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GOVERNOR ENOCH LINCOLN, Author of The Village
CHAPTER XXXI MAINE'S CONTRIBUTION TO LITERATURE By John Clair Minot
Literature in a restricted sense, as a fine art, is one thing. Literature in its broader sense, as including in general the published works of the writers of a given region over a given period, is quite another thing. In this broader understanding of what literature is let us consider what Maine has contributed to it. It follows, then, that our discussion-which, in any case, must be incomplete and inadequate-will be in the main an appreciative summary of what Maine-born writers and Maine influences have contributed to American literature, rather than a work of analysis and of critical estimate of values.
Perhaps it is permissible to name 1604 as the year when the literary history of Maine began. That was sixteen years before the shores of Massachusetts gave their wintery welcome to the storm-tossed Mayflower, and three years before the first English settlements were made at James- town and Popham. Nevertheless that year, 1604, saw the De Monts expedi- tion occupying this region in the name of France and establishing itself on a little island in the St. Croix River. About eighty members of that expedition ventured to pass the winter there, the first Europeans to pass a winter on our shores since the days of the legendary Norsemen. Half of them died before the spring came. There were no other Europeans in America north of the Spaniards in Florida.
To while away the lonely weeks of that long and cruel winter the bright spirits of the company prepared and passed around-of course in written form-a little paper that they called the Master William. Samuel de Champlain, the historian of the expedition, later the founder of Que- bec and the father of New France, refers to it briefly. What a pity that he did not embody a copy of it in his vivid narrative of that winter-for the Master William was undeniably the first American periodical, and Samuel de Champlain's journal, which, happily, has survived, was the first history, or written work of any sort, penned within the present limits of New England.
Three years later the English under George Popham came to the mouth of the Kennebec. Their attempt to colonize, like that of the French on the St. Croix, proved but a broken beginning. Like Moses, they only looked, as it were, into the promised land. Yet their ill-fated colony had
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its faithful chroniclers and the narrative has come down to us. Of that narrative I have always loved especially well the story that James Davis tells of a trip of twenty of the Popham colonists, he being one of the num- ber, up the Kennebec in October, 1607. How delightful it is, that first picture we get of what is now the capital of Maine-the green island in the rapids of the river; the great store of wild grapes "exceedinge good and sweett, of to sorts both red, but one of them a mervellous deepe red"; the abundance of vegetation and wild fruits on the shores, and the general goodness of the land which the English visitors confessed was beyond their power of expression.
A mile or two above the island in the rapids, which disappeared when the Augusta dam was built more than two centuries later, the party camped on the shore two nights, parleyed with the friendly Indians and set up the cross of Christianity in the heart of a land that had never known it before.
Those early narratives have no end of fascinating allurements, but we must not linger with them. Most of the other early explorers of our coast-Gosnold, Pring, Weymouth, John Smith and the rest-either kept elaborate journals of their voyages and discoveries, or suffered narratives to be written by members of their expeditions, and all that body of price- less historical material may properly be called the first contribution of Maine to literature.
Nor was it many years after that era of exploration before the native- born of Maine began to write and publish. Probably the first on that long list is John Crowne, poet and dramatist, who was born on our coast about 1640-though Nova Scotia has put forward a claim that he was born there. He has been called the rival of Dryden. His dramatic works and translations in verse are in the Boston Public Library-and there I took them from the shelves the other day, only to find small temptation to scan the musty pages.
To skip a full century-probably the most accomplished scholar in America during the last half of the 18th century was Stephen Sewall, who was born in York in 1734. He served long on the Harvard faculty. His work included Hebrew, Syrian, Chaldee, and Greek grammars and dic- tionaries, Latin orations and even the translation of Young's "Night Thoughts" into Latin verse.
We are told that the first book given to the world from a Maine press was "Female Friendship", a thin little volume published at Hallowell in 1797. The first book of Maine poems was published in Portland in 1811, the work of Eliza S. True, who had been born in that city sixty years earlier. The book bore this title: "The Amaranth, Being a Collection of Original Pieces in Prose and Verse, Calculated to Amuse the Minds of Youth Without Corrupting Their Morals". It were well if the writers of
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our generation always felt the spur of an ambition so worthy as that! That volume, as we see, contained prose as well as verse. It is said that the first Maine book wholly in verse was "The Village", brought out in 1816 by Enoch Lincoln, who became the sixth governor of our state.
