the grow 
 ing city of Boston. But this was a mere nothing. 
 The pressure in the northern districts was increas 
 ing. Something must happen, and suddenly the 
 something came. 
 
 The great West opened all in a moment as if the 
 
168 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 curtain had arisen for the first act. Gold had been 
 found on the far Pacific, fabulous masses of gold 
 to be had for the mere gathering in California, a 
 region as vague and as far away as the valley of 
 diamonds which Sindbad entered. How it thrilled 
 the northern farms! Then had come the Kansas- 
 Nebraska call that sounded over New England like 
 a trumpet blast; for every settler sixty acres of 
 flat land and a yoke of oxen free. Iowa, Minne 
 sota, Wisconsin, Illinois; men talked of nothing 
 else. Whole families started westward ; young boys 
 stole from their homes at dead of night and worked 
 their way toward the Mississippi, their imaginations 
 set on fire by the tales they had heard. 
 
 Then suddenly, like a fire alarm at night, rang 
 out the call to war. Seventy thousand, five hun 
 dred thousand, two million men must come from the 
 North, and there must be a thousand leaders raised 
 instantly, leaders of the first rank, for this was to 
 be a war such as the world never before had seen. 
 Never has there been such a call for men, men for 
 the armies of the North, men to break the vast 
 West, men to develop the iron and the oil and the 
 coal, men to bridge rivers and streams and to 
 tunnel mountains and build cities. And they were 
 to be picked and perfect men, of heroic mold, iron- 
 limbed and self-reliant, men that nothing could 
 quench and nothing dominate, who could grapple 
 
The Epic of New England 169 
 
 with a whole continent and wrestle with problems 
 as wide as the world itself. And it was not a mere 
 dozen or a score that was wanted ; it was thousands 
 and tens of thousands. And they must be had in 
 stantly. There was no time to train this army, to 
 discipline and college it for the new work. It 
 must be picked from material already at hand. And 
 to the glory of the New World, all was ready. In 
 1838 Emerson had written : "This country has not 
 fulfilled what seemed the reasonable expectation 
 of mankind. Men looked, when all feudal straps 
 and bandages were snapped asunder, that Nature, 
 too long the mother of dwarfs, should reimburse 
 itself by a brood of Titans who should laugh and 
 leap in the continent, and run up the mountains of 
 the West with the errand of genius and love." And 
 even as he wrote, the race of Titans which he de 
 scribed was in its cradles all about him, and now 
 they are ready. In twenty years New England sent 
 forth a brood that not even America will ever equal 
 again. Emerson himself in later years could say, 
 "We shall not again disparage America, now we 
 have seen what men it will bear." 
 
 It was this fourth generation that carried through 
 the great Civil War, that conquered the vast West 
 of America and turned it in a single lifetime from a 
 raw wilderness stretching over a quarter of the 
 earth s girdle into a garden and an empire. To 
 
170 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 these marvelous men nothing was impossible. They 
 spanned the vast distances with railroads, penetrated 
 the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas as if they had 
 been molehills, crushed the Plains Indians, exter 
 minated the great buffalo herds, opened up all the 
 rivers, built Chicago and the cities of the Plain, or 
 ganized the iron works of Pittsburg, uncovered the 
 coal and the oil and sent them broadcast over the 
 earth, and in their old age left the West they had 
 found in their boyhood a dream that to their grand 
 sons seemed as wild and romantic and as far away as 
 the tales of the "Arabian Nights." 
 
 But alas for the old hive. A visit to New Eng 
 land to-day is a sad pilgrimage to one who knows 
 aught of the early years. There hangs over it 
 forever an atmosphere of melancholy and tender 
 regret. The very winds and the waters seem to 
 murmur, "They are gone." iJThe Civil War de 
 stroyed for the South the old plantation life and 
 the only aristocracy in the European sense of the 
 word that America has ever known, and it left 
 behind it that vague sadness and longing that are 
 the soul of romance; but the war destroyed just as 
 surely the old regime in New England, the old 
 patriarchal life, the sense of family and of home 
 that comes only in perfectly organized neighbor 
 hoods untouched by the world, and it left behind 
 it the same "before the war" atmosphere of a 
 
The Epic of New England 171 
 
 golden age forever gone. For North and South 
 alike the war ended an era, and behind it lies the 
 only romance this garish republican land of ours 
 has ever known. 
 
 In New England it vanished almost literally in a 
 night. It was like the bursting of a barrier behind 
 which the waters have been silently gathering. Now 
 vast stretches of the land are again wildernesses; 
 everywhere silence save as the hawk screams over 
 it and the fox arouses the night echoes. Whole 
 neighborhoods have been abandoned; school dis 
 tricts where sixty and seventy scholars plowed 
 through the winter snow deserted completely. 
 Again as in the days of the earlier generations are 
 the farms confined to the river bottoms and the 
 easier worked plains. Those hillside fields over 
 which the fathers toiled so terribly are distant pas 
 tures now, wild and seldom visited, or else they are 
 veritable forests, and the deer, an animal unknown 
 to the third and fourth generations, swarm again as 
 in the days of the first settlers. Slowly but surely 
 the wilderness again is claiming its own. As the 
 hunter crashes though the thick woods he comes 
 constantly upon the great stone walls and the rock 
 heaps of that race which has vanished almost as 
 completely as the mound-builders. Sometimes he 
 finds the cellar hole and the old well, and near by 
 perhaps a few ghastly skeletons of apple-trees, but 
 
172 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 there is nothing else to tell him that here only a 
 lifetime ago was a home that had rung with the 
 happy voices of children. 
 
 That exodus never has been recorded. There is 
 in it the material for a thousand tragedies. What 
 heartburnings in the old homes from which the 
 children had all departed! Here the father and 
 mother abandoned the farm and went, too ; here the 
 mother died first and the father lived alone for a 
 time in the home that once had been so full of 
 joyous life; and here perhaps it was that the father 
 died first. Almost every one of these little aban 
 doned farms has a tragedy written over its latter 
 days. No one can tell the longings, the heartburn 
 ings, the loneliness of two parents growing old, 
 their children all in distant lands, their farm which 
 had always been their home no longer a thing of 
 value. A few years they struggle along in the 
 old round, but the end is inevitable. The farm 
 house door closes forever when it shuts behind the 
 little funeral procession. The son who has come for 
 a few sad days from the West would gladly sell the 
 old place, but there is no one to buy. For a time 
 the hay is sold to those who will buy it, but the 
 gray birches grow swiftly over the walls, the grass 
 is no longer worth the cutting, and the farm becomes 
 a pasture. The old buildings, their roofs tumbled 
 in, furnish shelter for a while to the sheep and the 
 
The Epic of New England 173 
 
 young cattle until a spring fire clears the place of 
 the rubbish. The forest returns with swiftness, 
 and it blots out at last the final vestige of the labors 
 of man. 
 
 To-day this Northland is the country that God 
 forsook. A curse seems to have fallen upon it. 
 A blight has fallen upon its fruit-trees; the brown- 
 tail and the gipsy moths have blasted it; the gray 
 birch is in the old pastures; the lumber-man and 
 the forest-fire have swept off its pines and spruce 
 and pointed firs. The churches are all but aban 
 doned. What few farms there are are taken more 
 and more by French Canadians and other aliens who 
 know no more of the history of the land than did 
 the old Teutons who settled amid the Celtic monu 
 ments. To them the great stone cairns, relics of 
 the first clearing, and the double stone walls run- 
 ing for miles over the hilltops and through tangled 
 forests, and the abandoned cellar holes and wells in 
 distant pastures are as unintelligible as are the relics 
 of the mound-builders to the farmers of the Middle 
 West. 
 
 The cultivated lands are every year decreasing. 
 In the State of New Hampshire, according to 
 Sanborn, its historian, "More than a million acres 
 cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage and 
 woodland in 1900." The native race is swiftly 
 dying out. In 1900 almost half of the population 
 
174 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 of Massachusetts were born of foreign parentage. 
 The hill towns are losing in population steadily. 
 Let me take as a type my boyhood town in Graf ton 
 County. In 1860 its population was 1273; in 1870, 
 876; in 1880, 728; in 1890, 679; in 1900, 630; in 
 1910, 559; in 1920, 480. In 1861 in a single day 
 a hundred young men enlisted from this town for 
 the war, and the greater number of them never re 
 turned as permanent dwellers. Whole neighbor 
 hoods in the seventies migrated to Minnesota and 
 to Iowa. In 1860 there was scarcely a foreign- 
 born person within the limits of the township; to 
 day of the small remnant that remains nearly 25 per 
 cent, are of alien birth. It is so in the whole State. 
 Again to quote Sanborn : "In one generation the 
 foreign-born in New Hampshire have trebled and 
 those of foreign parentage considerably more than 
 doubled." 
 
 The epic of New England centers about four 
 generations, and the greatest of them was the last, 
 that marvelous single generation that burst from its 
 borders like another wave of vikings from the 
 north and tamed a raw continent. It is a new epic 
 of a new Jason who burst into the unknown West 
 and wrung from it the marvelous golden fleece 
 which we pigmies of the later years must look at 
 forever in wonder. 
 
ON THE TERMINAL MORAINE OF NEW 
 ENGLAND PURITANISM * 
 
 ONE may not dwell long with the biography or 
 the writings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman without 
 being reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne. There 
 is suggestive parallelism at the start. Both traced 
 their lines of descent to old Salem, Massachusetts, 
 and to families which had persisted there since 
 colonial days. In the line of the one was William 
 Hawthorne, a grim magistrate who ordered the 
 lashing of Quakers and itinerant preachers and 
 vagabonds; and in the line of the other was Bray 
 Wilkins, a judge in the witchcraft trials of a later 
 day. That the two grimmest recorders of Puritan 
 tragedy and its inherited results should have origi 
 nated in this town of dark tradition is, we some 
 how like to feel, not a coincidence. It sets us to 
 looking for other parallelisms ; it furnishes us with 
 a key. 
 
 A descendant of Bray Wilkins, Warren E. Wil 
 kins, born in the generation which began in the 
 
 1 By permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers of "A 
 New England Nun," Modern Classics edition. 
 
 175 
 
176 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 thirties of the last century, was the first of his line 
 to break permanently from the Salem home and to 
 render himself unfixed of hearth, a man, in the 
 American fashion, of many environments. De 
 spite his restlessness, he was a gentle soul. Joseph 
 Chamberlain, collaborator with Miss Wilkins on the 
 novel "The Long Arm," has said that "the Puritan 
 seemed to survive in him, as it does in thousands of 
 other Yankees of the finer and unsordid type, 
 merely in a sort of exaggerated nervousness, con 
 scientiousness, and general unworldliness. He was 
 an architect of the old kind, trained in the building 
 trades rather than in the schools ; and he varied this, 
 his true occupation, with a little unsuccessful store- 
 keeping up at Brattleboro. Miss Wilkins mother s 
 people were of the Holbrooks of Holbrook fine 
 genteel people of the old sort, " survivals of an 
 early New England aristocracy. Wei shall find 
 many of them depicted with tender care as we 
 read "A Humble Romance" and the tales which 
 followed it. 
 
 From this union of two branches of primitive 
 New England stock was born Mary Eleanor Wilkins 
 on January 7, 1862, at Randolph, a little village half 
 an hour by rail out of Boston, in a home next door 
 to the mansion which her grandfather Holbrook 
 had built with his own hands. 
 
 There is little to record of her early years. A 
 
New England Puritanism 177 
 
 frail and sensitive child, unable to attend school, she 
 was much by herself, a dreamer and an eager reader 
 in the seclusion of her home while other children 
 were playing at active games in the out of doors. 
 One thinks of this when one reads of the lonely and 
 imaginative children scattered throughout her sto 
 ries: Nancy Wren in "A Gentle Ghost"; Diantha 
 in The Prism" ; and the pathetic little soul in "Big 
 Sister Solly." When she was eight her parents 
 tried the experiment of sending her to Mount Hoi- 
 yoke Seminary, but in a year her health had become 
 so precarious that she was withdrawn. Two years 
 later, in 1873, she removed with her parents to 
 Brattleboro, Vermont, a larger town at the base of 
 the Green Mountains and near the Connecticut River. 
 "Sometimes I wonder," she has written, "if the 
 marvellous beauty of that locality was not largely 
 instrumental in making me try to achieve anything." 
 Here again she saw a little of school life, this time as 
 a day pupil in a boarding-school at West Brattle 
 boro, but not for long. Like Emily Bronte, with 
 whom in so many ways she may be compared, she 
 was almost wholly self-educated and that in her 
 own home. She was an imaginative child and early 
 she created for herself a world of her own from the 
 materials of her reading. "I read Dickens and 
 Thackeray and Poe," she says, "and some trans 
 lations of Goethe. I also read translations from 
 
178 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the Greek. I remember being delighted at a very 
 early age with some of the Greek philosophers, I 
 cannot remember which. I was on very intimate 
 terms with mythological people. I read Ossian; I 
 read a lot of poetry." 
 
 This Hawthorne-like seclusion during a shy and 
 dreamy childhood, this perpetual reading of poetry 
 and old romance and far-off literatures, made upon 
 her an indelible impression. Being "on very inti 
 mate terms with mythological people" meant that 
 the world of fairies became to her as real as it was 
 to her own heroine of "The Prism," who, through 
 the cut-glass pendant which she had appropriated 
 from the parlor lamp, saw the whole fairy world, 
 and who, as she told of her visions, had "in her 
 eyes a light not of her day or generation, maybe 
 inherited from some far-off Celtic ancestor . . . 
 a strain of imagination which had survived the 
 glaring light of latter days of commonness." And 
 then one remembers that the author of the story has 
 spoken of her own ancestry as "straight American, 
 with a legend of French lineage generations back." 
 Two distinct strains, indeed, we shall find in this 
 daughter of New England: the Puritan with tyran 
 nical conscience and grim repression of soul, and the 
 Gallic with lightsomeness of fancy and exquisite 
 sensitiveness to beauty. 
 
 The Gallic element was the first to manifest it- 
 
New England Puritanism 179 
 
 self. It was only natural that a child of her tem 
 perament and rearing should begin to write early, 
 and that her first attempts should be lyrical, should 
 be fanciful little songs for childhood and ballads 
 of fairy-land. One may find them in early volumes 
 of "St. Nicholas," lyrics like "Cross-Patch" and 
 "Rock-a-bye Baby," or in "Wide Awake," fairy 
 tales in prose like "The Cow with the Golden 
 Horns," which furnished the title for her first pub 
 lished book, or "The Princess Rosetta," or "The 
 Silver Hen." "Given perfect freedom of choice, 
 which I was not given," she has said, "I might have 
 been a lyrist, but the notes would certainly have 
 been intense." Even as a child she had reveled in 
 the song-books of the Elizabethans, and that she 
 had read the more modern masters, like Rossetti, 
 is evident from such lyrics as "Banbury Cross": 
 
 "Pray show the way to Banbury Cross/ 
 
 Silver bells are ringing; 
 "To find the place I m at a loss," 
 
 Silver bells are ringing; 
 "Pass six tall hollyhocks red and white ; 
 Then, turn the corner toward the right " 
 
 and so on and on. Her fairy ballads ring with 
 conviction. She is at her best in dainty works 
 like "The Fairy Flag" ; in some of her climaxes, in 
 deed, she is almost perfect: 
 
180 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 There came a twang o pearly harp, 
 There came a lilting loud and sweet; 
 
 And softly o er the fairy bridge 
 
 There came the dance o slender feet. 
 
 In September, 1881, when she was twenty, she be 
 gan a series of vers de societe lyrics in "The Cen 
 tury Magazine" -"Sweet Phyllis," "Boy s Love," 
 "It was a Lass," and others, lyrics that were not 
 dimmed by their proximity in the magazine to 
 similar work by James Whitcomb Riley, Frank 
 Dempster Sherman, H. C. Bunner, and Andrew 
 Lang. A lyric like this, for instance, written a 
 little later, would enrich any collection : 
 
 Now is the cherry in blossom, Love, 
 
 Love of my heart, with the apple to follow; 
 
 Over the village at nightfall now 
 
 Merrily veers and darts the swallow. 
 
 At nightfall now in the dark marsh grass 
 Awakes the chorus that sings old sorrow; 
 
 The evening star is dim for the dew, 
 
 And the apple and lilac will bloom to-morrow. 
 
 The honeysuckle is red on the rock; 
 
 The willow floats over the brook like a feather; 
 In every shadow some love lies hid, 
 
 And you and I in the world together. 
 
 The last of the "Century" series, "A Maiden Lady," 
 
New England Puritanism 181 
 
 is the transition from her period of poetry and 
 dreams to that of prose. From its opening stanza, 
 
 Of a summer afternoon, 
 In a parlor window there, 
 She would sit, her meek face showing 
 Delicately long and fair, 
 
 Sewing on some dainty garment, no one ever saw her 
 wear, 
 
 to the last, 
 
 When she cried, poor, shy old maiden, 
 Her artless secret saw the sun : 
 She had been with love acquainted, 
 Always, just like anyone: 
 But had kept him in a closet hidden, as a skeleton, 
 
 we have the material and the method of the short 
 stories which were even then beginning to come : their 
 swift characterization, their touch of humor and gen 
 tle pathos, and their telling close. The lyric marks 
 the end of one period and the beginning of another. 
 
 The second period in her life came with the 
 death of her father in 1883. Her last years at 
 Brattleboro had been filled with the bitterest ex 
 periences of bereavement. Her only sister had 
 
182 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 died and then her mother. For a time she kept 
 house for her father ; then he too died, and, virtually 
 alone in the world, she returned to the home of her 
 girlhood and took up her residence with Miss Mary 
 Wales, a friend of her earlier years. "I returned 
 to Randolph, Massachusetts," she says with typical 
 incisiveness, "and made my home with friends. I 
 was forced to work for my mere living, and of 
 course continued writing, which I had already be 
 gun, although when my father, the last of my 
 family, died, I had earned very little. ... I wrote 
 no more vers de societe, no more Cherries in Blos 
 som. I had to earn my living. I also had an 
 aunt to support. . ., . I had written onjly three 
 stories, that is real stories for adults. One was a 
 prize story, fifty dollars, the others were accepted 
 by Harper & Brothers." 
 
 The prize-winning story, "A Shadow Family," 
 was printed in the Boston paper which had conducted 
 the contest; the second story, "Two Old Lovers," 
 was accepted by "Harper s Bazar," then edited by 
 Mary L. Booth, who was the first to discover the 
 new short story writer; and the third, "A Humble 
 Romance," was published in "Harper s Monthly" 
 in June, 1884. From now on she became a writer 
 of short fiction, a literary craftsman, writing to the 
 limit of her strength, not what she would, but what 
 she must if she was to sell her product and win 
 
New England Puritanism 183 
 
 immediate success, which in her case was necessary. 
 "Circumstances," she has said, "seemed to make it 
 imperative for me that I do that one thing and no 
 other. I did not at the time think much about the 
 choice. I think more now." 
 
 She was influenced, perhaps molded, by her times. 
 The eighties, at the opening of which she began to 
 work, stand in American fiction for "local color." 
 In 1884, when her stories began first to appear in 
 the Harper publications, -the literature-of-locality 
 tide, with its dialect and its strangeness of materials, 
 was at its full. During this single year there were 
 published "In the Tennessee Mountains" by Charles 
 Egbert Craddock, "Mingo and Other Sketches" by 
 Joel Chandler Harris, "On the Frontier" by Bret 
 Harte, "Doctor Sevier" by Cable, "Huckleberry 
 Finn" by Mark Twain, "Old Mark Langston" by 
 Richard Malcolm Johnston, "The Story of a Coun 
 try Town" by Edgar W. Howe, "Tompkins and 
 Other Folks" by Philander Deming, "A Country 
 Doctor" by Sarah Orne Jewett, and "The San 
 Rosario Ranch" by Maude Howe. Thomas Nelson 
 Page s story "Marse Chan," written entirely in the 
 negro dialect, was now brought out and published 
 after having been held by the magazine timidly for 
 several years, and immediately it was hailed by the 
 reading public as a modern classic. The period 
 of dialect was at its height; no wonder that Miss 
 
184 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Wilkins s second story in "Harper s Monthly," 
 "An Honest Soul," began, as most assuredly it 
 would not have begun in Hawthorne s day, with the 
 sentence : "Thar s Mis Bliss s pieces in the brown 
 kaliker bag, an thar s Mis Bennett s pieces in the 
 bed-tickin bag." There are fashions in literature 
 as there are fashions in wearing apparel, and one 
 who would live by literature must be aware of them 
 or else write for posterity. The new writer was 
 in no position to become a rebel even if she had 
 desired, .and she therefore began to make localized 
 studies of the life about her, even as Miss Murfree 
 was doing, and Page and Harris and Cable. 
 
 The New England of the eighties seemingly had 
 been exhausted as a background for fiction. Mrs. 
 Stowe had used it freely and Rose Terry Cooke and 
 Sarah Orne Jewett and Howells and others, but 
 there had been little attempt as yet to study it with 
 the new focus, to seek for the strange, the unique 
 in background and character. The times demanded 
 Colonel Starbottles and Yuba Bills, Ramonas and 
 Colonel Sellerses, Posson Joneses and Mingos, and 
 to find them in New England one must seek for them 
 in that terminal moraine of human specimens which 
 the New England glacial period of puritanism 
 had left in its wake: abnormalities of conscience, 
 freedom of will become narrow wilfulness, unswerv 
 ing allegiance to an idea degenerated into balkiness, 
 
New England Puritanism 185 
 
 frugality engendered by a scanty soil warped into 
 a Silas-Berry-like meanness of soul, the sensitive 
 ness born of isolated environment became the very 
 essence of sullen pride and egotism, and added to 
 all this a patriarchal sense of masculine superiority 
 and headship of households, based on a narrow in 
 terpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, which has 
 resulted in a type of womanhood often so individual 
 and so peculiar in its tragic problems as to be classi 
 fiable as unique. 
 
 It was into this field of investigation that Miss 
 Wilkins threw herself with all the intensity of her 
 lyric soul. She chose the short story form of ex 
 pression partly because it was the fashion of the 
 time but chiefly because it promised the most im 
 mediate results. "What directed me to the short 
 story? I think the answer is very simple. The 
 short story did not take so long to write, it was 
 easier, and of course I was not sure of my own 
 ability to write even the short story, much less a 
 novel. I consider the art of the novel as a very 
 different affair from that of the short story. The 
 latter can be a simple little melody, the other can be 
 grand opera." Her New England conscience de 
 manded moral basis for her art, her lyric soul could 
 express itself only with intensity; therefore the seri 
 ousness of her themes, the swift rush of her narra 
 tive without pause for ornament or background, the 
 
186 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 absorption of soul that forgot itself in its eager 
 contemplation of the drama unfolding before her. 
 Her vogue came not from any new information that 
 she gave concerning her material or life in general: 
 it came from her originality of method, her grip 
 ping intensity, her power to move the reader s emo 
 tions. 
 
 In 1887 twenty-eight of her short stories were 
 published in a collection entitled "A Humble Ro 
 mance and Other Stories." Her first real books, 
 "The Cow with the Golden Horns" and "The Ad 
 ventures of Ann," collections of early juvenile stories 
 for "Wide Awake," had been published without 
 her knowledge. The book produced no such sensa 
 tion as did the first collections of Harte and Miss 
 Murfree and Cable and Harris. The New York 
 "Critic," the leading critical journal of its day in 
 America, dismissed it with seven lines, half of them 
 patronizing praise and half protest against the 
 grotesque impossibility of one of her characters. 
 Holmes and Lowell, however, felt the power of the 
 new writer and congratulated her. General recog 
 nition came slowly. The year 1890 may be set as 
 the date of her final triumph. The "Critic" again 
 noticed her, this time with the simple announcement 
 that "There is something like a craze in England over 
 Mary E. Wilkins." Then had come the full tide 
 of her popularity. When a year later, in 1891, 
 
New England Puritanism 187 
 
 "A New England Nun and Other Stories" appeared, 
 most of the American critics echoed the review 
 of the London "Spectator": "The stories are 
 among the most remarkable feats of what we may 
 call literary impressionism in our language, so 
 powerfully do they stamp on the reader s mind the 
 image of the classes and individuals they portray 
 without spending on the picture a single redundant 
 word, a single superfluous word." 
 
 The decade from 1887, the year of "A Humble 
 Romance," to "Madelon: a Novel," 1896, was the 
 golden period of her genius. It was the period of 
 short stories in her first manner : stories bare of all 
 save the absolute essentials, staccato in style, often 
 crude even to incorrectness, yet so vibrant with 
 human life that they hold their reader now with in 
 tense sympathy, now with indignation, now with 
 pleasure, now with something like fear. "Young 
 Lucretia and Other Stories," juvenile tales from 
 "St. Nicholas," came in 1892, and "Jane Field," 
 which by every standard of criticism is a short 
 story, began as a serial in "Harper s Monthly" the 
 same year. Two years later, in 1894, in "Harper s 
 Weekly," came "Pembroke," nominally a novel, but 
 really a series of short story episodes. All the 
 stories in "Silence and Other Stories," 1898, were 
 written during this period, the last of them being 
 "Evelina s Garden," which appeared in "Harper s * 
 
188 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 in June, 1896. It was the decade of her most 
 spontaneous work, the period of her young enthusi 
 asm. 
 
 In the joy and the wonder of her success her 
 youthful dreams of literature came again. "Miss 
 Wilkins informs me that she has always had a 
 desire to write a play," wrote Mr. Charles E, 
 Wingate in one of his Boston letters of the period. 
 She had actually begun upon one and like Haw 
 thorne she turned for her material to old Salem and 
 its great tragedy. In 1890 she had finished "Giles 
 Corey, Yeoman : a Play," and it had been read with 
 high approval at the Deerfield summer school of 
 history and romance. Later on, completely re 
 written, it was given a trial on the Boston stage, 
 and, to be brief, it failed, completely and definitely. 
 Undoubted power and literary beauty it had, but 
 its writer knew nothing of stagecraft, and more 
 over its sponsors handled it with awkwardness, and 
 its failure was total. Poetry, too, still called to 
 her. In 1897 she issued "Once Upon a Time 
 and Other Child Verses," and more and more in 
 frequently she sent lyrics to the leading magazines. 
 One may find as late as 1900 such sonnets as "Cyrano 
 de Bergerac" in "Harper s" and "The Lode Star" 
 in "Scribner s," lyrics that make us wonder what 
 might have been had she been able to dedicate all 
 of her powers to the elder muses. 
 
