§ 41. Why there was little writing in the South

Thus it was that literature centred about the great cities of the North. There were several reasons why it could hardly be expected to flourish in the South. In the first place, there were no large towns where publishing houses had been established and where men of talent might gain inspiration from one another. Again, there was small home market for the wares of the author. There were libraries in many of the stately homes of the South, but their shelves were filled with the English classics of the eighteenth century. There was no lack of intellectual power; but plantation life called for executive ability and led naturally to statesmanship and oratory rather than to the printed page. There were orators, such men as Henry Clay, "the great leader;" the ardent, brilliant Patrick Henry of earlier times; Robert Young Hayne, equally eloquent in address and in debate; and John Caldwell Calhoun, whom Webster called "a senator of Rome." There was almost from the beginning a poem written in one place and a history or a biography in another. The most famous of these scattered writings were produced by William Wirt, a Maryland lawyer. Early in the century he wrote his Letters of a British Spy, which contains his touching description of The Blind Preacher. In 1817 his eminence as a lawyer was proved by his being chosen Attorney-General of the United States, and his ability as an author by the publication of his Life of Patrick Henry. This book is rather doubtful as to some of its facts, and rather flowery as to its rhetoric, but so vivid that the picture which it draws of the great orator has held its own for nearly a century. Charleston was the nearest approach to a literary centre, for it was the home of Simms, Hayne, and Timrod.

§ 42. William Gilmore Simms, 1806–1870

In 1827, when the Knickerbocker writers had already brought forth some of their most valuable productions, Simms published a little volume of poems. He published a second, a third, and many others; but his best work was in prose. He wrote novel after novel, as hastily and carelessly as Cooper, but with a certain dash and vigor. The Yemassee  is ranked as his best work. It has no adequate plot, but contains many thrilling adventures and narrow escapes. Simms is often called the "Cooper of the South;" and in one important detail he is Cooper's superior, namely, his women are real women. They are not introduced merely as pretty dummies whose rescue will exhibit the prowess of the hero: they are thoughtful and intelligent, and, in time of need, they can take a hand in their own rescue. In The Yemassee, for instance, "Grayson's wife" has a terrible struggle with an Indian at her window. She faints, but—like a real woman— not until she has won the victory. In one respect Simms did work that is of increasing value; he laid his scenes in the country about his own home, he studied the best historical records, he learned the traditions of the South. The result is that in his novels there is a wealth of information about Southern colonial life that can hardly be found elsewhere.

§ 43. Paul Hamilton Hayne, 1830–1886

Simms was of value to the world of literature in another way than by wielding his own pen. He was a kind and helpful friend to the younger authors who gathered around him. The chief of these was Hayne, who is often called "the poet-laureate of the South." Hayne had a comfortable fortune and a troop of friends, and there was only one reason why his life should not have flowed on easily and pleasantly. That reason was the Civil War. He enlisted in the Confederate Army, and, even after he was sent home too ill for service, his pen was ever busied with ringing lyrics of warfare. When peace came, he found himself almost penniless. Many a man has taken up such a struggle with life bravely; Hayne did more, for he took it up cheerfully. He built himself a tiny cottage and "persisted in being happy." Before the war, he had published three volumes of verse, and now from that little home came forth many graceful, beautiful lyrics. This is part of his description of the song of the mocking-bird at night:—

It rose in dazzling spirals overhead, Whence to wild sweetness wed, Poured marvellous melodies, silvery trill on trill; The very leaves grew still On the charmed trees to hearken; while for me, Heart-trilled to ecstasy, I followed—followed the bright shape that flew, Still circling up the blue, Till as a fountain that has reached its height, Falls back in sprays of light Slowly dissolved, so that enrapturing lay Divinely melts away Through tremulous spaces to a music-mist, Soon by the fitful breeze How gently kissed Into remote and tender silences.

He wrote narrative verse, but was especially successful in the sonnet, with its harassing restrictions and limitations. Hayne's writings have one charm that those of greater poets often lack; his personality gleams through them. He trusts us with his sorrows and his joys. He writes of the father whom he never saw, of the dear son "Will," of whom he says:—

We roam the hills together, In the golden summer weather, Will and I.

He writes of his wife's "bonny brown hand,"—

The hand that holds an honest heart, and rules a happy hearth.

He writes of the majestic pine against which his poet friend laid his weary head. In whatever he writes, he shows himself not only a poet, but also a sincere and lovable man.

