In 1829 Richard H. Dana, the poet and father of the author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” remarked that “If Bryant must write in a paper to get his bread, I pray God he may get a bellyful.” Bryant had entered the office of the Evening Post in the summer of 1826, half by accident and without any intention of making journalism his profession; yet he was to remain there fifty-two years, till the very day he received his death-stroke. No other great figure in American literature save Dr. Franklin has such a record as a publicist. How did it happen that the foremost poet in America, already known as such by “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl,” became the “junior editor” of the Evening Post in Coleman’s declining years? The young poet-lawyer had come to New York city from Great Barrington, Mass., at the beginning of 1825, when he was but thirty years old, brought thither by Henry D. Sedgwick and Gulian C. Verplanck, two citizens of substance and influence who had been struck by the genius shown in his first volume of verse. The Sedgwicks were a well-known Berkshire family. Catharine M. Sedgwick, later modestly famous as a novelist, was the first to make Bryant’s acquaintance, and had strongly commended the struggling barrister to her older brother Henry, who was a leader at the New York bar. With neither his profession nor with life in a small town was Bryant contented; and the applause which had been given to “Thanatopsis” in the North American Review, to “The Ages” when he read it before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, and to his first thin volume in 1821, seemed to justify his hopes for a metropolitan literary career. “The time is peculiarly propitious,” Henry Sedgwick122 urged him from New York; “the Athen?um, just instituted, is exciting a sort of literary rage, and it is proposed to set up a journal in connection with it.” If his pen did not yield a full living, he could make an additional sum by giving lessons to foreigners in the English language and literature. Bryant willingly yielded. Leaving his wife and baby behind, he settled in a boarding house that spring, and became one of the two editors of the monthly New York Review, the first number of which appeared in June, 1825.
His arrival to reside in New York had attracted general notice. To all discerning lovers of literature in the city, and they were many, his best poems were well known. Verplanck had given his first volume a cordial review in the New York American, and when he had made a preliminary visit to the city in 1824 the Evening Post had reprinted “Thanatopsis” with a warm word of praise. At the homes of Sedgwick and Verplanck, the former a sort of Holland House for New York, Bryant was at once made acquainted with Fitzgreene Halleck and J. G. Percival, with the aspiring young poets Hillhouse and Robert Sands, with the artists S. F. B. Morse and Dunlap, with Chancellor Kent and President Duer of Columbia. We may be sure that Coleman, who was proud of his friendship with Brockden Brown and Irving, did not fail to seek out the young New Englander who had come from near his former home, and whose poem “Green River” celebrated a stream that Coleman knew well. On Nov. 16, 1825, the Evening Post republished from the New York Review Bryant’s “The Death of the Flowers,” on March 3, 1826, it took from a magazine his “To a Cloud,” and on June 11 it reprinted “The Song of Pitcairn’s Island”; while various flattering references were made to his work.
Yet Bryant’s position was a precarious and anxious one. He wrote his friend Dana that, relieved as he was to get out of his “shabby” profession as a lawyer, in which he had been shocked by a bad miscarriage of justice and by the petty wrangles in which he was involved, he was123 not sure that he had found a better. Reviewing books was not the most congenial of employments. His salary was at first $1,000 a year; but the Review drooped, and after an effort had been made to bolster it up by amalgamation with two other periodicals, Bryant found himself in the early summer of 1826 co-editor of the United States Review and Literary Gazette, with a quarter ownership and a salary of only $500. His confidence in his ability to live by his pen was so shaken that he obtained a permit to practice law in the city courts, and was actually associated with Henry Sedgwick in a case.
At this juncture, in the middle of June, William Coleman was thrown from his gig by a runaway horse. It was for a time doubted whether he would recover, and as he was confined to his room for ten weeks, it was necessary to find some one to assist his son on the Evening Post. A temporary position was offered Bryant, and Verplanck and others earnestly counselled him to take it. “The establishment is an extremely lucrative one,” wrote Bryant. “It is owned by two individuals—Mr. Coleman and Mr. Burnham. The profits are estimated at about thirty thousand dollars a year—fifteen to each proprietor. This is better than poetry and magazines.”
