USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 20
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John Lothrop Motley took the Netherlands for his prov- ince. The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856) gave him a reputation second only to Prescott's; it has not Prescott's brilliancy, but it has narrative power. It is also solidly based on long study of documents, so that it was accepted and re- mains with modifications acceptable to Dutch scholars, not because it is partisan to the Netherlands and hostile to Spain. Motley's temper is even and not emotional, except that he is in love with his subject, as an historian should be. Motley proceeded to The History of the United Netherlands (1860- 1868). His final work is John of Barneveld (1874). Motley rendered service to America by two letters in the London Times (May 23, 24, 1861) on "Causes of The Civil War," which did much to change the hostile tone of the British press.
The finest literary artist of all the historians is Francis Parkman. His primary interest is the American Indian, whom he knew thoroughly at first hand, and his life among the Sioux is the subject of his earliest book, The California and Oregon Trail (1849). This leads him to older Indian history in The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). His great work is the series of histories of the contest between England and France in America: The Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) ; The Jesuits in North America (1867) ; La
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Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) ; The Old Regime in Canada (1874) ; Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) ; Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) ; A Half Century of Conflict (1892). These books constitute an epic, the masterpiece of American historical writing. They lie beyond the period with which this chapter deals, but they belong here, for they have their roots in the best of the older history and every possible virtue of the new.
ORATORY
This was the golden age of oratory. Most of the clergy and all the politicians were orators, or tried to be, and allied to the oration is the lecture on the popular lyceum platform. Note that several of Emerson's thoughtful addresses are called orations. Clerical oratory is as old as the church, and Am- erican political oratory is the child of the British Parliament. To be a good speaker was the ambition of millions of school- boys. The art of public speaking was widely cultivated and oral communication was relatively more important as a means of conveying ideas to the multitude than it is now. In John Quincy Adams's Diary we read of orations and eulogies two hours long, and in 1826 he writes: "There is at this time in this Commonwealth a practical school of popular oratory, of which I believe myself to be the principal founder by my own orations and lectures."
WEBSTER THE ORATOR
Daniel Webster undoubtedly owed much of his success as politician and lawyer to his ideas and general ability. But if he had not been an orator, we might never have heard of him. He was the supreme public speaker of his time. Un- like most of his rivals, he survives in print, because whatever the occasion or the quality of his thought, his speeches have literary quality, many of them are readable and quotable. The voice of the orator perishes like that of the singer or the actor. For testimony as to Webster's vocal magic we depend on his contemporaries, and as to that there is no difference of opinion. The impression of his personality, compelling and attractive, is better preserved for us in Carlyle's description of
From a photograph by Notman Courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society FRANCIS PARKMAN
Courtesy of Halliday Historic Photograph Co. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
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him in 1839 than in a gallery of portraits: "The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face ; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blozen; the mastiff mouth accurately closed."
The "Discourse" at Plymouth in December, 1820, made him the idol of New England. And as orator he held his popularity and increased it to the end through all political dis- sentions. The "Discourse" is admirable for its appeal to the emotions, to the sense of the heroic, and for its just sufficient use of historical illustration. Because Webster's great oc- casions gave him something real to say, and because he was a sensible man, not without humor, his speeches are remark- ably free from the prevalent sins of oratory, florid rhetoric and sound signifying nothing. He was, indeed, an artist with a style of his own, constructing his speeches, instinctively or deliberately (probably both), with excellent design.
His second memorable oration is that at the laying of the corner stone of the Bunker Hill monument in 1825. That oration is almost as solid a part of American tradition as the monument itself. And so also is the second Bunker Hill oration at the completion of the monument in 1843.