New England Puritanism 189 
 
 in 
 
 It was in this second period then, the period 
 which ended with "Pembroke" and the exquisite 
 story "Evelina s Garden," that Miss Wilkins made 
 her strongest and most original contribution to 
 American literature. But criticism had been doing 
 its work. Almost every reviewer since her first 
 book had closed his review by pointing out her 
 bareness and repression of style, her short, almost 
 gasping sentence structure and, in the case of Tern- 
 broke," which had run serially as a novel, had noted 
 its looseness of structure. They declared it to be 
 like "Jane Field/ of short story texture rather than 
 a novel, and they bade her back to her earlier field, 
 often with the observation that the short story by 
 its very nature unfits one who has long used it for 
 any other form of fiction. 
 
 That Miss Wilkins was aware of this criticism 
 cannot be doubted. In the only bit of literary 
 criticism that I can find from her pen, a critique of 
 Emily Bronte written in 1903, she has expressed the 
 opinion that had the author of "Wuthering Heights" 
 "lived longer she might have become equally ac 
 quainted with the truth and power of grace; she 
 might have widened her audience; she might have 
 
190 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 attracted instead of repelled, but she could not have 
 written a greater book, so far as the abstract qual 
 ity of greatness goes." Were Emily Bronte alive 
 to-day she might reply to her critic: "Your own 
 experience would seem to show that this is true. 
 You lived longer than I, you sought to become ac 
 quainted with the truth and power of grace, you 
 strove to attract and please, you widened your au 
 dience, but unquestionably you wrote nothing so 
 great as your first work, so far as the abstract 
 quality of greatness goes." The retort would sum 
 up the quality of her final period, her period of 
 novels, beginning with "Madelon," of experiments 
 ki style and technique, of conscious art. 
 
 One s first impression as one approaches the work 
 of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is a feeling of sur 
 prise at its bulk. Her industry has been remark 
 able. "Edgewater People," 1918, was her thirty- 
 eighth book. Beginning with "Madelon," 1896, 
 she wrote nine major novels in twelve years, the 
 most of them for serial publication in magazines, 
 and during the same time she issued nine collections 
 of short stories. The total of her short stories in 
 all her collections is 173, and in addition she has 
 written about sixty-five more which have never 
 been republished from the magazines. Seventy- 
 one of her short stories appeared in "Harper s 
 Magazine" alone. Moreover, in addition to the 
 
New England Puritanism 191 
 
 nine novels mentioned above, she has written either 
 wholly or in part six other stories which are gener 
 ally rated as novels. When her physical frailness is 
 considered and the ill health that she has struggled 
 with her life long, the quantity of her literary out 
 put is not the least of her claims upon our wonder. 
 One is next impressed by the variety in her work, 
 especially in the output after "Pembroke." It 
 seems like the work of an experimenter, of one who 
 is careful to adapt her products to the standards of 
 the various markets that may care to buy them. 
 In 1895 came a detective novel founded on the 
 Borden murder case in Massachusetts, "The Long 
 Arm," which, revised by Mr. Chamberlain of the 
 "Youth s Companion," won the first prize of $2000 
 from three thousand competitors. The next year 
 came "Madelon," an intense love story with a 
 heroine not of New England ancestry, a maiden 
 partly French and partly Indian, who in her savage, 
 unreasoning cleaving to her lover reminds us of 
 the lovers in Emily Bronte s romance. Quickly 
 following it came "Jerome, a Poor Young Man," 
 the longest and most elaborate of her fiction, a 
 novel of purpose for "Harper s Weekly," a sermon 
 for the times. Abandoning her early method of 
 standing detached from her material, she became 
 a propagandist, a sentimentalist with a theory, a 
 pleader for the under dog in the industrial battle. 
 
192 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 With her next novel, "The Jamesons," contributed 
 as a serial to "The Ladies Home Journal," she 
 tried still another experiment. We may call 
 it a "period story," a serio-comic satire upon 
 the fads and foibles of its time. From its 
 very nature it is ephemeral work, as ephemeral 
 as a fashion-plate. Mrs. Jameson, a city woman 
 who sets out to reform a little country town and 
 to give it city ideals, is a caricature. No sane 
 woman in America, no matter what has been her 
 training, will be so ignorant of country life as to 
 feed her pigs on alternate days so the bacon may 
 have alternate streaks of fat and lean, or will 
 insist on setting hens on hard-boiled eggs so that the 
 nests may be thoroughly antiseptic. It is not even 
 good comedy. This was in 1899. The next year, 
 the year of "To Have and to Hold," "When Knight 
 hood was in Flower," and "Alice of Old Vincennes," 
 she, too, wrote a historical romance, "The Heart s 
 Highway, a Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth 
 Century," vibrant with passion, in flowing, gorgeous 
 sentences that, compared with those of her earlier 
 work, are as hot-house roses compared with the 
 wild violets of a New Hampshire springtime. A 
 passage like this certainly has little in it to remind 
 one of the stories in her first collections : 
 
 As we followed on that moonlight night, she and I 
 alone, of a sudden I felt my youth and love arise to 
 
New England Puritanism 193 
 
 such an assailing of the joy of life, that I knew myself 
 dragged as it were by it, and had no more choosing as 
 to what I should not do. Verily it would be easier to 
 lead an army of malcontents than one s own self. 
 And something there was about the moon-light on that 
 fair Virginian night, and the heaviness of the honey- 
 scents, and the pressure of life and love on every side, 
 in bush and vine and tree and nest, which seemed to 
 overbear me and sweep me along on the crest of some 
 green tide of spring. Verily there are forces of this 
 world which are beyond the overcoming of mortal 
 man so long as he is encumbered by his mortality. 
 
 IV 
 
 After her marriage in 1902 to Dr. Charles M. 
 Freeman, whom she had first met in the home of 
 Dr. Alden, and her removal to Metuchen, New 
 Jersey, where she has since made her home, she de 
 voted herself for several years to short story work, 
 but in 1905 she published in "Harper s Bazar" a 
 long novel, "The Debtor," then the next year in 
 "Harper s Weekly" "By the Light of the Soul," 
 and since that time she has issued "Doc Gordon," 
 1906, "The Shoulders of Atlas," 1908, "Butterfly 
 House," a serial in "The Woman s Home Com 
 panion," and finally, in collaboration with Mrs. 
 Florence Morse Kingsley, "The Alabaster Box" 
 surely a miscellaneous collection. One need not 
 
194 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 linger long with these books. Almost without ex 
 ception they lack constructive art : the plot in many 
 of them is improbable, it does not steadily and in 
 evitably grow to a culmination, the ending often is 
 weak. Their power, and all of them have unques 
 tioned elements of strength, lies in parts instead of 
 wholes, in passages and episodes, in vivid character 
 ization, in pictures, however, of completed character 
 rather than in tracings of gradual character develop 
 ment ; in short story technique, in short, rather than 
 in novelistic art. In many of the novels there is 
 a distinct gain in sentence length and fluidity of 
 style, yet one feels every such gain has been at the 
 expense of spontaneity and convincingness. 
 
 Much better may one linger over the ninety-five 
 and more short stories which she wrote during the 
 period. Like her novels they show a surprising 
 variety of types of fiction and like them a sur 
 prising unevenness. That they are not all of them 
 on the level of her earlier work is not to be wondered 
 at; no literary crop so quickly exhausts the soil as 
 the short story. A single collection of studies of 
 localized environment is all that most writers can 
 make with profit, as witness Harte and Cable, Miss 
 Murfree and Page. Mrs. Freeman in her short 
 story work has clung to her New England themes 
 and characters as tenaciously as Harte clung to 
 California and with something of the same result. 
 
New England Puritanism 195 
 
 Some of these later stories have about them, like so 
 many of her novels, the odor of the market-place. 
 They were made to order. In "People of Our 
 Neighborhood, * for instance, published in a domestic 
 journal, she seems deliberately to have exploited 
 her powers of characterization. Often, moreover, 
 there is evidence of haste, of jaded enthusiasm, of 
 diminishing returns from an over-cultivated area. 
 And yet, despite all this, one may say with confidence 
 that the general average of her later short story 
 work is higher than that of the later short story 
 average of any American contemporary, and that 
 here and there in her later collections one may find 
 a story that comes fully up to the highest achieve 
 ments of her time. 
 
 In many of her later short stories she tried, as in 
 her novels, to enrich her style, to rid herself of the 
 mannerisms of the eighties, and, in some of her 
 collections, to change the key of her work, and to 
 attempt themes more in accord with her earlier 
 ambitions. "The most of my work," she has said, 
 and there is a touch of the pathetic in her words, 
 "is not really the kind that I myself like. I want 
 more symbolism, more mysticism. I left that out 
 because it struck me people did not want it, and 
 I was forced to consider selling qualities." A faint 
 trace of symbolism, Hawthorne-like in its sugges- 
 tiveness, pervades all her best work. One sees 
 
196 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 it in the gradual stoop that came to the stubborn 
 Barney Thayer and that was overcome when once 
 he threw off his burden of pride, and one sees it in 
 a story published as late as 1917, "The Cloak Also," 
 in which the condition of the neighboring river is 
 constantly mentioned in connection with the leading 
 character, Joel Rich, the defrauded storekeeper, who 
 suddenly, like the river after the hot spring day, 
 broke the bonds that so long had held him and 
 swept over his customers with a torrent of truth 
 about themselves. The story ends thus: "There 
 was a breaking-up of human meanness and dis 
 honesty greater than the breaking-up of the ice in 
 the great river/ One might illustrate, too, with, 
 Amarina, in the story "Amarina s Roses," the "last 
 of the Deering women" who was herself a rose, "an 
 instance of endurance instead of degeneration. She 
 was as perfect as one of the roses in her garden, 
 which had come of the reproduction of many genera 
 tions of bloom." This is the theme of her volume 
 "Understudies," poetic exercises in symbolism, 
 flowers and animals so treated as to suggest women 
 and men, and also of her collection "Six Trees," 
 stories of people who are not only analogous to 
 certain trees, but in some subtle way are bound to 
 them in their lives and destinies. Her treatment 
 of the mystic world is also Hawthorne-like in its 
 subtle art. No literary theme is so disastrous to 
 
New England Puritanism 197 
 
 the unskilful; none requires of its user more con 
 summate skill. As a teller of ghost stories few 
 have surpassed her. She has no tales of vulgar 
 horror; the usual machinery of such stories she 
 throws away; the boundaries between the seen and 
 the unseen she does not set. Of her ghosts one 
 may hardly say whether they are of the earth or 
 not : they are maidens who have merely faded 
 away from their ghostlike lives. There is a gentle 
 mystery in her very titles : "The Southwest 
 Chamber," "Shadows on the Wall," "Luella Miller," 
 "The Vacant Lot," "The Wind in the Rosebush." 
 Not all her stories deal with the New England 
 environment. Some of them are parables like many 
 of Hawthorne s. "A Slip of the Leash," for in 
 stance, which may be compared with the elder 
 romancer s "Wakefield," makes us wonder what 
 might have been had she earlier confined herself 
 to such themes. The story is universal. The head 
 of a prosperous family in the far West becomes 
 more and more oppressed by the chains of conven 
 tion that have bound him hand and foot to one 
 spot and one round of life. The eternal monotony 
 of civilization lays more and more hold upon his 
 soul, until one day in the restlessness of the early 
 springtime, "rasped beyond endurance," he drops 
 everything by an impulse and disappears into the 
 perfect freedom of the forest. Month after month 
 
198 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 he lingers upon the outskirts of the settlement, watch 
 ing the slow adjustment of his family to their new 
 life without him. Year after year goes by. The 
 subtle changes in the woman who was his wife as* 
 the sense of widowhood comes upon her and then 
 gradually fades into a new sense of freedom, and 
 the consequent changes in the characters of his 
 children, all are noted by the man as he stands un 
 seen and silently protects them. Then finally, by an 
 other impulse, he returns like Wakefield, takes up 
 the thread of his life where he had dropped it so 
 long before, and all moves again in the old channel, 
 but in the meantime the souls of the man and the 
 woman have been laid open to our gaze, and with 
 a start we find ourselves asking the ancient ques 
 tion, "Lord, is it I?" She has done nothing 
 stronger. It is enough in itself to warrant our 
 statement that in her last period, the period that 
 has been so consistently assailed by her critics, her 
 powers as a writer of short stories did not wholly 
 decline. As late as 1909 the New York "Nation," 
 reviewing her book, "The Winning Lady and Other 
 Stories," could call it the best of all her collections. 
 
 VI 
 
 It is, however, the short stories of her earliest 
 collections, "A Humble Romance" and "A New 
 
New England Puritanism 199 
 
 England Nun," with "Pembroke" which followed, 
 that will give her her final place among American 
 writers. In these we have her first spontaneous 
 work; work that is hers alone, and that has fur 
 nished a short story type which no one may imitate 
 without detection any more than one may imitate 
 the work of Irving or of Poe. This element of 
 originality is the first that must be considered by 
 the critic. We of a later day, to whom the manner 
 has become familiar, do not realize how startlingly 
 novel these tales appeared to their first readers. In 
 1887, the year of A Humble Romance/ Kipling 
 was unknown in America: the first mention of his 
 name in the "Critic" was in March, 1890. It was 
 in 1893, ten years after Miss Wilkins s removal, 
 that he also took up his residence in Brattleboro and 
 that his loud trumpet began to dominate the fiction 
 of the decade. The first surprise at the work of 
 Miss Wilkins came from her method, her peculiar 
 perspective, her style, her startling originality. 
 She appeared suddenly, almost without forebears; 
 seemingly she had been influenced by no one. "Con 
 cerning any influence of other writers," she has 
 written of herself, "it may seem egotistical, but 
 there was none. I did, however strange it may 
 seem, stand entirely alone. As a matter of fact, I 
 would read nothing which I thought might influence 
 me. I had not read the French short stories ; I had 
 
200 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 not read Miss Jewett s stories. I will add that, 
 although I have repeatedly heard that I was founded 
 on Jane Austen, I have never read any of her 
 books." 
 
 This independence accounts for many crudities in 
 her earlier work, and it accounts also for most of 
 those elements in her short stories that have given 
 her the place that is hers. She was herself and no 
 one else. Her short sentence structure is a part 
 of her personal equation; it is her literary length of 
 stride. When she attempts more elaborate struc 
 ture she becomes self-conscious and unconvincing. 
 All her efforts in her novels to gain a more flowing 
 style have been unable to give her the long sentence 
 habit. As late as 1913 she could begin a story 
 with a paragraph like this : 
 
 Jim Bennett had never married. He had passed 
 middle life and possessed considerable property. 
 Susan Adkins kept house for him. She was a widow 
 and a very distant relative. Jim had two nieces, his 
 brother s daughters. One, Alma Beecher, was mar 
 ried; the other, Amanda, was not. The nieces had 
 naively grasping views concerning their uncle and his 
 property. 
 
 It is as bare and as disjointed as a scenario. The 
 writer has concentrated upon four persons and a 
 situation, and she presents her material intensely 
 with no more thought of ornamentation than had 
 
New England Puritanism 201 
 
 her Puritan ancestors when they poured out their 
 burning convictions of sin and salvation. Every 
 where repression. The dialogue moves swiftly 
 without explanation; every coloring adjective is 
 primly removed. 
 
 The center of her art, the beginning and the end 
 of it, is humanity, the individual soul. She 
 plunges at once in medias res, usually with the name 
 of her leading character. Her backgrounds are 
 incidental. There is as little description in her best 
 stories as there is in an old ballad. Swiftly she in 
 troduces her two or three or four characters: they 
 reveal themselves by means of dialogue, they become 
 often fearfully alive, they grip at the heart or the 
 throat, and then suddenly with a throb the story is 
 done, like a ballad. Unlike Bret Harte or Miss 
 Murfree or Hardy, with whom the physical land 
 scape is often one of the characters in the tale, she 
 so strips her narratives of background that they 
 become universal in their atmosphere and setting. 
 The grim story "Louisa" might be a translation 
 from the Russian; "A Village Lear" might be 
 passed as a story of Egdon Heath. The most of 
 her stories are localized only by the fact that her 
 characters are such as are found solely within the 
 confines of the old New England puritanism. Her 
 chief use of landscape, as has been suggested, is 
 Hawthornesque the use of it symbolically, poetic- 
 
202 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 ally, as an interpreting or contrasting touch in her 
 human tragedy or comedy. Thus the closing sen 
 tences in "A Village Lear" : the old man, dying, 
 sees in imagination his cruel daughters transfigured, 
 coming to him over the meadow with love in their 
 faces, "jest as they did when they was young" : 
 
 "Jest see em, Sary." The old man laughed. Out 
 of his ghastly, death-stricken features shone the 
 expression of a happy child. "Jest look at em, Sary," 
 he repeated. 
 
 Sarah looked, and she saw only the meadow covered 
 with a short waving crop of goldenrod, and over it 
 the September sky. 
 
 This intensity, repressed with New England sever 
 ity, is the only style that could fitly treat the material 
 that her conscience and her stern sense of truth 
 furnished her the only material that she knew. 
 Hier characters are like plants that have sprung up 
 from a sterile soil. As subjects for fiction in the 
 older interpretation of fiction they seem impossible : 
 tillers of rocky hillsides, their natures warped by 
 their poverty-stricken environment ; old maids, prim 
 and angular, who have erected a secret shrine in 
 their hearts in commemoration of a moment in the 
 long ago to which a more sophisticated maiden 
 would never have given a second thought; work 
 house inmates, forlorn children, work-worn wives 
 of driving men, stern, practical-minded women 
 
New England Puritanism 203 
 
 whom generations of repression have rendered sex 
 less the descendants of come-outers, noncomform- 
 ists, dissenters, sons and daughters of the men who 
 survived the earlier regime with its blue-laws, its 
 interminable dialectic, its grim bareness, and, added 
 to all this, generations of solitude on hillside farms 
 tilled in the face of nature s protest. The result 
 was survivals, not of the fittest, but of the worst 
 elements abnormalities, reliance upon inherited 
 dogma, stubbornness of head and meanness often. 
 Moreover, the accumulated habits of generations 
 of wrestlers with moral problems had begotten an 
 uneasiness of soul whenever there was a stepping 
 out of the ruts plowed by the fathers the New 
 England conscience. In the stories of Miss Wilkins 
 even the children are victims: little Anna Eliza 
 finally confesses to her grandmother that she lost her 
 patchwork on purpose ; little Patience, after a heroic 
 struggle with herself, braves the terrors of the old 
 Squire s presence and gives him back the sixpence 
 prize he had awarded the best scholar in the school 
 because at the critical moment some one had whis 
 pered to her the answer to his question. In these 
 tales we see not the New England of Mrs. Stowe, 
 the New England of the high tide period, nor that 
 of Miss Jewett, the New England of the transition : 
 it is the picture of the swift decline and the final 
 wreckage, the distorted fragments of what once had 
 
204 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 been glorious. It is the fifth act of the Puritan 
 drama. A half-century before, the minister would 
 have been the central figure of a New England vil 
 lage picture; in "A New England Nun" there are 
 only four ministers mentioned, all of them minor 
 figures, spineless and effeminate. 
 
 How did this young girl of twenty-five know of 
 all this human tragedy, of all these grim and desolate 
 lives, of all these curious abnormalities of soul? 
 There are pages in her work as remorselessly grip 
 ping as anything in modern realism. One might 
 gather them into a New England "Spoon River 
 Anthology" pictures of senility almost terrifying, 
 as in "Louisa"; of the parish workhouse as depres 
 sing as Zola, in "Sister Liddy"; of human cruelty 
 as harrowing as Balzac s "Pere Goriot," in "A Vil 
 lage Lear." One may reply in the words of her 
 own critique of Emily Bronte: "Hedged about by 
 great spaces of loneliness and insuperable barriers 
 of religion, in an isolated parsonage with more of 
 the dead than the living for neighbors, . . . how 
 she ever came to comprehend the primitive brutal 
 ities and passions, and the great truth of life that 
 sanctifies them, is a mystery. The knowledge could 
 not have come from any actual experience. The 
 book is not the result of any personal stress. She 
 had given to her a light for the hidden darkness 
 of human nature, irrespective of her own emotions. 
 
New England Puritanism 205 
 
 A lamp was set to her* feet in the beginning. If 
 a girl of twenty-eight could write a novel like 
 Wuthering Heights/ no other conclusion is pos 
 sible." 
 
 This impression is strengthened by another, an al 
 most Shaksperian, element in her* work : she stands 
 external to her material and seemingly she is- irre 
 sponsible for it. She makes no comment ; her char 
 acters seemingly are alone responsible for the story 
 (they develop themselves. It is the art of the 
 old ballad which was anonymous; the subjective is 
 absent. To quote again from her critiqufe: " All 
 that Emily Bronte is intent upon is the truth, the 
 exactness of the equations of her characters, not the 
 impression which they, make upon her readers or 
 herself. She handles brutality and coarseness as 
 another woman would handle a painted fan. It is 
 enough for her that the thing is so. It is not 
 her business if it comes down like a sledge-hammer 
 upon the nerves of her audience, or even if it casts 
 reflections derogatory to herself." 
 
 Only in parts and passages is her work of "Spoon 
 River Anthology" texture. In soul she is a ro 
 manticist and a poet. Even in her most depressing 
 material there is little of realism in the Zola sense 
 of the term. Her New England critics declare that 
 her vision, so far as at least New England char 
 acter is concerned, is astigmatic; that she has given 
 
206 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 caricatures rather than realistic studies from the life. 
 They are wrong and they are right. In reality, 
 her characters are of the Dickens type, not photo 
 graphs but paintings, idealizations of the truth, in 
 dividuals intensely alive, yet drawn not from the 
 life, but from the heightened images projected by 
 their creator s imagination. They are therefore, 
 in reality, like the characters of Dickens, mytholog 
 ical creations. Their author, a nunlike soul who 
 has lived her whole life like an Emily Bronte in 
 the seclusion of a little village, frail of body and 
 delicate of health, over-imaginative, poetic, intense, 
 creates in the quiet of her study her own world. 
 Her materials are indeed scanty. She has, like 
 the Bronte sisters, known little of the actual lives 
 of men save as feminine talk of a small town has 
 brought them to her. Her own heart, however, 
 she has known, and her own dreamings and hopes 
 and idealizings. With these phe did her work. 
 How far unconsciously she has written autobiog 
 raphy we may never know, and yet we know this, 
 that the writer of fiction which is at all worth our 
 study can have no secrets, and that inevitably he 
 spins his web from his own heart. One need say 
 no more. Her characters mostly are unmarried 
 women. Of the central figures in the twenty- four 
 stories of "A New England Nun" nineteen are un 
 married females and all but five of them are past 
 
New England Puritanism 207 
 
 middle age. Or, to go still wider, there are in the 
 book, leaving out merely incidental personages, 
 sixty-seven characters, all but sixteen of whom are 
 women, just half of them unmarried. 
 
 With such material there are infinite possibilities 
 for depressed realism, and yet seldom are we sent 
 away depressed. Almost all her stories, and 
 some of them against the very protest of nature, 
 end happily. The lover returns ; the hapless maiden, 
 pathetically patient through years of waiting, is 
 married at last; justice is done and all is well. 
 Even "Louisa" turns out happily. The Puritan 
 conscience seems to consider it a duty to justify 
 the ways of God to man. Unconsciously it is im 
 pressed with the idea that it is compelled to be a de 
 fender of God and to make life s plots come out 
 in strict equity, with no injustice done. It is not 
 too much to declare that no descendant of the New 
 England Puritans can be an absolute realist. 
 
 Her favorite theme is revolt. Her tale opens with 
 a study of repression. The central figure is bound 
 by inherited forces which hold him as with steel. 
 Sometimes the force is external, as in the case of 
 Mrs. Penn in "The Revolt of Mother/ " but more 
 often is it internal. On the surface of the life there 
 is apparent serenity and reserve, but beneath there 
 is an increasing fire. Then suddenly the barriers 
 break and the strength of the recoil is in proportion 
 
208 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 to the strength of the repression. Jane Field, once 
 the barrier of her deception is down, spends the 
 rest of her life in an insane iteration of her story 
 of weakness; Selma Woodsum in the fierce im 
 petuosity of her repentence can scarce be restrained 
 from publishing in all the papers the story of her 
 violation of her conscience. It is the central topic 
 of "Jane Field"; it furnished the most gripping 
 episode in "Pembroke" the midnight coasting of 
 Ephraim; it is the theme of four stories in "A 
 New England Nun" : "A Village Singer," "Sister 
 Liddy," "Amanda and Love," "The Revolt of 
 Mother " ; and it is central in many later stories 
 like "Evelina s Garden," "The Givers," "A Slip 
 of the Leash," "The Cloak Also," and "The Liar." 
 She does not present her material merely to enter 
 tain. In all her stories there is far more than 
 the story. "The Revolt of Mother/ " for instance, 
 might furnish a thesis on the homes of farmers, 
 and yet no one may call it a purpose story. There 
 are times when the preacher that is within every 
 descendant of New Englanders gets the better of 
 the artist, but it is not often. In "The Amethyst 
 Comb," for example, she can launch out like this : 
 
 When a man or a woman holds fast to youth, even 
 if successfully, there is something of the pitiful and 
 the tragic involved. It is the everlasting struggle of 
 the soul to retain the joy of earth, whose fleeting 
 
New England Puritanism 209 
 
 distinguishes it from heaven, and whose retention is 
 not accomplished without an inner knowledge of its 
 futility. 
 
 But more often these deeper truths of the 
 story are gold that is far from the surface. 
 Never does she present unlovely pictures simply to 
 display them. Kipling s robust cynicism is in a 
 world apart from hers. She thinks well of life; she 
 hates oppression with her whole New England soul, 
 and she sends her reader away always more kindly 
 of heart, more tolerant, more neighborly in the 
 deeper sense of the word. 
 
 Her kinship is with Hawthorne rather than with 
 the realists. Both worked in the darker materials 
 of New England Puritanism; both were romancers 
 and poets, both were seekers after truth, and both 
 were able to throw over their work a subtle atmos 
 phere that was all their own. Hawthorne, writing 
 as he did in the mid-nineteenth century, in the mild 
 noon of later German romance, suffused his work 
 with the rich glow that the later writer, bound by 
 her more prosaic times, was unable to find ; she, 
 however, equal to him in her command of pathos 
 and of emotional intensity, was able to surpass him 
 in her command of gripping situation and her 
 powers of compelling characterization. Of the 
 generation born since the war she alone may be 
 compared with this earliest depicter of the New 
 England soul. 
 
