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Boston orators: Webster; Choate; Everett [1830

The simplest feature of his complex character was a patriotic devotion to the Constitution of the United States, so fervent as to resemble the religious enthusiasm of Puritan days; and his chief utterance of this was perhaps his famous Reply to Hayne, published in 1830, only two years before Emerson's withdrawal from the pulpit of the Second Church of Boston. With all Webster's patriotic fervour, his utterances now seem rather innocently artificial; they are clearly modelled on the masterpieces of Parliamentary oratory in the eighteenth century, which in turn were modelled on the oratorical masterpieces of Cicero and Demosthenes. They have, at the same time, a passionate yet controlled sincerity which marks them as his own. Similarly individual are the more coolly elaborate orations which laid a firm rhetorical basis for the widely useful public career of Webster's most eminent Boston contemporary, Edward Everett. The school of oratory which these two masters exemplify was numerous, and persisted long. Its later formal master was Rufus Choate, whose achievements at the bar are still fresh in the public memory, though he has been dead for more than forty years. The somewhat demagogic speakers who stirred anti-slavery sentiment, with what seemed to conservative minds a reckless disregard of truth, sprang from the same rhetorical stock. The species of oratory which reached its height in the patriotic eloquence of Webster was the same which declined in the virulent diatribes of Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips.

Meanwhile, almost from the time of the Revolution, another kind of activity had also declared itself in Massachusetts. Harvard College, the oldest of American universities, had been founded there as early as 1636; but for rather more than two centuries it did little more than preserve, with admirable fidelity, the tradition of classical and mathematical scholarship. When the awakening of national consciousness began to stir Harvard men, it excited them towards fresher kinds of learning. They began to found learned societies, libraries, and periodicals, some of which still exist. For more than a century the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Historical Society have maintained, each in its own way, a standard of learning which will bear comparison with the best. The Boston Athenaeum, founded about 1815, is now a library of positive and growing importance, from which has indirectly sprung the still richer and more widely-known Public Library of Boston, the model on which have been formed the numerous public libraries now so general in the United States. The North American Review, until it passed into commercial hands and was transferred to New York, maintained for many years in Boston a standard analogous to that of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Reviews in England.

From the influences thus concentrated sprang, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a school of historical writing which has won more than local recognition. Its first eminent master was William Hickling

-1891] Prescott. Motley. Parkman. Ticknor. Thoreau 745 Prescott, whose work dealt with the Spanish conquests of America, and subsequently with the later history of Spain. Its next leader was John Lothrop Motley, whose chief subject was the assertion of liberty by the Dutch, in their conflicts with the Spaniards. But the most accomplished member of this school was Francis Parkman, whose work, persisted in for fifty years despite incredible physical obstacles, records, perhaps definitively, the struggle in America between the constitutional system of England and the more arbitrary system of continental Europe, as embodied in the Canadian colonies of France.

Among the earlier writers of history in New England none had more permanent influence than George Ticknor; but this influence was not primarily due to his writings. His principal work is a History of Spanish Literature, never very widely read. His principal activity, so far as popular memory goes, was the generous part which he took in the foundation of the Boston Public Library. But what seems now his most important contribution to the intellectual life of his country was the work which he conscientiously did for many years as Smith Professor at Harvard College. The chair, of which he was the first tenant, was founded to promote a study at that time almost unknown in America. the study of modern literature. He began his teaching in 1819; by 1835, when he resigned his professorship, the facts of modern literature were generally familiar to New England. A year later he was succeeded, at his own suggestion, by Longfellow, who held the chair until 1854; by that time New England not only knew what modern literature was, but eagerly enjoyed it. Longfellow was succeeded by Lowell, who, at least nominally, remained Smith Professor until his death in 1891. In his time New England learned not only to enjoy modern literature but critically to appreciate it. Since 1891 the chair has remained

vacant.

The names of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and of James Russell Lowell are among the most eminent in the roll of literary men who flourished in New England during this epoch; and the fact that both these men were professors of belles lettres in the oldest of American universities throws light on the nature of the literature which they made and which was in making about them. It was essentially an expression of the effect produced on the native American mind, when, deeply imbued with the ideal traditions of its country, it awakened at once to national consciousness and to sympathetic knowledge of what world-literature had achieved elsewhere. Hardly in existence before 1832, this Renaissance of New England was virtually complete when Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864. Though many of his contemporaries long survived him, none added any new feature to the characters which had been adequately expressed during his lifetime. We have already touched on the buoyant and vagrant idealism of Emerson and on the less inspiring individualism of Thoreau. Thoreau, even more memorably,

746 Whittier. Longfellow. Lowell. Holmes. Hawthorne [1830–

expressed the consolation and the sedate pleasure which may be found in the contemplation of nature even in rugged New England. John Greenleaf Whittier, so well known as the impassioned and sincere poet of antislavery enthusiasm, was more noteworthy still as another exponent of the peculiar charm which lurks beneath the rude face of the Yankee country. Mrs Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had flashed the horrors of slavery into the upper consciousness of the philanthropic world, had been succeeded by tales which, with the same careless admixture of genius and commonplace, had recorded the traditional society of earlier New England. Longfellow, with gentle amenity, had revealed to America the innocent charm which hides the murky depths of old-world literature; beyond anyone else he had translated the beauties of other languages into the simple tunes of his country, leaving his native air the sweeter for his song. Lowell, sympathetic at once with humanity and with the humanities, had proved himself the chief humanist of the Renaissance in New England; and meanwhile had made those quaint political satires which raise a doubt whether he was more remarkable as a satirist or as interpretative critic. Oliver Wendell Holmes had written excellent occasional poems and some of those uniquely garrulous essays, which beyond anything else express the humour and the kindly rationalism of his time; they have their grimmer side as well, when one comes to understand the bravery of his lifelong struggle against the haunting horrors of Calvinistic dogma. And Hawthorne, the most deeply artistic of all, had beautifully recorded, in his own exquisite and tender style, the native temper of the country which, during his time, was finally emerging from the benumbing self-consciousness of ancestral Puritanism.

