THE PERIOD IN OUTLINE LITERATURE Washington Irving (1783-1859): James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851): First notable American poet; inter- HISTORY Florida Region purchased from Monroe Doctrine, 1823 Erie Canal opened, 1825 First Railroad in United States, 1830 Morse Telegraph in operation (Baltimore and Washington) 1844 Mexican War, 1846-'47 Discovery of Gold in California, 1848 Literary interest centers about the Hudson River and Otsego Lake regions; prose and poetry reflect more distinctively American subjects; sketches and romances of mountain, forest, and sea. SOME USEFUL BOOKS Historical.-Burgess's The Middle Period, 1817-1858; Sparks's Expansion of the American People; Coman's Industrial History of the United States; Hitchcock's The Louisiana Purchase; Drake's Making of the Great West; Roosevelt's Winning of the West. Literary. Chapters in Richardson's, Wendell's, and Trent's American Literatures; Cairns's Development of American Literature, 1815-1833. Irving.-Pierre M. Irving's Life and Letters of Washington Irving; Warner's Life of Irving (American Men of Letters); Payne's Leading American Essayists.-The works of Irving may be had in numerous inexpensive editions; The Sketch Book, Life of Goldsmith, and other works are to be found in good school editions. Cooper.-Lounsbury's Life of Cooper (American Men of Letters); Clymer's James Fenimore Cooper (Beacon Biographies); Brownell's American Prose Masters; Erskine's Leading American Novelists. The Last of the Mohicans and other "Leather-stocking Tales" may be found in various series of school classics and in "Everyman's Library." Bryant.-Godwin's Life of Bryant (standard authority); Bigelow's Life of Bryant (American Men of Letters); Bradley's Life of Bryant (English Men of Letters); Stedman's Poets of America; Burton's Literary Leaders of America; Alden's Studies in Bryant (American Book Co.) The standard edition of Bryant's Poems is published by D. Appleton & Co.; his translation of Homer by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Page's Chief American Poets (Houghton) contains the best of his poems. Selections from all writers of the period may be found in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature; selections from the poets in Stedman's American Anthology and Bronson's American Poems. CHAPTER FOUR THE NEW ENGLAND WRITERS Material Development. The second quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of great material development in the United States and of marked social reforms in Europe. These reforms had little immediate influence in this country because we were too busy with the material and political upbuilding of our great American Commonwealth to do much else. Under the stimulus of inventions our growth was rapid and our prosperity great; commerce was quickened by the building of railroads, telegraph lines, cotton and woolen mills, and by the steady tide of immigration westward. The steamship meant frequent communication with Europe and the bringing into America of foreign races; victory in the Mexican War enlarged our southwestern frontier; the discovery of gold in California opened the Pacific slope to the eastern pioneer and furnished a new road to wealth. This material prosperity was accompanied, as often happens in history, by an intellectual awakening. The New England Awakening. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, New England had ceased to be prominent in literary activity. The leadership in letters had passed to Philadelphia and New York. The old Puritanism of the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards had lost its vitality, and the new forces were slow in germinating and coming to fruition; the dead hand of an outworn creed chilled the genius of several generations of New Englanders. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War came on, and the thought and energy of the best men were turned to making a nation and not a literature; in both the North and the South the political essay and oration formed for a time the staple of the literary output. [146] Then arose the tribe of magazine writers and the few important figures of the Knickerbocker Group. About 1840, however, it was evident that a new era had fully dawned in New England and that Massachusetts had regained her ascendency in literature. The awakening was both intellectual and spiritual-a protest against mental, religious, and physical bondage, and an almost impassioned assertion of freedom from the shackles of tradition. This remarkable movement, which has given to America her most distinguished group of writers, centered in Boston and the quiet village of Concord. At bottom it was an expression of a pervading spirit of liberalism, tending toward practical reform. In general it has come to be known as the "Transcendental Movement"; but there are three fairly well-defined phases, and it will make for clearness to treat them separately. Unitarianism is the religious phase, Transcendentalism proper the philosophic and literary, and Anti-Slavery, or Abolition, the political and social. All three entered into the making of New England literature. Unitarianism.-Unitarianism was a reaction against the old Puritan orthodoxy; it was liberalism in religion. The stern Calvinistic creed of the earlier divines had, so the newer generation felt, made the spiritual and mental life of New England narrow and dark by its insistence on such doctrines as total depravity, eternal damnation, and predestination. It stressed the evil in human nature and doomed the majority of men to destruction; the new teaching emphasized the innate nobility of human nature and magnified the worth of the individual. Man was no longer to be regarded as a despised worm of the dust, the object of divine wrath, "crawling between earth and heaven" in apologetic humility, but rather as an aspiring son of heaven, free to think and to act. This view of course dignified the human conscience, while the traditional orthodoxy, according to Unitarian thinking, degraded it. The main contention of the liberals, therefore-aside from the purely theological aspect of the question, which does not fall within the province of a history of literature was for freedom of thought and conscience. This religious controversy split the New England Congregationalists into two factions, the conservatives and the radicals, and colored the thought and the literature of that section for the next generation. The Unitarian impulse, let it be remembered, was simply a protest against what was regarded as mental and spiritual slavery, and a plea for the return into religion of the light of reason and intuition. Large numbers of the thinking and cultured people of New England gave their allegiance to the movement, and Harvard University became the intellectual center of Unitarian influence; while the conservative adherents of the old orthodoxy made Andover Theological Seminary their stronghold. Most of the Massachusetts writers, as we shall see, were sympathizers with the new movement and reflected its spirit directly or indirectly in their prose and poetry. The leader of the progressives was WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING (1780-1842), the Unitarian minister of Boston. He was born at Newport, Rhode Island, educated at Harvard, and spent his life, except for two years of tutoring in Virginia, in and about Boston. Frail in body, serene in spirit, persuasive in utterance, Channing is the most attractive personality among the early Unitarians and a spiritual forerunner of Emerson. He appealed not so much by the force of his logic or by the graces of oratory as by the "sweetness and light" of his message and the moral earnestness of a serious and lofty soul. Had he given himself to literature rather than to the discussion of theological questions, vital interest in which has died out with the advancing years, American letters would doubtless have had another singularly gifted prose essayist. Even as it is, some of his sermons and controversial essays are still read for their charm of style and their high thought, a tribute which |