THE SHADOW OF LONGFELLOW 
 
 IN the third number of his "Hymns to the Night," 
 Novalis records that once while he was weeping on 
 the grave that had swallowed up his very life, 
 "alone as no other mortal ever had been alone," 
 suddenly there had come upon him a kind of shud- 
 dery twilight, a new atmosphere, that swept from 
 him forever all desire for day. He stood in a 
 new world, the transfigured world of night. Then 
 through the mist there had appeared to him the 
 glorified figure of his beloved who henceforth was 
 to be an abiding presence, and from that moment 
 he had had "an eternal, unchanging faith in the 
 heaven of Night." 
 
 It is well known that the death of his betrothed, 
 followed a few weeks later by the death of his 
 favorite brother, made of Novalis a dreamer and 
 a mystic. It swept away from him the boundaries 
 between the worlds of matter and of spirit until he 
 was no longer sure that there were boundaries at 
 all. Henceforth for him the only reality was the 
 unreal. There were to be for him no more sharp 
 outlines; life was to move in a delicious mist, amid 
 the half -seen and the dreamy, in a "holy, inex- 
 
 210 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 211 
 
 pressible, mysterious Night. " Twilight with its 
 grotesqueries and shadows, allowing the imagina 
 tion free rein, moonlight soft and ethereal, delicious 
 sadness, longing for something vaguely felt yet 
 inexpressible, crumbling ruins, dim cathedrals, the 
 dream-world of medievalism all things where the 
 senses and the reason lose perspective and must be 
 supplemented by the fancy these became for him 
 the real. Day with its commonplaces was the un 
 reality. In a word, he became a romanticist and 
 a leader in that strange choir which sang the de 
 cadence of the German Sturm und Drang. 
 
 Almost identical was the experience of our own 
 Longfellow. The shock, the ,utter bereavement, 
 the unutterable loneliness, the brooding, the vision, 
 the ministry of night, the mysticism the parallel 
 is startling. He ran, it is true, into no fantasti- 
 cisms, he exploited no revolution, he curbed no con 
 suming genius, yet, for all that, he was the true child 
 of Novalis mystic, dreamer, poet of the Night. 
 While all about him were the din and the shoutings 
 of a lusty young nation carving with might a new 
 commonwealth from raw r nature, he steadfastly 
 held true to his vision, for, says Novalis, "he who 
 has once stood on earth s borderland and perceived 
 that new county the dwelling of Night returns 
 no more to the tumult of life, to the land where 
 light reigns amid ceaseless unrest." 
 
212 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 The year 1836 marks the opening of the second 
 period in the life of Longfellow. All that he pro 
 duced before it when compared with the product 
 of his later pen is as different as if written by an 
 other. An earnest, somewhat sentimental youth, 
 never a boy among boys, horizoned only by his 
 father s library, he had grown up like Hawthorne 
 in a world created by his imagination from frag 
 ments of his reading. 
 
 College widened his opportunities for knowing 
 books; it did little more. The ancient classics 
 Homer, Herodotus, Vergil,, Horace impersonal 
 creations that seem as if a part of nature herself, 
 not the deliberate work of man; the English bards 
 Milton, Pope, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith great 
 shadowy names, almost abstractions; and then, all 
 of a sudden, a book with the ink scarce dry, the 
 last numbers not yet written perhaps "The Sketch- 
 Book," marvelously modern, marvelously beautiful, 
 the work of one who was an American and a con 
 temporary : it set his pulse to running. He records 
 that he "read each succeeding number with ever- 
 increasing wonder and delight, spellbound by its 
 pleasant humor, its melancholy tenderness, its at 
 mosphere of reverie nay even by its gray-brown 
 covers, the shaded letters of its titles, and the fair 
 clear type, which seemed an outward symbol of 
 its style." Following hard upon it had come that 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 213 
 
 chaste little book of poems by Bryant, then "The 
 Spy" by Cooper, that first "seller" among American 
 novels. 
 
 Authorship at last had become a concrete thing in 
 the young student s mind. He, too, would make 
 books. And it was now that he began to dream 
 of a wider horizon ; to turn with longing toward that 
 vague land over which Irving had thrown his haze 
 of romance. "If I were in England now," writes 
 the college junior, "(and I have been wishing my 
 self there all the day long so warmly that if my 
 wishes could but turn to realities I should have been 
 there), I should become a bacchanalian for a while. 
 I do not believe that any person can read the fifth 
 number of the Sketch-Book without feeling at least, 
 if not expressing, a wish similar to my own/ 
 But Europe and literature were utterly out of the 
 question. The father was in only moderate circum 
 stances, and he had, moreover, a supply of hard- 
 headed Yankee wisdom. "A literary life," he wrote 
 the ambitious senior, "to one who has the means of 
 support, must be very pleasant, but there is not 
 enough wealth in this country to afford encourage 
 ment and patronage to merely literary men. * It 
 was time for the boy to settle down to the studying 
 of his profession. A time there was of heart-burn 
 ing and mild rebellion, but there was no help for it. 
 The young graduate settled down to the study of 
 
214 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the law with no prospects save those that concerned 
 the humdrum of his deeds and conveyances and 
 routine of the law office. 
 
 Then like a flash out of clear sky came the miracle. 
 Where else can you find a little, struggling coun 
 try college sending a boy of nineteen to Europe to 
 fit him for a chair in an utterly new subject, one 
 that even Harvard has only just recognized? But 
 no such thoughts engaged the youth. Away he 
 sailed into the land of his dreams, into the region 
 that The Sketch-Book" had made for him "a kind 
 of Holy Land lying far off beyond the blue horizon 
 of the ocean." 
 
 For three yeajrs he wandered over enchanted 
 ground France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England 
 a Wunderreise, a kind of glorified day-dream 
 come true. He came back an enthusiast, an inter 
 preter, a missionary. There had been no single 
 overmastering impression, but a broadening, a re 
 vealing, an educating in the broadest sense. His 
 travel had come at the precise moment in his life 
 when it could be most effective. It had taken from 
 him the Puritan narrowness and intolerance that 
 had been his birthright, and it had given him hori 
 zon, perspective, and degrees of comparison. 
 
 For the next six years he moved amid an atmos 
 phere of perpetual wonder and mild excitement. 
 To talk with him, to listen to his glowing lectures, 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 215 
 
 even to sit in his class-room, was to get a veritable 
 whiff from that Old World which to the little pro 
 vincial village was so far off and wonderful. He 
 began his work at Bowdoin as one opens a mission 
 in a heathen land. He threw himself into the work 
 with all the enthusiasm of youth. There were 
 jio adequate text-books grammars, readers for 
 learners of French, Spanish, Italian. He would 
 make them himself. He gave voluntary courses of 
 lectures; he taught with unction and conviction. 
 Bowdoin was too small for his mission work; he 
 would broaden his field. He wrote studies and 
 introductions and appreciations of the Romance lan 
 guages and sent them abroad to his countrymen in 
 the best review that America then possessed. 
 
 But the vision that had come to him in boy 
 hood over those gray-brown numbers of "The 
 Sketch-Book" was not forgotten amid all this 
 mission work. He, too, would be an Irving; he, 
 too, would issue books in numbers with shaded 
 letter titles and fair, clear print. Even while he had 
 been in Gottingen he had outlined his literary plans 
 a series of sketches after the "Sketch-Book" 
 pattern. Poetry, after his first few echoes of 
 Bryant, he had laid aside; his vocation was to be 
 prose. "I am writing a book," he confides to 
 Greene, during his fourth year at Bowdoin, "a 
 kind of Sketch-Book of France, Spain, Germany, 
 
216 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 and Italy." The book was Outre Mer," half 
 Spain, a little of Italy, and the rest France. It 
 was, indeed, a kind of "Sketch-Book"; it even ap 
 peared in numbers with "gray-brown covers," 
 "shaded letter titles, and fair, clear type." Irving 
 speaks from every chapter; a shadowy, emaciated 
 Irving to be sure, stripped of much of his "pleasant 
 humor," his "melancholy tenderness," his "atmos 
 phere of reverie"; yet unmistakably Irving. It was 
 a young man s book full of high spirits, didactic, 
 "flowery," at times even inflated; every book is a 
 "tome," every clock a "horologue." In the history 
 of American literature it has little significance; it 
 was simply one of the swarm of books that fluttered 
 for a time about "The Sketch-Book." It is worth 
 noting, perhaps, that the same year that witnessed 
 its publication in book form produced also Cooper s 
 "Sketches in Switzerland," Willis s "Pencillings by 
 the Way," and Tuckerman s "Italian Sketch-Book." 
 This, then, was the Longfellow who, in April, 
 1835, in his twenty-ninth year, started joyously with 
 his young wife for his second Lehrjahre. The 
 world was good; he had been called to Harvard, 
 to the most influential chair of modern languages 
 in America; his mission field had been increased 
 a thousandfold. The world was good. It was 
 quite another Longfellow who, late the next year, 
 came back alone and took up a solitary residence 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 217 
 
 among strangers at Cambridge). On November 
 29 his wife had died at Rotterdam. 
 
 We know very little of this crisis in the poet s 
 life. With a brother s delicacy his biographer 
 passes over it with five lines. What it meant in a 
 foreign land, then immeasurably more foreign than 
 to-day, among utter strangers, in strange surround 
 ings, alone, we can imagine. Four days after her 
 death, with her last words in his ears, "O Henry, 
 do not forget me. I will be with you and watch 
 over you," he was again on his wanderings. "All 
 that I have left me," he cried, "is the memory of 
 her goodness, her gentleness, her affection for me." 
 Hardly caring what he did, he pushed on to Heidel 
 berg as he had planned, and tried to drown his 
 memory in work. 
 
 Then came the second blow even as it had come 
 to Novalis the death of his brother-in-law, his 
 dearest friend. It is from this point that we trace 
 the beginning of the later Longfellow. He was 
 alone. "Oh, George," he writes to his friend 
 Greene, "what have I not suffered during the last 
 three months, and I have no friend to cheer and 
 console me." His solitude, his brooding, his natural 
 sentimentality drove him in upon his own soul; 
 the image of his lost one was ever before him. 
 "Hardly a day passes," he wrote a year later, "that 
 some face, or familiar object, or some passage in 
 
218 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the book I am reading, does not call up the image 
 of my beloved wife so vividly that I pause and burst 
 into tears and sometimes cannot rally again for 
 hours." 
 
 Everything was turning him to romanticism : his 
 naturally subjective, sentimental temperament; his 
 mystic tendencies, heritage of all descendants of 
 Puritans; his wrought and receptive condition; his 
 utter loneliness; the old medieval town with its 
 castle ruin; the romantic nooks and groves and 
 legends ; the opening springtime with all its German 
 softness and beauty; and, above all, the atmosphere 
 of romantic poetry that was shimmering all about 
 him. No wonder that the world lost its sharp 
 outlines ; that the unseen drew nearer, that the misty 
 past became the reality; that dreams and longings 
 dominated at length his soul. 
 
 The life of the poet by his brother, that book of 
 strange omissions, is almost silent here. We see 
 little of the processes which, during those months 
 at Heidelberg, made of Longfellow the poet that 
 we know. The biographer s comment implies a 
 copious journal, or, at least, a wealth of self -reveal 
 ing letters, but we are allowed to see nothing, though 
 otherwise it is impossible fully to know the poet. 
 
 We do know, however, that during the winter and 
 spring he read almost incessantly, and that his favor 
 ite authors were from that earlier school which even 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 219 
 
 then was still dominating German literature. In 
 Bonn, we know, he had met personally the venerable 
 A. W. Schlegel, and had conversed with him. We 
 know that he read fully the prose of Goethe, Tieck, 
 Hoffman, and Jean Paul. "Many hours were spent 
 in solitary rambles in the neighboring woods . . . 
 in sketching among the castle ruins, or enjoying the 
 magnificent views from its terraces." Under the 
 garden trees he read Herder. Sitting on the benches 
 of the road that climbs to the Wolfsbrunen, Rich- 
 ter s "Kampaner TJial is his companion/ "Hyper 
 ion" reveals fully the nature of his reading. He 
 was familiar with Tiedge s "Urania," Bettina Ar- 
 nim s "Goethe s Correspondence with a Child," Ar- 
 nim and Brentano s "Boy s Wonder-Horn," Nov- 
 alis s "Heinrich von Ofterdingen," Hoffmann s 
 "Tales," Fichte s "Destiny of Man," Schubert s 
 "History of the Soul," Goethe s "Faust," Miiller s 
 "Songs of a Wandering Horn Player," Jean Paul s 
 "Titan," Uhland s "Poems," Werner s "Dramas," 
 Tieck s "Poems," Carove s "Story Without an 
 End," Salis and Matthisson s "Lyrics." These, 
 save some few casual allusions, are all the writers 
 mentioned and criticized in "Hyperion," and it is 
 notable that with the single exception of Goethe they 
 belong, all of them, to the romantic group. It is al 
 most a roll-call of the school. 
 
 The influences that were shaping the new poet did 
 
220 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 not end with the months at Heidelberg. The lonely 
 journey into Switzerland, with Uhland in his pocket, 
 the meeting with Frances Appleton at Interlaken, 
 the solitary room in the old Cragie House at Cam 
 bridge, the continued reading of Goethe, Jean Paul, 
 Tieck, Hoffmann, the brooding and dreaming over 
 "Hyperion" the three years from that November 
 day at Rotterdam were the crucible from which 
 emerged the Longfellow which we know. "Most 
 of the time I am alone," he writes to Greene two 
 years after his return. "I want to travel. Am too 
 excited, too tumultuous inwardly and my health 
 suffers." He records in his journal September 8, 
 1838: "Moped and groped about unwell. De 
 jected no sunshine in the soul." His college 
 work no longer inspired him. At Bowdoin he had 
 written: "I am delighted more and more with 
 the profession I have chosen. ... I have such an 
 engrossing interest in the studies of my profession 
 that I write very seldom except in connection with 
 those studies." Now he complains constantly of 
 interruptions, of having his mind a playmate for 
 boys. "This dragooning of schoolboys in lessons 
 is like going backward." He longs for the even 
 ing hours when, with no one to disturb him, he can 
 read and write and dream deliciously of the world 
 he loves. 
 To get the full meaning of this period in Long- 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 221 
 
 fellow s life we have only to read "Hyperion," 
 which was published in July, 1839. The events of 
 the romance may be "mostly fictitious" even as the 
 author declared to Greene ; but the events are* the 
 smallest part of "Hyperion." "It contains my 
 cherished thoughts for three years," he declared; 
 he might have said: It contains my naked soul. 
 The shock, the brooding, the unutterable longing 
 and heart-hunger, the vision of* angels, the minis 
 try of night, the shadow-land of the romantic poets, 
 the new love, the struggle of this love with the 
 specter of the past it is all here. 
 
 The Longfellow of "Outre Mer," and the Bow- 
 doin days is a thing of the far past. The book is 
 a German book, like a translation of one of those 
 thousand shoots that sprang up about the trunk of 
 "Wilhelm Meister." Even the conception of the 
 book is German and romantic. Holderlin had writ 
 ten the first "Hyperion," so naming it, he ex 
 plains, because he stood "like the geese flat-footed in 
 the water of modernity, impotently endeavoring to 
 wing his flight upward toward the Greek heaven." 
 Like all the Tieck-Richter romances, Longfellow s 
 book is a rambling, chaotic creation, full of Jean 
 Paul interludes and digressions, with the slender 
 est thread of plot, and without climax or dramatic 
 force. In every way is it typical of its class. 
 Everywhere romance; atmosphere above all: "the 
 
222 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 mingling of daylight and starlight," "a dreamy, 
 yearning, ideal indistinctness." We can visualize 
 nothing. The heroine, after two pages of descrip 
 tion, is simply voice and eyes. It is a book written 
 at night to be read "the evening having come and the 
 tall candles being lighted" a book without prede 
 cessors on this side of the water, an exotic, a pale 
 and marvelous night-moth that has fluttered over 
 somehow from the ruins of the Old World. Every 
 where night scenes and twilight. The plot moves, 
 when it moves at all, from moonlight to moonlight. 
 To get its atmosphere, read of Emma of Ilmenau, 
 who shunned "the glare of daylight and society, 
 and wished to be ailone. Like the evening prim 
 rose, her heart opened only after sunset ; but bloomed 
 through the dark night with sweet fragrance." 
 
 Longfellow wrote the book with a purpose. "It 
 is a sincere book," he writes Greene, to whom, more 
 than to any one else, he confides his inner life, 
 "showing the passage of a morbid mind into a purer 
 and healthier state." To find what this morbid 
 mind was we have only to read the chapter en 
 titled "The Fountain of Oblivion." Here the stu 
 dent Hieronyntus, who has suddenly been da.zzled 
 by the beautiful Hermione, until, like one who has 
 looked at the sun, he can see nothing else, thinks 
 to drown his new love in the Fountain of Oblivion. 
 As he stood and gazed into its waters "he beheld 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 223 
 
 far down in their silent depths, dim and ill-defined 
 outlines, waving to and fro, like the folds of a 
 white garment in the twilight. Then more dis 
 tinct and permanent shapes arose shapes familiar 
 to his mind, yet forgotten and remembered again, 
 as the fragments of a dream; till at length, far, far 
 below him, he beheld the great City of the Past, 
 with silent marble streets, and moss-grown walls, 
 and spires uprising with a wave-like, flickering mo 
 tion. And amid the crowd that thronged those 
 streets, he beheld faces once familiar and dear to 
 him; and heard sorrowful, sweet voices singing, O, 
 forget us not! forget us not! and then the distant 
 mournful sound of funeral bells, that were tolling 
 below, in the City of the Past." But despite this 
 call from the old days he is powerless to surrender 
 his new love, and the struggle between the quick 
 and the dead goes on. Even* at the close nothing is 
 settled. The hero does, indeed, during the last few 
 pages, resolve no more to look "mournfully into 
 the past," u to be a man among men, and np longer 
 a dreamer among shadows," but it comes as a swift 
 impulse, a mere mood. The book shows no gradual 
 growth of character, no steady leading up to this 
 crisis. There is effect, but no cause. There can be 
 no transformation of soul at the mere sight of an 
 epitaph. 
 
 All through this period we find evidences of a 
 
224 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 struggle in the poet s life a wrestling, not only 
 with the new love that confronted the jealous past, 
 but with the moodiness, the aimlessness, the idle 
 dreaming, the vain regrets which had begun during 
 those solitary months at Heidelberg. His Puritan 
 conscience and the teaching of the later Goethe were 
 protesting against mere dreaming and moonlight 
 and lack of definite aim. That Longfellow was 
 inclined to moodiness and dreaming, with a ten 
 dency even to the purposeless, we have only to read 
 his journals to know. He was, indeed, the Mr. 
 Churchill of his own "Kavanagh" "a dreamy, 
 poetic man." "Life presented itself to him like the 
 Sphynx, with its perpetual riddle of the real and 
 the ideal. To the solution of this dark problem 
 he devoted his days and his nights. He was forced 
 to teach grammar when he would have written 
 poems ; and from day to day, and from year to year, 
 the trivial things of life postponed the great de 
 signs, which he felt capable of accomplishing, but 
 never had the resolute courage to begin. Thus he 
 dallied with his thoughts and with all things, and 
 wasted his strength in trifles; like the lazy sea, 
 that plays with the pebbles on the beach." And 
 after years the old schoolmaster had done nothing 
 "the same dreams, the same longings, the same 
 aspirations, the same indecision . . . While he 
 mused the fire burned in other brains." This is the 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 225 
 
 picture of the true romanticist, of a Brentano or 
 a Tieck it is the confession of a weakness of the 
 whole school. 
 
 Against this extreme Longfellow had constantly 
 to struggle. He wrote the "Psalm of Life" with 
 the same quill that had produced that penultimate 
 chapter of "Hyperion," and the inspiration of both 
 was the same. He first made public the poem dur 
 ing a lecture on Goethe doubtless to illustrate the 
 spirit of "Wilhelm Meister." Goethe, too, had had 
 his period of dreaming, of melancholy, of irresolu 
 tion. "That the life of man is but a dream," he had 
 written in "The Sorrows of Werther," "has come 
 into many a head ; and with me, too, some feeling of 
 that sort is ever at work." But the Goethe of the 
 "Wilhelm Meister" period is another man. Life is 
 no longer a dream, but a place for work. Be self-re 
 liant, self- forgetful, he cries; away with introspec 
 tion and morbid dreams; 
 
 Life s no resting, but a moving ; 
 Let thy life be deed on deed. 
 
 He could say now to the Werther of his youth: 
 
 Once more then, much-wept shadow, dost thou dare 
 
 Boldly to face the day s clear light, 
 To meet me on fresh blooming meadows fair, 
 
 And dost not tremble at my sight? 
 
226 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Act, then, as I, and look with joyous mind, 
 The moment in the face ; nor linger thou ! 
 
 Meet it with speed, so fraught with life, so kind 
 In action, and in love so radiant now. 
 
 The very soul of "Wilhelm Meister" is the mes 
 sage, "art is long, life is short, judgment difficult, 
 opportunity transient therefore, be doing." 
 
 Keep not standing fixed and rooted; 
 
 Briskly venture, briskly roam! 
 Head and hand, where er thou foot it, 
 
 And stout heart are still at home. 
 In each land the sun does visit 
 
 We are gay whate er betide ; 
 To give space for wandering, is it 
 
 That the world was made so wide. 
 
 The message came to Longfellow, as, indeed, 
 it had come to all Europe, like a breath from the 
 living North. Frederick Schlegel expressed his 
 belief that the nineteenth century was molded by 
 three great tendencies : Fichte s "Wissenschaf s- 
 lehre," Goethe s "Wilhelm Meister," and the French 
 Revolution, and there s a grain of truth in it. 
 
 It was this ringing message of action, of stirring 
 self-reliance, this challenge of the aimlessness, the 
 idle dreamings, the sentimentality of the age, that 
 Longfellow put into verse for his own soul dis 
 cipline. His first intent was that it should be for 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 227 
 
 no eyes but his own. Read, with this thought in 
 mind, "The Psalm of Life" becomes immediately 
 significant. There is no haziness about even the 
 first stanza, though it has been said that a prize was 
 once offered to any one who could interpret the 
 stanza, and no one succeeded in winning it. The 
 poem is everywhere full of crudeness. But de 
 spite defects, the poem marks a crisis in Longfellow s 
 life, and, in some ways, a crisis in American think 
 ing. This is the substance of what he wrote : 
 
 Life s no time for dreams; the soul that simply 
 slumbers and dreams is not living at all. The 
 world, it is true, seems to me to be a mere shadow 
 or dream even as it did to Werther, but it is not 
 ("things are not what they seem") life is real. 
 Art is long; life is short act; look the moment in 
 the face. It is not for me to muse idly on the 
 future, building castles, nor to be the slave of the 
 past. It is for me to be up and doing to-day. 
 
 It was the first real breaking of the spirit of 
 "Wilhelm Meister" on our shores, and it quickened 
 the heart-beat of the nation. In an era of sen- 
 timentalism, of Wertherism, of Byronism, of grave- 
 yardism Wendell suggests as a general name for 
 Bryant s works "Glimpses of the Grave" it came 
 indeed as the clash of steel. No wonder it gripped 
 the American conscience, even as it had stirred Ger 
 many and Europe. 
 
228 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 It was not in poetry, however, that the Long 
 fellow of the Heidelberg era sought to express 
 himself publicly. Months after the issue of 
 "Hyperion" he was doubtful as to his work. 
 "Meditating what I shall do next. Shall it be two 
 volumes more of Hyperion, or a drama on Cotton 
 Mather?" Poetry he had reserved for expressing 
 his own innermost soul. What he wrote was for 
 no other eye. The earliest stammer of his new 
 mood he had written during that first solitary win 
 ter at Cambridge, a Novalisque lyric confided a 
 year later to his journal, and then, later still, after 
 the startling success of "The Psalm of Life," given 
 to the public as "The Footsteps of Angels." One 
 cannot understand the later Longfellow without a 
 study of this earliest of his lyrics. I shall quote 
 it entire in its earlier version : it brings us nearer to 
 the poet : 
 
 When the hours of day are numbered, 
 And the soul-like voice of night 
 
 Wakes the better soul that slumbered 
 To a holy calm delight; 
 
 Ere the evening lamps are lighted, 
 And like specters grim and tall, 
 
 Shadows from the fitful firelight 
 Dance upon the parlor wall, 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 229 
 
 Then the forms of the departed 
 
 Enter at the open door ; 
 The belov d ones, the true-hearted 
 
 Come to sit with me once more. 
 
 And with them the being beauteous 
 Who unto my youth was given, 
 
 More than all things else to love me, 
 And is now a saint in heaven. 
 
 With a slow and noiseless footstep 
 
 Comes she like a shape divine, 
 Takes the vacant chair beside me, 
 
 Lays her gentle hand in mine. 
 
 And she sits and gazes at me, 
 
 With her deep and tender eyes, 
 Like the stars so still and saint-like, 
 
 Looking downward from the skies. 
 
 Here we have the soul of Novalis. The life of 
 the night has become the only real life. Day is the 
 unreality; the "better soul" sleeps until the twilight 
 comes. As with Novalis, the partitions between the 
 material and the spirit world have all but vanished. 
 Again and again do we catch this note in Long 
 fellow : 
 
 Have I dreamed or was it real 
 
 What I saw as in a vision, 
 When to marches hymeneal 
 
230 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 In the land of the ideal. 
 
 Moved my thoughts o er fields Elysian? 
 
 The two worlds of waking and of dreaming, of 
 flesh and of spirit, lie very close together in Long 
 fellow s poems. There is no need to give a list : 
 "Haunted Houses," "Song of the Silent Land," 
 "The Two Angels," "The Hlaunted Chamber," "Auf 
 Wiedersehen," are enough to illustrate. Years 
 later, after his early romanticism had- become modi 
 fied somewhat, the poet could still say : It is at night 
 that the better life begins; the day is the time for 
 phantoms and ghosts, not the night; the things of 
 day are trivial and commonplace, and without the 
 reality of night, life would be unendurable. 
 
 Into the darkness and the hush of night 
 Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away, 
 And with it fade the phantoms of the day, 
 
 The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light. 
 
 The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight. 
 The unprofitable splendor and display, 
 The agitations and the cares that prey 
 
 Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight. 
 