Throughout July Bryant was busy upon the Evening Post; on Aug. 2 he wrote an account of the Columbia Commencement for it, criticizing the young speakers for confusing “will” and “shall”; and on Aug. 12 he furnished it two brief poetic translations, from Clement Marot and Dante, neither of which is included in his collected works. Immediately thereafter he set out on a trip to Boston, to bear to Richard H. Dana also an offer from the Evening Post of a permanent place on its staff, which Dana, after some hesitation, refused. This trip was made possible by Coleman’s renewed attention to the journal. The poet’s absence gave the Evening Post an opportunity to speak highly of Bryant, whom it now considered a full staff-member. On Aug. 21–22 it republished his poem “The Two Graves” from the United States Review, writing of the accomplished author as one124 to whom, “by the general assent of the enlightened portion of his countrymen
‘The lyre and laurels both are given
With all the trophies of triumphant day.’”
Another evidence of the high esteem in which the newspaper held Bryant appeared when on Sept. 5 it translated from the Revue Encyclopedique of Paris a flattering notice of “the exquisite and finished beauty of the little poems from the pen of W. C. Bryant.” The French magazine credited “the poet of the Green River” with having destroyed “the too commonly received opinion that the moral and physical features of the New World are too cold and serene for the glorious visions of poetry.” In October Coleman spoke of the editors of the United States Review as “men whose labors heretofore have contributed so much to the elevation of the American character in the republic of letters”; and he reprinted Bryant’s “Mary Magdalene.” The poet returned from Boston via Cummington, and brought his wife with him to live.
It was made clear to readers that fall that there was a new and vigorous hand in the management of the journal. Coleman’s steady loss of health had been accompanied by a decline in the strength of his editorial utterances. Moreover, he was an editor of the old school that had passed away with the era of good feeling, and that was now out of place. He liked to fight over old battles—he debated the Hartford Convention with Theodore Dwight, and the Florida Purchase with the National Advocate. His newspaper was neither Whig nor Democrat, but might best be described as a Federalist sheet qualified by a mild attachment to Andrew Jackson. In the Presidential election of 1824 it had supported Crawford simply because Coleman hated John Quincy Adams as a traitor to Federalism. It was prosperous, for Michael Burnham, still an active man, saw to that. It had improved in many respects. In 1816 it had been enlarged to offer six columns to the page, instead of five, or twenty-four125 in all, and the amount of miscellaneous matter had increased; a short time earlier it had begun printing two editions, one at two and the other at four p. m.; in May, 1819, it had used its first news illustration, a rough drawing of “the velocipede, or swift-walker”; and in January, 1817, it had begun to make a very rare use of the first page for news. But the journal tended too much to look backward, not forward.
Bryant’s son-in-law and biographer, Parke Godwin, states that in the years 1826–29 we can trace his labors in the Evening Post in longer and better book reviews, more attention to art, clearer characterizations of public men, and frequent suggestions of reform in city affairs. This is in part misleading. The frequent suggestions for local improvements were an old feature of the journal, and did not become more numerous. Characterizations of public men were not often written nor were they important. More books were noticed, especially those of Bliss & White and the young firm of Harpers, because there were more books—the Post remarked that in the last three months of 1825 no less than 233 volumes had come from the American press, apart from periodicals, of which 137 were original American works; but mere notices were furnished, not reviews. More than once Bryant, who unmistakably penned these notices, apologizes for their brevity and sketchiness by saying that he had not had time to do more than glance through the book in hand. However, the frequency of these notices, and the inclusion of much literary gossip and book announcements, gave the newspaper an increased literary flavor.
There was, as Godwin says, more news of art, for Bryant was interested in painting, and supplied long critical descriptions of new canvases by Dunlap and Washington Allston, both his friends. There was an increased amount of news about Columbia College and those professors, Anthon, Da Ponte, and Henry J. Anderson, whom Bryant knew well. The English magazines and newspapers were read more diligently, and interesting126 items from them grew in number. Bryant took in charge the filling of the upper left-hand corner of the news page with poetry, and we see fresher and better verse there—verse by Thomas Hood, Bishop Heber, Hartley Coleridge, and other Englishmen who preceded Tennyson and Browning. The poet wrote some fresh little essays; as editor of the United States Review, for example, he had compiled a curious article from an old colonial file of the New York Gazette, and he made another on the same topic equally curious, for the Evening Post. A few of the essays were satirical—e.g., one of April 23, 1828, dealing with the fashion of indiscriminate puffery that had grown up in dramatic criticism.
