hard it cannot throw the dollar. Money controls and commands talent, not
talent money. The successful shopkeeper frowns on and browbeats the
accomplished politician, who has too much justice for the wharf and the
board of brokers; he notices that the rich men avert their eye, or keep
their beaver down, trembles and is sad, fearing that his daughter will
never find a fitting spouse. The Purse buys up able men of superior
education, corrupts and keeps them as its retained attorneys, in
congress or the church, not as counsel but advocate, bribed to make the
worse appear the better reason, and so help money to control the State
and wield its power against the interest of mankind. This is perfectly
well known; but no politician or minister, bribed to silence or to
speech, ever loses his respectability because he is bought by
respectable men,--if he get his pay. In all countries but this the
Office is before the Purse; here the State is chiefly an accessory of
the Exchange, and our politics only mercantile. This appears sometimes
against our will, in symbols not meant to tell the tale. Thus in the
House of Representatives in Massachusetts, a codfish stares the speaker
in the face--not a very intellectual looking fish. When it was put there
it was a symbol of the riches of the State, and so of the Commonwealth.
With singular and unconscious satire it tells the legislature to have an
eye "to the main chance," and, but for its fidelity to its highest
instincts and its obstinate silence, might be a symbol good enough for
the place.
Now after the Office and the Purse have taken their votaries from the
educated class, the ablest men are certainly not left behind. Three
roads open before our young Hercules as he leaves college, having
respectively as finger-post, the Pen, the Office, and the Purse. Few
follow the road of Letters. This need not be much complained of; nay it
might be rejoiced in, if the Purse and the Office in their modes of
power did represent the higher consciousness of mankind. But no one
contends it is so.
Still there are men who devote themselves to some literary callings
which have no connection with political office, and which are not
pursued for the sake of great wealth. Such men produce the greater part
of the permanent literature of the country. They are eminently scholars;
permanent scholars who act by their scholar-craft, not by the
state-craft of the politician, or the purse-craft of the capitalist. How
are these men paying their debt and performing their function? The
answer must be found in the science and the literature of the land.
American Science is something of which we may well be proud. Mr. Liebig
in Germany has found it necessary to defend himself from the charge of
following science for the loaves and fishes thereof, and he declares
that he espoused Chemistry not for her wealthy dower, not even for the
services her possible children might render to mankind, but solely for
her own sweet sake. Amongst the English race, on both sides of the
ocean, science is loved rather for the fruit than the blossom; its
service to the body is thought of more value than its service to the
mind. A man's respectability would be in danger, in America, if he loved
any science better than the money or fame it might bring. It is
characteristic of us that a scholar should write for reputation and
gold. Here, as elsewhere, the unprofitable parts of science fall to the
lot of poor men. When the rich man's son has the natural calling that
way, public opinion would dissuade him from the study of nature. The
greatest scientific attainments do not give a man so high social
consideration as a political office or a successful speculation--unless
it be the science which makes money. Scientific schools we call after
merely rich men, not men of wealthy minds. It is true we name streets
and squares, towns and counties after Franklin, but it is because he
keeps the lightning from factories, churches, and barns; tells us not
"to give too much for the whistle," and teaches "the way to make money
plenty in every man's pocket." We should not name them after Cuvier and
La Place.
Notwithstanding this, the scientific scholars of America, both the
home-born and the adopted sons, have manfully paid for their culture,
and done honor to the land. This is true of men in all departments of
science,--from that which searches the deeps of the sky to that which
explores the shallows of the sea. Individuals, States, and the nation
have all done themselves honor by the scientific researches and
discoveries that have been made. The outlay of money and of genius for
things which only pay the head and not the mouth of man, is beautiful
and a little surprising in such a utilitarian land as this. Time would
fail me to attend to particular cases.
Look at the Literature of America. Reserving the exceptional portion
thereof to be examined in a moment, let us study the instantial portion
of it, American Literature as a whole. This may be distributed into two
main divisions: First comes the Permanent Literature, consisting of
works not designed merely for a single and transient occasion, but
elaborately wrought for a general purpose. This is literature proper.
Next follows the Transient Literature, which is brought out for a
particular occasion, and designed to serve a special purpose. Let us
look at each.
The Permanent Literature of America is poor and meagre; it does not bear
the mark of manly hands, of original, creative minds. Most of it is
rather milk for babes than meat for men, though much of it is neither
fresh meat nor new milk, but the old dish often served up before. In
respect to its form, this portion of our literature is an imitation.
