IRWIN RUSSELL—FIRST FRUITS OF THE SOUTHERN ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. BY W. L. WEBER.

So wide is the connotation of the word Romanticism, we may make up almost any conceivable definition and be sure we have respectable authority in agreement with the view we have taken. The fault to be found with the current definitions is that they stress the source, at the expense, of the character of that influence which transformed "the age of prose and reason" into the "Renascence of Wonder." The influence to be stressed in the use I shall wish to make of the word Romanticism is protest against the settled, conservative, classical order of things. Secondarily, it will be remembered that the source of much of the literary material used by the protestants is to be found in the remote past—remote whether in time or in charge of mental attitude.

In order to be able to throw a clearly defined portrait of Irwin Russell on the canvas of Southern literature, it will be necessary rapidly to review the main outlines of this Romantic movement in the development of English thought a period which may be shown to be the prototype of our own after-the-war literary life.

We shall not go into details. First we should recall to mind the main literary currents of English thinking from the time of Dryden to the end of the dictatorship of the great Cham himself. It will be readily remembered that fashion in literature had changed soon after Shakespeare's death and his native wood-notes wild were forgot for a time. The age of prose and reason followed. Self-consciousness was a characteristic note of the Augustan, the eighteenth century literature. Narrowness of imagination, and faithfulness in copying made up the main classical elements in many an English poet under the regime of Formalism.

"Back to nature!" was the rallying cry of a protest against this formalism—an inarticulate protest which culminated in the Romantic movement. Under the leadership of Dryden and for more than a century after him, canons of literary art based on classical models had almost undisputed sway. Aristotle filtered through Horace and Horace diluted by Boileau were prescribed by doctors who would correct and amend English speech and literature. From these masters were drawn rules so minute and so inflexible as to put to the death budding originality by the demand for "correctness." If the poet were moved to describe pastoral scenes, he must needs go to Theocritus for the names of his characters, to Virgil for the contour of his scenery. But all this classicism was counterfeit. It was "more Latin than Greek, and more French than Latin." The classical poet, as he misnamed himself, followed with slavish persistence the creed which he had adopted. It was an accepted law that "the best of the modern poets in all languages are those that have the nearest copied the ancients." He would have nothing of country life. Rough and irregular scenery were distasteful to him. Mountains he described by Gothic—his pet term of opprobrium. Scenery as well as thought must conform to the level. "Decent conformity," then, characterized the Augustan age and enthusiasm had no place in the age of Dryden and of Pope.

Some of the characteristic features of the Romantic movement may be readily got at, by prefixing a negative to the qualities of the classical school. The country, out door life, rugged mountains, folk-songs, ballads in every form, the picturing of English people in English scenery were used as subject-matter—in other words, the telling what the writer had himself seen and, therefore, what he really knew, instead of what he had read. It was this reaction against formalism which produced such men as Chatterton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott.

It is not within the purpose of this paper to give a full list of the writers who may be said to be the forerunners of this movement which dominated English poetry during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Nor is it needful to enter into the controversy as to who first gave evidence of the changing attitude. So careful a critic as Theodore Watts assigns the place of priority to Thomas Chatterton, styles him the Father of the Romantic School, and insists that to his influence may be traced some of the best work of Keats and of Coleridge. It will always be well to remember that changes in literary habit do not take place in a year, rarely in a decade. It will, therefore, be easy to point out poets as early as Gray who gave prophecy of the new era. This much at least is noteworthy—putting aside the question as to who comes first of all—that the new current of ideas began very early to flow through poets who were hardly more than boys. Professor Beers has already reminded us that in Joseph Warton as well as in Thomas Chatterton—neither of whom was more than eighteen years of age—we may see the set of the literary current.

It may not be insisting too strongly on a parallel to see in the history of Southern literature a state of affairs much like that we have just sketched. It will be remembered that in 1818 Bryant sounded his protest against a "sickly and affected imitation of the peculiar manner of the late popular poets of England." As late as 1848 Lowell did not hesitate roughly to assert:

In these circumstances it is not surprising that Sydney Smith should have asked with suggestion of truth even if with evidence of venom, "Who reads an American book?" American literature in the Northern and Middle sections escaped from bondage many years before the South came into its own literary inheritance. Just as unreasoning worship of a pseudo-classicism had its death-grip on Eighteenth Century writers so a like uncritical devotion to the usually read classic writers and to earlier English authors had checked the growth of the budding Southern literature of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Conservative as the South has always been in matters of thought it was not surprising that this should be so. Paul H. Hayne tells what contemptuous references were made by the literary coterie of Charleston to the early efforts of Simms because he dared aspire to cultivate the Muses, when he must needs get his Homer through the medium of Chapman or of Pope. This respect unto classical authority was of long continuance among cultured men and showed itself, also, in the dry and tedious essays of Legare who was reputed a great scholar.

It was, indeed, not until 1870 that the South may be said to have achieved literary independence. As the sway of Greece and Rome passed away, the South came to be a literary dependency of England. Kennedy and Sims are dominated by Scott, just as Wirt and his friends of the "Old Bachelor" group got their inspiration from the Spectator. Of course there were poets as Hayne and Timrod and story-writers as Johnston and Thompson who sang and wrote clearly and with a note of individuality. But Lowell might have described the greater part of Southern literary work in the words:

With the same thought in mind Poe wrote that "one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel, their having crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction."