 The better life begins; the world no more 
 
 Molests us ; all its records we erase 
 From the dull commonplace book of our lives, 
 That like a palimpsest is written o er 
 
 With trivial incidents of time and place, 
 And, lo ! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives. 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 231 
 
 The success of the "Psalm of Life" and the few 
 lyrics that had followed it, joined with the impor 
 tunities of his friends, induced Longfellow, late in 
 the year 1839, to issue a collection of his lyrics and 
 translations. The very title, "Voices of the Night," 
 is significant. It was two books in one : the Bryant- 
 esque poems and the translations of the early Long 
 fellow, and the psalms and translations of the Heidel 
 berg mystic. The nine original poems are the soul 
 of the book, and they are shot through and through 
 with the softness and the sentiment of German ro 
 manticism. The "Prologue," which opens the col 
 lection with a bit of Tieck s "Waldeinsamkeit," 
 finds the poet amid the shadows of a solemn and 
 silent wood, dreaming under a patriarchal tree. He 
 determines that hereafter his songs must be not of 
 the external and the objective, things of the daylight, 
 but of the world within him, and the solemn voices 
 of the night. In the next poem we are in the full 
 current of romanticism: "the manifold, soft chimes 
 that fill the haunted chambers of the night"; "from 
 the cool silence of the midnight air, my spirit drank 
 repose" ; and 
 
 O holy night, from thee I learn to bear 
 
 What man has borne before; 
 Thou layest thy finger on the lips of care 
 
 And they complain no more. 
 
 It is in the selfsame key as Novalis s "Hymns to 
 
232 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 the Night" : "But sacred Night, with her unspoken 
 mysteries draws me to her . . . Dost thou not feel 
 pity for us, O holy Night? ... My whole being 
 awakes. I am thine and thou art mine. Night 
 has aroused me to life and manhood." It is a 
 dominant note in Longfellow: "The Light of the 
 Stars," "The Beleaguered City," "I Stood on the 
 Bridge at Midnight," "The Day is Done," "The 
 Rainy Day," "Daylight and Moonlight," "After 
 noon in February," "Curfew," "The Wind Over the 
 Chimney" their spirit pervades like an atmosphere 
 all of the poet s work. 
 
 It was this element that gave to Longfellow his 
 instant popularity, both in America and in England. 
 The people were ready for the "sadness and long 
 ing," and the dreamy mysticism of the German 
 school. They had been prepared by the sentimental- 
 ism of Byron and Moore, by the medievalism of 
 Scott, by the lacrymose poets, by "The Sorrows of 
 Werther." Germany had had no small influence in 
 molding the English writings of the early century, 
 but it had been the Germany of Burger and the 
 Sturm und Drang. It had touched Scott and Cole 
 ridge and Byron, but none of them, even Coleridge, 
 had cared much for Tieck. The work of the Spatro- 
 mantiker, especially the softened romance of Uh- 
 land, had come not at all to English and American 
 readers. It was brought in by Longfellow as some- 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 233 
 
 thing utterly new. Not that he did it deliberately 
 or even consciously. He brought it not because it 
 had appealed to his fancy, or because it had seemed 
 a pleasing acquisition to display to his countrymen, 
 but because it had become a veritable part of him 
 self. He sang it even as Salis and Uhland had 
 done, because his new soul had had in Germany its 
 birth and its beginning. It was romanticism, but 
 it was far removed from that of the first wild 
 Frederick Schlegel type, that worshiped the moon, 
 loved its neighbor s wife, and joined the Catholic 
 Church; it was of the later school dreamy and 
 meditative, full of delicious sadness and longing, 
 of subdued medievalism, of vagueness and hazy 
 outline, of "old forgotten, far-off things and battles 
 long ago" in a word, the romanticism of Uhland. 
 It was inevitable that the poet sooner or later 
 should have essayed the ballad, that literary form 
 so peculiarly the province of romanticism. He had 
 read Arnim and Brentano with eagerness. "The 
 boy s Wonder-Horn, " he exclaimed in "Hyper 
 ion," "I know the book almost by heart. Of all 
 your German books, it is the one which produces 
 upon my imagination the most wild and magic in 
 fluence. I have a passion for ballads. . . . They 
 are the gypsy children of song, born under green 
 hedge-rows, in the leafy lanes and by-paths of liter 
 ature in the genial summertime." 
 
234 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Ballads, indeed, had been almost his first thought 
 when he looked about him for poetic material during 
 that first period at Cambridge. "The Wreck of the 
 Hesperus" was the fifth poem that he wrote. "I 
 have been looking at the old northern sagas," he 
 confides to his journal in 1838, "and thinking of a 
 series of ballads or a romantic poem on the deeds 
 of the first bold Viking who crossed to this western 
 world, with storm spirits and devil machinery under 
 water." He proposed to Hawthorne that they col 
 laborate in Arnim-Brentano style for the production 
 of a collection of marvelous fairy tales and ballads 
 for boys. 
 
 The proposal to Hawthorne was evidently an 
 impulse. Soon after we find Hawthorne writing 
 him, "You refuse to let me blow a blast upon the 
 Wonder Horn/ Assuredly you have a right to 
 make all the music on your own instrument; but I 
 should serve you right were I to set up an opposition 
 for instance, with a cornstalk fiddle or a pumpkin- 
 vine trumpet." Hawthorne s threatened trumpet 
 gave out at length the well-known "Wonder Book," 
 and Longfellow s blast was the "Ballads and other 
 Poems" of 1841. 
 
 The horn rang at frequent intervals during all 
 the rest of the poet s life. "The Norman Baron," 
 "Walter von der Vogelweid," "The Phantom Ship," 
 "The Emperor s Bird s Nest," "Oliver Basselin," 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 235 
 
 "Victor Galbraith," "A Ballad of the Dutch Fleet" 
 they all have the true ballad ring; they might be 
 translations from Uhland. Their charm lies in 
 their simplicity, their haunting melody, their human 
 interest, their dreamy indistinctiveness, their echoes 
 of the dim past. They are romantic in their every 
 line; they have nothing American about them. 
 "The Wreck of the Hesperus" might have happened 
 in the North Sea, and Paul Revere s ride with a 
 change of names might have been an episode of the 
 German wars. 
 
 What Longfellow was after the publication of 
 this second volume of poems he remained. His 
 third residence in Germany in 1842 deepened his 
 romanticism, but it did not modify it. He had dis 
 covered his vocation. The sudden and widespread 
 popularity of his poetry had first astonished and 
 then sobered him. The voice of the people was 
 unmistakable, and it was like a call from on high. 
 No more prose; life was poesy. "I have been giv 
 ing as much time as possible to the young poets," 
 he writes from Mariensberg. He had found Freili- 
 grath and had spent many delicious days with him 
 in his romantic home on the Rhine. Young Ger 
 many attracted him not at all; he was of Uhland 
 and the Rhine, not of Heine. 
 
 He came home to write "The Belfry of Bruges" 
 and "Nuremberg," poems breathing romanticism 
 
236 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 from every line. The very choice of Nuremberg 
 as the subject of a poem is enough to classify the 
 poet, for was not that dreamy old city, "that pearl 
 of the middle ages," the very apotheosis of roman 
 ticism? When Tieck and Wackenroder traveled 
 together over Germany, they had entered the old 
 town in a sort of dream. "In a species of aesthetic 
 intoxication/ says Brandes, "the friends wandered 
 around the churches and the graveyards ; they stood 
 by the grave of Albert Diirer and Kans Sachs; a 
 vanished world arose before their eyes, and the 
 life of ancient Nuremberg became to them the 
 romance of art." It became in a way the capital 
 city of the romantic movement, and all that it was 
 to those early dreamers Longfellow has caught in 
 his poem : 
 
 Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of 
 
 art and song, 
 Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that 
 
 round them throng: 
 
 Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emperors, 
 rough and bold, 
 
 Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, cen 
 turies old. 
 
 Vanished is the ancient splendor, and before my 
 dreamy eye 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 237 
 
 Wave those mingled shapes and figures, like a faded 
 tapestry. 
 
 Not thy councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the 
 
 world s regard; 
 But thy painter, Albrecht Diirer, and Hans Sachs, thy 
 
 cobbler bard. 
 
 This yearning for the ideal, this turning away 
 from the commonplace present to the vague medie 
 val world where fancy and the imagination may 
 foot it free, is the very life of romanticism. But 
 the later German school softened its pictures of 
 the Middle Ages. It delighted in sentimental mus 
 ings amid the ruins, in pathetic legend, in dreamy 
 pictures of monks and harpers and knights and 
 radiant maidens with soft blue eyes. Heine, the 
 harshest critic of the school, declared that in Uh- 
 land s writings "the naive, rude, powerful tones of 
 the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealized 
 fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, 
 sentimental melancholy." Nearly half of Long 
 fellow s poems are medieval in background, and it 
 is the medievalism of Uhland. In work like "The 
 Golden Legend," an adaption of "Der Arme Hein- 
 rich," he is at his best. Its atmosphere from 
 beginning to end is that which plays over all of 
 his most characteristic work ; soft melancholy, vague 
 yearnings, feeling above everything. To G. P. R. 
 
238 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 James the poem resembled "an old ruin with the 
 ivy and the rich blue mold upon it." It is rather 
 the dream of a monk over his rubrics. 
 
 It is but natural that the Romish Church with 
 its traditions and its impressive ceremonials and 
 institutions should appeal strongly to the poet, as 
 it did to all of his school. He drew upon it con 
 stantly for his imagery and his epithets: "the owl 
 is a grave bird, a monk, who chants midnight mass 
 in the great temple of nature" ; the old clock on the 
 stairs is also "a monk, who crosses himself and 
 sighs, Alas." 
 
 The winds like anthems roll; 
 They are chanting solemn masses, 
 Singing, "Pray for this poor soul, 
 Pray, pray P 
 
 And the hooded clouds, like friars, 
 Tell their beads in drops of rain, 
 
 And patter their doleful prayers; 
 But their prayers are all in vain, 
 All in vain ! 
 
 Indeed to read the poet is like entering some 
 ancient Gothic cathedral with its subdued light, its 
 half-crumbled monuments of crusaders, its softly 
 murmuring organ, its shuddery vaults with the 
 bones of maidens, its slow procession of chanting 
 monks, its coolness and its mystery. 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 239 
 
 Touch Longfellow where you will and you will 
 find German romance. It shows itself in his 
 devotion to Dante, that mystic of mystics, that 
 "spokesman of the Middle Ages." 
 
 I enter and I see thee in the gloom 
 
 Of the long aisles, O poet Saturnine ! 
 
 And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. 
 The air is filled with some unknown perfume, 
 The congregation of the dead make room 
 
 For thee to pass ; the votive tapers shine ; 
 
 Like rooks that haunt Ravenna s groves of pine 
 The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. 
 From the confessionals I hear arise 
 
 Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies 
 
 And lamentations from the crypts below; 
 And then a voice celestial that begins 
 With the pathetic words, "Although your sins 
 
 As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow." 
 
 It shows itself in his Fichte-drawn message of 
 consolation: be resigned, all is Providence. It 
 shows itself in his choice of material. 
 
 "The romantic school," says Beers, "sought to 
 reinforce its native stock of materials by motifs 
 drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly 
 from Norse mythology and from Spanish romance." 
 In his passion for Northern myth Longfellow sur 
 passed even Schlegel and Uhland. His translations 
 and adaptations and above all his "Hiawatha," 
 
240 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 that "Indian edda" as he called it, that poem which 
 gives not only the meter but the very atmosphere 
 and soul of the Finnish "Kalevala," attest this. 
 For his fondness for Spanish romance one has only 
 to read his earliest drama. 
 
 Romanticism is only another name for youth and 
 aspiration. With the middle years of life the col 
 ors fade; the vague melancholy which somehow is 
 inseparable from young manhood is forgotten; 
 experience disciplines the imagination; life takes on 
 more restrained and sober moods. Uhland ceased 
 to sing long before middle life; Heine was a 
 romanticist only during his early years. Longfel 
 low s distinctively romantic period was over before 
 1849. It was then that he began to think of the 
 larger art, and to plan a "tower of song with lofty 
 parapet." 
 
 But it is not the work of this latter period, tinged 
 with romanticism even as it is, that stands to-day 
 in the popular mind as Longfellow. It is the little 
 handful of lyrics written near the year 1840 that 
 the world at large now associates with his name. 
 The dramas, the later lyrics, the "Christus," even 
 the "Tales of a Wayside Inn," are unknown to the 
 man in the street, but he knows "The Psalm of 
 Life" and "The Bridge." A college class of two 
 hundred men, asked recently to write without prep 
 aration each a list of the poems of Longfellow, 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 241 
 
 handed in altogether only thirty titles, and these in 
 the order of frequency of mention were: "Evangel- 
 ine," "Hiawatha," "Miles Standish," "The Village 
 Blacksmith," The Psalm of Life," The Children s 
 Hour," "Paul Revere s Ride," The Building of 
 the Ship," "The Day is Done," The Bridge," "The 
 Skeleton in Armor," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," 
 "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "The Rainy Day," 
 "Excelsior," "The Reaper and the Flowers," "The 
 Footsteps of Angels," "The Arrow and the Song," 
 "Resignation," "The Arsenal at Springfield," and 
 "Maidenhood." The rest were scattering. Of this 
 list only "Hiawatha," "Miles Standish," "The 
 Children s Hour," and "Paul Revere s Ride" were 
 written after 1849. The list is suggestive. This 
 is Longfellow as the people know him, but this is 
 also the Longfellow of the Heidelberg vision the 
 Longfellow of unchecked German romance. It 
 was this element that gave him his popularity. The 
 age was revolting against sentimentalism, but it 
 caught eagerly at the new tone of soft melancholy, 
 of melodious pathos, of idealized antiquity, of genre 
 art, of mysticism subdued by Goethe; in a word, it 
 caught eagerly at German romanticism for the first 
 time whispering its haunting music in English ears. 
 Longfellow was distinctively a lyrist. Although 
 half of all his original poetry is in dramatic form, 
 he was as far from being a dramatist as was Uh- 
 
242 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 land, who also wrote dramas. The drama requires 
 action, plot, absolute definiteness : distinctness first 
 of all. There must be evolution of character, 
 cause and effect, a steady and irresistible march of 
 events toward the final culmination. It must deal, 
 too, with intensely individualized figures that stand 
 out objectively against a background that does not 
 dominate or distract. But Longfellow was first 
 of all subjective; he saw through the lens of his 
 own soul shadowy ethereal beings; he could tell 
 of his own emotions and aspirations and longings, 
 but he was powerless, like all of the romantic poets, 
 to view life objectively, to paint sharp outlines, to 
 work step by step to an inevitable climax. 
 
 He came the nearest to the dramatic in "The 
 Spanish Student," but even this is essentially lyric. 
 It is a young man s dream, full of romantic senti 
 ment, of effects without cause, of vague characteri 
 zation; charming situations rather than dramatic 
 development. To quote a criticism on Tieck, "all 
 its author s care is lavished upon what he calls the 
 climate of events, their atmosphere and fragrance, 
 tone and color, the mood they inspired, the shadow 
 they cast, the light in which they are seen, which 
 is invariably that of the moon." Longfellow s 
 poetic works fill nine volumes, yet if his lyrics were 
 published alone they would fill scarce one, a remark 
 able fact when we consider that he was a lyrist only, 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 248 
 
 a lyrist as preeminently as was Salis or Ronsard. 
 He is at his best only in the poetry of moments, 
 of moods, of the individual soul. And of all his 
 lyrics the most spontaneous and genuine are his 
 sonnets, the work almost wholly of his later years ; 
 and it is because they welled from his own heart 
 and are not, like so much that he wrote, "poetry to 
 the second power" poetry about poetry. 
 
 Longfellow, then, was a lyrist of the German 
 romantic school. Like Uhland, he felt rather than 
 saw. 
 
 Hawthorne could not use the material for "Evan- 
 geline" ; it was too vague and dispersive to grip his 
 imagination. To Longfellow it was simply pathos ; 
 he could feel it and that was enough. He never 
 visited the Grand Pre region, or the Mississippi, or 
 the Falls of Minnehaha; there was no need of it. 
 Holderlin had never visited Greece before he wrote 
 his "Hyperion" with chapter after chapter of 
 description. To have made the visit might have 
 spoiled the picture. Realism, truth to actual exter 
 nals, even to the historical facts in the case, 
 amounted to little in Longfellow s scheme. It was 
 the atmosphere and the feeling that counted. He 
 cared only to call up the mdrchenwelt with the 
 golden mist over it, with its delicious sadness, and 
 its pathetic human figure dimly seen, and the result 
 is a book that has been wept over by two generations 
 
244 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 of schoolgirls. The heroine, Evangeline, is a mere 
 abstraction impossible to visualize. Heine declared 
 that "the women in Uhland s poems are only 
 beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine." "French 
 romanticism, * says Brandes, "produces clearly 
 defined figures; the ideal of German romanticism is 
 not a figure but a melody, not definite form but 
 indefinite aspiration." Evangeline is a feminine 
 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, seeking the world over 
 for the blue flower, and losing it in the end just 
 when it seemed in her grasp. 
 
 And it is so of "Hiawatha/ It is romantic 
 through and through, unreal even to ghostliness, 
 touching the actual world only here and there. Its 
 atmosphere and its melody are everything: moon 
 light, starlight, romantic love, the days that are 
 forgotten, and over all sentiment and pathos. The 
 Indians are in reality monks and medieval knights 
 and first cousins to the gods of Northern mythology. 
 
 Downward through the evening twilight 
 
 In the days that are forgotten, 
 
 In the unremembered ages, 
 
 From the full moon fell Nokomis, 
 
 Fell the beautiful Nokomis, 
 
 She a wife, but not a mother. 
 
 Downward through the evening twilight 
 On the Muskoday, the meadow, 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 245 
 
 On the prairie full of blossoms. 
 "See ! a star falls !" said the people. 
 From the sky a star is falling. 
 
 There among the ferns and mosses 
 There among the prairie lilies 
 On the Muskoday, the meadow, 
 In the moonlight and the starlight 
 Fair Nokomis bore a daughter, 
 And she called her name Wenonah, 
 As the first-born of her daughters. 
 And the daughter of Nokomis 
 Grew up like the prairie lilies, 
 Grew a tall and slender maiden, 
 With the beauty of the moonlight 
 With the beauty of the starlight. 
 
 A vague dream it is of fairy-land, of monsters and 
 marvels, the fancies of a childlike people; and its 
 main charm is "the moonlight and the starlight," 
 the soft Indian summer that envelops it like a haze. 
 But as Ibsen said of Schiller s "J un S^ rau >" "there 
 is no experience in it. It is not the result of power 
 ful personal impressions, but is a composition." 
 And this brings us to the main criticism that must 
 be made of all the romantic school : their work is the 
 result of conscious intention. The Sturm und 
 Drang of a literature is expulsive, creative, uncon 
 scious. The poet like Burger and Burns and Whit- 
 tier sings because he must, but the romancers, as 
 

 246 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Goethe has well expressed it, live "in a period of 
 forced talent." All but a few of Longfellow s 
 early "psalms," and sonnets, were written with 
 books face-down about his writing-pad. He prized 
 translation since it acted as a stimulant. "It stirs 
 up germs of thought." Imagine Burns or Burger 
 or Keats saying this. As a result his work "in 
 duces," as Emerson expressed it, "a serene mood." 
 Seldom do we feel the heart beat faster and sud 
 denly hold our breaths as we catch glimpses of new 
 worlds. All is melodious and serene, in an atmos 
 phere of delicious twilight, and the atmosphere and 
 the melody are everything. 
 
 His poetry is really American only in its themes. 
 He cared little for the prosaic, bustling life of his 
 native land; his heart was elsewhere. None of 
 our writers traveled so little in their own country; 
 aside from one trip to Washington he never got 
 further west than New York. He looked east 
 ward rather than westward; the study in the old 
 Craigie House had only eastern windows. The 
 burning problems, the fiery struggle of the for 
 ties and fifties really bored him at times. "Dined 
 with Agassiz to meet Emerson and others," he 
 writes in his journal in that tumultous year 1856. 
 "I was amused an-d annoyed to see how soon the 
 conversation drifted off into politics. It was not 
 till after dinner in the library, that we got upon any- 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 247 
 
 thing really interesting. It is like Dumas s turn 
 ing from the subject of tailors bills and rents and 
 the cost of living to that of romance with the re 
 mark, "Let us now turn to real life." With Sum- 
 ner, that flame of fire, for his bosom friend, it was 
 impossible for the poet to be wholly indifferent to 
 passing events; he could even write a few grace 
 ful and colorless lyrics on slavery that are to 
 Whittier s as water to aqua regia, yet he seems 
 never to have caught the full thrill and meaning 
 of the land and the age in which his life had been 
 cast. He remained to the last the gentle, lovable 
 monkish scholar, content with his friends and his 
 dreams of olden times, oblivious of the fact that a 
 mighty epic was enacting at his very door. 
 
 He is our Jean Paul, "the beloved," with his 
 cheery optimism, his belief in the worth of the in 
 dividual, his genre pictures, his soft dreamy idyls, 
 his Fichte message of resignation, and he is our 
 Uhland with his half-lights, his softened mysticism, 
 his medieval atmosphere, his serene level of ex 
 cellence. Whether or not his great influence upon 
 the common people at the moment when they were at 
 their most receptive stage was altogether good, is 
 open to question. When America like a schoolgirl 
 was hungry for culture and for poetry, Longfellow 
 gave German romance and he gave little else. He 
 came at the only moment in our history when he 
 
248 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 could have had a full hearing, or at least at the 
 only moment when he could have been given the 
 leading place to the exclusion of all others. His 
 enormous popularity, his contagious sentimental- 
 ism, his breath of the Old World at this moment 
 when America was peculiarly susceptible all this, 
 coming at the moment when a new group of poets 
 was gathering, cast a shadow over a whole period 
 of our poetic history. To Longfellow more than 
 to any other cause may be traced the general lack 
 of stamina in American poetry during two genera 
 tions of poets. 
 
 But it is vain to criticize; whatever we may say, 
 Longfellow s place is secure. He will be our beloved 
 poet, just as Uhland and Jean Paul are beloved. 
 His lyrics of consolation will still console the 
 feminine heart though they contain only Fichte set 
 to melody and moonlight. But his influence upon 
 the future cannot be a large one. America and the 
 world have outgrown German romanticism. Lowell 
 wrote young Howells : "You must sweat the Heine 
 out of you as men do mercury" ; the young poet of 
 the new century must sweat out Longfellow. We 
 demand to-day not vagueness but sharpness of out 
 line. Whitman is our prophet of to-day, and his 
 influence is spreading and deepening. Full and 
 clear comes the demand: Show us life; tell us 
 the truth of life in the concrete, in words that bite 
 
The Shadow of Longfellow 249 
 
 and burn. The office of the poet no longer is 
 merely to please, or to induce a serene mood. Mere 
 fancy and prettiness, mere conceits and melody, 
 mere atmosphere, mere traditions soft with the years, 
 and longings and dreamings no longer satisfy. The 
 poet is the seer : it is for him to look beyond the 
 day and the year; to voice the truth of our own 
 times, of our own selves, of our native land, and of 
 the years that are yet to be. 
 
THE MODERNNESS OF PHILIP 
 FRENEAU 
 
 IT is food for thought that the late war, by all 
 confessed the most perfect masterpiece of Mars, 
 must pass into record as the war that produced no 
 poetry. A few sporadic lyrics here and there, but 
 how many poems may one mention from memory 
 without consulting the collections of war verse? 
 And yet the lives of empires, the greatest and oldest 
 in Europe, trembled for years in the balance, armies 
 with their backs to the last wall fought for the 
 very life of their country, and deeds of heroism were 
 done by millions. Never has there been such need 
 for "Marseillaise" rouses, for soul-kindling battle- 
 hymns, for blood-stirring hero ballads, for thren 
 odies and laments at the open graves of martyrs of 
 freedom, for interpretations of the souls of nations, 
 for psalms of comfort, or of faith, or of exultation. 
 
 Especially has this been true of America. Is 
 democracy worth giving one s life for if it cannot 
 be sung? Is the American ideal worth holding 
 
 250 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 251 
 
 up for the world if it is not so tremendous a thing 
 that only poetry can voice it ? We were silent, and 
 yet no nation ever had theme more poetic ; no nation 
 ever entered war on higher grounds and no nation 
 ever had its imagination stirred by a tradition more 
 romantic. When America sent her young men to 
 France she sent them on a crusade. Every one of 
 them as his feet pressed the soil on which perhaps 
 he was to shed his blood could say in his heart, 
 "Lafayette, we are here." We need not expand the 
 thought. No poet ever had a more stirring theme. 
 But who is the laureate of "France allied"? He 
 is still Philip Freneau, dead ninety years ; with Walt 
 Whitman, the single American voice of 1871 "O 
 Star of France" in the second place. Whom will 
 one name as the third? We are inclined to speak 
 apologetically of Freneau if we ever speak of him 
 at all. He wrote too much, he mingled with a little 
 undoubted poetry a dreary mass of trash; it is 
 easy to dismiss him with faint praise: he lived in 
 the twilight of our poetry, and he wrote as best 
 he could without readers, or adequate criticism, 
 without poetic companions and without reward. 
 And yet for our richest output in many areas of our 
 poetry we still must return to him. Would that 
 he had been alive and at the height of his powers 
 when the German armies in 1914 swept through 
 Belgium and down into France! His songs of 
 
252 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 "France allied" should have been gathered at the 
 opening of the war and sent broadcast over America. 
 It was the conviction of Freneau that the French 
 Revolution, that struggle that ended in 1918 with 
 the fall of the kaiser and the czar, began in the 
 free forests of America. He voiced it again and 
 again. In 1791 this was his exulting cry: 
 
 From the spark that we kindled, a flame has gone forth 
 To astonish the world and enlighten mankind: 
 With a code of new doctrines the universe rings, 
 And Paine is addressing strange sermons to kings. 
 
 Had he lived in August, 1914, this, from his "On 
 the Fourteenth of July, 1792," would have been 
 the type of his war-cry, his challenge to the Hun, 
 his exultant toast : 
 
 By traitors driven to ruin s brink 
 Fair Freedom dreads united knaves. 
 The world must fall if she must bleed; 
 And yet, by heaven ! I m proud to think 
 The world was ne er subdued by slaves 
 Nor shall the hireling herd succeed. 
 
 Boy! fill the generous goblet high; 
 Success to France shall be the toast: 
 The fall of kings the fates foredoom, 
 The crown decays, its splendours die. 
 
