A History of American Literature

The non-mention of any Southern writers for nearly two centuries in a history of American literature is likely to mislead the unthinking reader. Certain qualifying facts should be reckoned with in drawing any deductions. The first and most specific is that Poe, although born in Boston and largely active in Philadelphia and New York, belongs to the South. His poems and tales are without time and space, but his criticisms are often vigorously sectional; yet he was really an isolated character, speaking for himself without associates or disciples.

For the comparative withdrawal of the South during a long period from the writing and publishing of poems, essays, and stories, there are two main reasons. One is the general nature of the early settlement (see pp. 3, 4, 6). The spread of the population over a wide area and the consequent lack of large towns gave no encouragement to printers and publishers before the Revolution and furnished no such gathering places as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Literature, like all the other arts, thrives best in fellowship. With the Revolution and after it the richest culture of the South devoted itself to statesmanship and expressed itself in oratory. John Adams, governmental specialist, regretted that he had no leisure for the arts (see p. 69), but Thomas Jefferson, his successor in the White House, was a creative educator, a linguist, an architect, and not unversed in music. Southern gentlemen from the days of Jefferson and Madison to those of Abraham Lincoln read “Mr. Addison” and “Mr. Steele” and “Mr. Pope,” fashioned their speech and writing after those courtly models, and, when they wrote at all, circulated their efforts among friends, not submitting them to the sordid touch of the publisher.

Moreover, the literary consciousness of the South is shown in the history of the American theater. The earliest performances of which there is record were given on Southern estates in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The Hallam company of players, arriving from England in 1752, secured their first hearing in Maryland and Virginia. Smaller Southern communities held their own with New York and Philadelphia in the patronage of the stage, while surviving Puritan prejudice made New England an arid field for the drama until well into the next century. Again, the founding of the University of Virginia, preëminent though not the oldest among Southern colleges, was a doubly important event in American education, for it was first among state universities, with a curriculum recognizing the demands of citizenship, and it was unique in the beauty of its housing. Finally, journalism was not neglected in the South, keeping pace with the progress in the rest of the country; and the Southern Literary Messenger (1834–1865) held an enviable place among American periodicals during its thirty years of life.

From 1850 the natural course of events in the South began to develop literary centers, of which Charleston, South Carolina, was the most notable. At this date William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) was in the high prime of life and was the unchallenged leader by virtue of age, literary achievement, and force of personality. He had appeared before the public with two volumes of poems in 1827, without foregoing poetry had gone on to prolific writing of adventure stories, and had produced at the rate of more than a book a year. He was an aboundingly vigorous, somewhat turbulent man, with a stimulating gift for talk and a very generous interest in all men of literary feeling and especially in younger aspirants. Around him and John Russell, the bookseller, there gathered by social gravitation a group who became for Charleston what the frequenters of the Old Corner Book Store were to Boston and rather more than what the “Bohemians” of Pfaff’s restaurant were to New York. Russell’s became a rendezvous for the best people during the daytimes – perhaps to buy, perhaps only to talk – and in the evenings the men gathered in the spirit of a literary club, though without organization or name. Russell’s Magazine was the natural fruit of the group-spirit thus engendered, just as the Atlantic Monthly (see p. 288) was of similar associations in Boston or as the Dial had been of the Transcendental Club in 1840 (see p. 195).

It was a further consequence of this plowing of the cultural soil that two Charleston boys born in 1829 and 1830 were encouraged as young men not only to write but to publish their poems and that one became the first editor and the other a frequent contributor to the local periodical. These were Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Of the two friends, somewhat as in the case of Halleck and Drake, Timrod, the one who showed promise of finer things, was the victim of an early death. As a youth he was given to the introspective seriousness and the grave extravagances of the growing poet – characteristics which are not wholly sacrificed in the grown poet, as they are in the average “sensible” man. His inclination to extol emotion as an end in itself, however, was fostered by a native hospitality toward sentimentalism for which there was little to correspond in the more prosaic North. In fact “the susceptibility of early feeling” which Irving wished to keep alive (see p. 126) and which was the central thread in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” was, and still is, a cue to certain prevailing Southern traits. Whatever may have been the origin of Southern speech and manners, they have continued in some measure to resemble those which we associate with English literature of the mid-eighteenth century. Both have a touch of courtly formality, a tendency toward the oratorical style, an explicit insistence on honor and chivalry, a display of deference to womanhood and to all beauty, and both are in constant danger from the insincerity which besets a speech or a literature which relies on conventional phrasing until the original locutions lose their original vitality.32

