The voyager from Europe who lands upon our shores perceives a difference
in the sky above his head; the height seems loftier, the zenith more
remote, the horizon-wall more steep; the moon appears to hang in the
middle air, beneath a dome that arches far beyond it. The sense of
natural symbolism is so strong in us, that the mind seeks a spiritual
significance in this glory of the atmosphere. It is not enough to find
the sky enlarged, and not the mind,--_cœlum, non animum_. One wishes
to be convinced that here the intellectual man inhales a deeper breath,
and walks with bolder tread; that philosopher and artist are here more
buoyant, more fresh, more fertile; that the human race has here escaped
at one bound from the despondency of ages, as from their wrongs.
And the true and healthy Americanism is to be found, let us believe, in
this attitude of hope; an attitude not necessarily connected with
culture nor with the absence of culture, but with the consciousness of a
new impulse given to all human progress. The most ignorant man may feel
the full strength and heartiness of the American idea, and so may the
most accomplished scholar. It is a matter of regret if thus far we have
mainly had to look for our Americanism and our scholarship in very
different quarters, and if it has been a rare delight to find the two in
one.
It seems unspeakably important that all persons among us, and especially
the student and the writer, should be pervaded with Americanism.
Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a
chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are
steadily establishing it here. It includes the faith that to this good
thing all other good things must in time be added. When a man is
heartily imbued with such a national sentiment as this, it is as marrow
in his bones and blood in his veins. He may still need culture, but he
has the basis of all culture. He is entitled to an imperturbable
patience and hopefulness, born of a living faith. All that is scanty in
our intellectual attainments, or poor in our artistic life, may then be
cheerfully endured: if a man sees his house steadily rising on sure
foundations, he can wait or let his children wait for the cornice and
the frieze. But if one happens to be born or bred in America without
this wholesome confidence, there is no happiness for him; he has his
alternative between being unhappy at home and unhappy abroad; it is a
choice of martyrdoms for himself, and a certainty of martyrdom for his
friends.
Happily, there are few among our cultivated men in whom this oxygen of
American life is wholly wanting. Where such exist, for them the path
across the ocean is easy, and the return how hard! Yet our national
character develops slowly; we are aiming at something better than our
English fathers, and we pay for it by greater vacillations and
vibrations of movement. The Englishman's strong point is a vigorous
insularity which he carries with him, portable and sometimes
insupportable. The American's more perilous gift is a certain power of
assimilation, so that he acquires something from every man he meets, but
runs the risk of parting with something in return. For the result,
greater possibilities of culture, balanced by greater extremes of
sycophancy and meanness. Emerson says that the Englishman of all men
stands most firmly on his feet. But it is not the whole of man's
mission to be found standing, even at the most important post. Let him
take one step forward,--and in that advancing figure you have the
American.
We are accustomed to say that the war and its results have made us a
nation, subordinated local distinctions, cleared us of our chief shame,
and given us the pride of a common career. This being the case, we may
afford to treat ourselves to a little modest self-confidence. Those
whose faith in the American people carried them hopefully through the
long contest with slavery will not be daunted before any minor
perplexities of Chinese immigrants or railway brigands or enfranchised
women. We are equal to these things; and we shall also be equal to the
creation of a literature. We need intellectual culture inexpressibly,
but we need a hearty faith still more. "Never yet was there a great
migration that did not result in a new form of national genius." But we
must guard against both croakers and boasters; and above all, we must
look beyond our little Boston or New York or Chicago or San Francisco,
and be willing citizens of the great Republic.