 In December we find him pouring forth his fiery 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 253 
 
 "On the Demolition of the French Monarchy." It 
 has a singularly modern ring. Thus might he have 
 described the first Battle of the Marne : 
 
 The Gaul, enrag d as they retire, 
 
 Hurls at their heads his blaze of fire 
 
 What hosts of Frederick s reeking crew; 
 
 Dying, have bid the world adieu, 
 
 To dogs their flesh been thrown ! 
 
 Escap d from death, a mangled train 
 
 In scatter d bands retreat: 
 
 Where, bounding on Silesia s plain, 
 
 The Despot holds his seat; 
 
 With feeble step, I see them go 
 
 The heavy news to tell 
 
 Where Oder s lazy waters flow, 
 
 Or glides the swift Moselle. 
 
 In a foot-note Freneau explained that "the Despot" 
 was "the Monarch of Prussia." And the poem 
 closes with what is half a prophecy: 
 
 O France ! the world to thee must owe 
 
 A debt they ne er can pay: 
 
 The Rights of Man you bid them know, 
 
 And kindle Reason s day ! 
 
 Columbia, in your friendship blest, 
 
 Your gallant deeds shall hail 
 
 On the same ground our fortunes rest, 
 
 Must flourish, or must fail : 
 
 But should all Europe s slaves combine 
 
254 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Against a cause so fair as thine, 
 And Asia aid a league so base 
 Defeat would all their aims disgrace, 
 And Liberty prevail! 
 
 And with true bardic rapture he peers into the 
 future, even to our own day, perhaps; this is what 
 he sees : 
 
 I see them spurn old laws, 
 Indignant, burst the Austrian yoke, 
 And clip the Eagle s claws : 
 From shore to shore, from sea to sea 
 They join, to set the wretched free, 
 And, driving from the servile court 
 Each titled slave they help support 
 The Democratic Cause! 
 
 Again in a foot-note Freneau explains: by "the 
 Eagle," he says, he means "the imperial standard of 
 Germany." 
 
 Again and again as the war progresses he cries 
 out in exultation, or urges on the battling hosts 
 of freedom, as in "On the Portraits of Louis and 
 Antoinette in the Senate Chamber," in the ringing 
 lines of "On the French Republicans" : 
 
 Americans! when in your country s cause 
 You march d, and dar d the English lion s jaws, 
 Crush d Hessian slaves, and made their hosts retreat, 
 Say, were you not Republican complete? 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 255 
 
 Friends to Republics, cross the Atlantic brine, 
 Low in the dust see regal splendour laid: 
 Hopeless forever sleeps the Bourbon line. 
 
 In "To a Republican with Mr. Paine s Rights of 
 Man," he sketches the duty of the American republic : 
 
 Be ours the task the ambitious to restrain, 
 And this great lesson teach that kings are vain ; 
 That warring realms to certain ruin haste, 
 That kings subsist by war, and wars are waste: 
 So shall our nation, form d on Virtue s plan, 
 Remain the guardian of the Rights of Man, 
 A vast Republic, fam d through every clime, 
 Without a king, to see the end of time. 
 
 At the civic feast given Citizen Genet in Phila 
 delphia, May 18, 1/93, Freneau was ordered to 
 translate Citizen Pichon s impassioned "Ode a 
 la Liberte," and after the seventh toast there was 
 sung "with great effect," according to Bache s "Au 
 rora," Freneau s "Ode," though Conway, in his 
 life of Paine, mentions that it had been sung in 1791 
 at the November festival of the London Revolution 
 ary Society. The ode unquestionably is Freneau s, 
 since he included it in the 1795 edition of his poems. 
 It should be included in every collection of our na 
 tional hymns : 
 
 God save the Rights of Man! 
 Give us a heart to scan 
 
256 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Blessings so dear; 
 Let them be spread around 
 Wherever man is found, 
 And with the welcome sound 
 Ravish his ear. 
 
 Let us with France agree, 
 
 And bid the world be free, 
 
 While tyrants fall ! 
 
 Let the rude savage host 
 
 Of their vast numbers boast * 
 
 Freedom s almighty trust 
 
 Laughs at them all ! 
 
 Though hosts of slaves conspire 
 To quench fair Gallia s fire, 
 Still shall they fail : 
 Though traitors round her rise, 
 Leagu d with her enemies, 
 To war each patriot flies, 
 And will prevail. 
 
 No more is valor s flame 
 Devoted to a name, 
 Taught to adore 
 Soldiers of Liberty 
 Disdain to bow the knee, 
 But teach Equality 
 To every shore. 
 
 The world at last will join 
 To aid thy grand design, 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 257 
 
 Dear Liberty! 
 To Russia s frozen lands 
 The generous flame expands : 
 On Afric s burning sands 
 Shall man be free ! 
 
 In this our western world 
 Be Freedom s flag unfurl d 
 Through all its shores ! 
 May no destructive blast 
 Our heaven of joy o ercast, 
 May Freedom s fabric last 
 While time endures. 
 
 If e er her cause require! ? 
 Should tyrants e er aspire 
 To aim their stroke, 
 May no proud despot daunt* 
 Should he his standard plant, 
 Freedom will never want 
 Her hearts of oak! 
 
 Certainly had Freneau been alive in 1914 he 
 would have joined with all his powers those heroic 
 souls like Roosevelt who demanded that America at 
 once take her part in the struggle. In July, 1793, 
 "On the Anniversary of the Storming of the Bas- 
 tile," he raised his voice in no uncertain note urging 
 his countrymen to fly to the aid of the nation that 
 had aided them in their extremity. 
 
258 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Ye sons of this degenerate clime, 
 Haste, arm the barque, expand the sail; 
 Assist to speed that golden time 
 When Freedom rules, and monarchs fail; 
 All left to France new powers may join, 
 And help to crush the cause divine. 
 
 Ah ! while I write, dear France Allied, 
 
 My ardent wish I scarce restrain, 
 
 To throw these Sybil leaves aside, 
 
 And fly to join you on the main: 
 Unfurl the topsail for the chace 
 And help to crush the tyrant race ! 
 
 And his lyric of 1795, "The Republican Genius of 
 Europe," might well be taken as a summing up of 
 the lessons of the great war from 1914 to 1918: 
 
 Emperors and kings ! in vain you strive 
 
 Your torments to conceal 
 The age is come that shakes your thrones, 
 Tramples in dust despotic crowns, 
 
 And bids the sceptre fail. 
 
 In western worlds the flame began: 
 
 From thence to France it flew 
 Through Europe now, it takes its way, 
 Beams an insufferable day, 
 
 And lays all tyrants low. 
 
 Genius of France! pursue the chace 
 Till Reason s laws restore 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 259 
 
 Man to be Man, in every clime; 
 That Being, active, great, sublime 
 Debas d in dust no more. 
 
 Even the war of the flying-machines would not 
 much have surprised Philip Freneau. As early as 
 1784, in his poem, "The Progress of Balloons," he 
 had prophesied aerial warfare : 
 
 If Britain should ever disturb us again, 
 (As they threaten to do in the next George s reign) 
 No doubt they will play us a set of new tunes, 
 And pepper us well from their fighting balloons. 
 
 Freight, he prophesied, would be carried whole 
 sale through the skies, post-riders would "travel 
 like ghosts on the wings of the air, and stages 
 would all spurn the ground in disdain" : 
 
 The stagemen, whose gallopers scarce have the power 
 
 Through the dirt to convey you ten miles in an hour, 
 
 When advanc d to balloons shall so furiously drive 
 
 You 11 hardly know whether you re dead or alive. 
 
 The man who in Boston sets out with the sun, 
 
 If the wind should be fair, may be with us at one, 
 
 At Gunpowder Ferry drink whiskey at three, 
 
 And at six be at Edentown ready for tea. 
 
 (The machine shall be order d, we hardly need say, 
 
 To travel in darkness as well as by day.) 
 
 At Charleston by ten he for sleep shall prepare 
 
 And by twelve the next day be the devil knows where. 
 
260 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Few of our American poets have deserved more 
 than Philip Freneau the ancient title of "seer," the 
 one who sees the hidden meanings of things and 
 who may look with revealing eye into the secrets 
 of the years that are to be. 
 
 II 
 
 The work of Freneau during the French Revolu 
 tion period of the IJQO S was but an incident in his 
 poetic career. From the first he was the poet 
 of Revolution. He had thrown his soul into the 
 war between the colonies and the mother country 
 and had voiced with passion every phase of the 
 struggle, and he had been a pioneer in the romantic 
 revolt a quarter of a century before Wordsworth. 
 
 His poetic career had begun in college, where 
 Madison, later to be President, was his room-mate. 
 He had excelled in Latin and Greek, and he had 
 dreamed of poetry over the volumes of the English 
 poets, especially those of Pope and Gray. Before 
 he was out of his teens he had written an epic. 
 Poetry he determined should be his life-work. He 
 surrendered himself to it with all the abandon of 
 the adolescent. He thought poetry, he lived it, he 
 dreamed of nothing else. And to his credit, though 
 he faced all his life those conditions that drove the 
 poetic completely out of Madison and all the other of 
 his contemporaries, he remained to the end of his 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 261 
 
 life, as best he could, unfalteringly true to the dream 
 of his youth. Inferior as much of his poetic prod 
 uct is, we must remember always that he gave 
 his generation at every crisis the poetry that genera 
 tion best could understand. 
 
 He was born into an age and an environment al 
 most utterly unpoetic. Early America had no time 
 for the muses. He who sows the wilderness and 
 hopes to reap the fruits of his toil can have no 
 avocation ; culture and the world of art forever must 
 be to him a far-away dream. If in addition to this 
 the sower has, as part of his religious creed, a con 
 tempt for the bright and the beautiful, there will 
 be at least no written poetry. For two centuries 
 America wrote her poetry in deeds. She was with 
 out artistic taste, without centers or standards of 
 culture, and, if we except the devotees of the sermon 
 and the almanac, without a reading class. In the 
 North the muses were the drudges of religious dog 
 matism ; in the South they had been cast out by the 
 practical goddess of affairs. The mother land fur 
 nished no inspiration; seldom in the history of 
 poetry had the fire burned so low. Freneau in his 
 apprentice days realized the difficulty. He wrote: 
 
 There are few writers of books in this new world, 
 and amongst them very few that deal in works of 
 imagination. In a country which two hundred years 
 ago was peopled only by savages and where the gov- 
 
262 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 ernment has ever in effect been no other than republi 
 can, it is really wonderful that there should be any 
 polite original authors at all in any line, especially when 
 it is considered that according to the common course of 
 things any particular nation or people must have 
 arrived to or rather passed their meridian of opulence 
 and refinement before they consider the possession of 
 the fine arts in any other light than a nuisance to the 
 community. 
 
 America before the Revolution was destitute of 
 even the germs of an original literature, and yet 
 Freneau, with his optimism and fervid republican 
 ism dreamed of an independent American literature. 
 He saw it, however, only in a very distant future. 
 Even after the Revolution we find him confessing 
 that "they [English writers] are excusable in treat 
 ing the American authors as inferiors, a political 
 and a literary independence of a nation being two 
 very different things. The former was accomplished 
 in about seven years and the latter will not be com 
 pletely effected, perhaps, in as many centuries." 
 Before there could be an original American litera 
 ture there must be some great primal impulse that 
 should stir mightily the whole people, that should 
 shake from their hands the old books and the old 
 models, that should arouse them to a true realization 
 of themselves, and that should clear the atmosphere 
 for a new and broader view of human life. Such 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 263 
 
 cataclysms are always needed, but they are often 
 centuries apart. 
 
 Fortunately for America such an upheaval was 
 at hand. It came with appalling suddenness. The 
 colonists had had no gradual preparation for the 
 idea of separation from England. As late as 1775 
 Franklin declared before the House of Commons 
 that in all his journeyings up and down the colonies 
 he had not heard expressed one single wish for in 
 dependence. Even after Concord and Bunker Hill 
 Freneau, the radical, could write: 
 
 Long may Britannia rule our hearts again, 
 Rule as she ruled in George the Second s reign. 
 
 The idea of independence came all in a moment, 
 but once it had come it went with leaps and bounds 
 to extremes. Never in all history has a whole 
 people been lifted by such rapid stages into a region 
 of such vast outlook. We can trace the growth of 
 the new spirit, not decade by decade, but month by 
 month: Justice, Freedom, Independence, and then 
 the radiant vision of perfect Liberty and the Rights 
 of Man, and then, like a torrent, the sense of 
 boundless possibilities and glorious destiny: 
 
 No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, 
 But the whole boundless continent is ours. 
 
 The soul of man, stirred by such ideals and sue- 
 
264 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 cessful in realizing them beyond his dreams, strug 
 gled for utterance. It is such upheavals in human 
 society that make poets and bring outbursts of 
 song and periods in the history of literature. But 
 there was no burst of song in America; instead 
 there followed one of the most pathetic spectacles 
 in literary history a people with a vision that 
 transported them into the clouds, yet powerless 
 through environment and early education to voice 
 that vision in song. The South, thrilled by the 
 new spirit, turned it at once into action, and took 
 the leadership in war and statesmanship. New 
 England lifted up her voice, but she could speak only 
 through the medium of old spiritual conceptions and 
 worn-out poetic forms. A young Connecticut par 
 son, thrilled through and through, poured his en 
 thusiasm into a heroic epic of the wars of Joshua; 
 a brilliant Boston lad would sing of "War and 
 Washington," but he must set it to the tune of 
 Dryden; and a gifted Connecticut satirist, over 
 flowing with the poetic spirit, was content simply 
 to add new American cantos to "Hudibras." With 
 all her rimers and all her inspiration New England 
 gave forth not a single original note. It was a 
 repeating of the old spectacle of a heavenly anthem 
 sung unto shepherds, unto those unable to give it 
 utterance. 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 265 
 
 We see them, however, struggling heroically with 
 the burden. From 1774, when Dwight completed 
 his "Conquest of Canaan," "the first piece of this 
 kind ever attempted in this country," until 1808, 
 which ends the period with Barlow s "Columbiad," 
 the "Polyolbion" of American poetry, the years are 
 strewn thick with the wrecks of epics. Every poet 
 of the era felt his soul burn with epic fire. Charles 
 Brockden Bro\vn when only sixteen had started 
 no less than three of these Homeric efforts; one 
 on the discovery of America and one each on 
 the conquests of Mexico and Peru. It was our 
 heroic era, but it yielded almost nothing of 
 value. 
 
 It was in 1772, at the opening of this age of 
 epics, that Freneau, just graduating from Prince 
 ton, found his first poetic opportunity. Already 
 over his Vergil he had dreamed of Columbus as 
 a greater ^Eneas who had sailed into the pathless 
 West to discover a world and to plant therein seeds 
 of a mightier than Rome, but his work, like all 
 schoolboy epics, had resulted only in fragments 
 which were to strew his earlier volumes. But now 
 commencement was at hand. Here was a chance 
 indeed; here was a theme commensurate with the 
 occasion. Like Milton, he would essay "things un- 
 attempted yet in prose or rhyme" : 
 
266 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Now shall the adventurous Muse attempt a theme 
 More new, more noble, and more flush of fame 
 Than all that went before. 
 
 Never were graduation exercises based on broader 
 foundations. The two young graduates, for he 
 worked in conjunction with his classmate Bracken- 
 ridge, bewail at every step their limitations of space. 
 The plan they suggest is the plan of a "Columbiad." 
 They would begin with all the tale of Columbus; 
 they would rehearse the story of Cortes and Pizarro ; 
 they would discuss at learned length the origin and 
 the characteristics of the Indians ; they would tell the 
 story of the early colonies; and would trace the 
 course of settlement and review the progress and 
 the promise of agriculture and commerce; they 
 would peer into the future and mark the time 
 
 when we shall spread 
 
 Dominion from the North and South and West, 
 Far from the Atlantic to Pacific shores 
 And shackle half the convex of the main. 
 
 But, alas, the time ! An epic cannot be condensed 
 into a graduation poem. Suddenly Freneau (and 
 we must not read the poem from later reprints 
 where the author frankly admits that he has added 
 new lines for "a supposed prophetical anticipation of 
 subsequent events") bursts into true prophetic rap 
 ture. Remember this was in 1775, when the wild 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 267 
 
 Western frontier was almost within sound of the 
 Atlantic : 
 
 I see, I see, 
 
 A thousand kingdoms raised; cities and men 
 Numerous as sand upon the ocean shore. 
 The Ohio soon shall glide by many a town 
 Of note; and where the Mississippi stream, 
 By forest shaded, now runs weeping on, 
 Nations shall grow, and estates not less in fame 
 Than Greece and Rome of old. We too shall boast 
 Our Alexanders, Pompeys, Heroes, Kings, 
 That in the womb of time yet dormant lie, 
 Waiting the joyful hour of life and light, 
 O snatch me hence, ye muses, to those days 
 When through the vail of dark antiquity 
 Our sons shall hear of us as things remote, 
 That blossomed in the morn of days. 
 
 It is not a great poem if we measure it by abso 
 lute standards; but it is a very great poem if we 
 view it in connection with the conditions that pro 
 duced it. Full as it is of Latin influence and com 
 mencement-day zeal, it is the first real poem that 
 America ever made; the first poem that was im 
 pelled hot from a man s soul. It is more than this : 
 it is the first fruit of a new influence in the world 
 of letters the first literary product of that mighty 
 force that set in motion the American and the 
 French Revolutions with all that they mean in human 
 
268 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 history. The poem at times reaches the heights. 
 
 "Alas!" cries the young singer with a ring in his 
 
 voice unknown in English poetry since the "spacious 
 
 days," 
 
 Alas! 
 
 How could I weep that we were born so soon 
 Just in the dawning of these mighty times 
 Whose scenes are painting for eternity. 
 
 Here at last is an inspired and original singer in 
 the wilderness of the New World; here at last is 
 a poet who can voice for humanity the new message 
 from free-aired America. 
 
 ill 
 
 It is significant that this earliest poet should have 
 come from the middle colonies. He was neither 
 Puritan nor Cavalier. He had inherited with his 
 Huguenot blood an intense love for liberty, religious 
 as well as civil, a taste for the bright and beautiful, 
 a vivacious imagination, a sensitive, excitable nature 
 that longed for variety and found delight in move 
 ment, and a sturdy self-reliance and independence 
 that made him unwilling long to follow the lead of 
 another. "If fortune," he writes in his young man 
 hood, "or the ill taste of the public compell you 
 ever to turn shallopman on the Delaware, let it be 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 269 
 
 your first care to have command of the boat. * 
 There was nothing in the boy s early environment 
 and training to repress this fearless, beauty-loving 
 spirit. New York, where he was born in January, 
 1752, was to a degree neutral territory between 
 the extremes of the North and the South. The 
 father, a wine-merchant in easy circumstances, had 
 filled his home with books and refinement, and had 
 looked carefully to the education of his children. 
 At fifteen Freneau was so well prepared for Prince 
 ton that the president sent to his parents a special 
 letter of congratulation. 
 
 The young student s instincts were refined and 
 scholarly. There are evidences that he read while 
 in college nearly all the English poets. When he 
 first began to write verses for himself we do not 
 know. It was certainly early; when we catch our 
 first certain glimpses of the youth, poetry has be 
 come with him a passion and almost a vocation. 
 As early as 1768 we find him making a poetic para 
 phrase of the book of Jonah, in the orthodox manner 
 and measure of Pope, to be sure, but remarkably 
 sustained and finished for the work of a freshman. 
 A little later he tried his hand at a more original 
 task, a piece of characterization and local color, 
 "The Village Merchant," a poem so good that 
 twenty-six years later he deemed it worthy of sepa 
 rate publication. As his college course progressed 
 
270 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 his themes became more ambitious. He made in 
 blank verse a poem on "The Pyramids of Egypt"; 
 charmed with "L Allegro" and "II Penseroso," he 
 repeated their sweet music in "The Ode to Fancy" 
 and "The Citizen s Resolve," the most fanciful and 
 genuinely poetic lyrics that up to the time had 
 sprung from American soil. Then as he read in his 
 Seneca the prophetic words which he has translated 
 in his "Columbus and Ferdinand" : 
 
 The time shall come when numerous years are past, 
 The ocean shall dissolve the hand of things 
 And an extended region rise at last ; 
 
 And Typhis shall disclose the mighty land 
 Far, far away where none have roved before, 
 Nor shall the world s remotest region be 
 Gibraltar s rock or Thule s savage shore, 
 
 he napped out an epic of the New World. "Co 
 lumbus to Ferdinand," "The Antiquity of America," 
 "Discovery," "Pictures of Columbus," and, last of 
 all, the brilliant "Rising Glory of America," that 
 epic prelude, are but the scattered and distorted 
 wreckage of this glorious vision. Thus did the 
 poet serve his apprenticeship; thus singing did he 
 go from college into the world. 
 
 So far Freneau had seen life only at a distance, 
 through the medium of his books. His next per 
 iod was one of disillusion. Unable at once to study 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 271 
 
 a profession he became a private tutor, but after 
 an experience of thirteen days he made his escape, 
 and late in 1772 went to Somerset County, Mary 
 land, to assist his classmate Brackenridge with his 
 little academy. From this exile he writes Madison : 
 "I have printed a poem in New York called The 
 American Village/ containing about four hundred 
 lines, also a few short pieces ... as to the main 
 poem, it is damned by all good and judicious judges. 
 My name is in the title page." He is full of po 
 etical plans; poetry is his real vocation. "I am 
 now reading physic at my leisure hours, that is when 
 I am neither sleeping, hearing classes or writing 
 poetry, for these three take up all my time." Every 
 thing but poesy is distasteful ; teaching he abomi 
 nates. "It worries me to death and by no means 
 suits my giddy wandering brain. . . . We have 
 about thirty students in this academy who prey 
 upon me like leaches. When shall I leave this 
 whimpering pack and hide my head in Acomack?" 
 The book * damned by all good and judicious 
 judges" has been "lost," as Freneau expressed it, "in 
 the lumber of forgotten things." Only a single 
 mutilated copy survives to testify that it was the 
 honest work of a true poet, one who was not 
 ashamed to put his name on the title-page. Its 
 freshness and originality were doubtless its doom. 
 The age, as Wordsworth was to learn twenty years 
 
272 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 later, was unaccustomed to pictures of homely things 
 made with the eye upon the object. Gradually the 
 young poet awoke to the realization of his situation : 
 America was unprepared for her prophet ; she would 
 not listen to him. The discovery shocked and em 
 bittered him. "Barbers cannot possibly exist as 
 such," he writes, "among a people who have neither 
 hair nor beards. How then can a poet hope for 
 success in a city where there are not three persons 
 possessed of elegant ideas?" Again in his clever 
 tale of the sick author, who recounts in what we 
 to-day recognize as the true Stocktonian manner the 
 various transmigrations olf )his soul during the 
 centuries, he writes : 
 
 I remember I wrote poetry as long ago as in the 
 reign of Ezra-bel-haraden, one of the most ancient 
 kings of Persia. ... I have been a drayman s horse, 
 a Jamaica s field negro, a sailor in an English man- 
 of-war, and last of all, to complete my misery, am 
 now doing penance as an American poet. What will 
 become of me next I cannot yet tell. Certain, I am, 
 however, that be the change what it may, it cannot be 
 very much for the worse. 
 
 He ever dreamed of seeking more congenial regions : 
 
 Long I have sat on this disastrous shore 
 
 And sighing, sought to gain a passage o er 
 
 To Europe s towers, where, as our travellers say, 
 
 Poets may flourish, or, perhaps they may. 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 273 
 
 For a year or more Freneau s pen was dipped in 
 vinegar. His intense hatred of oppression, his 
 anger at the insolence of the British at Boston, his 
 bitterness of soul, all combined to fill him with a 
 kind of berserker rage. During the autumn of 
 1775 sarcasm and satire fairly rolled from his pen. 
 The patriots were delighted; here was something 
 they could appreciate. To this day Freneau is re 
 membered chiefly on account of this work. In 
 August and September he wrote no less than six 
 long poems, four or five of which were issued at 
 short intervals as pamphlets. It is worthy of note, 
 however, that to none of these hasty outpourings 
 did the poet affix his name. 
 
 IV 
 
 This first period of satire was cut short late in 
 1775 by a business venture which took the poet to 
 the West Indies. "Mac Swiggen," his valedictory 
 to the public and to his critics, is worthy of the pen 
 that in later years produced "English Bards and 
 Scotch Reviewers." There is real pathos in its 
 closing lines : 
 
 I to the sea with weary steps descend, 
 
 Quit the mean conquest that such swine must yield 
 
 And leave Mac Swiggen to enjoy the field. 
 
274* Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 In distant isles some happier scene I ll choose 
 And court in softer shades the unwilling Muse. 
 
 The change was a salutary one. Amid the novel 
 scenery and dreamy beauty of the tropics, Freneau 
 forgot his rage, forgot the narrow carping of his 
 critics, and the bitterness of his soul. During the 
 next year and more he did his strongest and most 
 enduring work. "The Beauties of Santa Cruz," 
 "The House of Night," and "The Jamaica Funeral," 
 all written during this auspicious interval, give us 
 the true measure of Freneau s power. 
 
 In "Santa Cruz" he pours out his first rapture 
 over the tropic isles. The teeming vegetation, the 
 novel plant forms the mangrove, the palmetto, the 
 tamarind the luscious fruit and brilliant flowers, 
 the sudden and fierce hurricanes, the sensuous 
 beauty of the southern night when 
 
 The drowsy pelican wings home his way 
 The misty eve sits heavy on the sea, 
 
 thrilled him and stirred within him all that was 
 poetic. "Surely," he cries, "such were the isles that 
 happy Flaccus sung," and again, 
 
 O grant me, gods, if yet condemned to stray, 
 At least to spend life s sober evening here. 
 
 The summer isles "betwixt old Cancer and the mid 
 way line" have never had a more inspired laureate ; 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 275 
 
 to this day "Santa Cruz" is the noblest song ever 
 called forth by the West Indies. 
 