While "The Amaranth" and "The Village" were enjoying their first popularity-which, we must confess, was neither large nor long-a little lad was roaming the pleasant streets
"of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea."
From the black wharves he watched the tossing tides and felt
"the beauty and mystery of the ships And the magic of the sea."
In the shadows of Deering's woods and beside the shore where he caught "in sudden gleams The sheen of the far-surrounding seas And islands that were the Hesperides,"
he thought the long, long, thoughts of youth, and thrilled to "The song and the silence in the heart That in part are prophecies and in part Are longings wild and vain."
That little lad bore a name that became long ago, and remains after a century has passed, the best known and the best loved in American literature. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may, or may not, be the great- est of our American poets-it can hardly be expected that all the critics will agree on a thing of that sort-but we of Maine are little disposed to concede that the matter is open to argument. And when we stand in Westminster Abbey and see there in Poet's Corner the bust of Longfellow, the only American so honored by our Motherland,-or when we stand before the replica of that bust in Bowdoin's Memorial Hall, or at Harvard, which took the young poet-professor after Bowdoin had trained him-we get a sense of the strength and the universality of the appeal that Long- fellow has made to the hearts of men.
More than a generation has passed since Longfellow laid down his pen after writing his last lines-
"Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light, It is daybreak everywhere,-"
but in spite of all the changing fashions of the hurrying years no poet has supplanted him, or seems likely to supplant him, in the homes and schools of our land. I am confident that nine out of ten of you who are here tonight are familiar with more poems by Longfellow-in a way that you can quote from them or count them as favorite poems-than by any
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other author. And the same would be true in a thousand other gather- ings, like this and unlike this, if that number were held tonight between coast and coast.
Perhaps that test alone suffices. But even disregarding the half hun- dred or hundred of Longfellow's briefer poems that remain familiar and popular from generation to generation, who of our poets has given us so many longer works-works of sustained beauty and strength-that keep their hold on readers of all classes? The Song of Hiawatha, unique in literature, an Indian epic; The Courtship of Myles Standish, with its beautiful pictures of old Plymouth ways and woods; Evangeline, with the haunting pathos of its unforgettable tragedy; The Tales of a Wayside Inn, as undying as the Canterbury tales that inspired them; the masterly trilogy of The Divine Tragedy, The Golden Legend and the New England Tragedies, and the great translation of Dante, faithfully rendering the original line by line, yet always musical and beautiful-what would Ameri- can literature be without them ?
What can we say was Maine's part in all the sum total of what Long- fellow gave the world? Here, of Maine ancestry, he was born; here he was educated; here he passed the golden years of youth and early man- hood. Immeasurably great upon all the work of his later years must have been those influences. And all through his life-from his under- graduate days in Brunswick, when the whispering pines and the sunrise on the hills gave him the inspiration for his earliest poems, until he came back to the old Church on the Hill, fifty years later, to read to his surviv- ing classmates his Morituri Salutamus, the finest tribute to Alma Mater and to old age that poet has ever penned-all through those years, Maine gave him themes for the expression of his poetic genius. What city has a more beautiful poem that is all its own than Portland has in My Lost Youth? Fryeburg has its special claim on Longfellow in the verses on Lovell's Fight, written for the centenary of the fight in 1825, and the first verses that the young poet gave to the world with his name attached. The beautiful Songo River does not forget that Longfellow sang of its devious windings. Among all of Longfellow's sonnets-and he stands pre- eminent as a writer of sonnets-there is none more perfect in form or finer in substance than his tribute to Professor Parker Cleveland, which begins,
"Among the many lives that I have known, None I remember more serene and sweet,
More rounded in itself and more complete, Than his."
The Baron of St. Castine, one of the very few poems in The Tales of a Wayside Inn that is not wholly on an Old World theme, is, however, more a story of the Pyrenees than of the Maine coast.
