§ 18. The Knickerbocker School

During the Revolutionary period the literary centre had gradually moved from Massachusetts to Philadelphia. When the nineteenth century began, a boy of seventeen was just leaving school whose talents were to do much to make New York, his birthplace and home, a literary centre. Moreover, the name of one of his characters, Diedrich Knickerbocker, has become a literary term; for just as three English authors have been classed together as the Lake Poets because they chanced to live in the Lake Country, so the term Knickerbocker School has been found convenient to apply to Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and the lesser writers who were at that time more or less connected with New York.

§ 19. Washington Irving, 1783–1859

This boy of seventeen was Washington Irving. He first distinguished himself by roaming about in the city and neighboring villages, while the town crier rang his bell and cried industriously, "Child lost! Child lost!" After leaving school, he studied law; but he must have rejoiced when his family decided that the best way to improve his somewhat feeble health was to send him to Europe, far more of a journey in 1800 than a trip around the world in 1900. He wandered through France, Italy, and England, and enjoyed himself everywhere. When he returned to New York, nearly two years later, he was admitted to the bar; but he spent all his leisure hours on literature. The Spectator had the same attraction for him that it had had for Franklin. When he was nineteen, he had written a few essays in a somewhat similar style; and now he set to work with his brother William and a friend, James K. Paulding, to publish a Spectator of their own. They named it Salmagundi, and in the first number they calmly announced:—

Our purpose is simply to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age; this is an arduous task, and therefore we undertake it with confidence.

The twenty numbers of this paper that appeared were bright, merry, and good-natured. Their wit had no sting, and they became popular in New York. The law practice must have suffered some neglect, for Irving had another plan in his mind. One day a notice appeared in the Evening Post under the head of "Distressing." It spoke of the disappearance of one Diedrich Knickerbocker. Other notices followed. One said, "A very curious kind of a written book has been found in his room in his own handwriting." The way was thus prepared, and soon Knickerbocker's History of New York was on the market. It was the most fascinating mingling of fun and sober history that can be conceived of, and was mischievously dedicated to the New York Historical Society. Everybody read it, and everybody laughed. Even the somewhat aggrieved descendants of the Dutch colonists managed to smile politely.

Knickerbocker's History brought its author three thousand dollars. His talent was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic, but for ten years he wrote nothing more. Finally he went to England in behalf of the business in which he and his brother had engaged. The business was a failure, but still he lingered in London. A government position in Washington was offered him, but he refused it. Then his friends lost all patience. He had but slender means, he was thirty-five years old, and if he was ever to do any literary work, it was time that he made a beginning. Irving felt "cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited," as he said; but he roused himself to work, and soon he began to send manuscript to a New York publisher, to be brought out in numbers under the signature "Geoffrey Crayon." His friends no longer wished that he had taken the government position, for this work, the Sketch Book, was a glowing success. Everybody liked it, and with good reason, for among the essays and sketches, all of rare merit, were Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Praises were showered upon the author until he felt, as he wrote to a friend, "almost appalled by such success." Walter Scott, "that golden-hearted man," as Irving called him, brought about the publication of the book in England by Murray's famous publishing house. Its success there was as marked as in America, for at last a book had come from the New World that no one could refuse to accept as literature. The Americans had not forgotten the sneer of the English critic, "Who reads an American book?" and they gloried in their countryman's glory. The sale was so great that the publisher honorably presented the author with more than a thousand dollars beyond the amount that had been agreed upon.

An enthusiastic welcome awaited Irving whenever he chose to cross the Atlantic, but he still lingered in Europe. In the next few years he published Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller. The latter was not very warmly received, for the public were clamoring for something new. Just as serenely as Scott had turned to fiction when people were tired of his poetry, so Irving turned to history and biography. He spent three years in Spain, and the result of those years was his Life of Columbus, The Conquest of Granada, The Companions of Columbus, and, last and most charming of all, The Alhambra.

