Kentucky in American Letters.
VOL. 1.
by John Wilson Townsend.
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Townsend's fellow countrymen must feel themselves to be put under a beautiful obligation to him by his work entitled _Kentucky in American Letters_. He has thus fenced off for the lovers of New World literature a well watered bluegrass pasture of prose and verse, which they may enter and range through according to their appetites for its peculiar green provender and their thirst for the limestone spring.
This strip of pasture is a hundred years long; its breadth may not be politely questioned!
For the backward-looking and for the forward-looking students of American literature, not its merely browsing readers, he has wrought a service of larger and more lasting account. Whether his patiently done and richly crowned work be the first of its class and kind, there is slight need to consider here: fitly enough it might be a pioneer, a path-blazer, as coming from the land of pioneers, path-blazers.
But whether or not other works of like character be already in the field of national observation, it is inevitable that many others soon will be. There must in time and in the natural course of events come about a complete marshalling of the American commonwealths, especially of the older American commonwealths, attended each by its women and men of letters; with the final result that the entire pageant of our literary creativeness as a people will thus be exhibited and reviewed within those barriers and divisions, which from the beginning have constituted the peculiar genius of our civilization.
When this has been done, when the States have severally made their profoundly significant showing, when the evidence up to some century mark or half-century mark is all presented, then for the first time we, as a reading and thoughtful self-studying people, may for the first time be advanced to the position of beginning to understand what as a whole our cis-Atlantic branch of English literature really is.
Thus Mr. Townsend's work and the work of his fellow-craftsmen are all stations on the long road but the right road. They are aids to the marshalling of the American commonwealths at a great meeting-point of the higher influences of our nation.
Now, already American literature has long been a subject in regard to which a library of books has been written. The authors of by far the most of these books are themselves Americans, and they have thus looked at our literature and at our civilization from within; the authors of the rest are foreigners who have investigated and philosophized from the outside. Altogether, native and foreign, they have approached their theme from divergent directions, with diverse aims, and under the influence of deep differences in their critical methods and in their own natures. But so far as the writer of these words is aware, no one of them either native or foreign has ever set about the study of American literature, enlightened with the only solvent principle that can ever furnish its solution.
That solvent principle is contained within a single proposition. That single proposition is the one upon which our forefathers deliberately chose to found the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World: that it should not be a civilization of States which were not a Nation; that it should not be the civilization of a nation without states; but that it should be a Nation of States.
Now, if any man aspires to draw from American literature the philosophy of its traits, if he sets it as the goal of his wisdom to explain its breadth and its narrowness, its plenty here and its lack there, its color in one place and its pallor in another, let him go back to the will of the fathers in the foundation of the Republic and find the explanation of our literature at the basis of our whole civilization. He will never find it anywhere else. He will find it there as he there finds the origin of our system of government, of our system of industry, of our system of political barriers, of our system of education: in the entire nature of our institutions as derived and unfolded from the idea that we should be a nation of states. Our literature--our novels and our poetry--have been as rigorously included in this development as all the other elements of our life.
For the first time in this way he may come to see a great light; and with that light shining about him he may be prepared to write the first history of American literature.
None has yet been written.
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PREFACE
I
What is a Kentucky book, is the one great question this work has elicited. Surely a Kentucky book is one written by a Kentuckian about Kentucky or Kentuckians and printed in Kentucky; surely it is a book written by a Kentuckian upon any subject under the sun, and published in any clime; surely it is one written in Kentucky by a citizen of any other state or country, regardless of the subject or place of publication, for, "in general, I have regarded the birthplace of a piece of literature more important than that of the author." But is a book, though treating of Kentucky or Kentuckians, regardless of its place of publication, whose author was not born in, nor for any appreciable period resided in, this state, entitled to be properly classified as a Kentucky work? The writer has responded in the negative to this question in the present work.