The highest aim of most of our literary journals has thus far been to
appear English, except where some diverging experimentalist has said,
"Let us be German," or "Let us be French." This was inevitable; as
inevitable as a boy's first imitations of Byron or Tennyson. But it
necessarily implied that our literature must, during this epoch, be
second-rate. We need to become national, not by any conscious effort,
such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting
our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one's way to be original,
but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one's way. Originality is
simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world,
said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a thousand
defects in the literary man who proceeds on this faith, than to forgive
the one great defect of imitation in the purist who seeks only to be
English. As Wasson has said, "The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome
figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do,
for the present?" We must pardon something to the spirit of liberty. We
must run some risks, as all immature creatures do, in the effort to use
our own limbs. Professor Edward Channing used to say that it was a bad
sign for a college boy to write too well; there should be exuberances
and inequalities. A nation which has but just begun to create a
literature must sow some wild oats. The most tiresome vaingloriousness
may be more hopeful than hypercriticism and spleen. The follies of the
absurdest spread-eagle orator may be far more promising, because they
smack more of the soil, than the neat Londonism of the city editor who
dissects him.
It is but a few years since we have dared to be American in even the
details and accessories of our literary work; to make our allusions to
natural objects real not conventional; to ignore the nightingale and
skylark, and look for the classic and romantic on our own soil. This
change began mainly with Emerson. Some of us can recall the bewilderment
with which his verses on the humblebee, for instance, were received,
when the choice of subject caused as much wonder as the treatment. It
was called "a foolish affectation of the familiar." Happily the
atmosphere of distance forms itself rapidly in a new land, and the poem
has now as serene a place in literature as if Andrew Marvell had written
it. The truly cosmopolitan writer is not he who carefully denudes his
work of everything occasional and temporary, but he who makes his local
coloring forever classic through the fascination of the dream it tells.
Reason, imagination, passion, are universal; but sky, climate, costume,
and even type of human character, belong to some one spot alone till
they find an artist potent enough to stamp their associations on the
memory of all the world. Whether his work be picture or symphony, legend
or lyric, is of little moment. The spirit of the execution is all in
all.
As yet, we Americans have hardly begun to think of the details of
execution in any art. We do not aim at perfection of detail even in
engineering, much less in literature. In the haste of our national life,
most of our intellectual work is done at a rush, is something inserted
in the odd moments of the engrossing pursuit. The popular preacher
becomes a novelist; the editor turns his paste-pot and scissors to the
compilation of a history; the same man must be poet, wit,
philanthropist, and genealogist. We find a sort of pleasure in seeing
this variety of effort, just as the bystanders like to see a
street-musician adjust every joint in his body to a separate instrument,
and play a concerted piece with the whole of himself. To be sure, he
plays each part badly, but it is such a wonder he should play them all!
Thus, in our rather hurried and helter-skelter training, the man is
brilliant, perhaps; his main work is well done; but his secondary work
is slurred. The book sells, no doubt, by reason of the author's
popularity in other fields; it is only the tone of our national
literature that suffers. There is nothing in American life that can make
concentration cease to be a virtue. Let a man choose his pursuit, and
make all else count for recreation only. Goethe's advice to Eckermann is
infinitely more important here than it ever was in Germany: "Beware of
dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius
thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it is sure to repent
of every ill-judged outlay."
In one respect, however, this desultory activity is an advantage: it
makes men look in a variety of directions for a standard. As each sect
in religion helps to protect us from some other sect, so every mental
tendency is the limitation of some other. We need the English culture,
but we do not need it more evidently than we need the German, the
French, the Greek, the Oriental. In prose literature, for instance, the
English contemporary models are not enough. There is an admirable vigor
and heartiness, a direct and manly tone; King Richard still lives; but
Saladin also had his fine sword-play; let us see him. There are the
delightful French qualities,--the atmosphere where literary art means
fineness of touch. "Où il n'y a point de délicatesse, il n'y a point de
littérature. Un écrit où ne se recontrent que de la force et un certain
feu sans éclat n'annonce que le caractère." But there is something in
the English climate which seems to turn the fine edge of any very choice
scymitar till it cuts Saladin's own fingers at last.
God forbid that I should disparage this broad Anglo-Saxon manhood which
is the basis of our national life. I knew an American mother who sent
her boy to Rugby School in England, in the certainty, as she said, that
he would there learn two things,--to play cricket and to speak the
truth. He acquired both thoroughly, and she brought him home for what
she deemed, in comparison, the ornamental branches. We cannot spare the
Englishman from our blood, but it is our business to make him more than
an Englishman. That iron must become steel; finer, harder, more elastic,
more polished. For this end the English stock was transferred from an
island to a continent, and mixed with new ingredients, that it might
lose its quality of coarseness, and take a more delicate grain.