His oration in commemoration of John Adams and Jef- ferson (1826) lasted two hours and a half, during which, as John Quincy Adams records in his Diary, "attention held the whole assembly mute." Webster dramatizes Adams as meet- ing objections to the signing of the Declaration of Inde- pendence with the words: "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my heart and hand to this vote." That is the sort of thing that Adams was incapable of saying. Moreover, the literary critic asks what is the difference in meaning between "live or die" and "survive or perish." Nevertheless in rhythm, in oratorical effect the sentence is perfect. You can almost hear Adams say it, as he did not, and Webster say it, as he did.
Of Webster's political forensics, the second reply to Robert Y. Hayne in January, 1830, is extraordinary in composition and in substance. It was delivered a week after Hayne's first attack and less than a week after the second. Yet it sounds as if it had been weeks in preparation; as indeed, it had been and longer, for it phrases thoughts long held and
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meditated. The famous words, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable !" crystalized Union senti- ment and had more practical consequence, so far as that issue was concerned, than any other speech before Lincoln's. The North forgot that service (or likely never realized it as later historians do) when Webster in the almost suicidal "Seventh of March Speech" (1850), his last great one, made another appeal to Unionism by supporting Clay's compromise.
EVERETT, PHILLIPS, AND SUMNER
Much in the Webster tradition is sound, still alive. Henry Cabot Lodge says in The Cambridge History of American Literature that when there is any "serious and large debate in Congress," Webster is quoted, "as he is in every session, twenty times as often as any other public man in our history." The tradition represented by Edward Everett is all but dead as oratory and as literature. Unlike Webster and Wendell Phillips, Everett was writer and scholar as well as speaker, and his published speeches sound written rather than spoken, though he was an effective and popular orator. It is inter- esting to compare his oration at Plymouth in 1824 with that of Webster four years earlier. Webster's sentences strike; Everett's sentences unfold, and what is unfolded is not now impressive, though its substance is as weighty as Webster's. Yet there are fine passages, if no memorable phrases, in the "Eulogy on LaFayette" (1834) and in the "Oration on Washington," which he gave many times from 1856 to 1859 to raise money to buy Mount Vernon. Because of the brief perfection, recognized later, of Lincoln's Gettysburg Ad- dress, Everett's long oration there has been underrated. It is enough that in spite of Lincoln's presence, Everett's oration made a tremendous impression.
A different kind of eloquence is that of Wendell Phillips, which is more direct and simple, not so elaborately involved. Its comparative simplicity is, of course, due partly to the fact that Phillips was driving home one idea. He was brilliant and sonorous because he was hot and passion swelled his cadences. Phillips has a place in American literature for much the same reason that Garrison has, because he did phrase in a form that is still expressive the anti-slavery conflict.
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With him oratory was a weapon rather than an art, and a weapon rusts after the war is done. Phillips's speeches have in them the metal of the time and of himself.
There is enduring vitality, also, in the speeches of Charles Sumner, and his oratory was the foundation of his career. In an oration on "The True Grandeur of Nations," delivered on the fourth of July, 1845, he discovered his power, and was soon a favorite on lecture platforms. His first discourses are literary and scholarly, for his learning was genuine and extensive, and the style is florid and somewhat self-conscious. It is only when, almost against his will, he becomes a politician and speaks on public affairs to a practical end that he shakes off the superfluous graces. His English then is vigorous and without surplusage. In the Senate to which he was elected with no previous political experience he became at once a leader of the anti-slavery forces with his speech, "Freedom national; Slavery sectional" (1852). His speech of May, 1856, "Crime against Kansas," was a powerful indictment of his opponents, not only their position but themselves, and it resulted in the physical assault on Sumner which made him an invalid for years. When he appeared again in the Senate he returned to the charge in a speech on "The Barbarism of Slavery," which remains the best short summary of the whole case and is in a way a summary of the era before the impend- ing Civil War.