Between 1826 and his departure upon a trip to Europe in June, 1834, Bryant—with one exception to be noted later—wrote no signed verse for the Evening Post, reserving his few productions, since he was too busy for much poetical composition, for the magazines and annuals. But several effusions from his pen can nevertheless be identified. In the first two months of 1829 the town was much interested by the courageous woman lecturer, one of the first of the long line which has struggled to enlarge woman’s sphere, Miss Fanny Wright. Bryant, as his letters show, wrote the rather scornful ode to this free-thinking disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, which appeared in the issue of Jan. 29:
127
Thou wonder of the age, from whom
Religion waits her final doom,
Her quiet death, her euthanasia,
Thou in whose eloquence and bloom
The age beholds a new Aspasia!
* * * * *
O ’tis a glorious sight for us,
The gaping throng, to see thee thus
The light of dawning truth dispense,
While Col. Stone, the learn’d and brave,
The press’s Atlas, mild but grave,
Hangs on the words that leave thy mouth,
Slaking his intellectual drouth,
In that rich stream of eloquence,
And notes thy teachings, to repeat
Their wisdom in his classic sheet ...
Another bit of verse, a short political satire (March 25, 1831), is identifiable by the fact that it is signed “Q,” the initial Bryant used for dramatic criticism, and that it is marked as his in the files presented by the Evening Post to the Lenox Collection. Called “The Bee in the Tar Barrel,” it represents the buzzings of the National Gazette—Henry Clay’s organ in New York—over the tariff, the removal of the Cherokees, and other current topics:
I heard a bee, on a summer day,
Brisk, and busy, and ripe for quarrel—
Bustling, and buzzing, and bouncing away,
In the fragrant depths of an old tar-barrel.
Do you ask what his buzzing was all about?
Oh, he was wondrous shrewd and critical.
’Twas sport to hear him scold and flout,
And the topics he chose were all political ...
Bryant also is probably to be credited with several of the last New Year’s addresses of the carriers, long rhymed reviews of the year’s events which were then expected annually. He could have tossed off more easily than any one else in the office such hexameters as the following (Jan. 2, 1829):
Since New Year’s day came last about,
The Emperor Nicholas sent out
A potent army, full of fight,
Cossack, and Pole, and Muscovite,
To give the Turks a castigation,
Such as they ne’er had since creation.
They passed the Pruth in fine condition,
And meeting no great opposition,
They thought to make their winter quarters
By Hellespont’s resounding waters ...
There are frequently unsigned poems of a serious character128 in the Evening Post during these years, but nine in ten are so poor that it is impossible to believe that Bryant wrote them. Now and then occurs one which might be his; such, for example, are the translations of lyrics from the German of Gleim which appeared on Nov. 13, 1827, and Dec. 2, 1828. Bryant did not claim all of his poems in even the United States Review; it has been assumed of these, and it may be assumed of any lost in the Evening Post files, that they were not worth claiming.
As a young man, Bryant took his journalistic duties light-heartedly, and one of his distinctive contributions lay in his literary hoaxes. He and his close friend Robert C. Sands, a talented young assistant of Col. Stone in editing the Commercial Advertiser, delighted in them. “Did you see a learned article in the Evening Post the other day about Pope Alexander VI and C?sar Borgia?” he wrote Gulian Verplanck, then a Congressman in Washington. “Matt. Patterson undertook to be saucy in the Commercial as to a Latin quotation in it, so we—i. e., Sands and myself—sent him on a fool’s errand.” The editor of the Commercial had corrected the Evening Post’s Latin, and Bryant had replied as follows, inventing the authority he cited:
As to the Latin of the phrase, “Vides, mi fili, quam parva sapientia gubernatur mundus,” he affirms that it is not good. He says that it should be, “Vides, mi fili, quantilla sapientia regitur mundus.” He adds, however, that it was not said by any of the Popes, but by some great statesman, whose name he does not give, probably because he does not know it. As to the correctness of the Latin, that is no business of ours.... If any of the Popes spoke bad Latin, two or three hundred years before we were born, it should be recollected that it was not in our power to help it. As to the fact of the phrase being made use of by one of the Popes, we will only say to the writer in the Commercial, that if he will consult the work entitled Virorum Illustrium Reliqui?, collected by the learned Reisch and published at the Hague, by John and Daniel Steucker, in 1650, a work well known to scholars, he will find that the words, as we have quoted them, were addressed by Pope Alexander VI to his son C?sar Borgia.