That is natural enough, considering the youth of the country. Every
nation, like every man, even one born to genius, begins by imitation.
Raphael, with servile pencil, followed his masters in his youth, but at
length his artistic eye attracted new-born angels from the calm
stillness of their upper heaven, and with liberal, free hand, with
masterly and original touch, the painter of the newness amazed the
world.
The early Christian literature is an imitation of the Hebrew or the
classic type: even after centuries had passed by, Sidonius, though a
bishop of the church, and destined to become a saint, uses the old
heathen imagery, referring to Triptolemus as a model for Christian
work, and talks about Triton and Galatea, to the Christian Queen of the
Goths. Saint Ambrose is a notorious imitator of pagan Cicero. The
Christians were all anointed with Jewish nard; and the sour grapes they
ate in sacrament have set on edge their children's teeth till now. The
modern nations of Europe began their literature by the driest copies of
Livy and Virgil. The Germans have the most original literature of the
last hundred years. But till the middle of the past century their
permanent literature was chiefly in Latin and French, with as little
originality as our own. The real poetic life of the nation found vent in
other forms. It is natural therefore, and according to the course of
history, that we should begin in this way. The best political
institutions of England are cherished here, so her best literature, and
it is not surprising that we are content with this rich inheritance of
artistic toil. In many things we are independent, but in much that
relates to the higher works of man, we are still colonies of England.
This appears not only in the vulgar fondness for English fashions,
manners and the like, which is chiefly an affectation, but in the
servile style with which we copy the great or little models of English
literature. Sometimes this is done consciously, oftener without knowing
it.
But the substance of our permanent literature is as faulty as its form.
It does not bear marks of a new, free, vigorous mind at work, looking at
things from the American point of view, and though it put its thought
in antique forms, yet thinking originally and for itself. It represents
the average thought of respectable men, directed to some particular
subject, and their average morality. It represents nothing more; how
could it while the ablest men have gone off to politics or trade? It is
such literature as almost anybody might get up if you would give him a
little time to make the preliminary studies. There is little in it that
is national; little individual and of the writer's own mind; it is
ground out in the public literary mill. It has no noble sentiments, no
great ideas, nothing which makes you burn; nothing which makes you much
worse or much better. You may feed on this literature all your days, and
whatsoever you may gain in girth, you shall not take in thought enough
to add half an inch to your stature.
Out of every hundred American literary works printed since the century
began, about eighty will be of this character. Compare the four most
conspicuous periodicals of America with the four great quarterlies of
England, and you see how inferior our literature is to theirs--in all
things, in form and in substance too. The European has the freedom of a
well-bred man--it appears in the movement of his thought, his use of
words, in the easy grace of his sentences, and the general manner of his
work; the American has the stiffness and limitations of a big, raw boy
in the presence of his schoolmaster. They are proud of being English,
and so have a certain lofty nationality which appears in their thought
and the form thereof, even in the freedom to use and invent new words.
Our authors of this class seem ashamed that they are Americans, and
accordingly are timid, ungraceful and weak. They dare not be original
when they could. Hence this sort of literature is dull. A man of the
average mind and conscience, heart and soul, studies a particular
subject a short time--for this is the land of brief processes--and
writes a book thereof, or thereon; a critic of the same average makes
his special study of the book, not its theme, "reviews" the work; is as
ready, and able to pass judgment on Bowditch's translation of La Place
in ten days after its appearance as ten years, and distributes praise
and blame, not according to the author's knowledge, but the critic's
ignorant caprice, and then average men read the book and the critique
with no immoderate joy or unmeasured grief. They learn some new facts,
no new ideas, and get no lofty impulse. The book was written without
inspiration, without philosophy, and is read with small profit. Yet it
is curious to observe the praise which such men receive, how soon they
are raised to the House of Lords in English literature. I have known
three American Sir Walter Scotts, half a dozen Addisons, one or two
Macaulays, a historian that was Hume and Gibbon both in one; several
Burnses, and Miltons by the quantity, not "mute," the more is the pity,
but "inglorious" enough; nay, even vain-glorious at the praise which
some penny-a-liner, or dollar-a-pager foolishly gave their cheap
extemporary stuff. In sacred literature it is the same: in a single
winter at Boston we had two American Saint Johns, in full blast for
several months. Though no Felix trembles, there are now extant in the
United States not less than six American Saint Pauls, in no manner of
peril except the most dangerous--of idle praise.
