Impressive feeling excited by the poet's death. Born in ton, Mass., W CHAPTER III. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. I. HEN Bryant died, in the flowery season that had inspired his sweetest lyric, the generai pause and hush were singularly impressive. To the death of no other American, for a long time before and after, could be applied so aptly that Indian metaphor of the sound of the fall of a great oak in the forest. The feeling was not one of unexpectedness, although his old age was free from decrepitude, -as if some deity kinder than Aurora had given him immortality without decay; not one of sorrow, for he lived beyond the usual limit of life; not that which we have when some man of office, rank, entanglement in great affairs, suddenly passes away. Yet the station of "the father of American song" was unique, and his loss was something strange and positive. He stood alone, in certain respects, an incomparable figure. He had become not only a representative citizen, journalist, poet, but the serene, transfigured ideal of a good and venerable man. As a writer he had been before the public from a Cumming date near the beginning of the century, and so changeless through all its changes that his critics, in estimating the poet just dead, really were judging the poet of fifty years before, instead of guessing at the Nov. 3, 1794. THE MAN AND THE POET. 63 ioned to much most citi zen. verdict of time upon his productions. Howsoever they might differ as to the measure of Bryant's gift, and of Bryant the man, one thing was sure: no minor" Fashpersonage could gain, and retain to the last, such a hold upon popular interest, honor, deferential esteem. honor." Others, before reaching his years, have had their rise and decline, outlasting themselves, and finding occasion to declare with Cato Major, "It is a hard thing, Romans, to render an account before the men of a period different from that in which one has lived!" But here was one who steadily grew to be the emblem The" foreof our finest order of citizenship, possibly its most acceptable type. This, as constantly was evident, became impressed even upon coarse and ordinary persons, singly or associated in legislative bodies; hardly judges, one would think, of such a matter, but accepting without cavil the public conception and the estimate of the thoughtful and refined. There is good reason at the base of every sustained opinion of the sort. What gave Bryant just this degree of special eminence? Not alone that he was a virtuous man, and a patriot in every sense; a journalist, linked with traditions of sturdy service in the past; a clear and vigorous writer and thinker; a wise and reverend sage, most sound of body and mind. He was not a great and representative editor, according to our modern standard. Otherwise, he was all these, and in their combination held a rank excelled by none and reached only by the excepted few. Beyond and in- The poet. cluding all these, he was a poet. It may be placed to the credit of the art of song that, being a person of such attributes, the addition of the poetic gift made him a bright, particular star. It is the poet, above all, that we must observe and estimate. Yet in order to discover the quality and limitations The man. A typical He of his genius, he must be considered not only as an American poet who represented his country at a certain time, but as a man speaking for himself. And in this wise, first seeking a key to his literary value, we see that he had become a most satisfying type of the republican republican, joining the traditional gravity, purity, and patriotic wisdom of the forefathers with the modernness and freshness of our own day. His life, public and private, was in keeping with his speech and writings. We often say of a poet or artist that he should not be judged like other men by his outward irrelevant mark or habit; that to see his best, his truest self you must read his poems or study his paintings. In reading Bryant's prose and verse, and in observing the poet himself, our judgments were the same. always held in view liberty, law, wisdom, piety, faith; and moral his sentiment was unsentimental; he never whined nor found fault with condition or nature; he was robust, but not tyrannical; frugal, but not too severe; grave, yet full of shrewd and kindly humor. Absolute simplicity characterized him. Ethics were always in sight. He was, indeed, an "old man for counsel"; what he learned in youth from the lives and precepts of Washington, Hamilton, and their compeers, that he taught and practised to the last. His intellectual faculties, like his physical, were balanced to the discreetest level, and this without abasing his poetic fire. His genius was not shown by the advance of one faculty and the impediment of others; it was the spirit of an even combination, and a fine one. Mental traits. His posi tion strength ened by worldly success. It is true that his practical success the worldly substance he had gained by the thrift and prudence that "poor Richard's maxims inculcate - gave him a prestige in the wealth-respecting metropolis which as a poet alone he could not, in his generation, have LENGTH OF SERVICE. 65 secured. It brought him near, as Mr. Hazeltine has pointed out, to the hosts of the Philistines, but it also impressed them with a conviction that there must be something in poetry after all. They saw him visibly haloed with a distinction beyond that which wealth and civic influence could bestow. Besides, even Philistia has its æsthetic rituals and pageantry, Philistia. and it was with a gracious and picturesque sense of the fitness of things that he bore his stately part in our festivals and processions. To this extent he was conventional, but he made conventionalism suggestive and often the promoter of thought and art. II. HERE, then, was a minstrel who, in appearance, more than others of a readier lyrical genius, seemed not unlike the legendary bard of Gray: "The poet stood, (Loose his beard and hoary hair Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air), "The Bard." equable ca Look at the extent of the period through which he A proflourished. He began in the early springtime of longed and Wordsworth, and long outlived new men like Baude-reer. laire and Poe. The various epochs of his career scarcely bear upon our consideration of its product, which, after his escape from the manner of Pope, was of an even quality during seventy years. In this he was fortunate and unfortunate. The former, because his early pieces were so noteworthy that, in the dearth of American poetry, they at once became home classics for a homely people, and one generation after another learned them admiringly by heart. At this His feeling tury Club, on Bry time, even though composed in the latest fashion and of greater merit than Bryant's, an author's pieces could not obtain for him such recognition and fame. But, owing to this otherwise good fortune, he worked under restrictions from which he never was even measurably freed. Before observing these, it again may be noted that his poetic career had neither rise, height, nor decline. He formed certain methods wholly natural to him in early youth, and was at once as admirable a poet as he ever afterward became. Throughout his prolonged term of life he sang without haste or effort, and always expressed himself rather than the varying methods of the time. From the first he was in sympathy with the aspect, atmosphere, feeling, of his own country. His tendency and manner were determined during the idyllic period of this republic, when nature and the thoughts which it suggested were themes for poets, rather than the dramatic relations of man with man. His sentiment was affected by the meditative verse of Cowper and Wordsworth, who rose above didacticism, or Emerson, made it imaginative by poetic insight. Emerson said. at the Cen- of Bryant: "This native, original, patriotic poet. I say original: I have heard him charged with being of a certain school. I heard it with surprise, and asked, What school? For he never reminded me of Goldsmith, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Moore. I found him always original, a true painter of the face of this country, and of the sentiment of his own people." This is, in a sense, true; yet there can be little doubt that, in most respects, Wordsworth was the master of his youth. All pupils must acknowledge masters at the beginning, but Murillo was Murillo none the less, although he ground colors for Castillo and studied with Velasquez. Bryant ground his colors ant's 70th birthday. |