Timrod as a youthful versifier passed through his period of unconvincing extravagance, and even in his earlier work showed by occasional flashes that he had his own gift for expression as well as a receptive mind for poetry. In 1859 his first book of poems was published. It had the coveted distinction of the Ticknor and Fields, Boston, imprint, but it was indubitably the utterance of a Charleston poet. The sonnet “I know not why, but all this weary day” is full of genuine feeling, and in its ominous despair foretells the coming war:

Timrod’s two greater poems were dedicated to the Confederacy. They are the outpourings of loyalty to the shortlived nation, full of passion, no freer from hate and recrimination than the average poems from the North, but positive in their ardent faith in the beneficent part the Confederacy was to play in future history. Like all other war poets he suffered from the embittering effects of the conflict. His first inclination was to think more about his hopes for the South than about his hatred of the North; yet even in “The Cotton Boll” and in “Ethnogenesis” he saw red at times, as any human partisan was bound to do. The newly federated South was to send out from its whitened fields an idealized cotton crop that “only bounds its blessings by mankind.” The labors of the planter were to strengthen the sinews of the world. Yet into this finely altruistic mood came the acrid thought of the war which was in progress, and in a moment he was vilifying the “Goth” in the same breath that he was resolving to be merciful. Timrod endured without flinching as an individual. As a confederate patriot he dreamed

But when the war was over, in his “Address to the Old Year” (1866) he was all for complete and speedy reconciliation.

Fortunately, in the slow approach toward this millennial conclusion Timrod was spared the brutal blunders of the Reconstruction period, for he died within the next twelvemonth, serene in his hopes.

Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–1886), a man of moderate talents and of achievement that was greater in bulk than quality, was whole-heartedly devoted to literature. With the founding of Russell’s, while the bookseller supplied the capital and Simms the general stimulus, Hayne was the obviously willing and capable young man to carry the editorial routine. If the war had not cut short the life of the magazine within three years, Hayne might have fulfilled a long and useful career in its guidance. Moreover, the kind of criticism to which his work would have accustomed him might have refined his own verse and reduced its quantity as it did for Aldrich and Gilder. But a career like theirs was denied him when Russell’s was discontinued, and he was forced into the precarious existence of living by his pen without the assurance of any regular salary. Though this may be a sordid detail, it is not a negligible one, for the lack of a certain income not only disturbs the artist’s mind but goads him to writing for monetary rather than artistic ends. This result is apparent in Hayne’s work. He had to force himself, and he wrote in consequence the only kind of poetry that industry and good will can produce.

Much of it was for special occasions. He wrote on demand for everything, from art exhibits to cotton expositions, always conscientiously without any special lightness or felicity. He fell into the conventional nineteenth-century habit of writing on romantic subjects located in parts of the earth which he knew only from other men’s poetry. His best work, of course, sprang more directly from his experience. Some of his war lyrics are stirring, though seldom up to Timrod’s best. Some of his protests after the war are spirited and wholly justified by the stupid clumsiness of Northern control. “South Carolina to the States of the North” and “The Stricken South to the North” suggest in verse what Page’s “Red Rock” and Tourgée’s “A Fool’s Errand” present through the detail of extended novels. Hayne’s tributes to other poets, particularly to Longfellow and Whittier, are full of generous admiration, and his nature poems ring finely true. Most of all the Southern pine fascinated him by its perennial grace and strength and its mysterious voice. A pine-tree anthology could be culled from his verse.

To be the poet of a class or a district and no more than that is ordinarily not a notable achievement, but the fact that they represented an epoch as well as a section emphasizes the significance of Timrod and Hayne. They were products of freshly stimulating conditions in the South; before the war they began to sing for a neighborhood that had long been comparatively silent. And when the war came on, and after its conclusion, they were not only its best singers but they were remarkable in war literature for the fineness of their positive spirit and their relative freedom from abusive rancor. They reaped in love and praise the reward that their impoverished constituency could not pay them in money.