Irving had now not only fame but an assured income. He returned to America, and there he found himself the man whom his country most delighted to honor. Once more he left her shores, to become minister to Spain for four years; but, save for that absence, he spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in his charming cottage, Sunnyside, on the Hudson near Tarrytown. He was not idle by any means. Among his later works are his Life of Goldsmith and Life of Washington. In these biographies he had two aims: to write truly and to write interestingly. His style is always clear, marked by exquisite gleams of humor, and so polished that a word can rarely be changed without spoiling the sentence. To this charm of style he adds in the case of his Life of Goldsmith such an atmosphere of friendliness, of comradeship, of perfect sympathy, that one has to recall dates in order to realize that the two men were not companions. No man's last years were ever more full of honors than Irving's. The whole country loved him. As Thackeray said, his gate was "forever swinging before visitors who came to him." Every one was welcomed, and every one carried away kindly thoughts of the magician of the Hudson.

§ 20. James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851

About the time that the New York town crier was finding Irving's wanderings a source of income, a year-old baby, named James Fenimore Cooper, was taking a much longer journey. He travelled from his birthplace in Burlington, New Jersey, to what is now Cooperstown, New York, where his father owned several thousand acres of land and proposed to establish a village. The village was established, a handsome residence was built, and there, in the very heart of the wilderness, the boy spent his early years. He was used to the free life of the forest; and it is small wonder that after he entered Yale, he found it rather difficult to obey orders and was sent home in disgrace.

His next step was to spend four years at sea. Then he married, left the navy, and became a country gentleman, with no more thought of writing novels than many other country gentlemen. One day, after reading a story of English life, he exclaimed, "I believe I could write a better book myself." "Try it, then," retorted his wife playfully; and he tried it. The result was Precaution. Unless the English novel was very poor, this book can hardly have been much of an improvement, for it is decidedly dull. Another fault is its lack of truth to life, for Cooper laid his scene in England in the midst of society that he knew nothing about. The book was anonymous. It was reprinted in England and was thought by some critics to be the work of an English writer. Americans of that day were so used to looking across the ocean for their literature that this mistake gave Cooper courage. Moreover, his friends stood by him generously. "Write another," they said, "and lay the scene in America." Cooper took up his pen again. The Spy was the result. Irving's Sketch Book had come out only a year or two earlier, and now American critics were indeed jubilant. A novel whose scene was laid in America and during the American Revolution had been written by an American and was a success in England. The bolder spirits began to whisper that American literature had really begun. Two years later, Cooper published The Pioneers, whose scene is laid in the forest, and also The Pilot, a sea tale.

There was little waiting for recognition. On both sides of the ocean his fame increased. He kept on writing, and his eager audience kept on reading and begged for more. His books were translated into French, German, Norwegian, even into Arabic and Persian. Among them was his History of the United States Navy, which is still an authority. Some of his books were very good, others were exceedingly poor. The Leatherstocking Tales are his best work. The best character is Natty Bumppo, or Leatherstocking, the hunter and scout, whose achievements are traced through the five volumes of the series.

Cooper spent several years abroad. When he returned, he found that the good folk of Cooperstown had long been using a piece of his land as a pleasure ground. Cooper called them trespassers, and the courts agreed with him. The matter would have ended there had it not been a bad habit of Cooper's to criticise things and people as boldly as if he were the one person whose actions were above criticism. Of course he had not spared the newspapers, and now they did not spare him. He sued them for libel again and again. In one suit of this kind, the court had to hear his two-volume novel, Home as Found, read aloud in order to decide whether the criticisms in question were libellous or not. He often won his suits, but he lost far more than he gained; for, while Irving was loved by the whole country, Cooper made new enemies every day. Before his death he pledged his family to give no sight of his papers and no details of his home life to any future biographer who might ask for them. This is unfortunate, for Cooper was a man who always turned his rough side to the world; but at least we can fall back upon the knowledge that the people who knew him best loved him most.