129 Upon a more elaborate hoax Bryant and Sands were assisted by Professors Anderson and Da Ponte—“a very learned jeu d’esprit,” he called it. It was a long letter to the Evening Post signed John Smith, in which they took a familiar couplet and translated it through all the principal tongues, ancient and modern, even into several Indian languages. It is hard to believe that these erudite quips had a large audience; but Bryant’s ode to Fanny Wright was much admired, and was generally attributed to Halleck, until that gentleman disclaimed it. In these high-spirited productions we see a side of Bryant that largely disappeared under his growing cares and the dignity that increased with his celebrity. We see the Bryant who used to meet with Verplanck and Sands at the house of the latter’s father in the hamlet of Hoboken, and make it ring with declamation and uproarious laughter. We see the poet-editor who used to throw off all anxieties and go for long walks, studying nature or chatting with companions, and who once at an evening party apologized for his fatigue by explaining that he had covered the road from Haverstraw to New York, nearly forty miles, that day. Bryant had his fun-loving side, and the few men whom he found closely congenial had no reason to complain of his coldness, as others often did.
But the new editor’s most effective impress upon the Evening Post was in its political and economic utterances. The journal had already inclined toward a low-tariff policy, for the commercial community of New York opposed protection; but its editorials upon this subject, as upon many others, were feeble. Bryant in the years 1822–24 had been led by his friends the Sedgwicks to study the British economists, Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, and the debates upon tariff questions prominent in Parliament about 1820. Theodore Sedgwick was a pronounced advocate of free trade, and completely converted Bryant. From the young man’s convictions upon this subject flowed his attachment to Jackson as an opponent of protection and monopoly, and his intense dislike of Clay, the leading advocate of the so-called American130 tariff system. He had once been a Federalist, and as a boy had written a hot Federalist poem, “The Embargo,” but his free-trade views now fast made him an ardent Democrat. His sympathies in commercial legislation were not with his native New England, but with the South.
Martin Van Buren writes in his Autobiography regarding the “American” or protective tariff theories that “To the very exposition of the system and the persistent assaults upon its injustice, and impolicy by the New York Evening Post, the country is more indebted for its final overthrow, in this State [New York] at least, than to any other single influence.” This was true. Bryant, who was to oppose protection till his death in 1878, lost no time in 1826 in aligning the journal against the legislation then proposed for higher duties upon woolens. He characterized the act of 1824 as “our last and worst” tariff, and that autumn supported his friend Verplanck, with C. C. Cambreleng and Jeromus Johnson, for city seats in Congress as “the avowed opponents of restrictive and prohibitory laws.” On Nov. 16 he wrote concerning the woolens bill:
From 1815 to the present day the demands of our manufacturers have been incessant; and the more bounty they receive, the more exorbitant their claims. It is time that they should be taught to wait, as other branches of industry do, for that revival of trade which can alone give them relief.... If the woolen manufactures have grown with unnatural rapidity during the last ten years, no legislative remedy can be applied; it is an evil which in every branch of industry periodically finds its own remedy. All acquainted with the subject know that our manufacturing is our most profitable branch of industry, and we trust Congress will no longer continue to pamper capitalists so highly favored by circumstances.
Almost alone among the Northern newspapers—the Providence Journal was its most important ally—the Evening Post unsuccessfully combated the tariff of 1828. The newspaper ascribed to it the Paterson textile strike of 1828, and predicted that these industrial outbreaks131 would yet equal the Manchester and Birmingham riots. In 1830 it asked where were the busy thousands who had once been employed in the city’s shipyards, along the docks, or in establishments for fitting out vessels. A few half-idle men were left; the rest, thanks to the tariff, were “in the miserable abodes of poverty, or in the poorhouse.” John Jacob Astor early in 1831 asked for a higher duty upon furs, declaring that he was undersold in the Eastern market by British traders who possessed an advantage in dealing with the Indians. The blankets, strouds, and garments which the savages liked were not made in the United States, but had to be imported from England and to pay a heavy duty, so that the Canadian fur agents could offer much more than the Americans for pelts. The Evening Post pounced upon this as an argument not for a tariff upon furs, but for abating the tariff on blankets and clothing.