WRITERS OF FICTION
In running over the first volumes of the Atlantic Monthly one is struck by the general excellence of the essays and of much of the verse and by the lack of vitality in the fiction. Among the best short stories are those of Rose Terry Cooke who wrote of Connecticut but whose people are the kind that might have lived in any Massachusetts village. The fiction of this period is mostly forgotten in comparison with the amount of verse and the number of essays that have survived or are at least still readable. Hawthorne's genius is almost solitary in Massachusetts, in all New England. Before The Scarlet Letter there is no novel of importance, and in the first volume of the Atlantic Emerson is saying, not only of American fiction but, it seems, of fiction generally : "How
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far off from life and manners and motives the novel still is. Life lies about us dumb." The New Englanders were read- ing the great English novelists, but for some reason did not apply their imaginations in the mode of prose fiction to their own lives. It may be simply that the three or four necessary men of genius did not happen to be alive, just as, obversely, the case would have been worse if Hawthorne had died in his cradle.
Before Hawthorne, or contemporaneous with him, there had been some interesting attempts, the results of which no longer entertain us, but which deserve a word in history. William Ware, a Unitarian clergyman, wrote three novels dealing with early Christian scenes: Zenobia; or the Fall of Palmyra (1838) ; Probus (1838), revised as Aurelian, (1848) ; Julian or Scenes in Judea (1841). These books were widely read at the time and continued to be read until the taste for that sort of religious historical romance declined or was better satisfied by such later examples as Ben Hur. Sylvester Judd, also a Unitarian clergyman, deliberately set out "to fill up a gap long left open in Unitarian literature-that of imagi- native writings." The results were Margaret, a Tale of the Real and the Ideal (1845) and Richard Edney (1850). Their merit is fidelity to life and character in a narrow New Eng- land community. But the story gets lost in the fogs of Transcendentalism, which is better stuff for verse and dis- quisition than for narrative.
A great book, which is put in this place if only for want of another, is not fiction at all but straight autobiography, Rich- ard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840). In all the literature of the sea, real or fictitious, it is a masterpiece literally without rival, for there was nothing like it before and nothing since has surpassed or even equalled it, as every later writer about the sea would eagerly admit. A boy of twenty, quite unconscious of literary power, by telling faithfully, for the first time from the forecastle point of view, his experiences as a common sailor, becomes a master mariner in the literary merchant marine, with Cooper and Melville. It is an extra- ordinary case of an unpretentious, unambitious record becom- ing, to the innocent surprise of the author, a masterpiece.
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And it is a very fitting masterpiece for a commonwealth that was sending its ships to every quarter of the globe.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The son of the captain of one of these ships (an earlier one) was Hawthorne, who travelled not seaward and forward but inland and backward in quest of romance. He was late in finding it and still later in finding many who were interested in his reports of it. In Twice-Told Tales (1837; enlarged edition, 1842) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) we find a few perfect short stories in a pellucid, often poetic style, and in such a tale as "The Gentle Boy", an early example of his attempt to find beauty in the gloom of Puritan darkness. But at the age of forty Hawthorne's genius is still fragmentary in expression and he is, as he calls himself, the obscurest man of letters in America.
In The Scarlet Letter (1850) his power is at its height and at full length. The story moves like a stream through a dusky wood. For Hawthorne the Puritan background is less an historical reality, though he is faithful enough to the spirit of it, than a fantastic scene in which to play with his flaming symbol and on which to set moving strange characters with their dark secrets and mysteries of the heart. His treatment of Hester Prynne is tender, even sentimental, rather than tragic. His sense of terror is intellectual rather than emo- tional; it is humane and pitiful but not profound. Hawthorne is a romantic dramatic poet in prose. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is set in a perpetual twilight in which even the child Phoebe is little more than an elfin phantom. Through a wrinkled front of present reality the story looks back to a darkly remote past through a plot that would be conventional if it were not touched with a haunting, almost tremulous sense of bewitchment and doom. In this book, as in The Scarlet Letter, the unwavering sustention of tone is a marvel of art and at the same time is simply a continuous expression of Hawthorne's own dominant mood.