Cooper's success was so immediate that he hardly realized the need of any thought or special preparation for a book; therefore he wrote carelessly, often with most shiftless inattention to style or plot or consistency. Mark Twain is scarcely more than just when he declares that the rules governing literary art require that "when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale." On the other hand, something must be pardoned to rapid composition, to the wish for an effect rather than accuracy of detail; and it is at best a most ungrateful task to pour out harsh criticism upon the man who has given us so many hours of downright pleasure, who has added to our literature two or three original characters, and who has brought into our libraries the salt breeze of the ocean and the rustling of the leaves of the forest.

§ 21. William Cullen Bryant, 1794–1878

America had now produced a writer of exquisite prose and a novelist of recognized ability, but had she a poet? The answer to this question lay in the portfolio of a young man of hardly eighteen years, who was named William Cullen Bryant.

He was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, the son of a country doctor. He was brought up almost as strictly as if he had been born in Plymouth a century and a half earlier. Still, there was much to enjoy in the quiet village life. There were occasional huskings, barn-raisings, and maple-sugar parties; there were the woods and the fields and the brooks and the flowers. There were books, and there was a father who loved them. There was little money to spare in the simple country home, but good books had a habit of finding their way thither, and the boy was encouraged to read poetry and to write it. Some of this encouragement was perhaps hardly wise; for when he produced a satirical poem, The Embargo, the father straightway had it put into print.

When Bryant was sixteen, he entered Williams College as a sophomore. His reputation went before him, and it was whispered among the boys, "He has written poetry and some of it has been printed." His college course was short, for the money gave out. The boy was much disappointed, but he went home quietly and began to study law. He did not forget poetry, however, and then it was that Thanatopsis, the poem in the portfolio, was written. Six years later, Dr. Bryant came upon it by accident and recognized its greatness at a glance. Without a word to his son, the proud father set out for Boston and left the manuscript at the rooms of the North American Review, which had recently been established. Tradition says that the editor who read it dropped the work in hand and hurried away to Cambridge to show his colleagues what a "find" he had made; and that one of them, Richard Henry Dana, declared there was some fraud in the matter, for no one in America could write such verse. The least appreciative reader of the poem could hardly help feeling the solemn majesty, the organ-tone rhythm, the wide sweep of noble thought. Thanatopsis is a masterpiece. It went the country over; and wherever it went, even in its earlier and less perfect form, it was welcomed as America's first great poem. Meanwhile, its author was practising as a lawyer in a little Massachusetts village. He was working conscientiously at his profession; but fortunately he was not so fully employed as to have no spare hours for poetry, and it was about this time that he wrote his beautiful lines, To a Waterfowl. This poem came straight from his own heart, for he was troubled about his future, and, as he said, felt "very forlorn and desolate." The last stanza,—

He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright,—

gave to him the comfort that it has given to many others, and he went on bravely.

Dana soon brought it about that Bryant should be invited to read the annual poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. The poem which he presented was The Ages. This, together with Thanatopsis, To a Waterfowl, and four other poems, was published in a slender little volume, in 1821.

Bryant was recognized as the first poet in the land, but even poets must buy bread and butter. Thus far, his poems had brought him a vast amount of praise and about two dollars apiece, and his law business had never given him a sufficient income. In 1825 he decided to accept a literary position that was offered him in New York. He soon became editor of The Evening Post, and this position he held for nearly fifty years. As an editor, he was absolutely independent, but always dignified and calm; and he held his paper to a high literary standard. It was during those years that he wrote The Fringed Gentian, The Antiquity of Freedom, The Flood of Years, and other poems that our literature could ill afford to lose. He said that he had little choice among his poems. Irving liked The Rivulet; Halleck, The Apple Tree; Dana, The Past. Bryant also translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. His life extended long after the lives of Irving and of Cooper had closed. Other poets had arisen in the land. They wrote on many themes; he wrote on few save death and nature. Their verses were often more warm-hearted, more passionate than Bryant's, and often they were easier reading; but Bryant never lost the place of honor and dignity that he had so fairly earned. He is the Father of American Poetry; and it is well for American poetry that it can look back to the calmness and strength and poise of such a founder. Lowell says:—

He is almost the one of your poets that knows How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose.