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842. He was therefore twelve or thirteen years younger than Hayne or Timrod, and his productive period was correspondingly later, namely, in the 70’s. He could trace his Lanier ancestry back to the court musicians of the Stuarts, and beyond them to a conjectured past in France. His mother sang and played in the home, and his father, a courtly and refined lawyer, was a “gentle reader” of the old Southern school. Macon was a town of extreme orthodoxy where “the only burning issues were sprinkling versus immersion, freewill versus predestination,” but where the rigors of Calvinism were mollified by innocent merrymaking and the amenities of Southern hospitality. From here Lanier went, in 1857, to Oglethorpe University as a member of the sophomore class, graduating from the modest college with first honors in 1860. Though successful in scholarship, he had found his chief enjoyments in wide reading of romantic literature and in flute-playing. He was convinced that his talents were in music, but his strong ethical bias led him to check them because he could not satisfactorily answer the question, What is the province of music in the economy of the world? On his appointment as tutor at Oglethorpe he decided to remain in college-teaching, rounding out his preparation by two years at Heidelberg. When the war broke he seemed to be well started on the path trod by Longfellow and Lowell.

In “Tiger Lilies,” his early romance, he described how the “afflatus of war” swept the South as it sweeps any land in the first hours of decision. “Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts, conditioning impatient lovers with war services. It thundered splendidly in the impassioned words of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in barrooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms… It offered tests to all allegiances and loyalties, – of church, of state; of private loves, of public devotion; of personal consanguinity, of social ties.” In 1861 Lanier enlisted in the first Georgia regiment to leave for the front. Four years later he returned with health permanently impaired by the hardships of service and of a prison camp.

Even though wrecked in health, he came out from the war saddened but not embittered, and convinced as early as 1867 that the saving of the Union had been worth the ordeal. His insistence that hatreds should be buried was maintained in face of every influence to the contrary. The countryside had been devastated and business brought to a stop. Libraries had been destroyed and colleges closed. As recuperation began the magnanimous influence of Lincoln waned, and the reign of the “carpetbaggers” inflamed the worst elements in the South, drove some of the better in despair to other parts of the country, and reduced the rest to bruised and heartsick indignation. Lanier could not be unaffected by such conditions. He took refuge in grinding work: first in teaching and then in several years of law practice in the examination of title deeds. “Tiger Lilies” was published in 1867 by Hurd and Houghton in New York, and a number of poems were printed there in the Round Table during 1867 and 1868. But depression and drudgery tended to silence him, and might have done so if the music in him had succumbed with the poetry and if the poetry had not been revived by the stimulating friendships of two older men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Bayard Taylor.

Music gained a new hold on him during an enforced health trip to Texas in the winter of 1872–1873. He had reveled in the concerts he had heard in different visits to New York after the war, but in San Antonio he fell in with a group of musicians for whom he was a player as well as an auditor. Without any formal instruction in the flute he had achieved such a command of the instrument that it had become a second voice for him. In the autumn of ’73 he met and played for Hamerick, Director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and in December he went in triumph to his initial rehearsal as first flutist in the newly organized Peabody Symphony Orchestra. For the rest of his life music was his most reliable means of support and a source of pleasure that amounted to little less than dissipation. As a performer he was in great demand for extra local engagements, from which he seemed to gain quite as much enjoyment as he gave – for he played in a kind of ecstasy; he “felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary inspiration, to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship.” As an auditor, whether of his own music or that rendered by others, his appreciation was almost wholly sensuous, an experience of raptures, thrills, and swooning joys. “Divine lamentations, far-off blowings of great winds, flutterings of tree and flower leaves and airs troubled with wing-beats of birds or spirits; floatings hither and thither of strange incenses and odors and essences; warm floods of sunlight, cool gleams of moonlight, faint enchantments of twilight; delirious dances, noble marches, processional chants, hymns of joy and grief: Ah, midst all these I lived last night, in the first chair next to Theodore Thomas’ orchestra.” From such a comment one is prepared for frequent references to the more modern composers, few to Beethoven, and none at all to Bach and Brahms; and one is helped to understand also the mistakenly limited dictum – too often quoted – that “Music is love in search of a word.” Music was immensely important in Lanier’s emotional life; the kind that he most enjoyed, and the kind of enjoyment he derived from it, furnished the cue for an interpretation of much of his poetry – a cue which is the clearer when compared with what music meant to Browning.