This natural conservatism was upheld by the fact that many Southerners of means sent their sons to England to be educated. The South being settled for the most part by emigrants of English blood, it is not surprising that the controlling influence should be from mother-country.

Before the war, Sydney Smith's cutting question might have been answered with greater suggestion of truth in the form, "who reads a Southern book?" A not untruthful answer would have been, "Southerners do not." We have never adequately supported our own writers. We have added to the tragedy of nations by allowing Poe to die the death of an outcast; Timrod to break his heart, without a crust to eat or a penny to buy food; Lanier not to have time to record the strains that were demanding utterance, in order to spend his wasting strength seeking support for wife and children; Russell broken in courage and in fortune to find not even a resting-place in the soil of his native State. Before the war the Southern library shelves were weighed down with Fielding, Smollett, Addison, Johnson, Scott and Dickens. Charleston had a public meeting to congratulate Macaulay on the issuance of one of the later volumes of his History. Simms and Timrod lived in the City by the Sea in obscurity and neglect. We have not yet reached the place where we turn first to our own writers.

To say we had no writers, no books is not true. We had a plentiful supply of books whose writers with a kind of literary metonymy transferred the conventionalities and commonplaces of English life to the atmosphere of the South. The result was not English and it was not Southern but it had the worst features of both. Wax flowers were long a popular form of domestic art and the literary amateur caught the unreality of the maker of flowers.

There was, indeed, abundant material in the South and much of it was made use of. A distinct weakness in our workmanship arose from the fact that too much material was used for a given purpose. The stage was overcrowded with characters, the plot was weakened by using too much incident. This surplus-age of incident seems to have distracted the writer's attention from the details of his craft. The value of the work of art was lost in carelessness of workmanship. The new order of things was to see a renaissance of simplicity. It was to be expected that in order to bring about a re-crystallization of Southern literary canons a shock was essential. That shock came in the form of the war between the States. New ideas, newly expressed was the inheritance.

The new school of Southern writers found their material near at hand and yet from a past growingly remote. They delighted to tell of the days of slavery—to idealize that period, perhaps—and with some acquaintance with slavery as it actually existed. While it has not been a half century since the master and his slave lived together in Southern lands, yet the number of those who have had experiential knowledge of slave-life in the South is increasingly small. To be accurate the picture of master and man had need to be painted quickly.

Perhaps the very first of our writers to give a true picture of negro life in negro dialect was Irwin Russell of Mississippi. He was certainly the first to make use of verse to put before us the negro as he saw him. Russell's negro is for the most part not the slave but the negro who is reconstructed in his legal relations, but altogether unreconstructed in habits of thought and of action. That negro, a picture of whom was to be had only during the decade immediately after the war, is the hero of much of Russell's verse. That he has pictured the character faithfully is evidenced by the fact of the life of his work. Despite encouragements to die, the slender volume of posthumous verse still lives and seems destined to have permanent place in American literature.

Russell's place in our literary history does not depend solely on the estimation put on his own work but is assured by the fact of his influence on those he preceded in this new field. Joel Chandler Harris was one of the first to recognize the genius of Russell and he doubtless looks upon the power of the young poet as one of the formative influences of his life. Likewise Thomas Nelson Page delights to ascribe to the Bard of the Quarters the inspiration of his own literary life.

It will be remembered that in sketching the English Romantic Movement the fact was recorded that the boys Warton and Chatterton occupied a place of prescience with regard to these new ideas. It will be worth while calling to mind that Irwin Russell's relation to the Southern Romantic Movement was much the same. Already at sixteen years of age, he had begun to write and ten years later he had completed his work and returned his talents to him who gave them.

The parallel to be drawn between the life of Chatterton and of Russell is interesting if not suggestive of actual brotherhood of thought.

As mere boys they both began to write verse. They both made use of a medium other than mother tongue. Chatterton manufactured for himself a speech we cannot do better than describe as the Rowley dialect; Russell put into form the rude speech of the negro with whom he had grown up; yet he had no help in the difficult work of transcriber.

Chatterton found the tasks set for him in a lawyer's office unbearable while there was poetry in his mind to be written down; Russell was actually admitted to the bar but the Muse of Letters had marked him for her own and the courtroom knew him no more. Breaking away from the bondage of legal drudgery, Chatterton went with high hopes from Bristol to London where for a few short months "the unhappy boy" strove against starvation only at last to be overcome in the struggle for living.

Russell left Port Gibson and went to New York to enter upon a literary life but after buffetings not a few, he at last entered into the eternal rest not vouchsafed on earth to that weary, outworn body.

Chatterton may be granted place as forerunner of that noble body of poets who have had part in making the poetry of the Nineteenth Century as distinct contribution to English literature. Before Irwin Russell there were, indeed, fore-gleams of the day that was to dawn, but it may not unfairly be urged that he was the first to turn his camera on one section of our Southern life and give us a picture that has cause to be enumerated among the monuments which must be consulted as primary authorities by the historian who will picture the life and thought of the Southern people.