§ 22. The Minor Knickerbocker Poets

Among the crowd of minor poets of the Knickerbocker School were Halleck, Drake, and Willis. Fitz-Greene Halleck was a Connecticut boy who went to New York when he was twenty-one years old. He found work in the counting-room of John Jacob Astor. He also found a poet friend in a young man named Joseph Rodman Drake. Together they wrote The Croakers, satirical poems on the New York of the day. These are rather bright and witty, but it is hard to realize that they won intense admiration. The story has been handed down that when the editor of the paper in which they appeared first met his unknown contributors, he exclaimed with enthusiasm, "I had no idea that we had such talent in America." It was from the friendship between Halleck and Drake that Drake's best known poem arose, The Culprit Fay. If we may trust the tradition, the two poets, together with Cooper, were one day talking of America. Halleck and Cooper declared that it was impossible to find the poetry in American rivers that had been found in Scottish streams, but Drake took the contrary side. "I will prove it," he said to himself; and within the next three days he produced his Culprit Fay, as dainty a bit of slight, graceful, imaginative verse as can be found. The scene is laid in Fairyland, and Fairyland is somewhere among the Highlands of the Hudson. The fairy hero loves a beautiful mortal, and, as a punishment, is doomed to penances that give room for many poetic fancies and delicate pictures. Drake died only four years later. He left behind him at least one other poem, first published in The Croakers, that will hardly be forgotten, The American Flag, with its noble beginning:—

When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air.

Halleck sorrowed deeply for the death of his friend. He himself lived for nearly half a century longer and wrote many poems, but nothing else as good as his loving tribute to Drake, which begins:—

Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days! None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise!

One other poem of Halleck's, Marco Bozzaris, has always been a favorite because of its vigor and spirit. Bryant said, "The reading of Marco Bozzaris. . . stirs up my blood like the sound of martial music or the blast of a trumpet." Parts of it bring to mind the demand of King Olaf for a poem "with a sword in every line." Worn as these verses are by much declaiming, there is still a good old martial ring in such lines as:—

Strike—till the last armed foe expires; Strike—for your altars and your fires; Strike—for the green graves of your sires; God and your native land.

At the end of this rousing war-cry are two lines that are as familiar as anything in the language:—

One of the few, the immortal names That were not born to die.

Another member of the Knickerbocker School was Nathaniel Parker Willis, a Maine boy who found his way to New York. He had hardly unpacked his trunk before it was decided that if he would go to Europe and send home a weekly letter for publication, it would be greatly to the advantage of the journal with which he was connected. Europe was still so distant as to make letters of travel interesting. These sketches, afterwards published as Pencillings by the Way, were light and graceful, and they were copied by scores of papers. When Willis came home, five years later, he edited the Home Journal, wrote pretty, imaginative sketches and many poems. There was nothing deep or thoughtful in them, rarely anything strong; but they were easily and gracefully written and people liked to read them. A few of the poems, such as The Belfry Pigeon, Unseen Spirits, Saturday Afternoon, and Parrhasius, are still favorites.

While in college, Willis wrote a number of sacred poems. Lowell wickedly said of them, "Nobody likes inspiration and water." But Lowell was wrong, for they found a large audience, and their author tasted all the sweets of popularity. He was not spoiled, however, and he was, as Halleck said, "one of the kindest of men." His own path to literary success had been smooth, but he was always ready to sympathize with the struggles of others and to aid them by every means in his power. He died in 1867; but many years before his death it was evident that the literary leadership had again fallen into the hands of New England.