Reuben Post Halleck

“ The greatest lesson taught by colonial literature, by men like Bradford, Winthrop, Edwards, and the New England clergy in general, is moral heroism, the determination to follow the shining path of the Eternal over the wave and through the forest to a new temple of human liberty. Their aspiration, endeavor, suffering, accomplishment, should strengthen our faith in the worth of those spiritual realities which are not quoted in the markets of the world, but which alone possess imperishable value. ”

“ American poets and prose writers have disclosed the glory of a new companionship with nature and have shown how we,
"... pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth."
After association with them, we also feel like exclaiming:—
"Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
... rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes."
No other literature has so forcibly expressed such an inspiring belief in individuality, the aim to have each human being realize that this plastic world expects to find in him an individual hero. ”

“ Any one who makes an original study of American literature will not be a mere apologist for it. He will marvel at the greatness of the moral lesson, at the fidelity of the presentation of the thought which has molded this nation, and at the peculiar aptness which its great authors have displayed in ministering to the special needs and aspirations of Americans. He will realize that the youth who stops with the indispensable study of English literature is not prepared for American citizenship, because our literature is needed to present the ideals of American life. ”

“ If he writes of early settlers of New York, we are in a Dutch atmosphere. If he tells the legends of the Alhambra, the atmosphere is Moorish. If he takes us to the Hudson or the Catskills or Sleepy Hollow or Granada, he adds to our artistic enjoyment by enveloping everything in its own peculiar atmosphere.
His clear, simple, smooth prose conceals its artistic finish so well and serves as the vehicle for so much humor, that readers often pass a long time in his company without experiencing fatigue. His style has been criticized for lack of vigor and for resemblance to Goldsmith's. ”

“ Let us remember that American life and literature owe their most interesting traits to these three Elizabethan qualities—initiative, ingenuity, and democracy. Let us not forget that the Cambridge University graduate, the cooper, cloth-maker, printer, and blacksmith had the initiative to set out for the New World, the ingenuity to deal with its varied exigencies, and the democratic spirit that enabled them to work side by side, no matter how diverse their former trades, modes of life, and social condition. ”

“ We cannot class as literature those historical writings which are not enlivened with imagination, invested with at least an occasional poetic touch, and expressed in rare style. Unfortunately the very qualities that render history attractive as literature often tend to raise doubts about the scientific method and accuracy of the historian. For this reason few histories keep for a great length of time a place in literature, unless, like Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York, they aim to give merely an imaginative interpretation of a past epoch. ”

“ He mingles humor and pathos, realism and idealism, in a masterly way. No other author has had the necessary dramatic touch to endow those times with such a powerful romantic appeal to our imagination. No one else has rescued them from the oblivion which usually overtakes all transitory stages of human development.
Bret Harte's pages afford us the rare privilege of again communing with genuine primitive feeling, with eternal human qualities, not deflected or warped by convention. He gives us the literature of democracy. ”

“ Only a few such persons as these, so rich in the qualities of the heart, appear in James's novels. He has portrayed a greater variety of men and women than any other American writer, but they usually interest him for some other quality than their power to love and suffer. He is tempted to regard life from the intellectual viewpoint, as a problem, a game, and a panorama. He does not, like Hawthorne, enter into the sanctuary and become the hero, laying the lash of remorse upon his back. ”

“ THE NEW SOUTH.—After the South had passed through the terrible struggle of the Civil War, in which much of her best blood perished, there followed the tragic days of the reconstruction. These were times of readjustment, when a wholly new method of life had to be undertaken by a conservative people; when the uncertain position of the negro led to frequent trouble; when the unscrupulous politician, guided only by desire for personal gain, played on the ignorance of the poor whites and the enfranchised negroes, and almost wrecked the commonwealth. ”

“ With humor to see the little eccentricities of the people among whom she lived and a sympathetic understanding of their heroic qualities, she has created real men and women,—farmers, school teachers, prim spinsters, clergymen, stern Roman matrons,—all unmistakable types of New England village life. Her unfailing ability to transplant the reader into rock-ribbed, snow-clad New England, with its many fond associations for most Americans, is proof of her power as an artist. ”

“ It is not always simple, and sometimes one overcharged stanza will mar an otherwise exquisite poem.
On the other hand, Lanier never gives voice to anything that is merely trivial or pretty. He is always in earnest, and the feeling most often aroused by him is a passionate exaltation. He is a nature poet. The color, the sunshine, the cornfields, the hills, and the marshes of the South are found in his work. But more than their outer aspect, he likes to interpret their spirit,—the peace of the marsh, the joy of the bird, the mystery of the forest, and the evidences of love everywhere. ”

“ An occasional revolt against extreme romanticism is needed to bring literature closer to everyday life. The tendency of the followers of any school is to push its conclusions to such an extreme that reaction necessarily sets in. Some turned to seek for the soul of reality in the uninteresting commonplace. Others learned from Shakespeare the necessity of looking at life from the combined point of view of the realist and the romanticist, and they discovered that the great dramatist's romantic pictures sometimes convey a truer idea of life than the most literal ones of the painstaking realist. ”

“ It is true that Irving writes three pages of essay before beginning the real story in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but the most of this preliminary matter is very interesting description. The quiet valley with its small brook, the tapping woodpecker, the drowsy shade of the trees, the spots haunted by the headless Hessian,—all fascinate us and provide an atmosphere which the modern short-story teller too seldom secures. ”

