William Ellery Leonard

“ There is no sex passion; if there was in Bryant any potentiality of the young Goethe or Byron, it was early transmuted into the quiet affections for wife and home. There is no passion for friends; without being a recluse, he never craved comradeship, like Whitman, for humanity’s sake, nor, like Shelley, for affinity’s sake, and was, in the lifelong fellowship with such men as the elder Dana, the literary mentor who is responsible for more of Bryant’s revisions in verse than any one knows, [15] spared the shocks that usually stimulate the expression of the passion of friendship. ”

“ Bryant wonderfully visualized and unified the vast scope of the racial movement and the range of natural phenomena. His “broad surveys,” as they have been called, are more than surveys: they are large acts of the combining imagination, presenting the significance, not merely the catalogue. These acts take us home to the most inveterate habit of his poet-mind. As method or device they seem to suggest a simple prescription for writing poetry; superficially, after one has met them again and yet again in Bryant, one might call them easy to do, because easy to understand. ”

“ Such a mind would not need to be told that Bryant’s diction was severe, simple, chaste, narrower in range than that of his political prose; that his rhymes were dignified, sonorous, exact and emphatic rather than subtle or allusive, and narrow in range—not from artistic poverty but because the rhyme vocabulary of the simple and serious moods is in English itself narrow, and much novelty and variety of rhyme is in our speech possible only when, like Browning, one portrays the grotesque and the eccentric, or like Shelley the fantastic, or like Butler the comic, or like Chaucer the familiar. ”

“ Man’s life, as individual and type, is what it is—birth and toil in time; and death is what it is, save when he mentions a private grief—for men and empires it is a passing away in a universe of time and change. The original version of Thanatopsis is more characteristic than its inconsistent introductory and concluding lines, now the oftenest quoted of all his writings. If Bryant was the Puritan in his austerity and morale, he was quite as much the Pagan in the universality of his ideas, and in his temperamental adjustment to brute fact. ”

“ His qualities of thought, feeling, imagination, were communicated, were indeed only communicable, because so wrought into his diction, his rhymes, cadences, and stanzas. Indeed, there is no separating a poet’s feeling, say, for a beautiful flower from his manner of expressing it—for all we know about his feeling for the flower is what he succeeds in communicating by speech. It is tautology to say that a poet treats a sublime idea sublimely—for it is the sublimity in the treatment that makes us realize the sublimity of the idea. We can at most conceive a poet’s “style” as a whole ”

“ My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea, to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. ”

“ Here nature, as herself the Life, is simply an hypostasis of the racial imagination in which Bryant so largely shared, just like his intimate personifications of her phenomena, her flowers, her winds, and waters; it is not a philosophic idea, but a primitive instinct. “Nature’s teachings” for men are simply the ideas that suggest themselves to Bryant himself (not inevitably to everyone) when he observes what goes on, or what is before him:
The faintest steak that on a petal lies May speak instruction to initiate eyes. ”

“ Sometimes the vision rides upon or stands beside no force in Nature, but is his own direct report, as in Fifty Years, on the changes in individual lives, in history, in inventions, especially in these States, since his class graduated at Williams. “Broad surveys” of human affairs and of the face of earth, so dull, routine, bombastic as far as attempted in Thomson’s Liberty, in Blair’s Grave, in White’s Time, become in Bryant’s less pretentious poems the essential triumph of a unique imagination. ”

“ The chief differences among men are not in their ideas, as ideas, but in the power of the ideas over their emotions, or in the ideas considered as the overflow of their emotions. In Bryant presumably the ideas became formulas of thought, clarified and explicit, through his feelings. A man of great reserve and poise, both in life and art, his “coldness,” well established in our literary tradition by some humorous lines of Lowell and a letter of Hawthorne, is a pathetic misreading. ”

“ Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. ”

“ It is often as if the personalities of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Moore, and Bryant had been merged into one helpless hypnoidal state of metrical and emotional garrulity. Yet every now and then an open-minded reader is surprised by some first-hand observation, some graceful analogy, some picturesqueness or energy, some short lyric cry ”

“ The task is, however, not to make a list, but to make the right list; a list not by capricious association of ideas, but by the laws of inner harmony of meaning. Again, in Bryant the list is itself often a fine, far look beyond the immediate fact—the immediate fact with which all but the poet would rest content. The Song of the Sower needed no suggestion from Schiller’s Song of the Bell, which, however, Bryant doubtless knew, [20] it highly illustrates his own natural procedure:
Fling wide the golden shower; we trust The strength of armies to the dust. The grain shall ripen for the warrior. ”

“ As a whole, Bryant’s prose style has quality as well as qualities, but here a word only on its relation to the style of his poetry. Bryant more than once explicitly differentiated the functions of the two harmonies; [25] but Prescott [26] was not the only one who detected in both the same qualities of mind: obviously a man is not two different beings according to whether he is playing a violin or a cello, singing or talking. Bryant, as Dowden said of Burke, saw “the life of society in a rich, concrete, imaginative way”; and not unlike Burke he had, as politician, the poet’s generalizing power. ”

“ In the eighteenth century tradition is the very preference for blank verse as the instrument for large and serious thought, and the lifelong preference itself for large and serious thought on Death, History, Destiny. ”

“ These ideas are sometimes merely analogies, where in effect the flower (be it the gentian) , or the bird (be it the waterfowl) , is the first term in a simile on man’s moral life; in this phase Bryant’s thought of nature differs from that of Homer, the Psalmist, Jesus, or any sage or seer, Pagan or Christian, only in the appositeness, more or less, of the illustrative symbol. It implies no more a philosophy of nature than similes drawn from the action of a locomotive or a motor-boat would imply a philosophy of machinery. ”

