The customary antithesis between "American" literature and "English"
literature is unfortunate and misleading in that it seems to exclude
American authors from the noble roll of those who have contributed to
the literature of our mother-tongue. Of course, when we consider it
carefully we cannot fail to see that the literature of a language is one
and indivisible and that the nativity or the domicile of those who make
it matters nothing. Just as Alexandrian literature is Greek, so American
literature is English; and as Theocritus demands inclusion in any
account of Greek literature, so Thoreau cannot be omitted from any
history of English literature as a whole. The works of Anthony Hamilton
and Rousseau, Mme. de Staël and M. Maeterlinck are not more indisputably
a part of the literature of the French language than the works of
Franklin and Emerson, of Hawthorne and Poe are part of the literature of
the English language. Theocritus may never have set foot on the soil of
Greece, and Thoreau never adventured himself on the Atlantic to visit
the island-home of his ancestors; yet the former expressed himself in
Greek and the latter in English,--and how can either be neglected in any
comprehensive survey of the literature of his own tongue?
None the less is it undeniable that there is in Franklin and Emerson, in
Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, whatever their mastery of the idiom they
inherited in common with Steele and Carlyle, with Browning and Lamb, an
indefinable and intangible flavor which distinguishes the first group
from the second. The men who have set down the feelings and the
thoughts, the words and the deeds of the inhabitants of the United
States have not quite the same outlook on life that we find in the men
who have made a similar record in the British Isles. The social
atmosphere is not the same on the opposite shores of the Western ocean;
and the social organization is different in many particulars. For all
that American literature is,--in the apt phrase of Mr. Howells,--"a
condition of English literature," nevertheless it is also distinctively
American. American writers are as loyal to the finer traditions of
English literature as British writers are; they take an equal pride that
they are also heirs of Chaucer and Dryden and subjects of King
Shakspere; yet they cannot help having the note of their own
nationality.
Green, when he came to the Fourth of July, 1776, declared that
thereafter the history of the English-speaking people flowed in two
currents; and it is equally obvious that the stream of English
literature has now two channels. The younger and the smaller is
American--and what can we call the older and the ampler except British?
A century ago there were published collections entitled the _British
Poets_, the _British Novelists_, and the _British Essayists_; and the
adjective was probably then chosen to indicate that these gatherings
included the work of Scotch and Irish writers. Whatever the reason, the
choice was happy; and the same adjective would serve to indicate now
that the selections excluded the work of American writers. The British
branch of English literature is the richer and the more various; yet the
American branch has its own richness and its own variety, even if these
qualities have revealed themselves only in the past hundred years.
It may be noted also that although American literature has not been
adorned by so great a galaxy of brilliant names as illumined British
literature in the nineteenth century, it has had the good fortune to
possess more authors of cosmopolitan fame than can be found in the
German literature of the past hundred years, in the Italian, or in the
Spanish. A forgotten American essayist once asserted that "foreign
nations are a contemporaneous posterity," and even if this smart saying
is not to be taken too literally, it has its significance. There is
therefore food for thought in the fact that at least half a dozen, not
to say half a score, of American authors have won wide popularity
outside the limits of their own language,--a statement which could not
be made of as many German or Italian or Spanish authors of the
nineteenth century. From the death of Goethe to the arrival of the
playwrights of the present generation, perhaps Heine is the sole German
writer either of prose or of verse who has established his reputation
broadly among the readers of other tongues than his own. And not more
than one or two Spanish or Italian authors have been received even by
their fellow Latins, as warmly as the French and the Germans have
welcomed Cooper and Poe, Emerson and Mark Twain.
It is to present typical and characteristic examples of the American
contribution to English literature in the essay-form that this volume
has been prepared. Perhaps the term "essay-form" is not happily chosen
since the charm of the essay lies in the fact that it is not formal,
that it may be whimsical in its point of departure, and capricious in
its ramblings after it has got itself under way. Even the Essay is
itself a chameleon, changing color while we study it. There is little in
common between Locke's austere _Essay on the Human Understanding_ and
Lamb's fantastic and frolicsome essay on _Roast Pig_. He would be bold
indeed who should take compass and chain to measure off the precise
territory of the Essay and to mark with scientific exactness the
boundaries which separate it from the Address on the one side and from
the Letter on the other.