Naturally, in 1828 the Post supported Jackson against J. Q. Adams for the Presidency, Bryant adding new reasons to those Coleman had used against Adams four years earlier. He represented the section that clamored for protection, while Jackson was for a lower tariff. Under the urgings of Senator Rufus King a decade before, the Post had said hard things about Jackson, but now it praised him for his long public service, for his Roman strength of will, and for his clearsighted political tenets. When he became President, it supported his Indian policy; it urged him on, as we shall see later, in his determination to crush the United States Bank. The tariff act of 1832, carrying a moderate reduction of duties, it naturally applauded. It was a compromise bill, Bryant admitted. “Yet a large majority of the friends of free trade are satisfied with it, because although not what they would have it, it is still a positive good, it simplifies the collection of the revenue, it removes many of the embarrassments in the way of the fair trader, it diminishes the temptation to smuggling, and it is an approach, if nothing more, to a fair and equal system of duties.”
132 While giving the Evening Post a clear-cut, courageous tariff policy, Bryant did much else with the editorial page. Early in 1827 he came out with a far more ringing denunciation of lotteries than it had before printed, and in August he induced it to announce that it would accept no more advertisements relating directly or indirectly to tickets in them. During the same year, following a number of business failures in the city, he wrote in advocacy of a comprehensive national bankruptcy act, such as was not passed till near the end of the century. To his surprise, merchants frowned on the proposal, and the Evening Post was left, in his expressive words, “like a public actor who believes he has just said something highly to the purpose, and looks around for applause, but meets only hisses.” Later, in 1837, Van Buren formally recommended a general bankruptcy law to Congress, but again it met with no favor. A number of steamboat accidents caused the journal to press for legislation punishing criminal carelessness and manslaughter by fitting penitentiary sentences. It took up with zeal, following Jackson’s inaugural message, the Administration’s campaign against the policy of national aid to internal improvements, for Bryant regarded such gifts to special local and political interests as an evil almost as great as protective tariff.
When the first rumblings of nullification were heard from South Carolina in 1829, the Evening Post refused to follow those newspapers which treated the subject flippantly. “Every man of common sense must know that if but a single stave is withdrawn from the barrel, it inevitably tumbles to pieces,” Bryant warned his readers; “and that whatever be the dimensions of the stave withdrawn, the catastrophe is equally sure and fatal.” It was impossible for the journal not to sympathize with the hot-tempered South Carolinians who wanted to destroy the application of the tariff of 1828 to their State. It thought that Col. Hayne was no more wrong about the Constitution than the turncoat Webster was wrong about the tariff; but it warned Calhoun’s and Hayne’s followers that their project was “insane”:
133
It is the destiny of all republics to be agitated occasionally by the desperate plans of disappointed and ambitious men, resolved to rule or ruin. Such might succeed with a corrupt people, but not in our intelligent and free land. Public opinion has indignantly rejected every proposition to dismember our confederacy, and has pronounced a just judgment on those who prefer themselves to their country—we have already among us more than one blasted monument of selfish ambition. The wreck of our republic is not yet at hand—the people’s devotion to the union is invincible, and the same verdict awaits every man, whether of the North, the South, the East, or the West, who would dare to violate its integrity. (Aug. 29, 1832.)
Whether applauding Jackson as he sternly recalled South Carolina to its senses, or attacking the protectionist doctrines, Bryant tried to open his editorials with a flash of humor or an apposite story. When the American delayed a twelvemonth in apologizing for an insult to Jackson, he told the anecdote of the worthy widow whose husband had been dead for seven years and who declared that she could stand it no longer. The opponent who sighed for the time when the Administration would go into a state of “retiracy” reminded him of the Irishman who had rushed for a map when he learned that Napoleon had taken Umbrage. An exchange with a discourteous antagonist recalled the member of the House of Commons who, having said that a colleague was not fit to carry guts to a bear, and being required to apologize, stated: “I retract—you are fit to carry guts to a bear.” During 1831 many Americans were boasting of having known Louis Philippe when he was an expatriate in this country; and in rebuke to their snobbery, the editor spoke of the man who was proud of having been noticed by a king—the king had said, “Get out of my way, you scoundrel!” Bryant wrote laboriously, not fluently, and made so many corrections that his copy was often almost illegible; but he wrote with polish.
