Another thing to be said is that America has a unique history among great nations in that it has never been affected by any great religious influence except that which has issued from the Scriptures. No religion has ever been influential in America except Christianity. For many years there have been sporadic and spasmodic efforts to extend the influence of Buddhism or other Indian cults. They have never been successful, because the American spirit is practical, and not meditative. We are not an introspective people. We do not look within ourselves for our religion. Whatever moral and religious influence our literature shows gets back first or last to our Scriptures. The point of view of nature that is taken by our writers like Bryant and Thoreau is that of the Nineteenth Psalm. Moreover, we have been strongly under the English influence. Irving insisted that we ought to be, that we were a young nation, that we ought frankly to follow the leadership of more experienced writers. Longfellow thought we had gone too far that way, and that our poets, at least, ought to be more independent, ought to write in the spirit of America and not of traditional poetry. Whether we ought to have yielded to it or not, it is true that English influence has told very strongly upon us, and the writers who have influenced our writers most have been those whom we have named as being themselves under the Bible influence.
We need not go into detail about these writers, though they are most attractive. Bryant did for us what Wordsworth did for England. He made nature seem vocal. "Thanatopsis" is not a Christian poem in the narrow sense of the word, and yet it could hardly have been written except under Christian influence. His own genial, beautiful character was itself a tribute to Christian civilization, and his life, as critic and essayist, has left an impression which we shall not soon lose. Professor Richardson thinks that the three problematical characters in American literature are Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The shrewdest estimate of Poe that has ever been given us is in Lowell's Fable for Critics:
"There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."
That says it exactly. Poe knew many horrible situations, but he did not know the way out; and of all our American writers laying claim to place in the first class Poe shows least influence of the Bible, and apparently needs it most.
Irving was the first American writer who stood high enough to be seen across the water. Thackeray's most beautiful essay is on Irving and Macaulay, who died just one month apart. In it he describes Irving as the best intermediary between the nations, telling us Americans that the English are still human, and assuring the English that Americans are already human. Irving was trained early and thoroughly in the Bible. All his life he was an old-fashioned Episcopalian with no concern for new religious ideas and with no rough edges anywhere. Charles Dudley Warner, speaking of Irving's moral quality, says: "I cannot bring myself to exclude it from a literary estimate, even in the face of the current gospel of art for art's sake."[1] Like Scott, he "recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences, and Irving's literature, walk around it and measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature."
[1] American Men of Letters Series, Washington Irving, p. 302.
Then there is Emerson, a son of the manse and once a minister himself. He was, therefore, perfectly familiar with the English Bible. He did not accept it in all its religious teaching. Indeed, we have never had a more marked individualist in our American public life than Emerson. At every point he was simply himself. There is very little quotation in his writing, very little visible influence of any one else. He was not a follower of Carlyle, though he was his friend. If there is any precedent for the construction of his sentences, and even of his essays, it is to be found in the Hebrew prophets. As some one puts it, "he uttered sayings." In many of his essays there is no particular reason why the paragraphs should run one, two, three, and not three, two, one, or two, one, three, or in any other order. But Mr. Emerson was just himself. It is yet true that "his value for the world at large lies in the fact that after all he is incurably religious." It is true that he could not see any importance in forms, or in ordinary declarations of faith. "He would fight no battle for prelacy, nor for the Westminster confession, nor for the Trinity, but as against atheism, pessimism, and materialism, he was an ally of Christianity." The influence of the Bible on Emerson is more marked in his spirit than in anything else. Once in a while, as in that familiar address at Concord (1873), you run across Scripture phrases: "Shall not they who receive the largest streams spread abroad the healing waters?" That figure appears in literature only in the Bible, and there are others like it in his writings.
As for Longfellow, he is shot through with Scripture. No man who did not know Scripture in more than a passing way could have written such a sentence as this: "There are times when the grasshopper is a burden, and thirsty with the heat of labor the spirit longs for the waters of Shiloah, that go softly." There are two strikingly beautiful expressions from Scripture. Take another familiar saying in the same essay when he says the prospect for poetry is brightening, since but a short time ago not a poet "moved the wing or opened the mouth or peeped." He did not run across that in general current writing. He got that directly from the Bible. In his poems is an amazing amount of reference to the Bible. One would expect much in the "Courtship of Miles Standish," for that is a story of the Puritans, and they spoke, naturally, in terms of the Bible; yet, of course, they could not do it in Longfellow's poem, if Longfellow did not know the language of the Bible very well. One might not expect to find it so much in "Evangeline," but it is there from beginning to end. In "Acadia," the cock crowed
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