As yet, it must be owned, this daring expectation is but feebly
reflected in our books. In looking over any collection of American
poetry, for instance, one is struck with the fact that it is not so much
faulty as inadequate. Emerson set free the poetic intuition of America,
Hawthorne its imagination. Both looked into the realm of passion,
Emerson with distrust, Hawthorne with eager interest; but neither
thrilled with its spell, and the American poet of passion is yet to
come. How tame and manageable are wont to be the emotions of our bards,
how placid and literary their allusions! There is no baptism of fire; no
heat that breeds excess. Yet it is not life that is grown dull, surely;
there are as many secrets in every heart, as many skeletons in every
closet, as in any elder period of the world's career. It is the
interpreters of life who are found wanting, and that not on this soil
alone, but throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not just to say, as
someone has said, that our language has not in this generation produced
a love-song, for it has produced Browning; but was it in England or in
Italy that he learned to sound the depths of all human emotion?
And it is not to verse that this temporary check of ardor applies. It is
often said that prose fiction now occupies the place held by the drama
during the Elizabethan age. Certainly this modern product shows
something of the brilliant profusion of that wondrous flowering of
genius; but here the resemblance ends. Where in our imaginative
literature does one find the concentrated utterance, the intense and
breathing life, the triumphs and despairs, the depth of emotion, the
tragedy, the thrill, that meet one everywhere in those Elizabethan
pages? What impetuous and commanding men are these, what passionate
women; how they love and hate, struggle and endure; how they play with
the world; what a trail of fire they leave behind them as they pass by!
Turn now to recent fiction. Dickens's people are amusing and lovable, no
doubt; Thackeray's are wicked and witty; but how under-sized they look,
and how they loiter on the mere surfaces of life, compared, I will not
say with Shakespeare's, but even with Chapman's and Webster's men. Set
aside Hawthorne in America, with perhaps Charlotte Brontë and George
Eliot in England, and there would scarcely be a fact in prose literature
to show that we modern Anglo-Saxons regard a profound human emotion as a
thing worth the painting. Who now dares delineate a lover, except with
good-natured pitying sarcasm, as in _David Copperfield_ or _Pendennis_?
In the Elizabethan period, with all its unspeakable coarseness, hot
blood still ran in the veins of literature; lovers burned and suffered
and were men. And what was true of love was true of all the passions of
the human soul.
In this respect, as in many others, France has preserved more of the
artistic tradition. The common criticism, however, is, that in modern
French literature, as in the Elizabethan, the play of feeling is too
naked and obvious, and that the Puritan self-restraint is worth more
than all that dissolute wealth. I believe it; and here comes in the
intellectual worth of America. Puritanism was a phase, a discipline, a
hygiene; but we cannot remain always Puritans. The world needed that
moral bracing, even for its art; but after all, life is not impoverished
by being ennobled; and in a happier age, with a larger faith, we may
again enrich ourselves with poetry and passion, while wearing that
heroic girdle still around us. Then the next blossoming of the world's
imagination need not bear within itself, like all the others, the seeds
of an epoch of decay.
I utterly reject the position taken by Matthew Arnold, that the Puritan
spirit in America was essentially hostile to literature and art. Of
course the forest pioneer cannot compose orchestral symphonies, nor the
founder of a state carve statues. But the thoughtful and scholarly men
who created the Massachusetts Colony brought with them the traditions of
their universities, and left these embodied in a college. The Puritan
life was only historically inconsistent with culture; there was no
logical antagonism. Indeed, that life had in it much that was congenial
to art, in its enthusiasm and its truthfulness. Take these Puritan
traits, employ them in a more genial sphere, add intellectual training
and a sunny faith, and you have a soil suited to art above all others.
