1054 5 The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary. and the political interests. They joined in to the dinner-table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women. The oldest son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkers in Boston society, and perhaps the most 20 popular man in the State, though apt to be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and Dana could be entertaining when they pleased, and though Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in hand, he was will- 25 ing to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to time; while Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good listener, and laughed over a witticism till he choked. supposed to have values only as educators or educated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like Hume, Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their works; here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very nearly the average of most boys in physical and mental stature. The influence was wholly political and literary. His father made no effort to force his mind, but left him free play, and this was perhaps best. Only in one way his father rendered him a great service by trying to teach him French and giving him some idea of French accent. Otherwise the family was rather an atmosphere than an influence. The boy had a large and overpowering set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or replicas of the same type, getting the same education, struggling with the same problems, and solving the question or leaving it unsolved much in the same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted or what to do for it, but all were conscious that they would like to control power in some form; and the same thing could be said of an ant or an elephant. Their form was tied to 30 politics or literature. They amounted to one individual with half-a-dozen sides or facets; their temperaments reacted on each other and made each child more like the other. This was also education, but in the 35 type, and the Boston or New England type was well enough known. What no one knew was whether the individual who thought himself a representative of this type was fit to deal with life. 40 By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially when it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the Epistles" of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly eighteenth-century historians be- 45 cause his father's library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the mental indolence of history. So, too, he read shelves of eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own 50 set of Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined. Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; but the boy was thirty years old before his education reached 55 Wordsworth. This is the story of an education, and the person or persons who figure in it are As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent children, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check, should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one was strong enough to control them, least of all their mother, the queen-bee of the hive, on whom ninetenths of the burden fell, on whose strength they all depended, but whose children were much too self-willed and self-confident to take guidance from her, or from any one else, unless in the direction they fancied. Father and mother were about equally helpless. Almost every large family in those days produced at least one black sheep, and if this generation of Adamses escaped, it was as much a matter of surprise to them as to their neighbors. By some happy chance they grew up to be 5 decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a 30 Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his companions. Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on homebred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school. Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy resources for boys and men. The bar-room and billiard-room were more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and swim and were sent to dancing school; they played a rudimentary game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat; still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellowlegs or a stray wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural history if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could ride across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant. Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boatracing came after 1850. For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures, winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained, as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs 35 turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, 40 they came out-Thackeray, Dickens, Bulthe facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and 45 Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school. These four tools were necessary to his 50 pears. On the whole he learned most success in life, but he never controlled then. any one of them. wer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and THE LATER POETS With the opening of the new century there began what promised to be a new creative period in American poetry. Like all "younger generation" movements, it had as its rallying cry: "Away with the outworn! We demand freedom from the old chains. We would sing of life as life is lived to-day, and felt to-day." Greatly was the movement influenced by the new and fearless realism of the times-that rising tide of realism that seemed to delight in the ugly and the hopeless areas of life,-areas that had been shunned instinctively by the generation that was passing from the scene. The patron saint of the movement, sometimes confessed and oftener not, was Walt Whitman who more and more was hailed as the greatest of the American poets. It was a period of newnesses, of breaking away, often to the extremes of grotesqueness and license. It began with vagrant varieties of imagism and symbolism, sometimes spontaneous as with Emily Dickinson, sometimes studied from foreign sources as with the work of Stephen Crane, perhaps, after Whitman, the most influential pioneer in the movement. Vagabondish license and wild exotic strains had come with Hovey and Carman, and demands for freedom and democratic brotherhood had been voiced by Markham, as in "The Man with the Hoe." In the second decade of the new century the movement embodied itself in a new "school" of poets. Suddenly poetry and poems became the central theme of literary discussion. A book of poems even achieved the success of a "best seller." Magazines of poetry headed by Miss Monroe's Poetry, published from Chicago, sprang up everywhere, and volumes of explanation of the new poetic theory, and studies of the new poets, and anthologies of their writings became numerous. The movement acquired a leader in Miss Amy Lowell, sister of the President of Harvard University, and by the end of the decade some half a dozen of its poets had gained general recognition. The group for the most part has been affected by the scientific temper of the period. It has sought for "the truth" as opposed to sentimentalism and dreaming. It has, on the whole, been negative in its findings and pessimistic in its view of life-sometimes even to the elimination of all but the sordid and the material. It has been critical, disillusioned, scientific. In its prosody it has for the most part been lacking in reverence for the old laws, letting itself go in a Walt Whitman freedom; in its subject-matter it has scorned nothing as trivial and nothing as unclean and in its measures and melodies it has often, as in the case of Sandburg and Lindsay, closely allied itself with the jazz music with which it was contemporary. Among the poets of the group most frequently mentioned at the present time are EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON, a graduate of Harvard, a restrained and cultured, yet critical and disillusioned observer of modern life; AMY LOWELL the militant propagandist of a new verseimagist, exploiter of "polyphonic prose," disciple and biographer of Keats yet admirer of the Chicago rythms of Sandburg; ROBERT FROST, voicer of the last act of the New England tragedy of nature in its beauty covering over the ruins of a vanishing people; CARL SANDBURG with his Chicago Poems, his Cornhuskers, his Slabs of the Sunburnt West-masculine poems for the banjo and the saxophone, voices of lawless freedom like the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman, his master, translated into Chicagoese; VACHEL LINDSAY, the last of the jongleurs, shouter of barbaric ballads and folk songs, maker of poems "intended to be read aloud," exploiter of beauty and righteousness to a Philistine world, and perhaps the most lyrically inspired of the younger group, GEORGE STERLING, whose final thirty years were lived in California-whose emotion at times was extravagant, clothing itself often in overrichness of imagery and diction, but always he was vigorous and original and intensely lyrical. The "school" is very young yet, and it is too early to assign any of its members a final place in the choir of American singers. STEPHEN CRANE1 (1871-1900) WAR IS KIND Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky 1 The poems of Stephen Crane are published by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. And the affrighted steed ran on alone, War is kind. "Grant that we may run swiftly across the world "To huddle in worship at Thy feet." I WONDER I wonder if sometimes in the dusk I wonder if sometimes in the dusk A time when thou loved me And our love was to thee thy all? Worn in an age of other fashions? For that love is now to me A supernal dream, White, white, white with many suns. War is Kind, 1899. 10 |