Coleman’s health after his runaway accident steadily failed. He had wholly lost the use of his lower limbs, and Bryant tells us that his appearance was remarkable. “He134 was of a full make, with a broad chest, muscular arms, which he wielded lightly and easily, and a deep-toned voice; but his legs dangled like strings.” The National Journal of July, 1827, commented upon his declining strength, in April and June, 1828, Evening Post readers were told that he was confined to his home, and on July 14, 1829, he died. Bryant instantly became, what he had previously been in all but name, editor-in-chief. Some assistance was needed, for Coleman’s son, though a man of literary tastes, did not wish to enter the office. In 1827 a share in the newspaper had been offered to Robert Sands, but after some hesitation he had declined it. Now an editorial position, and the opportunity of becoming part owner, was tendered William Leggett, a spirited young reformer who had been connected with the Morning Chronicle, and more recently had been editor of a frail weekly called the Critic, the final numbers of which he had not only written but set up, printed, and delivered himself. He gladly accepted.
Within four and a half years of coming to the city a literary adventurer, Bryant had thus become editor of one of its oldest and most prosperous journals. He had done this not because he had an inborn tendency to journalism, not because he wished to make a newspaper the sounding board for certain ideas or doctrines, but chiefly because he could not live by pure literature, and because the bar, for which he was in many ways well equipped, did not please him. But he did bring to the newspaper great ability and high ideals. No American editor of importance had made such use of the editorial page as he began to make. He had a love of freedom, a sense of justice, and a shrewd judgment of men and affairs, which his retiring nature debarred him from bringing into play in any other way. As an editor, this shy, unsocial man could work at arm’s length for the benefit of the people and nation, and except at arm’s length he could have had no public career at all. He was willing to toil hard in his chosen calling, and for many years to push poetry, though upon poetry alone he relied for enduring fame, into a135 secondary position. He had a keen sense of the dignity that should belong to his profession, and by word as well as example preached against that use of epithet and insult which was then common in it. In one of his early essays he deplored the character of many journalists:
Yet the vocation of a newspaper editor is a useful and indispensable, and, if rightly exercised, a noble vocation. It possesses this essential element of dignity—that they who are engaged in it are occupied with questions of the highest importance to the happiness of mankind. We cannot see, for our part, why it should not attract men of the first talents and the most exalted virtues. Why should not the discussions of the daily press demand as strong reasoning powers, as large and comprehensive ideas, as profound an acquaintance with principles, eloquence as commanding, and a style of argument as manly and elevated, as the debates of the Senate?
Once established in full charge of the Evening Post, with a capable lieutenant, he was able to make rapid, far-reaching, and profitable improvements in the form of the journal. In 1829 it was still closely akin to the Evening Post of 1801—four pages of six columns each, much smaller than newspaper pages of to-day, dingily printed and ineffectively made up. When he left for Europe five years later the four pages had seven columns each, and were much larger than present-day pages—great blanket papers. Old John Randolph of Roanoke wrote Bryant complaining that these expansive sheets crinkled so badly in the mail that he had to have his housekeeper iron them out. But the results of the enlargement were an enhanced revenue from advertisements, and a rise of the subscription list, at $10 a year, above 2,000. In 1834 the management boasted that the journal had never been in a more prosperous condition, and that not three other papers in the city were so productive. The whole number of employees, including those in the mechanical departments, was then thirty.
When Bryant wrote his wife in 1826 that the Evening Post’s profits were $30,000 a year, he overestimated136 them; its gross receipts were only that much. But Bryant’s share in the newspaper, which was at first one-eighth, which in 1830 became one-fourth, in 1832 was one-third of seven-eighths, and in 1833 was a full third, sufficed to free him from all money cares at once, and within a short time to make him prosperous. The journal’s books were balanced each year on Nov. 16, the anniversary of its founding. On that date in 1829, it was found that the net profits were $10,544, of which Bryant’s one-eighth made $1,318.04. The next year the net profits had risen to $13,466, and Bryant’s quarter share was $3,366.51. In 1831 there was a further increase to $14,429, making Bryant’s income $3,507.24. A heavy slump occurred the following twelvemonth, cutting the net profits to $10,220, and the poet’s share to $2,980.99, but this was only temporary. For the half-year alone ending May 16, 1833—the figures for the full year are lost—the profits were $6,000.35, making Bryant’s income for six months exactly $2,000; and for the full year which closed Nov. 16, 1834, his one-third share yielded no less than $4,646.20. In those days an income of $4,000 or above was handsome, and Bryant was able to sail in the summer of 1834 with a full purse.