 Freneau now entered the region of pure inven 
 tion. With his "House of Night" he became one 
 of the earliest pioneers in that dimly-lighted region 
 which was soon to be exploited by Coleridge and 
 Poe. The poem is the first distinctly romantic note 
 heard in America. Moreover, one may search in 
 vain in the English poetry of the early romantic 
 movement for anything that can equal it in strength 
 of conception and in sustained mastery over the 
 vaguely terrible. It is a "vision of the midnight 
 hour," in which the poet is led to a mysterious 
 "dome" where he becomes, despite himself, a wit 
 ness of the death of the grim monster Death him 
 self. The atmosphere of the poem is vague and 
 awful. The page that recounts the poet s depar 
 ture from the house of night quaking with fear 
 
 Beneath my feet substantial darkness lay 
 
 And screams were heard from the distempered ground, 
 
 his timid look behind him to find the windows of 
 the infernal dome a "flaming hell-red," the fear 
 ful shrieks of the dying monster within the walls, 
 the "hell- red wandering light" that led to the graves, 
 the sudden boom of the sexton s bell above him, and 
 then the troop of specters galloping fiercely on 
 Death s horses, while "their busy eyes shot terror 
 
276 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 to my soul" all this shows the power of the man 
 and what he might have been had he lived in a 
 literary atmosphere with competent criticism to 
 guide him. As a product of pure imagination the 
 poem is most remarkable, especially when we view 
 it in connection with the English literature of its 
 day. In its weird supernaturalism it anticipated 
 Scott, and in its early atmosphere of unrelieved 
 horror it clearly anticipated Coleridge. 
 
 In The Jamaica Funeral" Freneau outlines his 
 early philosophy of life. The poet is growing 
 in power and is fast breaking from the influence 
 of Gray, his early master. It is a Gallic philosophy 
 that he outlines; he is becoming infected with 
 Deism; he is a true bacchanalian. Is there not a 
 ring of the "Rubaiyat" in a stanza like this : 
 
 Count all the trees that crown Jamaica s hills, 
 Count all the stars that through the heavens you see, 
 Count every drop that the wide ocean fills 
 Then count the pleasures Bacchus yields to me. 
 
 Freneau s second period of satire began after his 
 confinement in the British prison-ships during the 
 summer of 1780. The experience aroused within 
 him a fury of indignation which he poured out with 
 hot pen. In a bitter, passionate fury he bade fare- 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 277 
 
 well to the muse of his choice and turned to the 
 sterner muse of satire who alone could "suit the 
 taste." During the next three years he wrote the 
 greater number of those satires and songs which 
 have earned for him the title of "Poet of the Revo 
 lution." Every movement of "the insolent foe" 
 called out a scathing criticism ; every heroic deed 
 of the struggling patriots called out a lyric. His 
 poems of this period are in themselves a history 
 of the last years of the war. His heart was in 
 his work ; the prison-ship had blotted for a time all 
 memories of the old bitterness, his early dreams, 
 everything save the one thought of his "injured 
 country s woe." He lampooned without mercy 
 Cornwallis, Clinton, Carleton, and the Royalist 
 printers, Rivington and Gaine. He sang tender 
 lyrics of the patriot dead at Eutaw Springs who 
 
 saw their injured Country s woe; 
 The flaming town, the wasted field; 
 Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; 
 They took the spear but left the shield. 
 
 He celebrated the naval victories of Barney and of 
 Jones, and he called down maledictions on the ship 
 that bore the "worthless Arnold" from American 
 shores. It is interesting in these days after our 
 war with Germany to find Freneau s opinion of the 
 Teutonic troops that fought against the patriots 
 
278 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 during the Revolution. He was unsparing in his 
 denunciation. They are "the slaves of kings," 
 "brutish," "stupid," "smit with the love of coun 
 tries not their own." They are drunkards "drink 
 ing from German sculls old Odin s beer." They 
 are worse than this. For troops with which to con 
 quer republican America the despot George 
 
 His phrenzy rampant with the right divine, 
 Explored the ancient world, to chain the new, 
 And tired, the despot searched each dark recess 
 And ransacked hell, to find the hireling Hesse. 
 
 Freneau had personal experience of German Kultur. 
 When a prisoner on the Hunter hospital ship he 
 was attended by a Hessian surgeon, who was the 
 only medical man the hundreds of sick prisoners 
 were allowed. 
 
 Fair science never called the wretch her son, 
 And art disdained the stupid man to own. 
 
 This doctor s treatment was heroic. "-Nostrums 
 from hell" he poured out in indiscriminating pro 
 fusion. 
 
 On those refusing he bestowed a kick, 
 Or menaced vengeance with his walking-stick; 
 Here uncontrolled he exercised his trade, 
 And grew experienced by the deaths he made ; 
 By frequent blows we from his cane endured 
 He killed at least as many as he cured. 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 279 
 
 In his prose narrative of his life on the prison ship 
 Freneau is still more specific. One night three of 
 the prisoners made their escape in the ship s boat. 
 
 This occasioned new trouble. The doctor refused 
 to come on board, and as he rowed past us next morn 
 ing to see somebody in the Jersey, which lay near us, 
 some of the sick calling to him for blisters, he told 
 them to put tar on their backs, which would serve as 
 well as anything, and so rowed away. However, 
 after two or three days his wrath was appeased, and 
 he deigned to come on board again. 
 
 And he the sole doctor for a hospital full of pa 
 tients, the most of them critically ill. 
 
 These are more than the fleeting voices of a 
 newspaper muse. Scott declared that "Eutaw 
 Springs" was "as fine a thing as there is of the 
 kind in the language." "The Memorable Victory 
 of Paul Jones," written when America was full of 
 the first news of the battle, is one of the glories of 
 American literature. Longfellow or Whittier never 
 wrote a more stirring ballad. It moves with leaps 
 and bounds; it is full of the very spirit of the battle. 
 
 She felt the fury of her ball, 
 Down, prostrate down, the Britons fall. 
 The decks are strew d with slain, 
 Jones to the foe his vessel lashed 
 And while the black artillery flashed 
 Loud thunders shook the main. 
 
280 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 It is not impertinent to observe that Thomas Camp 
 bell was but four years of age when this appeared. 
 
 This stirring lyric, with half a dozen more equally 
 spirited, makes Freneau not only the earliest but 
 in many respects the strongest of American naval 
 lyrists. In dash and fire, in ability to catch and 
 reproduce the odors and the atmosphere o,f the 
 ocean, in enthusiasm and excitement that is con 
 tagious and that plunges the reader at once into the 
 heart of the action, and in glowing patriotism that 
 makes the poems national hymns, no American poet 
 has excelled this earliest singer of the American 
 ocean. Campbell in later years excelled Freneau 
 as a poet of battle on the sea, but it was the elder 
 singer who furnished him his inspiration and taught 
 him the possibilities of the ocean as domain for po 
 etry. Freneau was the pioneer. That Campbell 
 read many of his poems we know, and that he even 
 took from them at least one whole line, without 
 acknowledging the theft, is all too evident. 
 
 It is to be regretted that these stirring naval 
 lyrics have been so long lost and forgotten. No 
 true American can read without a thrill of pride 
 and of patriotism such songs as Captain Jones 
 Invitation" and "The Death of Captain Biddle," the 
 intrepid seaman who from the Randolph poured 
 death into the British ship 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 281 
 
 Tremendous flash ! and hark, the ball 
 
 Drives through old Yarmouth, flames and all, 
 
 and then at the moment or victory was blown up 
 by his own magazine; or again "Stanzas on the 
 New Frigate Alliance/ the gallant ship "who walks 
 the ocean like its queen" and "Guards her native 
 shore," and "Barney s Victory over the General 
 Monk," that rollicking song of battle and of tri 
 umph, and best of all, perhaps, "The Sailor s In 
 vitation," which is full of the very salt and vigor 
 of the western seas. It was not Scott or Cooper 
 that added the domain of the ocean to literature; it 
 was Freneau. His books are full of the roar and 
 the sweep of the ocean, which he knew as the 
 farmer knows his ancestral acres. There is no more 
 true and vigorous picture of an ocean voyage and a 
 naval combat than that contained in Canto I of "The 
 British Prison Ship." The episode of the boat 
 swain s (fiery prayer just before the confBct is 
 unique in literature. 
 
 VI 
 
 The Revolution over, Freneau, after following 
 with stinging invective the departing foe and after 
 showering with ridicule and scorn Rivington and 
 
282 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Gaine and the discomfited Royalists, found his oc 
 cupation gone. The impetuous tide of his hate 
 and his outraged sense of justice and of freedom 
 had made him for a time forget his early dreams. 
 He had realized keenly that no poet can build a 
 permanent fame upon satire, and yet to serve his 
 injured country he would w^eld no other pen. 
 The enemy vanquished, there was no more need for 
 satire. But his countrymen, delighting in the bit 
 ing sarcasm and the hard blows which they could 
 fully appreciate and enjoy, demanded more. Fre- 
 neau turned upon them with bitterness : "For men 
 I keep a pen," he cried, "for dogs a cane!" He 
 would use the cane no more. But who would listen 
 to aught but rant and ridicule; who had ears to 
 appreciate anything else? Fate had thrown him in 
 to "a bard-baiting clime." A wave of the old bitter 
 ness swept over him : 
 
 Expect not in these times of rude renown 
 
 That verse like yours will have the chance to please: 
 
 No taste for plaintive elegy is known 
 
 Nor lyric ode none care for things like these. 
 
 He would leave, even as he left in 1776, so 
 cheerless an environment. Business again called 
 him from his country; he became the captain of a 
 coasting vessel plying between New York and 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 283 
 
 Southern ports. There is in his second farewell 
 to the muse a note of real pathos : 
 
 Then, Sylvius, come let you and I 
 On Ocean s aid once more rely, 
 Perhaps the Muse may still impart 
 Her balm to ease the aching heart. 
 Though cold may chill and storms dismay 
 Yet Zoilus will be far away. 
 
 Thereupon he became our poet of the sea. For 
 years he was a captain on the Atlantic, wrecked time 
 and again during voyages to the Southern ports 
 and the West Indies. No poems written in America 
 are so full of the very presence and soul of the 
 ocean. When one reads his "The Hurricane," for 
 instance, first published with the title "Verses made 
 at Sea in a Heavy Gale," knowing from the foot 
 note that "Captain Freneau s ship survived the vio 
 lent hurricane off Jamaica, July 30, 1784, when no 
 more than eight out of 150 sail of vessels in the 
 ports of Kingston and Port Royal were saved," 
 the poem becomes a living thing. 
 
 The poem "Hatteras" opens with the realistic line : 
 
 In fathoms five, the anchor gone. 
 
 And there is the very roll of the ocean in its broken 
 stanzas : 
 
284 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 The dangerous shoal, that breaks the wave 
 
 In columns to the sky; 
 
 The tempests black, that hourly rave, 
 
 Portend all danger nigh: 
 
 Sad are my dreams on ocean s verge ! 
 
 The Atlantic round me flows, 
 
 Upon whose ancient angry surge 
 
 No traveller finds repose. 
 
 There is vagabond flavor to his very titles, "Stanzas 
 Written at the Foot of Monte Souffriere, near the 
 Town of Basseterre, Guadaloupe," "Stanzas written 
 at the Island of Maderia," "On the Peak of 
 Teneriffe," "Stanzas written in Blackbeard s Castle," 
 "Lines written at Sea," the last with its opening 
 stanza : 
 
 No pleasure on earth can afford such delights 
 As the heavenly view of these tropical nights : 
 The glow of the stars, and the breeze of the sea, 
 Are heaven if heaven on ocean can be. 
 
 And is there not an epigrammatic quality about 
 this nautical summing up of the Bermuda Islands: 
 
 When verging to the height of thirty-two, 
 And east or west you guide the dashy prow; 
 Then fear by night the dangers of this shore, 
 Nature s wild garden, placed in sixty-four. 
 Here many a merchant his lost freight bemoans, 
 And many a gallant ship has laid her bones. 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 285 
 
 VII 
 
 Here was a man equipped by nature for a true 
 poet, a man with a message, yet dwarfed and 
 silenced by his environment. America was not 
 ready for her singer. It took half a century more 
 to make way in the wilderness for the new message 
 that had been whispered to Freneau in his young 
 manhood. Had he been a great world poet he 
 would have been heard despite all difficulties, he 
 would have trampled down the barriers about him 
 and compelled his age to listen, but the task was be 
 yond him. America to this day has produced no 
 poet who single-handed and alone could have per 
 formed such a labor of Hercules. Freneau turned 
 deliberately to the world of affairs and suffered his 
 early dream to fade gradually away. 
 
 In June, 1786, the very year that witnessed the 
 Kilmarnock edition of Burns, there appeared from 
 the press of Francis Bailey of Philadelphia the 
 first collected edition of Freneau s poems. It was 
 published with hesitation; its author was at sea; 
 for more than a year the manuscript had been in 
 the hands of the printer. From his advertisement 
 it appears that his only hope for the success of the 
 volume lay in its satire and songs of the Revolu 
 tion, which, as they had appeared "in newspapers 
 
286 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 and other periodicals in the different states of Amer 
 ica during the late war," had been read with "avid 
 ity and pleasure." 
 
 This volume to this day has never received the 
 consideration which it deserves. It was the first 
 collection of poems deserving of the name ever made 
 by an American poet. But it is far more than a 
 mere bibliographical curiosity; it contained the first 
 germs of true original poetry that America pro 
 duced. It was, moreover, the work of a man who 
 was not content merely to follow, but who left his 
 contemporaries behind and pushed vigorously, 
 though crudely, it must be confessed, into untrodden 
 regions and blazed pathways in the wilderness. 
 Had he like the later Longfellow been allowed to 
 seek the European sources of culture and to live 
 easily in poetic environment, who may tell what 
 would have been the result? 
 
 Had this early volume been an English book, it 
 long ago would have figured largely in the his 
 tories of the romantic and naturalistic movement 
 which resulted in the outburst of song that has 
 marked our present century. That Freneau was 
 a pioneer in the dim, romantic world that was 
 to be explored by Coleridge and Poe no one may 
 doubt who reads his "House of Night" ; that he was 
 a pioneer in the movement that succeeded in throw- 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 287 
 
 ing off the chain forged by Pope is evident from 
 even a cursory examination of his editions. "The 
 Wild Honeysuckle," for instance, which was 
 written in 1786, twelve years before the appearance 
 of the "Lyrical Ballads," is as spontaneous and as 
 free from Pope as anything by Wordsworth. It is 
 a nature lyric written with the eye upon the object, 
 without recollection of other poetry, and it draws 
 from the humble flower a lesson for humanity in 
 the true Wordsworthian manner. Before Freneau, 
 American poetry had been full of the eglantine, the 
 yew, and the Babylonian willow, the nightingale, 
 the lark the flora and the fauna of Hebrew and 
 British bards. Classic English poetry had looked 
 away from the actual landscape and had been about 
 as British in background as the "Eclogues" of 
 Vergil. In Freneau we find for the first time 
 the actual life of the American forest the wild 
 pink, the elm, the wild honeysuckle, the pumpkin, 
 the blackbird, the squirrel, the "loquacious whip- 
 poor-will" and in addition to this the varied 
 life of the American tropic islands. We find 
 for the first time examples of that true poetic 
 spirit that could find poetry in humble and even 
 vulgar things; that furthermore, like Burns, could 
 draw from the phenomena of lo\vly nature 
 deep lessons for human life. He sees the 
 
288 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 reflection of the stars in the bosom of the river: 
 
 But when the tide had ebbed away 
 The scene fantastic with it fled. 
 
 A bank of mud around me lay, 
 And sea-weed on the river s bed. 
 
 And from this he draws the obvious moral. Con 
 sider what Pope would have said of mud. Indeed, 
 to appreciate Freneau, one must habituate one s 
 self to the atmosphere of the classic age and view 
 things from the classic point of view. Whether 
 Freneau influenced the school of poets who in Eng 
 land broke away from the eighteenth century meth 
 ods it is useless to ask. We may observe, however, 
 that Freneau s poems were known and read freely 
 in England at the dawn of the critical period in 
 British poetry, and that even Scott could "lift" 
 without comment a whole line from one of them. 
 In his use of his native land and his familiar sur 
 roundings as a background for art Freneau dis 
 covered the poetical side of the Indian, and thus 
 became the literary father of Brockden Brown, 
 Cooper, and the little school of poetry which in the 
 early years of the century fondly believed that the 
 aboriginal American was to be the central figure in 
 the poetry of the New World. To the little real 
 poetry that there is in the Indian, Freneau did full 
 justice. He went, however, to no such absurd 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 289 
 
 lengths as did Cooper and Eastburn and Whittier. 
 His "Indian Death Song" if the poem indeed be 
 his which is full of the wild, stoical heroism of 
 the brave who is dying beneath the torture of his 
 enemies, makes all that is possible of the theme. 
 There has been no more true and poetic rendering 
 of this distinctly American phase of human char 
 acter. In "The Indian Student" he has done justice 
 to the Indian s love for the forest and to the un 
 tamable wildness of his nature. "The Dying 
 Indian" and "The Indian Burying Ground" sum 
 up all that is poetic in Indian legend and all that is 
 pathetic in the fate of the vanishing race. Poetry, 
 if it is to confine itself to the truth, can do little 
 mor<e for the Indian. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Such was Philip Freneau, a man in every respect 
 worthy to bear the title "father of American 
 poetry." He was the first true poet born upon our 
 our continent; he realized in his early youth his 
 true vocation; he gave himself with vigor and en 
 thusiasm to his calling; he fitted himself with wide 
 reading and classic culture; he received the full 
 inspiration of a great movement in human society ; 
 he lifted up his voice to sing, but he was smothered 
 and silenced by his contemporaries. He was all 
 
290 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 alone; he had about him no circle of "Pleiades" to 
 encourage and assist; he had no traditions behind 
 him that would compel silence. He was out of 
 step with the theology of his generation; he was 
 out of tune with the music of his day ; he was beat 
 ing time ha lf a century ahead of the chorus about 
 him. The people have to be educated to revolution, 
 and America had not yet learned to take the ini 
 tiative in things intellectual and esthetic. She 
 must follow the literary fashions beyond the sea. 
 Freneau was for breaking violently from England 
 and for setting up a new standard of culture and 
 literary art on this side of the water. 
 
 Can we never be thought 
 To have learning or grace, 
 Unless it be brought 
 From that damnable place? 
 
 But he reckoned without his countrymen. Not 
 until Emerson s day did it dawn upon Amercia 
 that it was possible for her to think for herself and 
 make poetry that did not echo the bards of England. 
 Thus did America reject her earliest poet; thus did 
 she stop her ears and compel him to lay aside his 
 seven-stringed lyre for the horn and the bagpipes. 
 
 Freneau lived to see his discarded harp in full 
 tune in other hands, first in England and then in 
 his own land. There is something pathetic in the 
 
The Modernness of Philip Freneau 291 
 
 figure of the old minstrel who had realized almost 
 nothing of his early dream and yet who had been 
 told by the great Jeffries that the time would surely 
 come when his poems would command a com 
 mentator like Gray, who had been extravagantly 
 praised by such masters as Scott and Campbell, who 
 had written to Madison as late as 1815, "my 
 publisher tells me the town will have them [his 
 verses] and of course have them they will" it is 
 pathetic to see this poet in his hoary old age, for 
 he lived until 1832, realizing that he had been ut 
 terly forgotten, witnessing the triumph of the very 
 songs that had haunted his youth, and seeing those 
 who had not half his own native ability crowned 
 by those who had rejected and forgotten* -him. 
 
 America has been unjust to Freneau. For a 
 century she left his poems in their first editions, 
 which are now rare and costly; she scattered his 
 letters and papers to the winds; she garbled and 
 distorted his life in every book of reference and 
 left untold the true story of his career. The present 
 generation knows him only as "the poet of the Rev 
 olution," and they dismiss him unread with the flip 
 pant criticism that he was a hasty and slipshod 
 maker of newspaper verse nearly all of which has 
 reached a deserved oblivion. That this is unjust 
 and unfounded every one who has read Freneau can 
 bear witness. He was a scholar of real attain- 
 
292 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 ments; he was a critic with discernment; he was a 
 conscientious workman. That he labored upon his 
 lines with care can be proved by following the 
 thoughtful changes in his different editions; that he 
 followed poetry with all the passion of a Poe there 
 is abundant proof; that he regarded his satires and 
 his jingles as a poetic avocation is written all over 
 his literary remains; and that he was forced to 
 abandon the muse of his choice we have attempted 
 to show. There are few sadder spectacles in our 
 literary history than the old poet deliberately 
 abandoning the dream of his youth, and cutting 
 from his later volumes the greater part of such 
 lyrics as "The House of Night" and The Jamaica 
 Funeral" because a crude public would not under 
 stand and tolerate. But time works slowly with 
 her verdicts ; true merit in the end is sure to receive 
 its deserts, and Freneau may even yet be given the 
 place that is his. 
 
THE CENTENARY OF BRYANT S 
 POETRY 
 
 THE publication of Bryant s first significant book, 
 "Poems by William Cullen Bryant," Cambridge, 
 Massachusetts, 1821, a thin little volume of forty- 
 eight pages, containing "The Ages," "To a Water 
 fowl," "Translation of a Fragment of Simonides," 
 "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," "The 
 Yellow Violet," "Song," "Green River," and 
 "Thanatopsis," marks the beginning of classic 
 American poetry. So often has this been repeated 
 in the text-books, and so continually has it been 
 iterated in the schools, that it has become for all of 
 us an axiom to be accepted without question. But 
 with the present year has come a new sensation. 
 The book is now entering upon its second century. 
 The first undisputed American classic has outlasted 
 three generations : American poetry is now of age. 
 
 The American short story, if we count "Rip 
 Van Winkle" as the earliest specimen, celebrated 
 its centennial in 1919; the American novel, if we 
 count "The Spy" as the beginning, became of age 
 
 293 
 
294 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 in 1921, but somehow Bryant seems farther away 
 from us than Irving though Irving died in 1859, and 
 farther away than Cooper though he died in 1851. 
 Bryant is our oldest classic American writer in a pe 
 culiar sense. It is now over forty years since he 
 died, the measure of a generation, but at the time of 
 his death he had lived for half a century beyond 
 the period of his really distinctive work. As a 
 poet he sprang into fame as early as 1817, and from 
 that point on there was not a time when he was not 
 rated among the greatest of American poets. Our 
 grandfathers and great-grandfathers settled it that 
 he was a classic. During the lifetime of us all he 
 has been a half-mythical figure, a patriarchal en 
 graving on the walls of schoolhouses. The poems , 
 we associate with his name seem the appro 
 priate work of such a bard : contemplations of death, 
 peerings into the abysmal gulfs of time, Druidic 
 meditations amid the ancient forests. He has been 
 our bardic figure, the hoary-bearded gleeman of our 
 period of origins, our half-mythical Homer. It has 
 seemed to throw back the beginnings of our poetry 
 into a region primeval ; it has given it an atmosphere 
 more mellow than we could have deemed possible. 
 With a century of perspective we may begin to 
 speak now with confidence. The contemporary 
 jealousies, ambitions, friendships, have been forgot 
 ten; the claques of the Percivals, the Hallecks, the 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 295 
 
 Pierponts, the Danas have passed completely into 
 oblivion ; the extravagant overpraisings of the early 
 editors like Stoddard have been reduced to real 
 Value one may now see over the underbrush. 
 What of William Cullen Bryant after a century of 
 his work? 
 
 ii 
 
 Criticism of Bryant must begin always with the 
 statement that he was a New Englander. In his 
 poetic product and in none other is he distinctive 
 he is no more to be classed as a Knickerbocker 
 than is Whittier. He was a descendant of Puritans 
 in unbroken lines, the best blood of New England 
 the Aldens, Bryants, Howards, Ameses, Harrises, 
 Haywards, Kieths, Mitchells, Packards, Snells, 
 Washburns English with a mixture of Cal- 
 vinistic Scotch. The family early had moved from 
 the Massachusetts Bay environment westward into 
 the mountains. When Bryant was born, it was at 
 Cummington in the Berkshires on a farm more 
 remote from city influences than even Whittier s. 
 It was a Puritan home of the older type, a survival. 
 Puritanism we know died first at the large centers; 
 it persisted in all its primitive sternness and auster 
 ity for a generation or two more in the remoter 
 valleys and quieter villages; lingered indeed far 
 
296 Side -Lights on American Literature 
 
 down into the last century when it faded out. Bryant 
 was the last conspicuous example of it: the last 
 of the Puritans. 
 
 To understand him at all one must study the 
 home in which he was reared, the household of his 
 grandfather Snell in which were passed those im 
 pressionable years that molded him. Here an at 
 mosphere sternly Calvinistic: the Bible read aloud 
 in solemn tones ; prayers morning and evening ring 
 ing always with the fervid poetic diction and the 
 resonant doom notes of Hebrew prophets. One 
 solemn petition, reiterated daily, filled the childish 
 imagination with something like terror: "Let not 
 our feet stumble on the dark mountains of eternal 
 death." He was nurtured upon Watts s psalms and 
 hymns, repeating with unction at three "with his 
 book in my hand and with such gestures as were 
 prescribed for me" such tremendous stanzas as 
 
 Spare us, O Lord! aloud we pray; 
 
 Nor let our sun go down at noon; 
 Thy years are one eternal day, 
 
 And must thy children die so soon? 
 
 The boy pleased the grim Puritan grandfather. 
 At ten he received from him a ninepenny piece for a 
 rimed version of the first chapter of Job. Re 
 warded thus, he proceeded to paraphrase the one 
 hundred and fourth Psalm. Storm and stress of 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 297 
 
 soul came before his teens. The prayer of the 
 publican in the New Testament was often in my 
 mouth, and I heard every variety of prayer at the 
 Sunday evening services conducted by laymen in 
 private houses." Before him always was the iron 
 grandfather: "I can hardly find words to express 
 the awe in which I stood of him." 
 
 But there was another influence in the home. 
 The version of Job, rewarded by the grandfather 
 because of its piety, was condemned by the father 
 because of its poetic crudity. The father had 
 tastes which one would hardly expect to find in that 
 austere environment. He had been at Harvard for 
 a time, he had received medical instruction from the 
 famous French exile Laprilete, he had been surgeon 
 of a merchant vessel, had been detained a year 
 among the French of the West Indies, had sailed to 
 the East Indies and rounded the Cape of Good Hope 
 where he had suffered shipwreck stormy petrel, 
 indeed, in the remote Berkshire village. He brought 
 a whiff of the world French, which he read and 
 spoke with fluency, polished manners, fastidiousness 
 in dress, religious broadness that went even to Uni- 
 tarianism, and, most important of all as we see it 
 to-day, a taste for the refinements of art and litera 
 ture that manifested itself in new books added to 
 the primitive Watts and Milton and Bunyan of the 
 family store: Pope s "Iliad," Thomson, Gold- 
 
298 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 smith, Cowper indeed Volumes of most of the 
 eminent English poets." "He wrote verses him 
 self," his son goes on, "mostly humorous and satir 
 ical. He was not unskilled in Latin poetry, in 
 which the odes of Horace were his favorites. He 
 was fond of music, played on the violin, and I re 
 member hearing him say that he once made a bass 
 viol." 
 