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By a coincidence that the world has never ceased to wonder at, Amer- ica's greatest novelist, the master wizard of romance, was a college class- mate of our best known and best loved poet. Although Hawthorne was not a native of our state, his name must have a place in any summary of Maine's contribution to literature. It is not simply that he passed much of his boyhood in Raymond and was educated at Bowdoin in the most fam- ous class that any college, large or small, ever graduated, but that his first novel, Fanshawe, was a story of Bowdoin and Brunswick, very thinly dis- guised.
I wonder how many of you ever read Fanshawe? Not many, I am sure. Hawthorne himself regarded the novel as a youthful effort-natur- ally enough, since it was published the year after his graduation-and not until after his death was it commonly included in his collected works. I remember when Professor Chapman, for forty years the beloved and brilliant head of Bowdoin's department of English, confessed that he was reading the story for the first time-the story of the little college town of nearly a century ago, of a hero who was soulful and studious, too good to live long ; of a villain, a former pirate, who tried to kidnap the fair ward of the college president; of a student revel in the old village tavern, rudely interrupted by "prexy". The style is amusingly heavy-a veritable prodi- gality of polysyllabic phraseology-but no student of the marvelous genius that gave the world The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun can afford to neglect Fanshawe.
Contemporaries of Longfellow, and, like him, natives of Portland, were Isaac Mclellan and Nathaniel Parker Willis-honored and widely popular during their lives, but producers of little that seems destined to endure. Both became metropolitan journalists and both travelled widely. Willis was far the more artistic workman, and there is much of beauty and literary charm in his poems, his essays and his works of travel. Espe- cially worthy of surviving are his scriptural poems in blank verse. Many of us must recall the Absolom in the school readers of a generation ago. Willis has been called a dilettante in literature-perhaps because, unlike many authors, he never had to struggle with want,-but he was neverthe- less a most industrious worker for the forty years that followed the pub- lication of his first poems while he was a student at Yale.
Nathaniel P. Willis came of a talented family. His sister, Sarah Pay- son Willis, who became the wife of James Parton, the historian, won fame under the pen name of "Fanny Fern". His father, Nathaniel Willis, while editor of the Eastern Argus, was the first editor ever imprisoned in Maine in punishment for the freedom with which he uttered his sentiments through the press. Earlier than that he had founded the Boston Recorder, the first religious newspaper ever published, and later, in 1827, he founded The Youth's Companion.
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And perhaps I may be permitted to add that The Youth's Companion, which a United States commissioner of education not long ago character- ized as the most important single educational agency in America, has been largely, and in other ways than its origin, a contribution of Maine to literature. In its editorial management and among its contributors Maine names have always been conspicuous. For a full generation its editorial head was Edward Stanwood of Augusta, eminent writer of his- tory and biography and an authority on political and economic subjects ; and for an even longer period its best loved story writer has been C. A. Stephens of Norway Lake. A score of other well known Maine names are high on its roll of editors and contributors. Its first subscriber was a Maine girl; and only last year a Maine man died who had been continuously a subscriber for ninety years-probably a record without a parallel on the subscription lists of any other periodical. And through all the years since Nathaniel Willis founded The Companion in 1827 it has been printed on paper made by the same Maine mill.
I wonder how many of you, or how many persons in Maine, ever heard of MacDonald Clarke, "the mad poet" of the early nineteenth cen- tury ? He was born in Bath in 1798-a few years before Longfellow, Willis and Mclellan were born in Portland-and died in New York in 1842. Eccentric from his youth, the buffetings of fate-"the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"-turned his eccentricities into the delirium of madness in which his broken life came to its tragic end. MacDonald Clarke was undeniably a brilliant man. He had the endowment of genius, and the half dozen books of verse that he brought out have many passages of true poetic beauty. They likewise have many passages that show his unbalanced mind. He was a familiar figure in New York, where his startling mannerisms and his peculiar dress made him conspicuous in public. He was a close associate of Willis, Fitz-Green Halleck and the other New York literary lights of that era, who helped him when the poverty and bitter disappointment of his life had broken his proud spirit. He sleeps in Greenwood Cemetery in a spot that he selected himself. It is a little knoll, since named Poet's Mound, facin? the lake. On the shaft that his friends erected are these lines that he wrote:
"But what are human plaudits now, He never deemed them worth his care; Yet Death has twined around his brow The wreath he was too proud to wear."