§ 44. Henry Timrod, 1829–1867

The friend who leaned against the pine was Henry Timrod. Their friendship began in the days when "Harry" passed under his desk a slate full of his own verses. Life was hard for the young poet. Lack of funds broke off his college course, and for many years he acted as tutor in various families. In 1860 a little volume of his poems was brought out in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. It was spoken of kindly—and that was all. Then came the war, and such poverty that he wrote of his verse, "I would consign every line of it to eternal oblivion, for—one hundred dollars in hand!"

Timrod writes in many tones. He is sometimes strong, as in The Cotton Boll;  sometimes light and graceful, as in Baby's Age, wherein the age is counted by flowers, a different flower for each week. This ends:—

But soon—so grave, and deep, and wise The meaning grows in Baby's eyes, So very  deep for Baby's age— We think to date a week with sage.

Sometimes he rises to noble heights, as in his description of the poet, at least one stanza of which is not unworthy of Tennyson:—

And he must be as arméd warrior strong, And he must be as gentle as a girl, And he must front, and sometimes suffer wrong, With brow unbent, and lip untaught to curl; For wrath, and scorn, and pride, however just, Fill the clear spirit's eyes with earthly dust.

In whatever tone he writes, there is sincerity, true love of nature, and a frequent flash of poetic expression, that make us dream pleasant dreams of what a little money and a little leisure might have brought from his pen.

§ 45. Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849

Another Southern writer, in some respects the greatest of all, was Edgar Allan Poe. He was left an orphan, and was taken into the family of a wealthy merchant of Baltimore named Allan. He was somewhat wild in college, and was brought home and put to work in Mr. Allan's office. He ran away, joined the army under an assumed name, was received at West Point through Mr. Allan's influence, but later discharged for neglect of his duties. Mr. Allan refused any further assistance, and Poe set to work to support himself by his pen. In the midst of poverty he married a beautiful young cousin whom he loved devotedly. He wrote a few poems and much prose. He held various editorial positions; he filled them most acceptably, but usually lost them through either his extreme sensitiveness or his use of stimulants. His child-wife died, and two years later Poe himself died.

These are the facts in the life of Poe; but his various biographers have put widely varying interpretations upon them. One pictures him, for instance, as a worthless drunkard; another, probably more truly, as of a sensitive, poetic organization that was thrown into confusion by a single glass of liquor.

As a literary man, Poe was first known by his prose, and especially by his reviews. He had a keen sense of literary excellence, and recognized it at a glance. He was utterly fearless—and fearlessness was a new and badly needed quality in American criticism. On the other hand, he had not the foundation of wide reading and study necessary for criticism that is to abide; and, worse than that, he was not great enough to be fair to the man whom he disliked or of whom he was jealous. His most valuable prose is his tales, for here he is a master. They are well constructed and the plot is well developed; every sentence, every word, counts toward the climax. That is the more mechanical part of the work; but Poe's power goes much further. He has a marvellous ability to make a story "real." He brings this about sometimes in Defoe's fashion, by throwing himself into the place of the character in hand and thinking what he  would do in such a position; sometimes by noting and emphasizing some significant detail, as, for instance, in The Cask of Amontillado. Here he mentions three times the webwork of nitre on the walls that proves their fearful depth below the river bed, and the victim's consequent hopelessness of rescue. Sometimes the opening sentence puts us into the mood of the story, so that, before it is fairly begun, an atmosphere has been provided that lends its own coloring to every detail. For instance, the first sentence of The Fall of the House of Usher  is:—

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

Here is the keynote of the story, and we are prepared for sadness and gloom. The unusual expressions, "soundless day" and "singularly dreary," hint at some mystery. The second sentence increases these feelings; and with each additional phrase the gloom and sadness become more dense.

No one knows better than Poe how to work up to a climax of horror, and then to intensify its awfulness by dropping in some contrasting detail. In The Cask of Amontillado, for instance, the false friend, in his carnival dress of motley with cap and bells, is chained and then walled up in the masonry that is to become his living tomb. A single aperture remains. Through this the avenger thrusts his torch and lets it fall. Poe says, "There came forth in return only a jingling of bells." The awful death that lies before the false friend grows doubly horrible at this suggestion of the merriment of the carnival.