The Blithedale Romance (1852) is of a more nearly con- temporaneous reality, for it is based in a way on Brook Farın and Transcendentalism, in both of which Hawthorne had only an observer's half quizzical interest. While the others were
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watching their ideas and their community farm go up in smoke, Hawthorne pulled a romance out of the ruins.
He is in, but not definably of, the life about him, seeking rather to escape it and with cool intellectuality partaking little of its enthusiasms and not at all of its vagaries. When every- body else was hotly antislavery and, in modern terms, Repub- lican, Hawthorne was a Democrat, so far as he was anything, and a friend and biographer of Franklin Pierce, who was to Hawthorne's neighbors almost a traitor. His friendship for Pierce, not a political but a personal matter going back to college days at Bowdoin, is important for literature only in that it gave Hawthorne the position of consul at Liverpool and so took him for several years to Europe.
In Italy he found his most artificial romance, The Marble Faun (1860). It had long been one of his half melancholy complaints that America is no favorable place for a writer of romance, since it lacks depth and variety. He now had a chance to see what he could do by applying his mystery-loving imagination to an older civilization. And on the whole he proved that his only real material must be American. The Marble Faun is not drenched with Italy, but is evidently the work of a foreigner seeking romance but not really feeling it. When he came home he returned to American subjects but did not live to finish them.
Hawthorne is by birth, breed, and experience thoroughly of New England, of eastern Massachusetts, and is its foremost, its solitary artist in fiction. There is no doubt that his ma- terial is indigenous. Yet of all men of talent of his time he is perhaps the least representative, for he did not express his time or care much for its dominant ideas. For him it was all a scene, a place to find the strange rather than the actual in character, a limited, impoverished region of romance.
POETS : WHITTIER
The poets did express the time. Though they imported much from Europe with all the enthusiasm of discovery, they drew much from their own life and from prevailing and sur- rounding ideas. Whittier found his first subjects, Legends of New England (1831), close at home, though the manner
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is imitative. It was an important, a dramatic moment when William Lloyd Garrison went to the Whittier farm to dis- cover the boy whose poems had been appearing in Garrison's Free Press. Whittier soon became an active anti-slavery worker, and the movement stirred him to a long series of poems which are the most vigorous and passionate expressions of the subject in verse. His succeeding volumes through a long life are so much of the same general matter and manner that it is not necessary to list most of the volumes. Several dates are significant : The Voices of Freedom (1849) ; Songs of Labor (1850) ; Snow-Bound (1866) ; The Tent on The Beach (1867). Upon most of the occasional pieces, even when Whittier was white hot, time has put a cooling if not an obliterating hand. But "Ichabod," on Webster's support of Clay's compromise, has not lost its fire. Of the many popu- lar ballads some, like "Maud Muller," are commonplace, but several are authentic, like "Skipper Ireson's Ride." There is lasting charm in "The Barefoot Boy," and Whittier's master- piece, "Snow-bound," must endure as long as there are any New Englanders left; its stuff is life itself, and the simple verse is excellent, in many passages even beautiful. Whittier is an instinctive poet, not a trained artist. He is his own best critic in the "Proem" of 1847, which is itself a fine sincere poem.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
From his workaday world Whittier became a national figure, and so, from his easy academic world, did Longfellow. It is a question which was the better beloved of the American people, and each would have yielded to the other. As poets their talents and defects were exactly opposite; Whittier was vigorous but deficient in art; Longfellow was a competent artist but deficient in vigor. They had in common the gift of popular appeal, of expressing the simple sentiments which ordinary people like to have phrased for them. And both have a real talent for readable narrative; Whittier is a born balladist and Longfellow is capable of carrying off somewhat longer stories in verse, Evangeline (1847), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). That the two poets became national institutions whose work
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everybody knew is a phenomenon rare enough in any country and not since repeated in this country. And that the learned Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres at Harvard should have been the silently acclaimed bard and poet laureate of the common people formed a relation between the world of scholarship and the outside world that no other professor, certainly no other poet-professor, has ever estab- lished in America, perhaps not in the world.