MacDonald Clarke is forgotten alike in the state of his birth and the city of his unhappy career, but worth remembering, perhaps, is something he said in a lucid interval shortly before his death: "Four things I am sure there will be in heaven-music, little children, flowers and fresh air".
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There are two groups of Maine writers whose work warrants special emphasis in any study, however brief and inadequate, of the contribution of our state to literature. They are the writers of juvenile works-Elijah Kellogg, Jacob Abbott and their successors-and the humorists of an earlier generation-Seba Smith, Edgar Wilson Nye and Charles F. Browne.
Elijah Kellogg undeniably stands in the front rank of all those who have written books for boys. I would call him king of them all, but somehow "king" and "kingly" ill become the shy little man who passed sixty years as pastor of a parish of farmers and fisher folk on the Harps- well shore. I hold in vivid recollection a scene of almost a quarter of a century ago, a scene that well tells the story of Elijah Kellogg. It was at the centennial celebration of Bowdoin College in 1894. More than twelve hundred sons of the college were at the dinner in a big tent on the campus, and among the speakers were the chief justices of the United States and of Maine, the governor and former governors and others high in the" public service and in law and letters. For each of them the great gather- ing had a greeting that was enthusiastic and even tumultuous. But when Elijah Kellogg came to the front of the platform, a frail little old man, blushing under his bronzed skin like a boy at the eulogistic presentation, then the graduates of Bowdoin, old and young, literally climbed to the table tops to shout the welcome that the love in their hearts prompted. And what a speech he gave them! It was the speech of the afternoon, and the demonstration that followed its final period was even greater than that which preceded his first words. And before the tumult of cheers and applause, renewed again and again, had died away; Elijah Kellogg slipped out under the tent, untied the horse that he had hitched to a fence near the campus, and drove off alone through the pine woods to his home and his work on the Harpswell shore.
That was Elijah Kellogg,-thrilling and lifting the hearts of men, inspiring the reverence of all who knew him, using his divine gift of elo- quence in the causes that he loved, avoiding the applause of the world, fol- lowing his quiet pathway where he could breathe the balsam of the pines and the salt of the sea. And those men, old and young, who climbed to the tables and cheered him to the echo-they had often declaimed "Sparta- cus to the Gladiators", "Regulus to the Carthagenians", and "Pericles to the People"; they had read Good Old Times and the Whispering Pine series, and the stories of adventure on Elm Island and along Pleasant Cove and in Forest Glen, all of them wholesome, virile tales that smack of the sea and the forest and the soil.
Elijah Kellogg was more than fifty years old before he began to write the thirty juvenile books that have made his name a household word to millions. If they are written in a style far above the level of most juvenile books-or of other books for that matter-let it be remembered that after 12
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his death his biographer, Professor Mitchell, found on the shelves of his little library 236 volumes of the classics of Greece and Rome, every one of them worn by the loving use of many years. Does it seem that I am dwell- ing overlong on the sailor-farmer-preacher of Harpswell? Oh, but no man can measure the influence of such books as he wrote for the live boys of the land; and it will be a sad day for America when a generation arises that knows not Elijah Kellogg!
Of other Maine authors who have made notable contributions to juvenile literature Jacob Abbott has a place of special prominence. His Rollo books, among the more than 200 volumes that came from his busy pen, gained wide popularity. They served well the purpose of the gen- eration for which they were written, but they have no such worth and no such elements of permanence as characterize the stories of Elijah Kel- logg. Noah Brooks, a son of Castine, perhaps more deserving of fame as a journalist and historian, was also a writer of good books for boys. And of our later day writers of this class there must be special mention of James Otis Kaler, writing, under the name of "James Otis", more than seventy books of the sane and stirring sort that boys are the better for reading; of Clarence B. Burleigh, who took time from the demands of journalism and public affairs to write wholesome stories of school days and of the lumber camp and the river drive,-and of Will O. Stevens, whose stories of the navy and the Naval Academy are in a class by them- selves.