There have been several noted American authors who have written volumes about Kentucky or Kentuckians, and they themselves were not natives of this state, nor resided within its confines. Those early Western travelers rarely omitted Kentucky from their journeys. The first of them, F. A. Michaux, published his famous _Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee_, at London, in 1805; two years later F. Cuming's _Tour to the Western Country, through Ohio and Kentucky_, was printed at Pittsburg; and in 1817 John Bradbury got out the first edition of his now noted _Travels in the Interior of America_, at London. Bradbury died in 1823 and to-day lies buried in the cemetery at Middletown, Kentucky, near Louisville. George W. Ogden's _Letters from the West_ (New Bedford, 1823); W. Bullock's _Sketch of a Journey through the Western States_ (London, 1827); and Tilly Buttrick's _Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries_ (Boston, 1831), round out fairly well that group of Scotchmen, Englishmen, New Englanders, and what not, who found many interesting things in Kentucky a hundred years and more ago. Ogden spent two summers in Kentucky; Bullock owned a river-side tract near Ludlow, Kentucky, and old Bradbury sleeps in a quiet Kentucky hamlet, but neither of them may be properly classified as a real Kentuckian.
The Beauchamp-Sharp tragedy of 1825 was the one Kentucky event that kindled the imaginations of more alien writers than any other happening in our history. Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Charles Fenno Hoffman, G. P. R. James, James Hall, and several others, wrote plays, novels, and poems based upon this tragedy. In 1832 James Kirke Paulding, the friend of Washington Irving, published one of the earliest Kentucky romances, entitled _Westward Ho!_ which name he got from the old Elizabethan drama of John Webster and Thomas Dekker. Two years after the appearance of Paulding's tale, William A. Caruthers, the Virginia novelist, printed _The Kentuckian in New York_; and in the same year Thomas Chandler Haliburton ("Sam Slick"), put forth one of his earliest works, _Kentucky, a Tale_ (London, 1834). In 1845 Charles Winterfield's _My First Days With the Rangers_, appeared, to be followed the next year by William T. Porter's _A Quarter Race in Kentucky_.
These writers hardly did more than point the way to Kentucky for Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose world-famous novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (Boston, 1852), was set against a background of slave-holding Kentucky. This is the most famous example our literature affords of a writer of another state or country coming to Kentucky for the materials out of which to build a book.
In 1860 David Ross Locke, the Ohio journalist and satirist, discovered the _Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby_, postmaster at "Confedrit X Roads, Kentucky," and his political satires on Kentucky, the _Nasby Letters_, tickled the readers of his paper, _The Toledo Blade_, through many years. These alleged communications from poor Petroleum may be read to-day in Locke's _Swingin' Round the Cirkel_, and _Ekkoes from Kentucky_. J. G. Marshall's _The Outlaw Brothers_ (New York, 1864); Miss Martha Remick's _Millicent Halford: a Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky in the year 1861_ (Boston, 1865); two novels by Edward Willett, entitled _Kentucky Border Foes_, and _Old Honesty: a Tale of the Early Days of Kentucky_, both of which were issued in the late sixties; Constance F.
Woolson's _Two Women_ (New York, 1877), and Mrs. Anna Bowman Dodd's story, _Glorinda_ (Boston, 1888), concludes the group of writers of the comparatively modern school who did not linger long in the "meadowland,"
but who found it good literary soil, and helped themselves accordingly.
In recent years Mr. Winston Churchill's _The Crossing_, Dr. James Ball Naylor's _The Kentuckian_, Mr. Augustus Thomas's _The Witching Hour_, and the Kentucky lyrics of Mrs. Alice Williams Brotherton, the Ohio poet, have drawn fresh attention to Kentucky as a background for literary productions, although they are written by those who cannot qualify as Kentuckians. But to claim any of these writers for the Commonwealth, would be to make one's self absurd. Dr. Naylor's lines upon this point are _apropos_:
I must admit--although it hurts!-- That I was born unlucky; I've never, literally, had A home in Old Kentucky.
And yet I feel should wayward Chance Direct my steps to roam there, I'd meet you all and greet you all-- And find myself _at home_ there!
As has already been indicated, the good physician-poet is not by any manner of means the only alien bard who has remembered Kentucky in his work. No less a poet than the great Sir Walter Scott celebrated Kentucky in _Marmion_--the State's first appearance in English poetry.
The passage may be found near the close of the ninth stanza in the third canto. Lord Marmion and his followers have ridden "the livelong day," and are now quartered at a well-known Scottish hostelry. They have all eaten and drunk until they are on the borderland of dreams when their leader, seeing their condition,
... called upon a squire:-- "Fitz-Eustace, know'st thou not some lay, To speed the lingering night away?