A living, natural, and full-grown literature contains two elements. One
is of mankind in general; that is human and universal. The other is of
the tribe in special, and of the writer in particular. This is national
and even personal: you see the idiosyncracy of the nation and the
individual author in the work. The universal human substance accepts the
author's form, and the public wine of mankind runs into the private
bottle of the author. Thus the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament is
fresh and original in substance and in form; the two elements are plain
enough, the universal and the particular. The staple of the Psalms of
David is human, of mankind, it is trust in God; but the twist, the die,
the texture, the pattern, all that is Hebrew--of the tribe, and
personal--of David, shepherd, warrior, poet, king. You see the pastoral
hill-sides of Judea in his holy hymns; nay, "Uriah's beauteous wife"
now and then sidles in to his sweetest psalm. The Old Testament books
smell of Palestine, of its air and its soil. The Rose of Sharon has
Hebrew earth about its roots. The geography of the Holy Land, its fauna
and its flora both, even its wind and sky, its early and its latter
rain, all appear in the literature of historian and bard. It is so in
the Iliad. You see how the sea looked from Homer's point of view, and
know how he felt the west wind, cold and raw. The human element has an
Ionian form and a Homeric hue. The ballads of the people in Scotland and
England are national in the same way; the staple of human life is
wrought into the Scottish form. Before the Germans had any permanent
national literature of this character, their fertile mind found vent in
legends, popular stories, now the admiration of the learned. These had
at home the German dress, but as the stories travelled into other lands,
they kept their human flesh and blood, but took a different garb and
acquired a different complexion from every country which they visited,
and, like the streams of their native Swabia, took the color of the soil
they travelled through.
The permanent and instantial literature of America is not national in
this sense. It has little that is American; it might as well be written
by some book-wright in Leipsic or London, and then imported. The
individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy
binding of the work. The nationality of America is only stamped on the
lids, and vulgarly blazoned on the back.
Is the book a History? it is written with no such freedom as you should
expect of a writer, looking at the breadth of the world from the lofty
stand-point of America. There is no new philosophy of history in it. You
would not think it was written in a democracy that keeps the peace
without armies or a national jail. Mr. Macaulay writes the history of
England as none but a North-Briton could do. Astonishingly well-read,
equipped with literary skill at least equal to the masterly art of
Voltaire, mapping out his subject like an engineer, and adorning it like
a painter, you yet see, all along, that the author is a Scotchman and a
whig. Nobody else could have written so. It is of Mr. Macaulay. But our
American writer thinks about matters just as everybody else does; that
is, he does not think at all, but only writes what he reads, and then,
like the good-natured bear in the nursery story, "thinks he has been
thinking." It is no such thing, he has been writing the common opinion
of common men, to get the applause of men as common as himself.
Is the book of Poetry? the substance is chiefly old, the form old, the
allusions are old. It is poetry of society, not of nature. You meet in
it the same everlasting mythology, the same geography, botany, zooelogy,
the same symbols; a new figure of speech suggested by the sight of
nature, not the reading of books, you could no more find than a fresh
shad in the Dead Sea. You take at random eight or ten "American poets"
of this stamp, you see at once what was the favorite author with each
new bard; you often see what particular work of Shelley, or Tennyson, or
Milton, or George Herbert, or, if the man has culture enough, of Goethe,
or Uhland, Jean Paul, or Schiller, suggested the "American Original."
His inspiration comes from literature, not from the great universe of
nature or of human life. You see that this writer has read Percy's
Reliques, and the German Wunderhorn; but you would not know that he
wrote in a republic--in a land full of new life, with great rivers and
tall mountains, with maple and oak trees that turn red in the autumn,
amongst a people who hold town-meetings, have free schools for
everybody, read newspapers voraciously, who have lightning rods on their
steeples, ride in railroads, are daguerreotyped by the sun, and who talk
by lightning from Halifax to New Orleans, who listen to the whippoorwill
and the bobolink, who believe in Slavery and the Declaration of
Independence, in the devil and the five points of Calvinism. You would
not know where our poet lived, or that he lived anywhere. Reading the
Iliad, you doubt that Homer was born blind; but our bard seems to have
been deaf also, and for expressing what was national in his time, might
likewise have been dumb.
