CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PS 92.H63 A reader's history of American ilteratur 3 1924 022 000 016 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022000016 md. READER'S HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON AND HENRY WALCOTT BOYNTON m^^^^m BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY ^ht iSibetjiitic ^te^^, "ffamfiriBoe COPYRIGHT 1903 BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON AND HENRY W. BOYNTON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PEEPACE This book is based upon a course of lec- tures delivered during January of 1903 be- fore the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their essential plan was that of concentrating atten- tion on leading figures, instead of burdening the memory with a great many minor names and data. Various hearers, including some teachers of literature, took pains to express their approval of this plan, and to suggest that the material might profitably be cast into book form. This necessarily meant a good deal of revision of a kind which the lecturer did not care to undertake ; and he was able to secure the cooperation of a younger asso- ciate, to whom has fallen the task of modify- ing and supplementing the original text, so far as either process was necessary in order to make a complete and consecutive, though still brief, narrative of the course of American iv PREFACE literature. The apparatus necessary for its use as a text-book has been supplied in an appendix, and is believed to be adequate. It should be said further that the personal reminiscences, and, in general, aU passages in which the first person singular is employed, are taken over bodily from the original lec- tures. Elsewhere the authorship of the book as it stands is a composite, but, it is hoped, not confused affair. Acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Long- mans (of London and New York), who have permitted the use of some passages from Short Studies of American Authors, and to Messrs. Harper and Brothers, who con- sented to similar extracts from a work pub- lished by them, entitled BooJc and Heart (New York and London, 1899), both these books being by the senior author of this work. CONTENTS CHAFTEB PAGE I. The Puritan Weiteks 1 II. The Secular "Weitbrs 24 III. The Philadelphia Period .... 60 IV. The New York Period 79 V. The New England Period — Prelim- inary 108 VI. The Cambridge Group 134 VII. The Concord Group 167 VIII. The Southern Influence — "Whit- man 199 IX. The Western Influence 235 X. Forecast 257 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAOB Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a daguerreotype TAKEN IN 1859 Frontispiece Title-page of Anne Bradstreet's Tents Muse . 10 Title-page op Cotton Mather's Wojstders of the Invisible World 16 Titlb-Pagb of Poor Richard's Almanac for 1739 68 Letter from William Cullen Bryant to Mrs. R. C. Waterston 100 Postal Card from Francis Parkman to T. W. HlGGINSON 118 Letter from Harriet Bebcher Stowe to Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co 126 Lines by Emily Dickinson 130 Lines by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . 140 Letter from John GreenlbafWhittier to F. J. Garrison 150 Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to T. W. Higginson 158 Letter from James Russell Lowell to T. W. Higginson 164 Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to T. W. Higginson 174 Letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to C. W. Webber 182 Letter from Henry David Thoreau to T. W. Higginson 196 A READER'S HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE CHAPTEK I THE PURITAJJ WBITERS When Shakespeare's Slender in " The Merry Wives of Windsor" claims that his cousin Shallow is a gentleman born, and The Point may write himself armigero, he °* V'«^- adds proudly, " All his successors, gone be- fore him, have done it, and all his ancestors that come after him may." Slender really builded better than he knew ; probably most of the applications at the Heralds' College in London, or at the offices of heraldic engravers in New York, are based on the principle he laid down. Its most triumphant application is that recorded by Gilbert Stuart. While he was in London the painter had a call from an Irishman who had become, through some lucky speculation, the possessor of a castle, and who appealed to Stuart to provide him ; 2 THE PURITAN WRITERS with a family portrait gallery. Stuart natu- rally supposed that there were miniatures or pictures of some kind which he might follow, but on arriving at the castle he found there the was nothing of sort. , " Then how am I to paint your ancestors, if you have no ancestors ? " he asked in some indignation. " Nothing is easier," said the Irishman " you have only to paint me the ancestors that I ought to have had." The proposal struck Stuart's sense of hu- mor, and he went to work, soon producing a series of knights in armor, judges in bushy wigs, and fine ladies with nosegays and lambs, to the perfect satisfaction of his patron. Here was Slender's fine conception literally carried out; the ancestors came afterward because their enterprising successor had gone before. Something hke this method has been em- ployed by many chroniclers of American lit- erature. Perceiving that America has pro- duced much that is creditable during the past century, they have set about finding a direct American pedigree for it. Yet they would readily agree that almost nothing which has attained permanent fame was writ- ; AMERICANISM 3 ten in America before the nineteenth century and they would not deny that, so far as its form, at least, is concerned, most of our later literature confesses an English ancestry. But if the spirit of those older writers, the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was American, what does Amerioan- the form of their writing matter? '^™' The answer to this question depends upon what we mean by Americanism. Until the very outbreak of the Eevolution there were few persons in the American colonies who were not, in sentiment as well as in mental in- heritance, English. England was " home " to them, as it is now to the British Canadian or Australian. Circumstances were of course bringing about a gradual divergence in man- ners and in special sympathies between the colonist of Massachusetts or Virginia and the Englishman of London. Even the shock of the Revolution could, so far as literature was concerned, only hasten that divergence of type — not transform it into a difference of type. To this day, indeed, the course of that divergence has been so slow that we still find Mr. Howells uttering the opinion, not quite justly, that American literature is merely " a condition of English literature." 4 THE PURITAN WEITEKS It would be a remarkable fact if America had, in so short a time, created an altogether new and distinct type of literature. What American Fishcr Ames said nearly a century Literature, " ^go is stiU true : It is uo reproach to the genius of America, if it does not pro- duce ordinarily such men as were deemed the prodigies of the ancient world. Nature has provided for the propagation of men — giants are rare ; and it is forbidden by her laws that there should be races of them." Probably no more wholesome service can now be done to the elementary study of the literature of the United States than by directing it toward the sane and cheerfid recognition of the close relation which has always existed between American writing and EngUsh writing ; and toward a careful weighing of the American authors in whom we properly take pride, upon the same scales which have served us in de- termining the value of British authors. With such ends in view, the present book will attempt, not to be a hterary history of America, but simply to give a connected ac- count of the pure literature which has been produced by Americans. It will not assume to be in any sense a minute literary cyclopaedia — ; PURE LITERATURE 5 of this work, but will rather attempt to select, as time selects, the best or representative names of each period in its course. The in- trinsic literary importance of these writers will be considered, rather than their merely histor- ical importance. Many minor names, there- fore, which might properly be included in a summary of respectable books hitherto pro- duced in America are here omitted altogether and others are given such minor mention as their literary merit appears to warrant. But it is time, you may say, to define more specifically what literature is. No definition of it ever yet given has surpassed Pure Liter- that magnificent sentence of Lord **"™- Bacon's which one marvels never to have seen quoted among the too scanty evidences that he wrote the works attributed to Shake- speare : " It [literature] hath something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by con- forming the show of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as rea- son and history do." It is only literature then, in Bacon's defi- nition, which truly " raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity." All else is reason (or reasoning) and history (or narrative). 6 THE PURITAN WRITERS "Where does literature find its source? Not in thought or feeling alone, else we should look to the cradle for our literature. Not even in the first impulses of speech ; the cradle supplies those, and so, in maturer life, do the street, the railway, the shop.