To deny it is to see in art only something frivolous and insincere. The
American writer in whom the artistic instinct was strongest came of
unmixed Puritan stock. Major John Hathorne, in 1692, put his offenders
on trial, and generally convicted and hanged them all. Nathaniel
Hawthorne held his more spiritual tribunal two centuries later, and his
keener scrutiny found some ground of vindication for each one. The
fidelity, the thoroughness, the conscientious purpose, were the same in
each. Both sought to rest their work, as all art and all law must rest,
upon the absolute truth. The writer kept, no doubt, something of the
somberness of the magistrate; each, doubtless, suffered in the woes he
studied; and as the one "had a knot of pain in his forehead all winter"
while meditating the doom of Arthur Dimmesdale, so may the other have
borne upon his own brow the trace of Martha Corey's grief.
No, it does not seem to me that the obstacle to a new birth of
literature and art in America lies in the Puritan tradition, but rather
in the timid and faithless spirit that lurks in the circles of culture,
and still holds something of literary and academic leadership in the
homes of the Puritans. What are the ghosts of a myriad Blue Laws
compared with the transplanted cynicism of one "Saturday Review"? How
can any noble literature germinate where young men are habitually taught
that there is no such thing as originality, and that nothing remains for
us in this effete epoch of history but the mere recombining of thoughts
which sprang first from braver brains? It is melancholy to see young men
come forth from the college walls with less enthusiasm than they carried
in; trained in a spirit which is in this respect worse than English
toryism--that is, does not even retain a hearty faith in the past. It is
better that a man should have eyes in the back of his head than that he
should be taught to sneer at even a retrospective vision. One may
believe that the golden age is behind us or before us, but alas for the
forlorn wisdom of him who rejects it altogether! It is not the climax of
culture that a college graduate should emulate the obituary praise
bestowed by Cotton Mather on the Rev. John Mitchell of Cambridge, "a
truly aged young man." Better a thousand times train a boy on Scott's
novels or the Border Ballads than educate him to believe, on the one
side, that chivalry was a cheat and the troubadours imbeciles, and on
the other hand, that universal suffrage is an absurdity and the one real
need is to get rid of our voters. A great crisis like a civil war brings
men temporarily to their senses, and the young resume the attitude
natural to their years, in spite of their teachers; but it is a sad
thing when, in seeking for the generous impulses of youth, we have to
turn from the public sentiment of the colleges to that of the workshops
and the farms.
It is a thing not to be forgotten, that for a long series of years the
people of our Northern States were habitually in advance of their
institutions of learning, in courage and comprehensiveness of thought.
There were long years during which the most cultivated scholar, so soon
as he embraced an unpopular opinion, was apt to find the college doors
closed against him, and only the country lyceum--the people's
college--left open. Slavery had to be abolished before the most
accomplished orator of the nation could be invited to address the
graduates of his own university. The first among American scholars was
nominated year after year, only to be rejected, before the academic
societies of his own neighborhood. Yet during all that time the rural
lecture associations showered their invitations on Parker and Phillips;
culture shunned them, but the common people heard them gladly. The home
of real thought was outside, not inside, the college walls. It hardly
embarrassed a professor's position if he defended slavery as a divine
institution; but he risked his place if he denounced the wrong. In those
days, if by any chance a man of bold opinions drifted into a reputable
professorship, we listened sadly to hear his voice grow faint. He
usually began to lose his faith, his courage, his toleration,--in short,
his Americanism,--when he left the ranks of the uninstructed.
That time is past; and the literary class has now come more into
sympathy with the popular heart. It is perhaps fortunate that there is
as yet but little _esprit de corps_ among our writers, so that they
receive their best sympathy, not from each other, but from the people.
Even the memory of our most original authors, as Thoreau, or Margaret
Fuller Ossoli, is apt to receive its sharpest stabs from those of the
same guild. When we American writers find grace to do our best, it is
not so much because we are sustained by each other, as that we are
conscious of a deep popular heart, slowly but surely answering back to
ours, and offering a worthier stimulus than the applause of a coterie.