 The young Bryant was fragile, precocious, over- 
 intellectual, predisposed to consumption, the grim 
 specter of which haunted him even into manhood 
 like a foreboding of death. His little sister faded 
 and died during that home period of his life when 
 every emotion stamps the soul. Everything his 
 puritanical environment, his frail hold upon the 
 physical, his reading in the elegiac school of poets: 
 Young, Gray, Parnell, Blair all inclined him to 
 meditation, melancholy, poetic thought. 
 
 He appears never to have had a boyhood. Never 
 in his recollection was there a time when he was not 
 pointed out as the writer of remarkable poetry. 
 As a child he declaimed original verse as a school 
 exercise ; at thirteen he was the author of a book so 
 successful sad stuff now that a second and en 
 larged edition was printed, at fourteen he was pre 
 paring for college under the tutelage of his grand 
 father s brother, another grim Puritan, who drove 
 the boy mercilessly, allowing not a moment for 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 299 
 
 play, through interminable Latin : in eight months 
 through the "Colloquies" of Corderius, all of Vergil, 
 the "Orations" of Cicero, and the New Testament 
 in Latin. Then came the Greek under another in 
 flexible divine : the Rev. Mr. Hallack. 
 
 I was early at my task in the morning, and kept on 
 till bedtime; at night I dreamed of Greek, and my 
 first thought in the morning was of my lesson for the 
 day. At the end of two calendar months I knew 
 the Greek New Testament from end to end almost 
 as if it had been English. 
 
 At fifteen he entered the sophomore class at 
 Williams, and after two terms he left, dissatisfied 
 with the intellectual standards of the college. Such 
 was the boy Bryant. 
 
 His hopes of attending Yale disappointed by 
 financial conditions at home, he spent the autumn 
 unsettled. Now it was that his father brought him 
 from Boston Southey s "Remains of Henry Kirke 
 White" red-letter day for the young poet. Here 
 was a kindred soul, a genius stricken with consump 
 tion before life had fairly opened, and crying out in 
 agony of spirit. "I read the poems with great eager 
 ness and so often that I committed several of them 
 to memory, particularly the ode to the Rosemary." 
 Strange choice it would seem now. Here is the 
 opening stanza : 
 
300 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Sweet scented flower! who art wont to bloom 
 
 On January s front severe, 
 
 And o er the wintery desert drear 
 To waft thy waste perfume! 
 Come, thou shalt form my nosegay now, 
 And I will bind thee round my brow ; 
 
 And as I twine the mournful wreath, 
 I 11 weave a melancholy song ; 
 And sweet the strain shall be, and long, 
 
 The melody of death. 
 
 Kirke White as we read him today has little 
 save his sentimental melancholy and his echoes of 
 earlier music Milton, Cowley, Thomson, Young 
 but to the young Berkshire Piiritan who had 
 been reared in daily contemplation of death and 
 who felt that he too was early for the tomb, he was 
 a twin soul. His declamatory, "Thanatopsis"-like 
 poem "Time," his lyric "To an Early Primrose" 
 suggestive of "The Yellow Violet" to come, his 
 titles "Thanatos" and "Athanatos," all had their 
 effect upon the maturing poet. 
 
 There were other influences. "I remember read 
 ing, at that time, that remarkable poem, Blair s 
 Grave/ and dwelling with pleasure upon its finer 
 passages. I had the opportunity of comparing it 
 with a poem on a kindred subject, also in blank 
 verse, that of Bishop Porteus on Death " strange 
 field of study for youth of sixteen. Other books 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 301 
 
 he found : "a thin volume of the miscellaneous poems 
 of Southey," and Cowper, whom he studied anew. 
 "I now passed from his shorter poems, which are 
 generally mere rhymed prose, to his Task, the finer 
 passages of which supplied a form of blank verse 
 that captivated my admiration." 
 
 The autobiography ends here, but enough is given 
 to explain the early Bryant : his Puritan soul with 
 its brooding sense of death; the melancholy pathos 
 of Kirke White; the resonant funereal declamation 
 of Blair, notably in such passages as that beginning, 
 
 What is this world? 
 What but a spacious burial field unwalled? 
 
 and, finally, the easy naturalness of Cowper s blank 
 verse. That the young student, aware as he must 
 have been of his own powers, should be trying 
 his pen as he pored ov^er his masters, was inevitable. 
 At some time during the period he made an attempt 
 of his own, an exercise we may call it several at 
 tempts indeed and stowed them away in his desk 
 uncompleted to be elaborated some time perchance 
 into finished wholes. 
 
 in 
 
 The time had come to leave Latin and Greek and 
 poetry. Literature as a profession was impossible 
 in America. "Some men of taste and learning 
 
302 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 amongst us," to quote his words in 1818, "might oc 
 casionally amuse their leisure with poetical trifles," 
 but with Bryant there could be no divided allegiance. 
 The crisis of his life was upon him. What strug 
 gles he passed through we do not know: there are 
 no self-revealing letters as in Longfellow s case. 
 We know only that he chose the law and that he 
 gave himself to it with all the Puritan earnestness 
 that formerly he had given to his college prepara 
 tion. His poem "To a Friend on His Marriage," 
 published in "The North American Review" in 
 1818 and manifestly written during the period of 
 his legal studies, indicates that he deliberately aban 
 doned the muses. He turned to his "harp, neg 
 lected long," only to celebrate a friend s marriage : 
 
 Such be thy days. O er Coke s black letter page, 
 Trimming the lamp at eve, t is mine to pore ; 
 Well pleased to see the venerable sage, 
 Unlock his treasur d wealth of legal lore; 
 And I, that lov d to trace the woods before, 
 And climb the hill a play mate of the breeze 
 Have vow d to tune the rural lay no more, 
 Have bid my useless classicks sleep at ease, 
 And left the race of bards to scribble, starve and 
 freeze. 
 
 Farewell. When mildly through the naked wood, 
 The clear warm sun effus d a mellow ray ; 
 And livelier health propell d the vital flood, 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 303 
 
 Loitering at large, I pour d the incondite lay, 
 Forgot the cares and business of the day, 
 Forgot the quirks of Lyttleton and Coke, 
 Forgot the public storms, and party fray; 
 And, as the inspiring flame across me broke, 
 To thee the lowly harp, neglected long, I woke. 
 
 When "Thanatopsis" appeared in "The North 
 American Review/ he had completed his four years 
 of legal study, had been admitted to the bar, and 
 had practised law for two years. He was twenty- 
 three years of age and had settled down into his 
 profession with no thought of change. To get 
 the impression that he was toying half-heartedly 
 with the law and that he was scribbling poetry when 
 he should have been studying legal cases, one must 
 neglect all that we know of him. He was grandson 
 of that grim Puritan who had put him in front of 
 him at the hay-raking to rap his heels if he fell 
 behind. Through his whole life he applied himself 
 unreservedly to the duty at hand. 
 
 Literary fame came suddenly and by accident. 
 The story that his father found in his desk frag 
 ments of his earlier poetical exercises and took them 
 to the editors of "The North American Review" 
 bears all the marks of truth. A glance at the poems 
 in their earlier form is convincing. Never would 
 author present his material in such form: the 
 four riming quatrains, boyishly inferior, printed as 
 
304 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 if they were a part of the blank verse fragment, 
 the abrupt beginning and the sudden ending of 
 the main piece as if it were a part wrenched out of 
 a whole, and the second piece without even a title. 
 This latter fragment, afterward to be expanded 
 under the title, "Inscription for the Entrance of a 
 Wood," surely must have been written after reading 
 Southey s collection of "Inscriptions," perhaps after 
 that entitled "For a Tablet on the Banks of a 
 Stream." It reads like the blank verse of the later 
 Bryant : 
 
 Stranger! a while upon this mossy bank 
 
 Recline thee. If the Sun rides high, the breeze 
 
 That loves to ripple o er the rivulet 
 
 Will play around thy brow, and the cool sound 
 
 Of running waters soothe thee. Mark how clear 
 
 They sparkle o er the shallows; and behold, 
 
 Where o er their surface wheels with restless speed 
 
 Yon glossy insect, on the sand below 
 
 How its swift shadow flits. In solitude 
 
 The rivulet is pure, and trees and herbs 
 
 Bend o er its salutary course refreshed ; 
 
 But, passing on amid the haunts of men, 
 
 It finds pollution there, and rolls from thence 
 
 A tainted stream. Seek st thou for Happiness? 
 
 Go, Stranger, sojourn in the woodland cot 
 
 Of Innocence, and thou shalt find her there. 
 
 But exercises though they are, unfinished frag- 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 305 
 
 ments, musings of a young student over his books, 
 they have within them nevertheless the breath of 
 life. As one comes upon them amid the general 
 feebleness of verse in "The North American Re 
 view/ the interminable translations of Boileau s 
 satires into labored heroics, the hackneyed transla 
 tions from Horace, the effusions like "Hope and 
 Memory" and "The Cyprian Queen," and the pom 
 pous ode in schoolboy Latin, it is like coming upon 
 a cold spring in the illimitable desert. One who ap 
 proaches them, however, in this setting will learn a 
 secret secret at least to the authors of text 
 books: the poems as we have them to-day have 
 suffered change until they are almost new creations. 
 To call "Thanatopsis" an example of precocity is 
 foolishness. The original piece is a fragment echo 
 ing the spirit of Kirke White s "Time"; but the 
 later "Thanatopsis" is a vital unit. Its soul was 
 not given it until 1821 when the poet was twenty- 
 seven. When called upon to print his poems after 
 his Harvard rendition of "The Ages," he molded 
 the fragment into a whole, expanding the original 
 forty-seven lines into eighty-one among the ad 
 ditions the well-known opening and closing parts, 
 the original having opened with the lines 
 
 Yet a few days, and thee 
 The all-beholding sun shall see no more 
 
 and closed with the line 
 
306 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 And make their bed with thee, 
 
 changing the point of view completely, and adding 
 everywhere touches of distinction. 
 
 He had discovered a new master. To Richard 
 H. Dana he once remarked that "upon opening 
 Wordsworth, a thousand springs seemed to gush 
 up at once in his heart, and the face of nature, of 
 a sudden to change into a strange freshness and 
 life." The nature of the change one may see in 
 the additions and the emendations to the original 
 draft of "Thanatopsis." The reflections upon the 
 universality of death become no more sentimental 
 and puritanic, as in the case of Kirke White; they 
 become a part of the great voice of nature. Nature 
 has become a teacher, a comforter, and a religion. 
 
 The emendations everywhere are significant. In 
 the original, for instance, the lines ran: 
 
 Then venerable woods rivers that move 
 In majesty, and the complaining brooks 
 That wind among the meads and make them green. 
 
 In the final version this was expanded to 
 
 Then venerable woods rivers that move 
 In majesty, and the complaining brooks 
 That make the meadows green ; and, poured round all, 
 Old Ocean s gray and melancholy waste. 
 
 In the orginal this : 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 307 
 That veil Oregan, where he hears no sound, 
 was changed to the well-known 
 Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound. 
 
 In the original this : 
 
 Thousands more 
 
 Will share thy destiny. The tittering world 
 Dance on to the grave. The busy brood of care 
 Plod on, and each one chases as before 
 His favorite phantom. 
 
 In the final version significant changes in almost 
 every line: 
 
 All that breathe 
 
 Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh 
 When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care 
 Plod on, and each one as before will chase 
 His favorite phantom. 
 
 The full influence of Wordsworth came later 
 best seen, perhaps, in "A Winter Piece," a poem that 
 without the slightest trace of plagiarism could not 
 have been written by one who had not read Words 
 worth s "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tin- 
 tern Abbey." The heart of Wordsworth s poem is 
 this: 
 
 How oft 
 
 In darkness, and amid the many shapes 
 Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir 
 Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 
 
308 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, 
 
 How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
 
 O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, 
 
 How often has my spirit turned to thee! 
 
 And of Bryant s it is this : 
 
 And when the ills of life 
 
 Had chafed my spirit when the unsteady pulse 
 Beat with strange flutterings I would wander forth 
 And seek the woods. Then sunshine on my path 
 Was to me as a friend. . . . 
 
 . . . Then the chant 
 
 Of birds, and chime of brooks, and soft caress 
 Of the fresh sylvian air, made me forget 
 The thoughts that broke my peace. 
 
 Nature was to both the healer, the pastor, the 
 soothing presence that brought again sanity and 
 joyousness. Bryant never proceeded beyond this 
 conception of nature, but Wordsworth, as we shall 
 see, passed on into larger conceptions and so be 
 came a poet immeasurably larger and immeasurably 
 more prophet-like. 
 
 No man ever achieved poetic fame with less of 
 striving than did Bryant. The fragments of poetry 
 anonymously published in a scholarly literary review 
 could bring no immediate popularity, but they could 
 do what was better for the poet : they could draw 
 the attention of the Boston circle which had in its 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 309 
 
 hands the best that America could offer. The 
 praises of the editors Dana the leading spirit 
 led the young barrister to empty his first portfolio. 
 "Translation of a Fragment of Simonides," "To a 
 Waterfowl," and "To a Friend on His Marriage" 
 appeared in the March, 1818, number. For the 
 July number he was asked to review the Rev. Soly- 
 man Brown s "An Essay on American Poetry," and 
 his response was that careful essay which deserves 
 to be printed as the general introduction to the his 
 tory of nineteenth century American poetry. Until 
 this day there has been no better study of the literary 
 conditions of the early years of the American re 
 public : 
 
 English in our origin, and owing to the character 
 of our birthplace, almost all that we have cause to be 
 proud of in our natures; speaking her language, and 
 reading her literature with the same commonness as 
 if it were our own; boasting of her works of genius 
 in the entire f orgetf ulness that they are not ours ; and 
 defending them with the same earnestness of partiality 
 as if our own reputation were at stake; we seem to 
 have been unmindful that it was possible for us to 
 have a literary character at home and writers of our 
 own to read and admire. We look to England for 
 almost all our learning and entertainment; our met- 
 aphysicks and morals are drawn from her; and for 
 poetry, the common reading of all countries, we enter 
 
310 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 into the assembly of her bards alone. This continued 
 dependence upon England has riot only turned us away 
 from the observation of what is well done here, but 
 has begotten a distrust of our own judgment and 
 taste. We hesitate at pronouncing an opinion on what 
 has not received judgment there ; and dare not confess 
 where we have been offended or pleased, lest her tribu 
 nals of criticism should, by and by, come down upon 
 us and tell us we are wrong. 
 
 Warning his countrymen against all extravagant 
 claims and all extravagant hopes of equaling the 
 great literatures of the older nations, he neverthe 
 less strikes up boldly for an independent native 
 product. 
 
 National gratitude national pride every high and 
 generous feeling that attaches us to the land of our 
 birth, or that exalts our characters as individuals, ask 
 us that we should foster the infant literature of our 
 country. . . . The poetry of the United States, though 
 it has not yet reached that perfection to which some 
 other countries have carried theirs, is yet even better 
 than we could have been expected to produce, consid 
 ering that our nation has scarcely seen two centuries 
 since the first of its founders erected -their cabins on 
 its soil, that our literary institutions are yet in their 
 infancy, and that our citizens are just beginning to 
 find leisure to attend to intellectual refinement and 
 indulge in intellectual luxury, and the means of 
 rewarding intellectual excellence. 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 311 
 
 The flattering attentions of the leading American 
 review laid again upon the young man the old be 
 witching spell. He was like the boy who has re 
 nounced forever the object of his early infatuation 
 and who suddenly finds himself smiled upon by 
 her whom he was supposed to have forgotten. That 
 he had given up the study and enjoyment of poetry 
 is not for a moment to be supposed. His essay "On 
 the Use of Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse" in the 
 September, 1819, "Review" he called a "little retro 
 spect which I have taken of the usage of our poets 
 who have written in blank verse," and he speaks as 
 one who has read comparatively all of Shakspere 
 and the older dramatists, Milton, Dryden, Young, 
 Thomson, Dyer, Glover, Cumberland, Akenside, 
 Armstrong, and Cowper. 
 
 In 1821 Richard H. Dana had begun his "The 
 Idle Man," a distinctive little periodical written 
 wholly by its editor save for the poems by Bryant : 
 "Green River" in the second issue, "A Walk at 
 Sunset" in the third issue, and "Winter Scenes" in 
 the fourth. And the same year Boston again 
 pushed him into publicity in a way decidedly sur 
 prising: he was asked to deliver the annual poem 
 before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard College an 
 unprecedented request: he of the two terms in the 
 meager inland college addressing the most critical 
 and academic body in America. The theme that 
 
312 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 possessed him was the same that had come to the 
 young Freneau whose "The Rising Glory of Amer 
 ica" had rendered distinctive the Princeton gradua 
 tion of 1771, and to Barlow who dreamed his life 
 long over that tremendous conception which he 
 called at first "The Vision of Columbus." It was 
 a peculiarly American theme: the long roll of the 
 ages culminating in the establishment in the New 
 World of the hope of all lands. 
 
 Here the free spirit of mankind, at length, 
 Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place 
 . A limit to the giant s unchained strength, 
 Or curb his swiftness in the forward race? 
 
 His effort was successful to the degree that a 
 printed edition was called for, and in response the 
 young poet put forth the significant volume of 1821. 
 
 The first book of poems it was that America with 
 out apology might offer to the world; a production 
 that any nation might be proud to add to its treas 
 ures. It contained the best of all that Bryant was 
 destined to offer; all the qualities that we associate 
 with his poetry were in it. Had he died in 1821, 
 America to-day would be mourning the loss of a 
 poet as commanding as Wordsworth. 
 
 The rest is told quickly. Like many another, 
 he who had been "well pleased" with Coke and the 
 theory of the law had become disgusted with the 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 313 
 
 actual practice of it; "the dregs of men" it forced 
 upon him, and all the barbarous j anglings of litiga 
 tion. His swift, unlooked-for rise to literary promi 
 nence added to his unrest. The break came in 
 1825: the abandoning of the law and the assump 
 tion in New York of the editorship of a struggling 
 literary magazine. The venture proved to be a 
 losing one : the magazine failed, leaving him in the 
 somber mood described in his poem "The Journey 
 of Life." Then came temporary employment upon 
 the New York "Evening Post," and finally in 1829 
 the promotion to the chief editorship. During the 
 next half -century he lived in the maelstrom of a 
 great city daily. Thus swiftly the life of Bry 
 ant. 
 
 IV 
 
 All of the poet that is distinctive came before the 
 end of his first year in New York. The publication 
 in 1826 of the poem "I Cannot Forget with What 
 Fervid Devotion," whatever may have been its date 
 of composition, marks the end. Rarely has the 
 poet so disclosed his whole heart. 
 
 I cannot forget with what fervid devotion 
 
 I worshipped the visions of verse and of fame; 
 
 Each gaze at the glories of earth, sky, and ocean, 
 To my kindled emotions, was wind over flame. 
 
314 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 And deep were my musings in life s early blossom, 
 Mid the twilight of mountain-groves wandering 
 
 long; 
 How thrilled my young veins, and how throbbed my 
 
 full bosom 
 When o er me descended the spirit of song! 
 
 Mong the deep-cloven fells that for ages had listened 
 To the rush of the pebble-paved river between, 
 
 Where the kingfisher screamed and gray precipice 
 
 glistened, 
 All breathless with awe have I gazed on the scene. 
 
 Till I felt the dark power o er my reveries stealing, 
 From the gloom of the thickets that over me hung, 
 
 And the thoughts that awoke, in the rapture of feeling, 
 Were formed into verse as they rose to my tongue. 
 
 Bright visions! I mixed with the world, and ye 
 faded, 
 
 No longer your pure rural worshipper now ; 
 In the haunts your continual presence pervaded, 
 
 Ye shrink from the signet of care on my brow. 
 
 In the old mossy groves on the breast of the mountain, 
 In deep lonely glens where the waters complain, 
 
 By the shade of the rock, by the gush of the fountain, 
 I seek your loved footsteps, but seek them in vain. 
 
 Oh, leave not forlorn and forever forsaken, 
 Your pupil and victim to life and its tears! 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 315 
 
 But sometimes return, and in mercy awaken 
 The glories ye showed to his earlier years. 
 
 It was a period of struggle, of abandoning poetry 
 and returning to it like a child that runs away, but 
 at times is filled with irresistible longings to return. 
 For the 1826 "Atlantic Souvenir," the first of the 
 annuals, he sent a poem which he called "Nature," 
 a poem he later put into his collected edition without 
 a title and without the last stanza. It is another 
 document in the period of struggle, another cry 
 from the depths of his soul. 
 
 NATURE 
 
 I broke the charm that held me long, 
 
 The dear, dear witchery of song : 
 
 I said the poet s idle lore 
 
 Should waste my prime of years no more ; 
 
 For poetry, though heavenly born, 
 
 Consorts with poverty and scorn. 
 
 ii 
 
 I broke the charm, nor deemed its power 
 
 Could fetter me another hour; 
 
 Ah, thoughtless ! how could I forget, 
 
 Its causes were around me yet; 
 
 For wheresoe er I looked, the while, 
 
 Was nature s everlasting smile. 
 
316 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 in 
 
 Still came, and lingered on my sight 
 
 Of flowers and streams the bloom and light, 
 
 The story of the stars and sun, 
 
 And these, and poetry are one : 
 
 They, ere the world had fixed me long, 
 
 Recalled me to the love of song. 
 
 IV 
 
 Thus where the cliff, abrupt and steep, 
 Looks down upon the sullen deep, 
 Far from his mother s side, the child 
 Sat playing on the verge, and smiled : 
 She laid her bosom bare, and won 
 From the dread brink her truant son. 
 
 Before finally surrendering himself to the busi 
 ness that was to engulf him he tried earnestly the 
 door by which Irving had escaped. He had come 
 to New York to enter the literary life, to become 
 a professional man of letters, a creator of literature 
 and only literature. There was no money in poetry 
 and he turned to prose. Between 1827 and 1832 
 he wrote no less than thirteen short stories. For 
 "The Talisman," which he edited, he contributed 
 "An Adventure in the East Indies/ "The Cascade 
 of Melsingak," "Recollections df the South of 
 Spain," "A Story of the Island of Cuba," "The 
 Indian Spring," "The Whirlwind," "Phanette des 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 317 
 
 Gauldmes," and "The Marriage Blunder." For 
 "Tales of Glauber Spa" he wrote The Skeleton s 
 Cave" and "Medfield," and for various periodicals 
 he wrote others. 
 
 That one who had written poetry that is unde 
 niably of classic quality could write tales so de 
 void of art and all that fiction demands is one of 
 the unexplainable things. His The Marriage 
 Blunder," for instance, begins with a dissertation 
 upon marriage, tells at length of a journey the au 
 thor once made into the Red River country, de 
 scribes with minuteness a man he met there, and then 
 proceeds with a story told him by this stranger. 
 The story proper begins on the twelfth page, after 
 one third of the total number of words has been 
 used. In his tale The Whirlwind," instead of 
 saying that a Baptist minister was on his way to 
 Lexington to baptize some converts, he explains 
 that he was going "to perform beside the translucent 
 streams and under the venerable trees of that fine 
 region, those picturesque solemnities of his sect, to 
 which they love to point as a maniform emblem 
 of purification from moral pollution, and of the res 
 urrection from the death of sin and the sleep of 
 the grave." 
 
 The poet Bryant died at length in the city news 
 paper office. The poems that insure him room 
 among the poets are those few desultory moments 
 
318 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 before he had lost his early vision, and the world had 
 crowded in and robbed him. They are only a hand 
 ful; they bulk not much larger than Poe s anthology. 
 We may venture to name them : "Thanatopsis," 
 "The Yellow Violet," "Inscription for the Entrance 
 to a Wood," "To a Waterfowl," "Green River," 
 "A Winter Piece," "A Walk at Sunset," "Hymn to 
 Death," "November," "A Forest Hymn," "The 
 Death of the Flowers," and "I Cannot Forget with 
 What Fervid Devotion." One more we may add, 
 perhaps, "The Prairies," inspired by his entrance for 
 a moment into a new and fresh world, and there are 
 many who would plead for "To a Fringed Gentian" 
 and "The Journey of Life." The rest do not greatly 
 matter. 
 
 Fragmentary that is the first impression. Genius 
 repressed, deliberately smothered out, a series of 
 farewells to the muse, and brief returns as to stolen 
 pleasure, then silence or worse than silence the 
 voice of a poet abandoned of the inspiring presence 
 and unconscious of his loss. Bryant s poems are 
 a miscellany of glorious fragments with here and 
 there a supreme lyric. The bits of blank verse, 
 "A Forest Hymn," "Hymn to Death," "A Winter 
 Piece," and the like, impress one as fragments 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 319 
 
 from a larger whole, wonderfully finished columns 
 for a temple never completed, never even planned. 
 What might have been if, like Wordsworth, he 
 could have given his life entirely to poetry, we may 
 not ask. 
 
 As it is, he was the scant blossom of New Eng 
 land puritanism before it was touched by the trans 
 cendental fertilizer, the single yellow violet of a 
 cold spring: 
 
 Of all her train, the hands of Spring 
 First plant thee in the watery mould, 
 
 And I have seen thee blossoming 
 Beside the snow-bank s edges cold. 
 
 It was no native wild flower: an Old World 
 species rather, grown stately, prim, pale by trans 
 planting into new soil, old-fashioned, simple no 
 doubling and fringing, no flashy colorings to stir 
 the passions. Puritanism breathed from its every 
 petal, an eighteenth century puritanism totally un 
 affected by Wesleyanism despite all the influences 
 of Cowper. 
 
 Only half-heartedly was the young poet a child 
 of the nineteenth century. He was of the classic 
 ists, law-bound as by iron, self-contained, ret 
 icent. Such a one, with such an ancestry and such 
 a schooling, will not let himself go, he will do noth 
 ing in passion, he will not bare his soul nor cry 
 
320 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 aloud. No "native wood notes wild" for him : he 
 will form himself upon the tradition of the elders. 
 Listen to him as at twenty- four he instructs his 
 fellow-bards : "We speak not of a disposition to 
 emulate whatever is beautiful and excellent in their 
 [the English poets] writings, still less would we 
 be understood as intending to censure that sort of 
 imitation which, exploring all the treasures of Eng 
 lish poetry, culls from all a diction, that shall 
 form a natural and becoming dress for the con 
 ceptions of the writer this is a course of prepara 
 tion which every one ought to go through before he 
 appears before the public." 
 