The literary world, however, looked with cold disapproval upon Bryant’s entrance into the newspaper field, which it believed was occupied by cheap political controversialists, and thought offered an atmosphere hostile to poetry. It found confirmation for this attitude in the marked slackening of Bryant’s productiveness as a poet. Of the whole quantity of verse which he wrote during his long lifetime, about 13,000 lines, approximately one-third had been composed before 1829. During 1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, in 1832 only two hundred and twenty-two, and in 1833 apparently none at all; nor was his verse of this period in his best vein. He was too completely occupied in mastering his new calling to cultivate the muse.
“Would that Mr. Bryant was employed in writing poetry ... and sending back his thoughts to the streams137 and mountains which his young eyes were familiar with, and from which he drank his first inspiration!” lamented a writer in the New England Magazine for 1831. “But alas! he is busied about far other things, and what he is writing, is as little like poetry, as Gen. Jackson is like Apollo.” This writer had called on the editor in his little Pine Street office. “He is a man rather under the middle height than otherwise, with bright blue eyes and an ample forehead, but not very distinguished either in face or person,” we are told. “His manners are quiet and unassuming, and marked with a slight dash of diffidence; and his conversation (when he does converse, for he is more used to thinking than talking), is remarkably free from pretension, and is characterized by good sense rather than genius.” Why could he not have remained a lawyer in Great Barrington, amid his Berkshire hills and brooks?
We cannot close this notice without again expressing our sorrow at the nature of Mr. Bryant’s present occupation, and that a man capable of writing poetry to make so many hearts throb, and so many eyes glisten with delight, should be lending himself to an employment in which the greater the success the more occasion there is for regret, for it must arise from the exertion of those very qualities which we are least willing a poet should possess. “’Tis strange, ’tis passing strange, ’tis pitiful, that” he should hang up his own cunning harp upon the willows, and take to blowing a brazen and discordant trumpet in the ranks of faction.
An early number of the Southern Literary Messenger regretted that Bryant was to be found “dashing in the political vortex” with those who “engage in party squabbles.” The New York Courier and Enquirer, in an utterance of 1832 which is to be discounted because of editorial jealousy, remarked that “he has embarked in a pursuit not suited to his genius and utterly at variance with all his studies and habits of mind. We wish him a better fate than can ever be his while doomed to follow a business for which he has not a solitary qualification, and compelled to give utterance to sentiments he most cordially despises.”
138 To a certain extent Bryant agreed with these writers. He did not believe journalism an unworthy or undignified occupation. In the Evening Post of July 30, 1830, he gave reasons for holding the contrary opinion, descanting upon the value of the opportunity to guide the thinking of thousands. “In combating error in all shapes and disguises,” he wrote, it was ample compensation for an editor’s trials “to perceive that you are understood by the intelligent, and appreciated by the candid, and that truth and correct principles are gradually extending their sway through your efforts.” But he had no attachment as yet to the editorial career, he wanted with all his heart to have leisure for pure literature, and he meant to get out of the newspaper office as quickly and finally as possible. He bracketed it with the law as a “wrangling profession,” and talked of being chained to the oar. Always fond of travel, he escaped from his desk after 1830 as much as he possibly could. In January, 1832, he took a trip to Washington, making the establishment of a regular Washington correspondence his excuse, and had a conversation of three quarters of an hour there with Jackson. That spring he made an excursion to Illinois, to visit his brothers. During the summer of 1833 he went to Montreal and Quebec. When he took passage abroad on June 24, 1834, he hoped that the business capacity of Michael Burnham and the editorial capacity of William Leggett would make anything but intermittent attention by him to the Evening Post thenceforth unnecessary. “I have been employed long enough with the management of a daily newspaper, and desire leisure for literary occupations that I love better,” he later wrote his brother. “It was not my intention when I went to Europe to return to the business of conducting a newspaper.” He hoped that his third share would support him.
How these expectations were suddenly wrecked, and how Bryant was brought back by harsh necessity to rescue the Evening Post from ruin, is a dramatic story.