These names, perhaps the most memorable in the record of New England letters, probably imply most of the tendencies which found. expression there. But many more people were writing at the same time. Much of the work in question may be found in the earlier volumes of the Atlantic Monthly, which was founded in 1857. It remains to this day the chief vehicle of literature in New England; and it has never swerved from its standard intention to publish nothing but what has been honestly meant and excellently phrased. In the earlier days, its most eminent editors were Lowell and Fields, men of widely different characters, but both of them native Yankees, full of instinctive sympathy with what was most deeply characteristic of their country. It is significant of what ensued in New England that their two most eminent successors in the control of the Atlantic Monthly have been neither New England men, nor, for all their admirable devotion to literature, completely at ease in New England surroundings. And it is hardly excessive to say that, so far as pure letters go, New England has not subsequently produced any writers of much more than local importance.

In brief, the literature of New England may be regarded, for the moment, as complete. For nearly two hundred years the region had

-1900] Changes in New England. Whitman. Harte 747

been defining its native character under the rigid influence of Puritan theology. When the Revolution awakened it to its final sense of nationality, the strength of formal Puritanism was broken. A certain disintegration ensued. So long as the generations were alive which had grown to consciousness under the conservative influences of the older time, the expression of New England retained at once the idealism and the aspiration toward ideal excellence, of every kind, which had been the saving grace of the Fathers. Then, in course of time, Unitarianism lapsed into uncontrolled freedom of devout thought, and so into such vagaries that, as we have seen, prudent folk have been apt to recoil into the arms of Churches more rigidly ecclesiastical than those of their forefathers. So, while the literature of New England once seemed a prophecy of some newly-enfranchised future, it is beginning to reveal itself rather as the record of an ideal and innocent past. And, all the while, the disintegrated region from which it sprang has been tending to lapse more and more into provincial isolation.

The subsequent literature of America is contemporary. Its chief centre is undoubtedly New York, where the principal publishers of the country are now settled, and where the most widely circulated magazines are established. It is hardly excessive, however, to say that the only writer, no longer living, who has achieved in that region a reputation comparable with that achieved by the eminent writers of New England is Walt Whitman. To many, particularly abroad, he appears deeply and prophetically American. To most Americans his rude eccentricities of thought and phrase appear so far from characteristic of their country, that, while admitting him to possess some touch of genius, they are apt to think of him as a sporadic anarchist. To name the writers and to discuss the literary tendencies of the present day would be out of place here. Of the numberless writers of local short stories who have sprung up throughout the country, none has yet surpassed the first to declare himself Bret Harte, who so vividly set forth certain picturesque aspects of the American conquest of the Pacific slope. Like him, the most popular living American writers have generally emerged from the ranks of popular journalism.

It is hard to summarise the modern American temper; and it is harder still to summarise the literary history at whose course we have so hastily glanced. Yet, on the whole, this seems analogous to the legal and the philosophical history on which we touched before. The country whose thoughts and aspirations it has expressed is a country animated by more than common devotion to ideals- the conceptions which are matters not of knowledge, but of fervent faith. It is a country, at the same time, which has been brought by historical necessity face to face with innumerable practical questions, which have had to be settled swiftly. Its precept has consequently soared above its practice, until to strangers it may well seem hypocritical. Its saving grace has been

748

The modern age. The fine arts

[1850-1900

that it retains a spiritual honesty, like that of Elizabethan Englishmen, which has kept unbroken its perhaps mistaken confidence in its own essential integrity. In earlier days the ideals were perhaps more frequently asserted than now; for, at least since the great national convulsion of the Civil War, Americans have been forced, by circumstances beyond human control, to devote their chief energies to the practical solution, in the simplest attainable way, of questions which, if they had paused to master their complexity, might have proved almost paralytically appalling. So meanwhile, very naturally, their literary expression has tended, on the whole, to rather journalistically precise and vivid statements of something resembling fact.

In fine arts other than that of literature America has not yet found very characteristic expression. Its sculpture and its painting have been so far modelled on the contemporary work of Europe that the only American sculptors or painters who have attained high excellence have generally been resident abroad.

Something similar is true of music in America. Of late years, particularly in Boston, New York, and Chicago, America has had orchestras of admirable quality. It has also many respectable schools of music; and the standard of musical art, in general, has become more than respectable. But American musical life and expression have not yet assumed any tangibly national character, such as one feels, for example, in the music of Italy, of Germany, of France, or of Russia. Neither performers nor composers differ much from well-trained performers and composers elsewhere. When America desired a national march for the Centennial Celebration of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Wagner was invited to write it; and the performance of it was intrusted to musicians who were mostly of German birth. What was true twenty-seven years ago remains on the whole equally true to-day.

With architecture the case is different. In later colonial times, American buildings, though generally constructed of wood, and always lighter in material than the monumental buildings of Europe, had often exhibited a certain delicacy of proportion which renders such of them as still exist agreeable examples of the pseudo-classic style general throughout the eighteenth century. The earlier buildings of the independent Republic, such as the State House in Boston, and the White House and the original Capitol at Washington, preserve, on a somewhat more pretentious scale, much of this charm. In the United States, as in England, there succeeded a period of architecture from which all trace of fine art seemed to have departed; and when, about the time of the Civil War, some signs of an artistic revival appeared, its first efforts, particularly in public buildings, were singularly unfortunate. Within the last thirty years, on the other hand, something resembling a true architectural renaissance has declared itself in America. The great increase of wealth