Is it a volume of Sermons? they might have been written at Edinburgh,
Madrid, or Constantinople as well as in New England; as well preached to
the "Homo Sapiens" of Linnaeus, or the Man in the Moon, as to the special
audience that heard, or heard them not, but only paid for having the
things preached. There is nothing individual about them; the author
seems as impersonal as Spinoza's conception of God. The sermons are like
an almanac calculated for the meridian of no place in particular, for no
time in special. There is no allusion to any thing American. The author
never mentions a river this side of the Jordan; knows no mountain but
Lebanon, Zion, and Carmel, and would think it profane to talk of the
Alleghanies and the Mississippi, of Monadnock and the Androscoggin. He
mentions Babylon and Jerusalem, not New York and Baltimore; you would
never dream that he lived in a church without a bishop, and a state
without a king, in a democratic nation that held three million slaves,
with ministers chosen by the people. He is surrounded, clouded over, and
hid by the traditions of the "ages of faith" behind him. He never thanks
God for the dew and snow, only for "the early and the latter rain" of a
classic sacred land; a temperance man, he blesses God for the wine
because the great Psalmist did so thousands of years ago. He speaks of
the olive and the fig-tree which he never saw, not of the apple-tree and
the peach before his eyes all day long, their fruit the joy of his
children's heart. If you guessed at his time and place, you would think
he lived, not under General Taylor, but under King Ahab, or Jeroboam;
that his audience rode on camels or in chariots, not in steam-cars; that
they fought with bows and arrows against the children of Moab; that
their favorite sin was the worship of some graven image, and that they
made their children pass through the fire unto Moloch, not through the
counting-house unto Mammon. You would not know whether the preacher was
married or a bachelor, rich or poor, saint or sinner; you would probably
conclude he was not much of a saint, nor even much of a sinner.
The authors of this portion of our literature seem ashamed of America.
One day she will take her revenge. They are the parasites of letters,
and live on what other men have made classic. They would study the Holy
Land, Greece, Etruria, Egypt, Nineveh, spots made famous by great and
holy men, and let the native races of America fade out, taking no pains
to study the monuments which so swiftly pass away from our own
continent. It is curious that most of the accounts of the Indians of
North America come from men not natives here, from French and Germans;
and characteristic that we should send an expedition to the Dead Sea,
while wide tracts of this continent lie all untouched by the white man's
foot; and, also, that while we make such generous and noble efforts to
christianize and bless the red, yellow, and black heathens at the
world's end, we should leave the American Indian and Negro to die in
savage darkness, the South making it penal to teach a black man to write
or read.
Yet, there is one portion of our permanent literature, if literature it
may be called, which is wholly indigenous and original. The lives of the
early martyrs and confessors are purely Christian, so are the legends of
saints and other pious men: there was nothing like this in the Hebrew or
heathen literature; cause and occasion were alike wanting for it. So we
have one series of literary productions that could be written by none
but Americans, and only here: I mean the Lives of Fugitive Slaves. But
as these are not the work of the men of superior culture, they hardly
help to pay the scholar's debt. Yet all the original romance of America
is in them, not in the white man's novel.
* * * * *
Next is the Transient Literature, composed chiefly of speeches,
orations, state papers, political and other occasional pamphlets,
business reports, articles in the journals, and other productions
designed to serve some present purpose. These are commonly the work of
educated men, though not of such as make literature a profession. Taking
this department as a whole, it differs much from the permanent
literature; here is freshness of thought and newness of form. If
American books are mainly an imitation of old models, it would be
difficult to find the prototype of some American speeches. They "would
have made Quintilian stare and gasp." Take the State Papers of the
American government during the administration of Mr. Polk, the speeches
made in Congress at the same time, the State Papers of the several
States--you have a much better and more favorable idea of the vigor and
originality of the American mind, than you would get from all the bound
books printed in that period. The diplomatic writings of American
politicians compare favorably with those of any nation in the world. In
eloquence no modern nation is before us, perhaps none is our equal. Here
you see the inborn strength and manly vigor of the American mind. You
meet the same spirit which fells the forest, girdles the land with
railroads, annexes Texas and covets Cuba, Nicaragua, all the world. You
see that the authors of this literature are workers also. Others have
read of wild beasts; here are the men that have seen the wolf.
A portion of this literature represents the past, and has the vices
already named. It comes from human history and not human nature; as you
read it, you think of the inertia and the cowardliness of mankind;
nothing is progressive, nothing noble, generous or just, only
respectable. The past is preferred before the present; money is put
before men, a vested right before a natural right. Such literature
appears in all countries. The ally of despotism, and the foe of mankind,
it is yet a legitimate exponent of a large class of men. The leading
journals of America, political and commercial, or literary, are poor and
feeble; our reviews of books afford matter for grave consideration. You
would often suppose them written by the same hand which manufactures the
advertisements of the grand caravan, or some patent medicine; or when
unfavorable, by some of the men who write defamatory articles on the eve
of an election.