“ If no other American poet has written, year measured by year, so little poetry, the poetry of no other so clearly defines at once its author’s character, environment, and country; if no other American poet was apparently so much occupied with other interests than poetry, not excepting the critic, diplomat, orator, and humorist Lowell, none felt his high calling, it seems, with as priestly a consecration,—no, truly, not excepting Whitman, who protested thereon sometimes a little too much.
§ 2. Bryant’s Independence as a Poet. ”

“ But he belongs chiefly to the student of human nature; lonely, shy, unmarried, disappointed, poor, and dirty, he was in appearance and mode of life a character for Dickens, in heart and soul a character for Thackeray or George Eliot. Lowell pilloried him in an essay; Bryant was perhaps juster in his kindlier obituary criticism in The Evening Post. He was once a famous man. ”

“ There is no space to speak of his letters beyond noting that, with all their elegance, courtesy, criticism, information, they do not belong, with Cicero’s, Gray’s, Cowper’s, Byron’s, Emerson’s, Meredith’s, to the literature of correspondence, because they are without zest for little details of human life (whether in others or in himself) , or without informal spontaneity and flashes of insight—or without whatever it be that makes a private letter ultimately a public joy.
§ 15. His Prose Style. ”

“ Bryant’s Images. The few aspects of man and nature he reported have, in a way, been necessarily already suggested. With senses more alert to observe details in the physiognomy and voice of nature than of man, his imagination continually sees the same general vision: the Indian, shadowy type of a departed world, accoutred with feathers and tomahawk, realized, however, in almost none of his actual customs and in none of his actual feelings save that of sorrow for tribal ruin; the warriors of freedom, especially of the American Revolution ”

“ For a time they amused themselves and the town by facile and often pointed skits on contemporary politics, people, and events, under the title Croaker and Co., after the manner of English wits of the time, as Moore and the Smith brothers. Halleck is said to have written the last four lines of Drake’s American Flag, a lyric full of the old-fashioned expansive and defiant Americanism, and, with its flare of imagery and blare of sound, still sure to stir the blood of any one but a professional critic. ”

“ Nature in Bryant. On nature and man’s relation to nature, one who reads without prepossession will find the American Wordsworth equally elemental. He raises his hymn in the groves, which were God’s first temples,—venerable columns, these ranks of trees, reared by Him of old. ”

“ With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one, as Lowell’s Fable for Critics observed as late as 1848—a social satire on a flashy New Yorker and his fashionable daughter, with Byronic anti-climax and Byronic digressions on Greece, European and American politics, bad literature and bad statues. But a financial failure was substituted for Byronic crim.-cons., and the bluff and hearty Halleck “was never cynical in his satire, and Byron was”—to quote Bryant, [39] who speaks, however, a truer word for Halleck than for Halleck’s master. ”

“ But the metrics alone do have their peculiarities, which can, however, hardly be examined here: line endings like “and the green moss,” caesuras at the end of the first and of the fourth foot, the tendency to repeat the same caesura and cadence through a succession of lines, a stanza group of five or more lines with full stop followed by a single line or so, inverted accent at the beginning of a line, and a differentiated, strong cadence at the conclusion of the whole poem which gives the effect of a completion, not of a mere stopping,—these are all contributing factors. ”

“ How remote the short jerky stanzas of The Buccaneer (1827) , an ambitious tale of pirate and spectre, were from the talents and temper of the Bostonian descendant of the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, one may realize who reflects what Coleridge would have done with the spell and the uncanny, and what Byron with the crime and the movement—the two poets whom Dana was obviously emulating. But there are some good lines on the sea in The Buccaneer, and Dana’s lyric, The Little Beach Bird, gets a traditional honourable mention in the manuals. ”

“ Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago. The reference is equally to certain themes and moods and unclassified details in poems written long after Thanatopsis, all of which, though so characteristically Bryant’s, make us feel him as much closer to the eighteenth century tradition than any of his contemporaries, even than Holmes with his defernce to “the steel-bright epigrams of Pope”; so that we may appraise him much better by going forward from the moralizing, “nature” blank verse of Thomson, Cowper, Young, and Akenside, than backward from Wordsworth and Tennyson. ”

“ Is not this in imagination, mood, manner, even in the recurrent blank verse cadences, veritably as if an unpublished fragment of A Hymn of the Sea?
§ 16. Bryant the Citizen. So we return to the Poet. Yet when all is said, it is the whole man that is ours and that should be ours. He is the Citizen of our tradition; not to us today so much for his hand in the founding of two political parties, nor for his counsels by personal letter and speech that Lincoln, the Statesman of our tradition, heard with such grave respect, nor for his civic activities in art, charity, and reform ”

“ It is partly for this, perhaps, that the most Puritan of our poets is also the most Greek. Bryant’s limitations, then, are intimately engaged in the peculiar distinction of his work; and it is ungracious, as well as superficial, to quarrel with them.
§ 4. His Ideas. Bryant’s ideas, stated in bald prose, are elementary,—common property of simple minds. His metaphysics was predominantly that of the Old Testament: God is the Creator and His works and His purposes are good. ”

“ His assurance of individual immortality for all men, which scarcely touches the problem of sin, rests not on revelation, not on a philosophy of the transcendental significance of intellect, struggle, and pain, but mainly on primitive man’s desire to meet the loved and lost, the father, the sister, the wife. ”