Nor can we forget the Maine-born who have written books for girls. Among them Rebecca Sophie Clark, the "Sophie May" of a million grate- ful hearts, is pre-eminent. In her Norridgewock home on the shore of the Kennebec, she wrote the half hundred little volumes, one series of six after another, that have delighted succeeding generations of girl readers.
Among the Maine humorists the name of Seba Smith comes first both in point of time and in brilliance and versatility of accomplishments. If most of us are little familiar with his work today, let it be remembered that the writings on which his reputation, mainly rests were political satires that reached their mark in the first third of the last century, and that his death occurred a full half century ago. Seba Smith was born in Buckfield-the same town that gave the world John D. Long, a schol- arly writer as well as a statesman of the first rank. After his graduation from Bowdoin, a hundred years ago this summer, Seba Smith entered on the journalistic career, first in Portland and then in New York, that led to his Major Jack Downing letters on the politics of the times, the best known of his numerous works. He wrote much in verse, but probably felt that his masterpiece was a mathematical work on which he spent the last years of his life. The wife of Seba Smith was Elizabeth Oakes
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Smith, a Portland woman, and herself a writer of charm and brilliancy. An earlier generation often referred to this talented couple as "the Howitts of America".
The great national laughmakers of the generation immediately pre- ceding our own were Henry Wheeler Shaw, known as "Josh Billings", Edgar Wilson Nye, or "Bill Nye", and Charles Farrar Brown or "Artemus Ward". Henry Wheeler Shaw, the centenary of whose birth fell last month, was a son of western Massachusetts; but both the others were natives of Maine. Brown, whose brilliant career as a humorous lecturer was cut short by death when he was only 33, was born in Waterford, "in Waterford, up near Rumford", as he was wont to say. Nye was a native of Shirley, in the Piscataquis region that gave the world the Maxim broth- ers. Of the laughmakers of the present generation-unhappily all too few, or, at least, lacking the capacity to hold the attention of the public in these stressful times-Maine has a very substantial claim on John Kendrick Bangs, who has made his home on our coast for many years. He himself claims that he is "a-son-of-Ogunquit" and "a naturalized Mainiac".
Then there is that great body of literature that is the fruit of pure scholarship and of spiritual and humanitarian purpose-the works of the- ology, philosophy, ethics and sociology. Maine has contributed many shining names to the list of those who have written books of real dis- tinction in that field. We do not forget Calvin E. Stowe, Egbert Coffin Smyth, Ezra Abbot, George Barrell Cheever, Newman Smyth, Samuel Har- ris, Cyrus A. Bartol, Cyrus Hamlin, Charles Carroll Everett, Henry Boyn- ton Smith, Henry M. King, Minot J. Savage, Albion W. Small, Shailer Mat- thews, Edwin Pond Parker and Herbert E. Cushman. And on all that shining roll there is no name brighter than that of William DeWitt Hyde, the teacher beloved and the leader inspired, who laid aside his pen a year ago.
It would be pleasant and profitable to linger on some of those names, but I can do no more here than barely to mention them. The same pass- ing reference must suffice for other men, in varying fields of literature, whose names are high on Maine's honor roll of authors-David Barker, the Robert Burns of the Penobscot region; Joseph Williamson of Belfast, the historian of Maine; Arlo Bates, the flower of culture, writer of polished verse and pleasing novels, and long a guide to those seeking the best in literature; Moses Owen of Bath, a genius who came to an early and tragic end, but whose memory will not fade while Maine honors the battleflags that her sons brought back from the fields that saved the Union; Isaac Bassett Choate, he of the singing heart, who gave the world-but did the giving with such absence of ostentation that the gift has been all too little noted-half a dozen volumes of marvelous lyrical sweetness; Nathan Haskell Dole, clever and versatile son of a talented mother, Caroline
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