criticism. The younger men of Harvard have not only lacked common ideals; they have so far parted one from another that they have been honestly unable to perceive what virtues they may have possessed in common as distinguished from what faults an overdeveloped critical perception has revealed to each in the temper and the work of the others. And so the Renaissance of New England has declined. At least for the moment literary New England is a thing of the past. What the future may bring, no man can say ; but we are already far enough from the New England which was considerable in letters to ask what it has contributed to human expression. Not much, we must answer, on any large scale; of the men we have scrutinised only two, Emerson and Hawthorne, will generally be held considerably to have enriched the literature of our language. And Emerson has vagaries which may well justify a doubt whether his work is among those few final records of human wisdom which are imperishable Scriptures. Beyond doubt, again, though Hawthorne's tales possess sincerity of motive and beauty of form, they reveal at best a phase of human nature whose limits are obvious. Mutual admiration has combined with such limits to make New England overestimate itself; and for want of anything better to brag about, all America has bragged about the letters of New England, until in reactionary moods one begins to smile at the brag. As we look back at the Renaissance now vanishing into the past, however, we find in it, if not positive magnitude of achievement, at least qualities which go far to warrant this national pride which we have loved to believe justified. For in every aspect its literature is sincere and pure and sweet. The emigrants to New England were native Elizabethans, -stern and peculiar, but still temperamentally contemporary with Shakspere and the rest. In two centuries and a half, national experience forced English life and letters through many various phases, until at last the old country began to breed that fixed, conservative John Bull who has so lost Elizabethan spontaneity, versatility, and enthusiasm. In America, meantime, national inexperience kept the elder temper little changed until at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was aroused by the world-movement of revolution. Then, at last, our ancestral America, which had so unwittingly lingered behind the mother country, awoke. In the Alush of its waking, it strove to express the meaning of life; and the meaning of its life was the story of what two hundred years of national inexperience had wrought for a race of Elizabethan Puritans. Its utterances may well prove lacking in scope, in greatness; the days to come may well prove them of little lasting potence; but nothing can obscure their beautiful purity of spirit. For all its inexperience, New England life has been human. Its literal records are no more free than those of other regions and times from the greed and the lust, the trickery and the squalor, which everywhere defile earthly existence. What marks it apart is the childlike persistency of its ideals. Its nobler minds, who have left their records in its literature, retained something of the old spontaneity, the old versatility, the old enthusiasm of ancestral England. They retained, too, even more than they knew of that ardour for absolute truth which animated the grave fathers of the emigration. Their innocence of worldly wisdom led them to undue confidence in the excellence of human nature; the simplicity of their national past blinded them to the complexity of the days even now at hand, while the sod still lies light on their graves. We used to believe them heralds of the future; already we begin to perceive that they were rather chroniclers of times which shall be no more. Yet, after all, whatever comes, they possessed traits for which we may always give them unstinted reverence; for humanity must always find inspiring the record of bravely confident aspiration toward righteousness. BOOK VI THE REST OF THE STORY I NEW YORK SINCE 1857 LONG as we have dwelt on the Renaissance of New England, we can hardly have forgotten that the first considerable American literary expression developed in the Middle States. Before New England emerged into literature, the work of Brockden Brown had been completed and the reputations of Irving and Cooper and Bryant established. Bryant, as we have seen, lived through the whole period which brought New England letters to their height and to their decline. He outlived Poe, he outlived Willis, and long before he died the Knickerbocker School had passed into a memory. Meanwhile those writers whose works had centred about the "Atlantic Monthly " had achieved their full reputation. The "Atlantic Monthly," we remember, was started in 1857. That same year saw also the foundation of "Harper's Weekly," which still admirably persists in New York. At that time "Harper's Monthly Magazine" had been in existence for seven years; and the two New York newspapers which have maintained closest relation with literary matters, the "Evening Post" and the "Tribune," had long been thoroughly established. The other periodicals which now mark New York as the literary centre of the United States were not yet founded. In reverting to New York, then, we may conveniently revert to 1857. |