If we once lose faith in our audience, the muse grows silent. Even the
apparent indifference of this audience to culture and high finish may be
in the end a wholesome influence, recalling us to those more important
things, compared to which these are secondary qualities. The
indifference is only comparative; our public prefers good writing, as it
prefers good elocution; but it values energy, heartiness, and action
more. The public is right; it is the business of the writer, as of the
speaker, to perfect the finer graces without sacrificing things more
vital. "She was not a good singer," says some novelist of his heroine,
"but she sang with an inspiration such as good singers rarely indulge
in." Given those positive qualities, and I think that a fine execution
does not hinder acceptance in America, but rather aids it. Where there
is beauty of execution alone, a popular audience, even in America, very
easily goes to sleep. And in such matters, as the French actor, Samson,
said to the young dramatist, "sleep is an opinion."
It takes more than grammars and dictionaries to make a literature. "It
is the spirit in which we act that is the great matter," Goethe says.
_Der Geist aus dem wir handeln ist das Höchste._ Technical training may
give the negative merits of style, as an elocutionist may help a public
speaker by ridding him of tricks. But the positive force of writing or
of speech must come from positive sources,--ardor, energy, depth of
feeling or of thought. No instruction ever gave these, only the
inspiration of a great soul, a great need, or a great people. We all
know that a vast deal of oxygen may go into the style of a man; we see
in it not merely what books he has read, what company he has kept, but
also the food he eats, the exercise he takes, the air he breathes. And
so there is oxygen in the collective literature of a nation, and this
vital element proceeds, above all else, from liberty. For want of this
wholesome oxygen, the voice of Victor Hugo comes to us uncertain and
spasmodic, as of one in an alien atmosphere where breath is pain; for
want of it, the eloquent English tones that at first sounded so clear
and bell-like now reach us only faint and muffled, and lose their music
day by day. It is by the presence of this oxygen that American
literature is to be made great. We are lost if we permit this
inspiration of our nation's life to sustain only the journalist and the
stump-speaker, while we allow the colleges and the books to be choked
with the dust of dead centuries and to pant for daily breath.
Perhaps it may yet be found that the men who are contributing most to
raise the tone of American literature are the men who have never yet
written a book and have scarcely time to read one, but by their heroic
energy in other spheres are providing exemplars for what our books shall
one day be. The man who constructs a great mechanical work helps
literature, for he gives a model which shall one day inspire us to
construct literary works as great. I do not wish to be forever outdone
by the carpet-machinery of Clinton or the grain-elevators of Chicago. We
have not yet arrived at our literature,--other things must come first;
we are busy with our railroads, perfecting the vast alimentary canal by
which the nation assimilates raw immigrants at the rate of half a
million a year. We are not yet producing, we are digesting: food now,
literary composition by and by: Shakespeare did not write _Hamlet_ at
the dinner-table. It is of course impossible to explain this to
foreigners, and they still talk of convincing, while we talk of dining.
For one, I cannot dispense with the society which we call uncultivated.
Democratic sympathies seem to be mainly a matter of vigor and health. It
seems to be the first symptom of biliousness to think that only one's
self and one's cousins are entitled to consideration and constitute the
world. Every refined person is an aristocrat in his dyspeptic moments;
when hearty and well, he demands a wider range of sympathy. It is so
tedious to live only in one circle and have only a genteel acquaintance!
Mrs. Trench, in her delightful letters, complains of the society in
Dresden, about the year 1800, because of "the impossibility, without
overstepping all bounds of social custom, of associating with any but
_noblesse_." We order that matter otherwise in America. I wish not only
to know my neighbor, the man of fashion, who strolls to his club at
noon, but also my neighbor, the wheelwright, who goes to his dinner at
the same hour. One would not wish to be unacquainted with the fair
maiden who drives by in her basket-wagon in the afternoon; nor with the
other fair maiden, who may be seen at her washtub in the morning. Both
are quite worth knowing; both are good, sensible, dutiful girls: the
young laundress is the better mathematician, because she has gone
through the grammar school; but the other has the better French accent,
because she has spent half her life in Paris. They offer a variety, at
least, and save from that monotony which besets any set of people when
seen alone. There was much reason in Horace Walpole's coachman, who,
having driven the maids of honor all his life, bequeathed his earnings
to his son, on condition that he should never marry a maid of honor.
