CHAPTER XVI

THE NATIONAL AWAKENING

THERE is a measure of truth in speaking of the War of 1812 as a second war of independence. In throwing off the shackles of British commercial ascendency, American society experienced much the same sense of elation and liberation as the peoples of Europe who contemporaneously rose in their might against Napoleon and asserted their right to independent national existence. The war was followed in the United States by an expansion of the vital forces of the nation in all directions. The earliest manifestations of this new national consciousness, however, were characteristically boisterous. An English traveler, who visited the United States soon after the war, found every man, woman, and child talking about the Guerrière, the Java, the Macedonian, the Frolic, Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, and the "vast inferiority of British sailors and soldiers to the true-blooded Yankees." The events of the war were commemorated in songs which this Briton declared and no doubt truthfully to be "frothy, senseless bombast." But whatever limitations of culture were disclosed by this outburst of national conceit, no one could doubt for an instant that an exuberant vitality was cours ing through the veins of the nation.

It was a fair question, however, whether this na

tional feeling would find expression in any permanent literary form. A literature of its own America did not possess: every one with literary tastes was forced to this humiliating admission. Writing from Berlin in 1801, John Quincy Adams hailed the first number of Dennie's Port Folio with delight. "The object," he declared, "is noble. It is to take off that foul stain of literary barbarism which has so long exposed our country to the reproach of strangers and to the derision of our enemies." But the periodical had a very limited circle of readers, and its literary merits were slight. The Anthology and Boston Review, founded in 1805, had a wider influence upon letters in America; but it is memorable chiefly as the forerunner of the North American Review, modeled upon the English quarterlies, which was first published by William Tudor, in the year 1815, at Boston.

The publication of American books at this time was a hazardous enterprise. "The successful booksellers of the country," wrote one who recalled his own experiences in the book trade, "were for the most part the mere reproducers and sellers of English books." Yet American publishers often showed commendable enterprise. In 1817, Byron's Manfred was received, printed, and published at Philadelphia in a single day. Walter Scott, Moore, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Porter, and Lord Byron were the favorite British novelists and poets whose writings were reprinted in America. Among the American publications advertised by booksellers, were sermons, geographies, and schoolbooks; but rarely any pro

ductions which belonged to the category termed by contemporaries belles-lettres.

The slender literary product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious reviews, like the American Biblical Repository, the American Law Journal, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter magazines, like the Ladies' Literary Cabinet, the Young Ladies' Parental Mentor, and the Casket: or Flowers of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment, rose and fell on the fickle tide of public taste. Even the West had its magazines. Lexington, Kentucky, which disputed with Cincinnati the proud title, "Athens of the West," published the Western Review, one number of which contained a review of Don Juan within six weeks after the poem was published in England.

In the September number of the North American Review, in 1817, appeared an original poem of such merit as to mark an era in the history of American verse. There was in William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis, it is true, no such youthful exuberance of feeling as the first stirrings of poetic genius in a new world might be expected to exhibit. The sense of refined form seemed almost un-American; yet there are lines in the poem which suggest the primeval background of American life and its influence upon the American mind. In 1819 appeared Washington Irving's Sketch-Book- the first American book

which was widely read in England; and in 1821, Cooper published The Spy, which was the first to win favor on the Continent. Both Cooper and Irving were more or less conscious imitators of English prose writers, the one of Scott and the other of Addison; and they lacked consequently that originality which critics have always demanded as the hall-mark of a genuinely native art. It is easy to forget, however, that the Americans were not a primitive people. They were folk with a literary inheritance, of which albeit they often showed little knowledge. It was not for them to invent new forms, but to press new wine into old bottles. Of Irving, moreover, it should be said that he drew freely upon a vein of delicious humor, as in his Knickerbocker History of New York, which may be truly characterized as American.

The annals of American art in these years are even more bare. Benjamin West, to be sure, was born in Pennsylvania, but he achieved eminence in England. That he could succeed Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy was a tribute to his fame, but equally convincing proof that he had ceased to be identified with the land of his nativity. Gilbert Stuart owed much to West, but his return to America in 1792 saved him from complete subservience to English models. As a portrait painter he developed power and individuality. Posterity may well be grateful that the portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were painted with fidelity to nature as Stuart saw it, rather than in the grandiose manner of West. Two other names,

Malbone and Allston, deserve brief mention. The one achieved some distinction as a painter of miniatures; the other is remembered both as artist and man of letters in the literary circle which was forming about Boston. The name of Jonathan Trumbull completes the list of American artists. What David was to the great actors in the revolutionary drama in France, Trumbull was to the notable characters of the American Revolution. In his conception of his themes he was perhaps the most genuinely American painter of his time.

In the pages of his autobiography, Trumbull recounts an interview with his father which may take the place of any further comment on the dearth of artistic feeling in the United States. The young man was arguing passionately for his vocation. The father, a typical Yankee, listened with commendable patience, and complimented the lad when he had finished. "But,' added he, you must give me leave to say, that you appear to have overlooked, or forgotten, one very important point in your case.' Pray, sir,' I rejoined, what was that?' 'You appear to forget, sir, that Connecticut is not Athens'; and with this pithy remark, he bowed and withdrew and nevermore opened his lips upon the subject. How often have those few impressive words recurred to my memory."

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The names of Bryant, Cooper, and Irving are linked with the city of New York which enjoyed for a brief time that primacy in the world of American letters which it was fast acquiring in commerce. The center of literary and scholarly activity in the next