From the earliest volume, Voices of the Night (1839), to the last, Ultima Thule (1880), that is, from "A Psalm of Life" to "L'Envoi: A Poet and His Songs", Longfellow moves serenely and modestly triumphant from one book of verse to the next, with some gain in technique and a fair variety of subjects but with no great development of interior thought. A new volume from him is a public event. His poetic conquest of America is so complete that it can only be renewed from time to time. And there is no Waterloo for him even among later critical contests. For there is no con- test. His position is unshakable. With only a second-rate talent, he holds a multitude, not only in provincial New Eng- land but throughout the English-speaking world. And then he quietly silences the critical with the superb sonnets prefixed to his translation of Dante and the really admirable Golden Legend. He became a sort of golden legend himself and it has not yet proved to be pinchbeck or gilt.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Oliver Wendell Holmes had no such multitudinous audience as had Whittier and Longfellow, though his early poem, "Old Ironsides," went all over the country. He addressed the kind of people that he himself represented and humorously defined as the "Brahmin caste." He was indeed an intellectual aris- tocrat and pleasantly conscious of being one. When Lowell accused him of indifference to the burning issues of the day, Holmes cheerfully pleaded guilty. His poetic temper shows best not in his more pretentious poems, such as "The Cham- bered Nautilus," but in the occasional pieces. These are preserved-it is Lowell's happy phrase for a physician-in "fame's great antiseptic-Style."
Holmes was Professor of Anatomy at Harvard Medical
From photographs
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Courtesy of Halliday Historic Photograph Co. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
School and by all accounts a very good one. Long before bacteriology was thought of his observant mind suspected that puerperal fever was communicated by unclean doctors, midwives, and nurses. In his busy life literature was a di- version. However serious his ambitions as a professional writer, he is a supreme amateur, and in those solemn days his irresponsible gaiety is due to his freedom from the practical necessity of writing and from the moral pressure of great events and ideas.
For him Calvinism goes to smash simply in "The One-Hoss Shay." Holmes's verse, delightful as it is, is less important than his prose. When Lowell took the editorship of The Atlantic, he insisted that Holmes should be a first contributor, and so begins "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" (pub- lished in book form, 1858). This book of written talk, causerie at its best, has never lost its freshness and never can. It places Holmes among the great informal essayists from Montaigne to Lamb-and beyond. If it was extraordinary for a man near fifty to inaugurate something new in his own life and all but new in literature, it was still more remarkable that the sequels-sequels are notoriously weak-should have been of the same good stuff: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860) and The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872).
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
James Russell Lowell has left no such completely satis- factory book as The Autocrat. He was a miscellanist in verse and prose and his value is in the totality of his work and in- fluence. On one side he touches the scholarly and the academic; he succeeded Longfellow as Smith professor at Harvard. On the other side his thought extends to popular- or unpopular-ideas and he is one of the shrewdest, wisest critics of his times, a critic not only of books but of men and affairs. His poetry is burdened with didacticism, as he well knew and humorously confessed in A Fable for Critics (1848) :
There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme. The burden of his isms is lightened by humor, and it is that which gives the antiseptic of immortality to The Bigelow
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Papers (1848). That satire on the Mexican war in Yankee dialect survives many diatribes and arguments on the politics of the time. Lowell's serious verse is of high intention but without the magic wings or the vigor of fulfilment. The outstanding lines are simply not there; the best are those on Lincoln in the Commemoration Ode (1865).
Of his prose much, especially the literary criticism, is now musty. To appreciate it we must recover perspective, as was suggested at the beginning of this chapter. In America there was little so good as his essays on the old poets. For us at least two essays, not on literary subjects, have enduring interest. Both are found in My Study Windows (1871). One is the essay on Lincoln, dated 1864, in which Lowell seizes the living man as only later biography has apprehended him. The other paper is "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," which is a sort of new declaration of independ- ence.
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