I affirm that democratic society, the society of the future, enriches
and does not impoverish human life, and gives more, not less, material
for literary art. Distributing culture through all classes, it
diminishes class-distinction and develops individuality. Perhaps it is
the best phenomenon of American life, thus far, that the word
"gentleman," which in England still designates a social order, is here
more apt to refer to personal character. When we describe a person as a
gentleman, we usually refer to his manners, morals, and education, not
to his property or birth; and this change alone is worth the
transplantation across the Atlantic. The use of the word "lady" is yet
more comprehensive, and therefore more honorable still; we sometimes
see, in a shopkeeper's advertisement, "Saleslady wanted." No doubt the
mere fashionable novelist loses terribly by the change: when all
classes may wear the same dress-coat, what is left for him? But he who
aims to depict passion and character gains in proportion; his material
is increased tenfold. The living realities of American life ought to
come in among the tiresome lay-figures of average English fiction like
Steven Lawrence into the London drawing-room: tragedy must resume its
grander shape, and no longer turn on the vexed question whether the
daughter of this or that matchmaker shall marry the baronet. It is the
characteristic of a real book that, though the scene be laid in courts,
their whole machinery might be struck out and the essential interest of
the plot remain the same. In Auerbach's _On the Heights_, for instance,
the social heights might be abolished and the moral elevation would be
enough. The play of human emotion is a thing so absorbing, that the
petty distinctions of cottage and castle become as nothing in its
presence. Why not waive these small matters in advance, then, and go
straight to the real thing?
The greatest transatlantic successes which American novelists have yet
attained--those won by Cooper and Mrs. Stowe--have come through a daring
Americanism of subject, which introduced in each case a new figure to
the European world,--first the Indian, then the negro. Whatever the
merit of the work, it was plainly the theme which conquered. Such
successes are not easily to be repeated, for they were based on
temporary situations never to recur. But they prepare the way for higher
triumphs to be won by a profounder treatment,--the introduction into
literature, not of new tribes alone, but of the American spirit. To
analyze combinations of character that only our national life produces,
to portray dramatic situations that belong to a clearer social
atmosphere,--this is the higher Americanism. Of course, to cope with
such themes in such a spirit is less easy than to describe a foray or a
tournament, or to multiply indefinitely such still-life pictures as the
stereotyped English or French society affords; but the thing when once
done is incomparably nobler. It may be centuries before it is done: no
matter. It will be done, and with it will come a similar advance along
the whole line of literary labor, like the elevation which we have seen
in the whole quality of scientific work in this country within the last
twenty years.
We talk idly about the tyranny of the ancient classics, as if there were
some special peril about it, quite distinct from all other tyrannies.
But if a man is to be stunted by the influence of a master, it makes no
difference whether that master lived before or since the Christian
epoch. One folio volume is as ponderous as another, if it crushes down
the tender germs of thought. There is no great choice between the
volumes of the Encyclopædia. It is not important to know whether a man
reads Homer or Dante: the essential point is whether he believes the
world to be young or old; whether he sees as much scope for his own
inspiration as if never a book had appeared in the world. So long as he
does this, he has the American spirit: no books, no travel, can
overwhelm him, for these will only enlarge his thoughts and raise his
standard of execution. When he loses this faith, he takes rank among the
copyists and the secondary, and no accident can raise him to a place
among the benefactors of mankind. He is like a man who is frightened in
battle: you cannot exactly blame him, for it may be an affair of the
temperament or of the digestion; but you are glad to let him drop to the
rear, and to close up the ranks. Fields are won by those who believe in
the winning.
[From _Americanism in Literature_. Copyright, 1871, by James R.
Osgood & Co.]