“ The mission of all the great New England writers of this age was to make individuals freer, more cultivated, more self-reliant, more kindly, more spiritual. Puritan energy and spirituality spoke through them all. Nearly all could trace their descent from the early Puritans. It is not an infusion of new blood that has given America her greatest writers, but an infusion of new ideals. Some of these ideals were illusions, but a noble illusion has frequently led humanity upward. ”

“ A GLANCE BACKWARD Lack of originality is a frequent charge against young literatures, but the best foreign critics have testified to the originality of the Knickerbocker Legend, of Leatherstocking, of the great Puritan romances, in which the Ten Commandments are the supreme law, of the work of that southern wizard who has taught a great part of the world the art of the modern short story and who has charmed the ear of death with his melodies, of America's unique humor, so conspicuous in the service of reform and in rendering the New World philosophy doubly impressive. ”

“ These unusual and somewhat sensational characters give high color, warmth, and variety to the romance. The two exquisite Creole women, Aurora and her daughter, Clotilde, are a triumph of delicate characterization, being at one and the same time winning, lovable, illogical, innocent, capable, and noble. The love scene in which Aurora says "no," while she means "yes," and is not taken at her word, is as delicious a bit of humor and sentiment as there is in modern fiction. ”

“ Centuries will not repair that waste of creative ability in either section. France, after the lapse of more than two hundred years, is still suffering from the loss of her Huguenots. It is impossible to compute what American literature has lost as a result of this war, not only from the double waste involved in turning the energies of men to destruction and subsequently to the necessary repairs, but also from the sacrifice of life of those who might have displayed genius with the pen or furnished an encouraging audience to the gifted ones who did not speak because there were none to hear. ”

“ Donatello, the faun, Miriam, the beautiful and talented young artist, Kenyon, the American sculptor, and Hilda, the Puritan maid who tends the lamp of the Virgin in her tower among the doves and makes true copies of the old masters. From the beginning of the story some mysterious evil power is felt, and this power gains fuller and fuller ascendency over the characters. What that is the author does not say. It seems the very spirit of evil itself that twines its shadow about human beings and crushes them if they are not strong enough to resist. ”

“ Nowhere else in this country, not even at the West, was there a greater feeling of independence and a more complete exercise of individuality. There was a certainty about life and opinions, a feeling of relationship with everybody, a defiance of convention, that made Suffolk County the fit birthplace of a man who was destined to trample poetic conventions under his feet and to sing the song of democracy. In Walt Whitman's young days, all sorts and conditions of men on Long Island met familiarly on equal terms. ”

“ Every student will find his comprehension of American literature aided by a careful study of this Declaration. This trumpet-tongued declaration of the fact that every man has an equal right with every other man to his own life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has served as an ideal to inspire some of the best things in our literature. This ideal has not yet been completely reached, but it is finding expression in every effort for the social and moral improvements of our population. Jefferson went a step beyond the old Puritans in maintaining that happiness is a worthy object of pursuit. ”

“ In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God."
The impressive moral lesson taught by American literature is a presence not to be put by. Lowell's utterance is typical of our greatest authors:—
"Not failure, but low aim, is crime."
Hawthorne wrote his great masterpiece to express this central truth:—
"To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,—it is impalpable,—
it shrinks to nothing within his grasp." ”

“ Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature."
Henry James in his essay, The Art of Fiction, denies that the novelist is less concerned than the historian about the quest for truth. He says, "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. ”

“ All sections of the country do not agree in regard to whether Uncle Tom's Cabin gives a fairly representative picture of slavery. This is a question for the historian, not for the literary critic. We study Macbeth for its psychology, its revelation of human nature, its ethics, more than for its accurate exposition of the Scottish history of the time. We read Uncle Tom's Cabin to find out how the pen of one woman proved stronger than the fugitive slave laws of the United States, how it helped to render of no avail the decrees of the courts, and to usher in a four years' war. ”

“ She extends her hands to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children. Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring something of Eden back to our everyday lives. ”

“ He has left America a new form of prose, which bears the stamp of pure literature, and which is distinguished not so much for philosophy and depth as for grace, versatility, refined humor, bright intellectual flashes, and artistic finish. ”

“ Thoreau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the rain in its "summer voice." Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver, and the rabbit, as with his brothers. In dealing with nature, Whittier caught something of Wordsworth's spirituality, and Lowell was impressed with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it
"Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."
One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the companionship that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic. ”

“ Hatred of hypocrisy is one of his emphatic characteristics. If Tom Sawyer enjoyed himself more in watching a dog play with a pinch-bug in church than in listening to a doctrinal sermon, if he had a better time playing hookey than in attending the execrably dull school, Mark Twain is eager to expose the hypocrisy of those who would misrepresent Tom's real attitude toward church and school. While Mark Twain is determined to present life faithfully as he sees it, he dislikes as much as any Puritan to see evil triumph. ”

“ His facility in expression increased with his years, so that in Montcalm and Wolfe he has a mellowness and dignity that place him beside the best American prose writers. Although Prescott's work is more full of color, he does not surpass Parkman in the presentation of graphic pictures, Parkman has neither the solemn grandeur of Prescott nor the rapid eloquence of Motley, but Parkman has unique merits of his own,—the freshness of the pine woods, the reality and vividness of an eyewitness, an elemental strength inherent in the primitive nature of his novel subject. ”

“ Mark Twain's future place in literature will probably be due less to humor than to his ability as a philosopher and a historian. Humor will undoubtedly act on his writings as a preservative salt, but salt is valuable only to preserve substantial things. If matter of vital worth is not present in any written work, mere humor will not keep it alive. ”