Poe's poetry is on the fascinating borderland where poetry and music meet. His poems are not fifty in number, and many of them are but a few lines in length. The two that are best known are The Bells, a wonderfully beautiful expression of feeling through the mere sound of words, and The Raven. Poe has left a cold-blooded account of the "manufacture" of this latter poem. He declares that he chose beauty for the atmosphere, and that beauty excites the sensitive to tears; therefore he decided to write of melancholy. The most beautiful thing is a beautiful woman, the most melancholy is death; therefore he writes of the death of a beautiful woman. So with the refrain. O  is the most sonorous vowel, and when joined with r  is capable of "protracted emphasis;" therefore he fixes upon "Nevermore." He may be believed or disbelieved; but in The Raven, as in whatever else he writes, there is a weird and marvellous music. To him, everything poetical could be interpreted by sound; he said he "could distinctly hear the sound of the darkness as it stole over the horizon." He has a way of repeating a phrase with some slight change, as if he could not bear to leave it. Thus in Annabel Lee  he writes:—

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

This repetition is even more marked in Ulalume:—

The leaves they were crispéd and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere.

These phrases cling to the memory of the reader as if they were strains of music. We find ourselves saying them over and over. It is not easy to analyze the fascination of such verse, but it has fascination. Many years ago, when Poe was a young man, Higginson heard him read his mystic Al Aaraaf. He says, "In walking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt that we had been under the spell of some wizard." When we look in the poems of Poe for the "high seriousness" that Matthew Arnold names as one of the marks of the best poetry, it cannot be found; but in the power to express a mood, a feeling, by the mere sound of words, Poe has no rival.

§ 46. Sidney Lanier, 1842–1881

A few years after the death of Poe, a Southern college boy was earnestly demanding of himself, "What am I fit for?" He had musical genius, not merely the facility that can tinkle out tunes on various instruments, but deep, strong love of music and rare ability to produce music. His father, a lawyer of Macon, Georgia, felt that to be a musician was rather small business; and his son had yielded to this belief so far as the genius within him would permit. Another talent had this rarely gifted boy,—for poetry.

The Civil War was a harsh master for such a spirit, but in its first days he enlisted in the Confederate army, and saw some terrible fighting. More than three years later he was taken prisoner—he and his flute. After five months they were released. For sixteen years he taught, he read, he wrote, he lectured at Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere, and for several winters he played first flute in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore. All those years he was in a constant struggle with consumption and poverty. Sometimes for many months he could do nothing but suffer. Between the attacks of illness he did a large amount of literary work. It was not always the kind of writing that he was longing to do,—some of it would in other hands have been nothing but hack work; but with a spirit like Lanier's there could be no such thing as hack work, for he threw such talent into it, such pleasure in using the pen, that at his touch it became literature. He edited Froissart and other chronicles of long ago, and he wrote a novel. He wrote also on the development of the novel, on the science of English verse, on the relations of poetry and music, and on Shakespeare and his forerunners. He was always a student, and always original.

Lanier had the lofty conscientiousness of a great poet. Some truth underlies each of his poems, whether it is the simple—and profound—Ballad of the Trees and the Master,—

Into the woods my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent. Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him; The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn tree had a mind to Him When into the woods He came. Out of the woods my Master went, And He was well content. Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame. When Death and Shame would woo Him last, From under the trees they drew Him last: 'T was on a tree they slew Him—last When out of the woods He came,—

the nobly rhythmical Marshes of Glynn, or The Song of the Chattahoochee,—

All down the hills of Habersham, All through the valleys of Hall, The rushes cried Abide, abide, The willful water weeds held me thrall, The laving laurel turned my tide, The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay, The dewberry dipped for to work delay, And the little weeds sighed Abide, abide, Here in the hills of Habersham, Here in the valleys of Hall.

Poe had a melody of unearthly sweetness, but little basis of thought; Lanier had a richer, if less bewitching melody, and  thought. He had the balance, the self-control, in which Poe was lacking. It is almost a sure test of any kind of greatness if its achievements carry with them an overtone that murmurs, "The man is greater than his deed. He could do more than he has ever done." We do not feel this in Poe; we do feel it in Lanier. In his rare combination of Southern richness with Northern restraint, he will ever be an inspiration to the poetry that must arise from the luxuriant land of the South. He is not only the greatest Southern poet; he is one of the greatest poets that our country has produced. "How I long to sing a thousand various songs that oppress me unsung!" he wrote; and no lover of poetry can turn the last leaf of his single volume of verse without an earnest wish that a longer life had permitted his desire to be gratified.