We slumber by the fire."--
VIII
"So please you," thus the youth rejoined "Our choicest minstrel's left behind."
And while Fitz realizes that he cannot, in any degree, equal the famous singer to whom he has referred, he now further praises him, calls down curses on the cause that kept him from following Marmion, and ventures
"To sing his favourite roundelay."
IX
A mellow voice Fitz-Eustace had, The air he chose was wild and sad; Such have I heard, in Scottish land, Rise from the busy harvest band, When falls before the mountaineer, On lowland plains, the ripened ear.
Now one shrill voice the notes prolong, Now a wild chorus swells the song: Oft have I listened, and stood still, As it came soften'd up the hill, And deem'd it the lament of men Who languish'd for their native glen; And thought how sad would be such sound, On Susquehannah's swampy ground, _Kentucky's wood-encumber'd brake_, Or wild Ontario's boundless lake, Where heart-sick exiles, in the strain, Recall'd fair Scotland's hills again!
After Sir Walter, the next English poet to tell the world of Kentucky and one of her sons, was George Gordon (Lord) Byron. His references are found in the eighth canto and the sixty-first to the sixty-seventh stanzas inclusive, of _Don Juan_. This poem was begun in 1819 and published, several cantos at a time, until the final sixteenth appeared in 1824. The sixty-first stanza will serve our purpose.
LXI
Of all men, saving Sylla, the man-slayer, Who passes for in life and death most lucky, Of the greatest names which in our faces stare, _The General Boone, back-woodsman of Kentucky_, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere; For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he Enjoy'd the lonely, vigorous, harmless days Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
In 1827 Alfred Tennyson, with his brother Charles, published a slender sheaf of juvenile verses, entitled _Poems By Two Brothers_. _On Sublimity_ contains eleven stanzas of ten lines each. The poet disdains "vales in tenderest green," and asks for "the wild cascade, the rugged scene," the sea, the mountains, dark cathedrals, storms, "Niagara's flood of matchless might," and Mammoth Cave.
The hurricane fair earth to darkness changing, _Kentucky's chambers of eternal gloom_,[1]
The swift-pac'd columns of the desert ranging Th' uneven waste, the violent Simoom The snow-clad peaks, stupendous Gungo-tree!
Whence springs the hallow'd Jumna's echoing tide, Hear Cotopaxi's cloud-capt majesty, Enormous Chimborazo's naked pride, The dizzy Cape of winds that cleaves the sky, Whence we look down into eternity, The pillar'd cave of Morven's giant king The Yanar, and the Geyser's boiling fountain, The deep volcano's inward murmuring, The shadowy Colossus of the mountain; Antiparos, where sun-beams never enter; Loud Stromboli, amid the quaking isles; The terrible Maelstroom, around his centre Wheeling his circuit of unnumber'd miles: These, these are sights and sounds that freeze the blood, Yet charm the awe-struck soul which doats on solitude.
Tennyson was the third and last English poet of the nineteenth century to make mention of Kentucky in his works.
Much writing has been done by Kentuckians from the beginning until the present time, but most of what is usually termed literature is the work of the school of today. That much, however, of the early productions, especially the anonymous and fugitive poems, have been forever lost, may be gathered from a letter written to Edwin Bryant, editor of _The Lexington Intelligencer_, by an Ohio correspondent, which appeared in that paper in January, 1834, a part of which is as follows:
There were a vast number of rural and sentimental songs, sung by the hunters and pioneers, that, in this our day, to the present generation would be truly interesting. Would it not be wise for you, Messrs. Editors, to publish a note in your valuable paper, offering the "Poets' Corner," and save what you can of the fragments of "Olden Times?"... I know that there were many sentimental pieces--some written by a Mr. Bullock--many war songs; one on St. Clair's defeat; and there was a wonderful flow of poetical effusions on the first discovery of a settlement of Kentucky. There was a wooing song of the hunter--one stanza I can only repeat:
"I will plough and live, and you may knit and sowe, And through the wild woods, I'll hunt the buffaloe!"
To many these things may appear as ... light as empty air, but look to the future, and you will at once discover the inquisitive mind will earnestly desire to look into such matters and things.