 Anything like self-revelation he shrank from. 
 He would not republish from "The North American 
 Review" his really beautiful "Lines to a Friend on 
 his Marriage," but he could cherish as if it were 
 gold the undistinctive translation from Simonides 
 which had appeared in the same number. He aimed 
 at the intellect of his reader, and he leaves him cold. 
 Like all other New Englanders, he preached con 
 stantly, but it was with the calm, contemplative voice 
 of Watts rather than with the passion of Wesley. 
 
 But cold though he was, we may not say that the 
 emotional within him was atrophied. It is only be 
 cause it was not that he lives to-day. We make a 
 list of the few poems where for a moment he for 
 got his eighteenth century manners and cried from 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 321 
 
 his heart, and as we study them we wake to the 
 realization that we have duplicated the little list upon 
 which his fame must depend. "The Waterfowl" is 
 a cry from a soul deeply stirred, and so are "Green 
 River" and "I Cannot Forget," and the "Death of 
 the Flowers." The Hymn to Death," 1821, con 
 tains a bit of unconscious self-revealing that throws 
 a flood of light upon the poet. The first two thirds 
 of it is in the stately Bryant manner, a contempla 
 tive treatise upon Death, as detached and as bril 
 liantly conventional as Pope s "Essay on Man," a 
 cold argument just as one argues upon politics, 
 but before the poet had finished, his father died and 
 the poem turned suddenly into a cry from a man s 
 soul. 
 
 Alas ! I little thought that the stern power 
 Whose fearful praise I sang, would try me thus 
 Before the strain was ended. It must cease 
 For he is in his grave who taught my youth 
 The art of verse, and in the bud of life 
 Offered me to the muses. Oh, cut off 
 Untimely ! 
 
 In his treatment of nature he was influenced by 
 Wordsworth, but not fundamentally. In spirit he 
 was of the eighteenth century even here. There 
 is little in him of the democratic and the social. 
 His is the soul of a Wharton and a Logan who 
 
322 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 would retire to the woods for their own pleasure and 
 profit. His ideal is the Puritan one of self-realiza- ^ 
 tion, self-improvement, self -salvation. He would re 
 tire from the "haunts of men" as often as possible to 
 repurify himself, to forget amid the beauties of 
 nature the misery of the crowd, to revive the visions 
 of his boyhood spent amid the solitudes, and to get 
 nearer to God whom, in the jostling crowd, he could 
 not feel. His are the poems of a solitary soul 
 intent upon contemplation of the deeper problems, 
 a soul that escapes now and then into the silences 
 for itself alone. 
 
 Really he was not of the nineteenth century at all. 
 Wordsworth underwent the same experience but 
 quickly he passed on into the larger outlook of the 
 new century. To him nature grew to have a social 
 import. He looked upon it 
 
 Hearing oftentimes . . 
 The still, sad music of humanity. 
 
 Unlike Bryant he could romanticize it, fill it with 
 transcendental idealism, and even pantheistic attri 
 butes. To Wordsworth it became at length but a 
 natural step from nature as perceived by the senses 
 to Nature as revealed by the kindled poetic imagina 
 tion, and peopled with the creations of the primitive 
 poets : 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 323 
 
 Great God ! I d rather be 
 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 In other words, Wordsworth was a romanticist, a 
 transcendentalist, a poet of the new century, while 
 Bryant was an eighteenth century Puritan who went 
 into the solemn forest and mused alone upon life and 
 death and God. 
 
 His real contribution to American poetry came 
 from his personality rather than from his message ; 
 that majestic, solemn individuality that wrought it 
 self without effort mto all that he did during the 
 brief period of his inspiration. There is a bardic 
 ring to his song that one finds in no other modern 
 poet. Print his lines without their verse form and 
 often they might be mistaken for passages from 
 Ossian. This for instance from "A Walk at Sun 
 set" : 
 
 Oh, sun! That o er the western mountains now 
 goest down in glory ! ever beautiful and blessed in thy 
 radiance, whether thou colourest the eastern heaven 
 and night ^mist cool, till the bright day-star vanish, or 
 on high climbest. and streamest thy white splendours 
 from mid-sky. 
 
324 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Or this from the lyric "Lines on Revisiting the 
 Country" : 
 
 Ay, flame thy fiercest, sun! thou canst not wake, in 
 this pure air, the plague that walks unseen. The 
 maize leaf and the maple bough but take, from thy 
 strong heat, a deeper, glossier green. The mountain 
 wind, that faints not in thy ray, sweeps the blue 
 streams of pestilence away. 
 
 One feels that the stanza would have been more 
 Bryant-like could he have put it into unrimed chant- 
 measure and ended it with 
 
 Sweeps away the blue streams of pestilence. 
 
 His blank verse, solemn and resonant, like the 
 reverberations of organ tones down the aisles of a 
 cathedral, is one of the glories of American litera 
 ture. He did but little, but that little is permanent. 
 American poetry began as the American nation 
 began, with a tremendous note of seriousness, with 
 a broadness of view commensurate with the con 
 tinent, with the voice of primeval forests and bound 
 less prairies, yea, even with The Song of the 
 Stars" and "The Firmament." 
 
 And though he learned his art of eighteenth cen 
 tury England he is nevertheless our own ; last voice 
 of our earlier traditions, first voice of our larger 
 visions as a new nation under the sun. He used 
 the materials of the western world; the native water- 
 
The Centenary of Bryant s Poetry 325 
 
 fowl, the yellow violet, the primitive forests. Not 
 wholly in his turns of phrase is he free of Pope and 
 his century he can call fishes "the scaly herds" 
 and he can advise Dana to change his "The 
 Dying Crow" to "The Dying Raven" yet most 
 marvelously is he American if one reads him in 
 comparison with his contemporaries. He draws 
 his figures and illustrations from the life about him. 
 Even in his essay on "Trisyllabic Feet," in which 
 he remarks that Young imitated Pope to his own 
 disadvantage, he will use a native comparison : "It 
 was like setting the Mississippi to spout little fets 
 d eau and turn children s watenvheels." 
 
 And it was no narrowly localized America that 
 he sang; no little provincial area glorified, no New 
 England insulated and made a new England. The 
 freshness and broadness of the western world are 
 in his song. The first unquestioned poet in Amer 
 ica was the first ^-American poet. Our literature 
 opens with a note that is a worthy prelude to all 
 that may be in the centuries to come. 
 
 The influence of Bryant upon the New England 
 group that arose in the thirties was peculiar. His 
 success as a poet and the chaste beauty of his nature 
 lyrics stimulated nearly all of them to their first 
 efforts, but his distinctive note was echoed by few 
 of them. He led them undoubtedly to native 
 themes, but he imparted to none his classic soul. 
 
326 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 The influx of transcendentalism and of romanticism 
 quickly overcame his influence and swallowed him 
 up. Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tenny 
 son, and the German romanticists ruled the mid 
 years of the century until the early pioneer classicist 
 was forgotten. His "Thanatopsis" and his solemn 
 contemplations of death may for a time have pro 
 longed our period of sadness and sentiment, that 
 adolescent growing period in America; but not 
 enough to be worth our study. 
 
 He is a lone, cold peak on the horizon of our 
 poetry, grand and solemn in the morning twilight 
 of American song. He did but little, but that little 
 is unlike anything else in the range of our literature. 
 He is the poetic monument of our early Puritan 
 origins, the mark upon the border-line between the 
 old passing order and the new world that was to be. 
 
POE S "ULALUME" 
 
 POE was preeminently a lyrist. With a soul ab 
 normally sensitive, with nerves that every harsh 
 note jangled, endowed with an intense longing for 
 human sympathy, yet with a nature that was fated 
 by its very elements to be misunderstood at every 
 point, with a pride that forbade explanations, that 
 curled the lip and suffered in silence, Poe early 
 became self -centered and introspective. If a man 
 needed sympathy and help it was he, yet he re 
 ceived none. With his sensitive physical nature an 
 indulgence that in another man would have been but 
 a slight misstep was with him a fall, yet the world 
 made no distinctions. Misunderstood, out of touch 
 with normal humanity, he became bitter. He found 
 no companionship save his own soul, no food save 
 his own heart, and this rendered morbid his 
 thoughts, distorted his perspective, and made ab 
 normal all his standards of measure. Like Byron, 
 he projected himself into all that he did. At length 
 it became impossible for him to look at life objec 
 tively. He must be the hero of his stories ; he must 
 
 use no scenery, no atmosphere save that found in 
 
 327 
 
328 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 his own soul. If he sang, it must be a bitter song 
 about his own bitter life. Even his dramatic frag 
 ments are lyrics. To him any poetry save the short 
 impassioned lyric, which owing to its very intensity 
 must be brief, was impossible. In his Poetic 
 Principle," he contended that even "Paradise Lost" 
 was but a a series of lyrics/ 
 
 With this conception of the nature of poetry, Poe, 
 who, whatever else he might have been, was a con 
 sistent artist, took up the lyre only in moments of 
 passion ; and that these moments came but seldom is 
 shown by the scantiness of his lyrical product. Few 
 poets have won commanding place with so small a 
 margin of actual accomplishment. Poe s whole po 
 etic product makes but a thin volume, and if from it 
 we remove those poems which almost alone estab 
 lish his fame, we shall reduce it to a dozen pages. 
 Poe walks among the great lyrists of the world by 
 virtue of not more than ten lyrics. Roughly in the 
 order of their production these lyrics are "The 
 Sleeper," "The City in the Sea," "Israfel," "The 
 Haunted Palace," "The Conqueror Worm," "The 
 Raven," "Ulalume," "The Bells," "For Annie," and 
 "Annabel Lee." But even with a list as small as 
 this Poe is secure in his fame. There is an atmos 
 phere about these lyrics that is wholly undefinable; 
 a weird music that is half unearthly; a mysterious 
 force that is all but irresistible. They seize upon 
 
Poes "Ulcdume" 329 
 
 the imagination of the reader and bear it into the 
 regions that only the imagination may tread, through 
 strange lands with names from the realms beyond 
 Xanadu, they harrow him with exotic cadences, they 
 chill him with a fear of he knows not what, and 
 everywhere they follow him with that low, wild 
 music that suggests the accompaniments of Eastern 
 necromancy. 
 
 The most spontaneous of all his lyrics, the one 
 that flashes its light into the greatest number of 
 chambers in the poet s soul, is "Ulalume," perhaps 
 the least understood of all Poe s writings. The 
 average reader gets from it very little save a strange 
 melancholy music and a sense of the terrible that 
 he finds difficult to explain. To some it has seemed 
 humorous. Willis, its first critic, classed it as ^a 
 curiosity in philologic flavor." To him it was sim- 
 pTy1T"skilful exercise of rarity and niceness of lan- 
 guage." To some critics it has seemed but the wild 
 vagaries of an insane master poet, to others a fanci 
 ful elegy for an idolized wife, to others it has 
 been inexplicable. Not long ago a university lec 
 turer, after dwelling upon the nameless atmosphere 
 and the unearthly music of the poem, declared as 
 his opinion that no one would ever be able to dis 
 cover what the poet had really meant. He doubted 
 if Poe had known himself what he meant. It is 
 very sure that without the life of the poet as a 
 
 
330 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 commentary "Ulalume" is a hopeless enigma. Read 
 after a careful study of the circumstances that cre 
 ated it, however, it becomes clear, and, what is more, 
 it throws light upon the poet s inner life. "Ula 
 lume" is not an elegy ; it is not a threnody for a lost 
 wife or an etherealized Lenore; it is not a display 
 of mere verbal dexterity; it is not the incoherence 
 of an insane master it is an honest lyric that leads 
 us to a man s heart ; it is a cry of utter despair from 
 a man s inmost souK 
 
 Poe wrote this poem in the autumn of 1847, a * 
 the lowest ebb of his career. One year earlier, in 
 the autumn of 1846, he had found the limit of his 
 physical powers. Constant overwork and unre 
 lieved mental strain had combined with dissipation 
 to reduce him to a state bordering upon collapse. 
 His brain refused to obey him; it became impos 
 sible for him to work, and upon him depended the 
 support of a sick wife and her mother. During 
 the late autumn and early winter of 1846-47 this 
 little family suffered all the extremes of poverty. 
 Unable to furnish sufficient fire, or covering, or food, 
 Poe saw his wife, who needed the most delicate care, 
 in wanfcof the bare necessities of life, and sinking 
 daily lower and lower. The well-known descrip 
 tion of this home, written by Mrs. Gove, who late 
 in January happened to discover the perishing fam 
 ily, is one of the most pathetic in our literary annals : 
 
Foe s "Ulalume" 331 
 
 There was no clothing on the bed, which was only 
 straw. . . . The weather was cold and the sick lady 
 had. the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic 
 fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, 
 wrapped in her husband s greatcoat with a large 
 tortoiseshell cat in her bosom. . . . The coat and the 
 cat were the sufferer s only means of warmth except 
 as her husband held her hands and her mother her 
 feet. 
 
 The end came January 30, and Poe, after follow 
 ing on foot the coffin to the grave, sank in almost 
 total collapse. "I did not feel much hope/ writes 
 Mrs. Shew, his nurse, who was also a physician, 
 "that he could be raised up from brain fever, 
 brought on by extreme suffering of mind and body 
 actual want and hunger and cold having been 
 borne by this heroic husband in order to supply 
 food, medicine, and comforts to his dying wife, 
 until exhaustion and lifelessness were so near at 
 every reaction of the fever that even sedatives had 
 to be administered with extreme caution." 
 
 Poe rallied from this first fever only to suffer in 
 March a relapse which for weeks threatened his 
 life. The summer and autumn of 1847 were a 
 period of slow convalescence. He had been near 
 to death, and near to insanity. The extremely sen 
 sitive organism had been so rudely shaken that never 
 again was it to be in adjustment. At first a great 
 
332 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 horror, a darkness, and utter despair had settled 
 over him, but little by little he began to lay hold on 
 the threads of life. At length he could even hope 
 for brighter days. Though shattered in body and 
 nerve and mind, he began to plan a great prose 
 poem, "Eureka," which was to be the crowning 
 effort of his life. The sympathy and help of Mrs. 
 Shew, who with his mother had snatched him from 
 death, began to arouse in him the pale, uncertain 
 vision of a new life of love and hope. But such 
 dreams were only for intervals. His old past, with 
 its horrors, confronted him at every step. It ruled 
 him like a demon and drove him powerless into 
 despair. Poe lived two and a half years after 
 the death of his wife, and during it all his life was 
 an alternation between brief and feverish intervals 
 of hope, and long periods of half-insane delirium, 
 of blackness, and despair. He yearned with all 
 the power of his nature for sympathy. "Unless 
 some true and tender and pure womanly love saves 
 me," he wrote to Mrs. Shew only a year before 
 the final tragedy at Baltimore, "I shall hardly last 
 a year longer alive." All those half-insane love- 
 episodes of this period of Poe s life were but results 
 of this eager longing for some one who could under 
 stand, some one who could rescue him from his past 
 that was hurrying him on. 
 
 With this chapter of Poe s life understood, "Ula- 
 
Foe s "Ulalume" 333 
 
 lume" becomes at once clear. It was written at the 
 close of Foe s year of horrors the October of his 
 "most immemorial year immemorial since it 
 seemed to drag its horrible length back to the utmost 
 bounds of his memory, and since it lay as a vague, 
 half -forgotten dream. The poem, like "The 
 Raven," "The Haunted Palace," and others, is an 
 allegory, though not all of its imagery is symbolic. 
 The poet no longer lives in the old familiar world. 
 He has entered a "misty mid region" that is not life, 
 that is not death a ghoul-haunted forest of cypress, 
 a region of unrelieved horror and blackness. His 
 heart is hot and volcanic ; it is like a sulphurous cur 
 rent of lava hissing and groaning through an Arctic 
 waste of death. He is alone ; he has no companion, 
 no confidant, save his own soul ; he is driven to 
 commune with himself. But his active brain has 
 become sluggish and palsied, and at times he for 
 gets his awful surroundings. It even seems at times 
 as if there was to be a morning; to his palsied con 
 sciousness there appears a hint of dawn. A pale 
 nebulous light appears in the east. It is like the 
 rising of a new hope ; it is a goddess who has seen 
 his tears and has understood the torment, the never- 
 dying worm in his soul, who, despite the horror 
 which surrounds him, has dared to come to him, 
 and to look upon him "with love in her luminous 
 eyes," who w r ill lead him by the hand from the 
 
334 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 horrors in which he is powerless into the path to 
 the skies. The lines quiver and throb with passion. 
 Oh, the ecstasy of being at last understood, of being 
 in contact with one who could know and sympathize ! 
 Was it Mrs. Shew who first gave Poe this vision 
 of a new hope? If one reads the poem "To L. M. 
 S. ," the first recorded word of Poe after his es 
 cape from death, and "To ," "Not long ago the 
 
 writer of these lines" written to Mrs. Shew just 
 after "Ulalume" and then reads the despairing let 
 ter of June, 1848, he will find it hard to believe it 
 
 otherwise. In "To " he clearly asserts that it 
 
 is Mrs. Shew whom he sees at the end of the cypress 
 vista: 
 
 Alas, I cannot feel ; for t is not feeling, 
 This standing motionless upon the golden 
 Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams, 
 Gazing entranced adown the gorgeous vista, 
 And thrilling as I see, upon the right, 
 Upon the left, and all the way along, 
 Amid empurpled vapors, far away, 
 To where the prospect terminates thee only. 
 
 But the world of despair rushes quickly back 
 upon his soul. A moment of ecstasy and then his 
 sluggish brain remembers. This pale star, too pale 
 to be real, is sent but to increase his torment. It 
 is the work of ghouls, a thing of horror, to shudder 
 
Poe s "Ulalume" 335 
 
 at and to fear. In an agony of revulsion of feeling 
 his soul sinks into the dust. But his wavering, 
 palsied brain cannot long be constant either to hope 
 or despair. Again the vision beckons him up 
 ward; hope and joy and beauty seem about to bloom 
 once more in his blackened life. Eagerly he fol 
 lows the pale star which is so full of hope and 
 beauty and which "flickers up to heaven through 
 the night," but he is "stopped by the door of a 
 tomb." The star is but a phantom, the work of a 
 demon who knows how to make his hell complete; 
 after every struggle he is thrown back helpless upon 
 his own blasted soul. Mrs. Shew respected him, 
 pitied him, admired him, but she did not love him. 
 Her answer was final. There is no escape. Fate 
 has taken every precaution "to bar up the way and 
 to ban it"; he is alone with his dead in the ghoul- 
 haunted cypress, and all visions of hope are but 
 to mock and torment him. 
 
 This, then, is the meaning of "Ulalume." It is 
 a sob from the depths of blank despair; it is the 
 most pathetic poem in American literature. Every 
 thing about it attests its genuineness. It is not fin 
 ished; it is a spontaneous outpouring of feeling, 
 unpolished, unrevised. Such work was uncommon 
 with Poe, who labored over his lyrics sometimes for 
 years. I am inclined to believe that the account 
 of the composition of "The Raven" is largely true. 
 
336 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 The more spontaneous the song the nearer we get 
 to the heart of the singer. From the mechanical 
 point of view "Ulalume" is the most unfinished of 
 the poet s productions. Its monotony of expres 
 sion; its snail pace; its frequent discords; its cock 
 ney rimes; its abundance of pleonasm are positive 
 blemishes, and yet they increase the value of the 
 poem as a human document. Perhaps the most not 
 able "peculiarity, not to say defect, of "Ulalume" is 
 its repetition. Yet this is significant. It shows that 
 the poet s mind was almost in a state of collapse. 
 It worked feebly. An idea, when it came, was hov 
 ered over and repeated with slight change until an 
 other idea came to reinforce it. 
 
 That the poem is the work of an abnormal mind 
 is stamped everywhere upon it. For the poet to 
 imagine two personalities within himself, which 
 held converse with each other, which strenghtened 
 and fortified each other, is in itself a symptom of 
 insanity. It is this strange separation of the poet 
 into two personalities that is the chief source of 
 ambiguity in the poem. At every point the poem 
 seems remote from ordinary human experience. Its 
 geography is not of this world; its proper names, 
 "Auber" and "Yaanek," belong to another planet: 
 its atmosphere is that of ghoul-land, of the "misty 
 mid region" that no man has ever actually known. 
 Its haunting music comes from its abundant allitera- 
 
Poe s "Ulalume" 337 
 
 tion and rime, but more from its abnormal repetend, 
 which we have shown to be a symptom of intellec 
 tual disease. 
 
 It was Poe s fate to be misunderstood. His own 
 generation looked only at his external life. He was 
 marvelously gifted, they said, but he was an unholy 
 thing, a demoniac from the tombs, who tore himself 
 upon the rocks and whom no man might bind, a vic 
 tim of vices and passions. They made no excuse for 
 him, they tried to cover none of his defects, they 
 sought for none of the hidden fountains of his life. 
 The present judges him more kindly, but even now 
 it is not fully understood what manner of man he 
 really was. No one can study to its heart a lyric 
 like "Ulalume" and not feel the pathos that lay in 
 its creator s soul. The fatal gift of genius sepa 
 rated him from his fellow-men, deprived him of 
 human sympathy, and drove him for companionship 
 to live a hermit with his own soul. What wonder 
 that his perspective became distorted, that he be 
 came morbid and unnatural, the companion of 
 strange fancies? What utter pathos in his bitter 
 cry for help : "For months I have known that you 
 were deserting me, not willingly, but none the less 
 surely my destiny 
 
 Disaster, following fast and following faster, till his 
 song one burden bore 
 
338 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden 
 bore 
 
 Of Never nevermore. " 
 
 "Ulalume" is the epitome of Poe s last years. It 
 is the picture of a soul hovering between hope and 
 inevitable despair, a soul longing passionately for 
 a sympathy which it can never have, a soul strug 
 gling toward the light yet beaten back at every 
 point, a soul that realized as few other souls ever 
 have the supernal beauty which is possible in human 
 life, yet condemned like Tantalus never to share 
 its joys. 
 
 ULALUME 
 
 The skies they were ashen and sober; 
 
 The leaves they were crisped and sere. 
 
 The leaves they were withering and sere: 
 It was night in the lonesome October 
 
 Of my most immemorial year : 
 It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 
 
 In the misty mid region of Weir 
 It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 
 
 In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 
 
 Here once, through an alley Titanic, 
 Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul 
 Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. 
 
 These were days when my heart was volcanic 
 As the scoriae rivers that roll 
 
Poe s "Ulalume" 339 
 
 As the lavas that restlessly roll 
 Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek 
 
 In the ultimate climes of the pole 
 That groan as they roll down Mount 
 Yaanek 
 
 In the realms of the Boreal Pole. 
 
 Our talk had been serious and sober, 
 
 But our thoughts they were palsied and 
 sere 
 
 Our memories were treacherous and sere 
 For we knew not the month was October, 
 
 And we marked not the night of the year. 
 
 (Ah, night of all nights in the year!) 
 We noted not the dim lake of Auber 
 
 (Though once we had journeyed down 
 
 here) 
 Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, 
 
 Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 
 
 And now, as the night was senescent 
 
 And star-dials pointed to morn 
 
 As the star-dials hinted of morn 
 At the end of our path a liquescent 
 
 And nebulous luster was born, 
 Out of which a miraculous crescent 
 
 Arose, with a duplicate horn 
 Astarte s bediamonded crescent 
 
 Distinct with its duplicate horn. 
 
 And I said: "She is warmer than Dian; 
 She rolls through an ether of sighs 
 
340 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 She revels in a region of sighs. 
 She has seen that the tears are not dry on 
 These cheeks, where the worm never dies, 
 And has come past the stars of the Lion, 
 
 To point us the path to the skies 
 
 To the Lethean peace of the skies 
 Come up, in despite of the Lion, 
 
 To shine on us with her bright eyes: 
 Come up through the lair of the Lion, 
 
 With love in her luminous eyes." 
 
 But Psyche, uplifting her finger, 
 
 Said : "Sadly this star I mistrust 
 Her pallor I strangely mistrust : 
 
 Ah, hasten! ah, let us not linger! 
 Ah, fly! let us fly! for we must." 
 
 In terror she spoke, letting sink her 
 Wings until they trailed in the dust. 
 
 In agony sobbed, letting sink her 
 
 Plumes till they trailed in the dust 
 Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. 
 
 I replied : "This is nothing but dreaming : 
 Let us on by this tremulous light! 
 Let us bathe in this crystalline light! 
 
 Its Sibyllic splendor is beaming 
 
 With hope and in Beauty to-night: 
 See ! it flickers up the sky through the 
 night ! 
 
 Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming, 
 And be sure it will lead us aright 
 
Foe s "Ulalume" 341 
 
 We safely may trust to a gleaming, 
 That cannot but guide us aright, 
 Since it flickers up to Heaven through 
 the night." 
 
 Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, 
 And tempted her out of her gloom 
 And conquered her scruples and gloom; 
 
 And we passed to the end of the vista, 
 
 But were stopped by the door of a tomb 
 By the door of a legended tomb; 
 
 And I said : "What is written, sweet sister, 
 On the door of this legended tomb?" 
 She replied : "Ulalume Ulalume ! 
 Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume !" 
 
 Then my heart it grew ashen and sober 
 As the leaves that were crisped and sere 
 As the leaves that were withering and sere ; 
 
 And I cried: "It was surely October 
 On this very night of last year 
 That I journeyed I journeyed down here 
 That I brought a dread burden down here, 
 On this night of all nights in the year, 
 Ah, what demon hath tempted me here? 
 
 Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber 
 This misty mid region of Weir: 
 
 Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber, 
 This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 
 
 Said we, then the two, then: "Ah, can it 
 Have been that the woodlandish ghouls 
 
342 Side-Lights on American Literature 
 
 The pitiful, the merciful ghouls 
 To bar up our way and to ban it 
 
 From the secret that lies in these wolds 
 
 From the thing that lies hidden in these 
 
 wolds 
 Have drawn up the spector of a planet 
 
 From the limbo of lunary souls 
 This sinfully scintillant planet 
 
 From the Hell of the planetary souls?" 
 
RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 TO *> 202 Main Library 
 
 LOAN PERIOD 1 
 HOME USE 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. 
 
 Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
 MAY 6 2000 
 
 FORM NO. DD6 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 
 BERKELEY, CA 94720 
 
 s 
 
U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 
 ^^^~ 
 
 >fM> - 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 . t