The violent political agitation and the profound
social unrest of the period found expression in multitudinous works of
prose or verse; but the curious fact is that these are all minor works, and
could without much loss be omitted from our literary records. They are
mostly sectional in spirit, and only what is national or human can long
endure.
Minor Works
To illustrate our criticism, the terrible war that dominates the period
never had any worthy literary expression; there are thousands of writings
but not a single great poem or story or essay or drama on the subject. The
antislavery movement likewise brought forth its poets, novelists, orators
and essayists; some of the greater writers were drawn into its whirlpool of
agitation, and Whittier voiced the conviction that the age called for a man
rather than a poet in a cry which was half defiance and half regret:
Better than self-indulgent years
The outflung heart of youth,
Than pleasant songs in idle ears
The tumult of the truth!
That was the feeling in the heart of many a promising young southern or
northern poet in midcentury, just as it was in 1776, when our best writers
neglected literature for political satires against Whigs or Tories. Yet of
the thousand works which the antislavery agitation inspired we can think of
only one, Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which lives with power to
our own day; and there is something of universal human nature in that
famous book, written not from knowledge or experience but from the
imagination, which appeals broadly to our human sympathy, and which makes
it welcome in countries where slavery as a political or a moral issue has
long since been forgotten.
General Characteristics
Though the ferment of the age produced no great books, it certainly
influenced our literature, making it a very different product from that of
the early national period. For example, nearly every political issue soon
became a moral issue; and there is a deep ethical earnestness in the essays
of Emerson, the poems of Longfellow and the novels of Hawthorne which sets
them apart, as of a different spirit, from the works of Irving, Poe and
Cooper.
Again, the mental unrest of the period showed itself in a passion for new
ideas, new philosophy, new prose and poetry. We have already spoken of the
transcendental philosophy, but even more significant was the sudden
broadening of literary interest. American readers had long been familiar
with the best English poets; now they desired to know how our common life
had been reflected by poets of other nations. In answer to that desire
came, first, the establishment of professorships of belles-lettres
in our American colleges; and then a flood of translations from European
and oriental literatures. As we shall presently see, every prominent writer
from Emerson to Whitman was influenced by new views of life as reflected in
the world's poetry. Longfellow is a conspicuous example; with his songs
inspired by Spanish or German or Scandinavian originals he is at times more
like an echo of Europe than a voice from the New World.
From the philosopher Kant, who called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects". The roots of the American philosophy ran deep into German and English Romanticism.