"Some (there are) that turn over all books and are equally searching in
all papers," said Ben Jonson; "that write out of what they presently
find or meet, without choice.... Such are all the Essayists, ever their
master Montaigne." Bacon and Emerson followed in the footsteps of
Montaigne, and present us with the results of their browsings among
books and of their own dispersed meditations. In their hands the essay
lacks cohesion and unity; it is essentially discursive. Montaigne never
stuck to his text, when he had one; and the paragraphs of any of
Emerson's essays might be shuffled without increasing their fortuitous
discontinuity.
After Montaigne and Bacon came Steele and Addison, in whose hands the
essay broadened its scope and took on a new aspect. The eighteenth
century essay is so various that it may be accepted as the forerunner of
the nineteenth century magazine, with its character-sketches and its
brief tales, its literary and dramatic criticism, its obituary
commemorations and its serial stories--for what but a serial story is
the succession of papers devoted to the sayings and doings of Sir Roger?
It was a new departure, although the writers of the _Tatler_ and of the
_Spectator_ had profited by the _Conversations_ of Walton and by the
_Characters_ of La Bruyère, by the epistles of Horace and by the
comedies of Molière. (Has it ever been pointed out that the method of
Steele and Addison in depicting Sir Roger is curiously akin to the
method of Molière in presenting M. Jourdain?)
The delightful form of poetry which we call by a French name, _vers de
société,_ (although it has flourished more abundantly in English
literature than in French) and which Mr. Austin Dobson, one of its
supreme masters, prefers to call by Cowper's term, "familiar verse," may
be accepted as the metrical equivalent of the prose essay as this was
developed and expanded by the English writers of the eighteenth century.
And as the familiar verse of our language is ampler and richer than that
of any other tongue, so also is the familiar essay. Indeed, the essay is
one of the most characteristic expressions of the quality of our race.
In its ease and its lightness and its variety, it is almost unthinkable
in German; and even in French it is far less frequent than in English
and far less assiduously cultivated.
As Emerson trod in the footsteps of Bacon so Washington Irving walked in
the trail blazed by Steele and Addison and Goldsmith; and Franklin
earlier, although his essays are in fact only letters, had revealed his
possession of the special quality the essay demands,--the playful wisdom
of a man of the world who is also a man of letters. Indeed, Dr. Franklin
was far better fitted to shine as an essayist than his more ponderous
contemporary, Dr. Johnson; certainly Franklin would never have "made
little fishes talk like whales." And in the nineteenth century the
American branch of English literature has had a group of essayists less
numerous than that which adorned the British branch, but not less
interesting or less important to their own people.
Among these American essayists we may find all sorts and conditions of
writers,--poets adventuring themselves in prose, novelists eschewing
story-telling, statesmen turning for a moment to matters of less weight,
men of science and men of affairs chatting about themselves and airing
their opinions at large. In their hands, as in the hands of their
British contemporaries, the essay remains infinitely various, refusing
to conform to any single type, and insisting on being itself and on
expressing its author. We find in the best of these American essayists
the familiar style and the everyday vocabulary, the apparent simplicity
and the seeming absence of effort, the horror of pedantry and the scorn
of affectation, which are the abiding characteristics of the true essay.
We find also the flavor of good talk, of the sprightly conversation that
may sparkle in front of a wood fire and that often vanishes with the
curling blue smoke.
It is the bounden duty of every maker of an anthology to set forth the
principles that have guided him in the choice of the examples he is
proffering to the public. The present editor has excluded purely
literary criticism, as not quite falling within the boundaries of the
essay, properly so-called. Then he has avoided all set orations,
although he has not hesitated to include more than one paper originally
prepared to be read aloud by its writer, because these examples seemed
to him to fall within the boundaries of the essay. (Nearly all of
Emerson's essays, it may be noted, had been lectures in an early stage
of their existence.) Furthermore he has omitted all fiction, strictly to
be so termed, although he would gladly have welcomed an apologue like
Mark Twain's "Traveling with a Reformer," which is essentially an essay
despite its use of dialogue. He has included also Franklin's "Dialogue
with the Gout," which is instinct with the true spirit of the essay; and
he has accepted as essays Franklin's "Ephemera" and "The Whistle,"
although they were both of them letters to the same lady. As the essay
flowers out of leisure and out of culture, and as there has been in the
United States no long background of easy tranquillity, there is in the
American branch of English literature a relative deficiency in certain
of the lighter forms of the essay more abundantly represented in the
British branch; and therefore the less frequent examples of these
lighter forms have here been companioned by graver discussions, never
grave enough, however, to be described as disquisitions. Finally, every
selection is presented entire, except that Dana's paper on Kean's acting
has been shorn of a needless preparatory note.