AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOL. I.

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 15

AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOL. I.

A Wonderful Half-Century

The Flowering of New England. By Van Wyck Brooks. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 550 pp. (15s net.)

[Reviewed by R. G. C. McNAB.]

Richard Dana, John Quincy Adams, Washington Irving, Longfellow, # Alcott, W. E. Channing, Whittier' Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, W. H. Prescott, Motley, Daniel Webster, Thoreau, these are the chief names in Mr Brooks’s book, which, is the first volume of his history of American literature, and covers but 50 years, 1815-1865, of the literary history of one state. But both (he period and the state are peculiar. At first sight 550 pages seem too large an allowance for so apparently small a portion of Mr Brooks’s task, but no equal period and no one state have so much to be considered. Mr Brooks’s method is interesting. He is sure of his own competence, and with reason; as he himself writes, “It has seemed to me unnecessary to resort to notes to support my own authority.” His knowledge is complete, his critical sense is keen, his patriotism is intense, but not deceptive, and he writes with a calm sureness and somewhat scholarly poise that his New England heroes would have approved. His history is, as the saying goes, as interesting as a novel, and a great deal more informative. If fault must be found, it is the inevitable comment, from which Mr Brooks will not shrink, that there is no absolute standard by which the New England writers may be appraised. Sixteen writers have been named, and about these and about a score of others Mr Brooks gives every piece of information that will explain their literary development; birth, education, parentage, friendships, occupation, special impulses, writings, relative success, and the influences that they underwent or caused. All these phases are treated, so that personalities and places become real and vivid. Some of the reconstructions are brilliant. One is the picture of Hawthorne’s Salem.

Americans. The men of New England felt that they were free (Concord was the source of the first resistance to slavery), they were part of a living, proud community, they were fulfilling a great common purpose; as teachers, as writers (and many teachers became writers), as light-bringers, their part in creating the spirit of the republic was to give it knowledge and to stir intelligence and pride. They were helped by journalists and the editors of periodicals, and they had willing pupils. Mill-girls covered their factory walls with their own poems, they subscribed to the English reviews, they knew Macaulay and Wordsworth, and they quoted “Paradise Lost.” Farm boys walked many miles to hear a lecturer; Dana kept a crew of sailors from going ashore on the California coast by reading “Woodstock” to them. At each step of his progress, Mr Brooks pauses to describe the natural or domestic setting of his persons. Among the best of these descriptions are his account of Harvard and the story of the woodland home of Thoreau. And yet it is wrong to consider the New England writers as a group consciously working together. They were scattered, and, except for those who lived in Boston, rarely met. Ticknor’s Harvard circle saw little of Thoreau and Whittier, and neither group had much to do with Holmes and Lowell. By 1850 many of the New England writers were famous throughout the world. Longfellow reached a popularity so wide that a Chinese mandarin had the “Psalm of Life” inscribed on an ivory fan, and a dying soldier at Sebastopol, repeated a verse of the poem. The historians, Prescott and Motley, had the most enduring fame. Both were men of profound culture, who prepared themselves for writing by years of study, and whose knowledge was grounded upon a rock of classical learning: but they were men also of generous warmth. Indeed, to this warmth Mr Brooks attributes Motley’s fame: “In celebrating the rise of the Dutch Republic, Motley was celebrating the modern man, the American type in its first historic appearance.” The “Flowering of New England” contains many pieces of sharp criticism and clear appraisal. Thus, having spoken of the influence of Carlyle, the second strongest fveign literary power in New E • land, after Scott, Mr Brooks writes: “This was before the brutality of his later years grew upon him with his indigestion, till the splendid dreams of his youth were all but lost in the spoiled peasant’s worship of lordship and power.” And again, glorifying a book, now often despised, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he quote* Mr C. E. M. Joad. “A work is great when it has ceased to matter that it is bad.”

For Salem, like the whole New England sea-coast, bristled with old wives’ tales and old men’s legends. No need to invent stories there; one heard them in the taverns, from the sailors, from charcoal-burners who looked like wizards, from the good-for-nothings on the waterfront. One heard of locked closets in haunted houses where skeletons had been found. One heard of walls that resounded with knocks where there had once been doorways, now bricked up. One heard of poisonous houses and blood-stained houses, old maids who lived in total darkness, misers who wallowed naked in heaps of pine-tree shillings.

But the most important part of this account of the birth of a literature is the passion that made it possible. First there was a zeal for learning that sent Harvard scholars like Ticknor and Everett to Europe, already classical authorities in a community where the janitor could quote Virgil, to match themselves against German professors, and to bring back to Boston or Cambridge, or Concord the most rich and living fruits of the culture of France and Spain and Germany. Spain was the favourite land of these young

Many misconceptions’ about New Er gland will be set right by this book; no longer will this branch of literature be thought to be local and lacking solidity. Mr Brooks’s own firm knowledge and generous understanding are in keeping wilh his subject.