something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in
the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with
the great artists of the Renaissance. But his nationality hung around
his neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his native
Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Innocents Abroad" and through
parts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such coarse and
ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best
humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really the
mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is
Titian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as
the noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity,
after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the
knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not a civilized man,
disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling
history, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm of
its gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? In the presence of all beauty of
man's creation--in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever its
form--the voice of Mark Twain was the voice of the Philistine. A
literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that
lifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes and
Aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he
seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and
the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literary
criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial
and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such
romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that
interested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the
absurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France
(the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan village
of the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered the
world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of
the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new
ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself,
and the full peer of the true and the good.
It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men as Mark Twain that one
finds the best proofs of the Puritan influence in American letters, for
it is there that it is least expected and hence most significant. Our
native critics, unanimously Puritans themselves, are anaesthetic to the
flavour, but to Dr. Kellner, with his half-European, half-Oriental
culture, it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it, not only in
the harsh Calvinistic fables of Hawthorne and the pious gurglings of
Longfellow, but also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness of
Howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James Lane Allen, and even in the
work of Joel Chandler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well, why not?
What could be more erroneous than the common assumption that Puritanism
is exclusively a Northern, a New England, madness? The truth is that it
is as thoroughly national as the kindred belief in the devil, and runs
almost unobstructed from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to the
Gulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the North, that it takes on
its most bellicose and extravagant forms. Between the upper tier of New
England and the Potomac river there was not a single prohibition
state--but thereafter, alas, they came in huge blocks! And behind that
infinitely prosperous Puritanism there is a long and unbroken tradition.
Berkeley, the last of the Cavaliers, was kicked out of power in Virginia
so long ago as 1650. Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Maryland, was
brought to terms by the Puritans of the Severn in 1657. The Scotch
Covenanter, the most uncompromising and unenlightened of all Puritans,
flourished in the Carolinas from the start, and in 1698, or thereabout,
he was reinforced from New England. In 1757 a band of Puritans invaded
what is now Georgia--and Georgia has been a Puritan barbarism ever
since. Even while the early (and half-mythical) Cavaliers were still in
nominal control of all these Southern plantations, they clung to the
sea-coast. The population that moved down the chain of the Appalachians
during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then swept over
them into the Mississippi valley, was composed almost entirely of
Puritans--chiefly intransigeants from New England (where Unitarianism
was getting on its legs), kirk-crazy Scotch, and that plupious
beauty-hating folk, the Scotch-Irish. "In the South today," said John
Fiske a generation ago, "there is more Puritanism surviving than in New
England." In that whole region, an area three times as large as France
or Germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of playing
Beethoven's C minor symphony, or a single painting worth looking at, or
a single public building or monument of any genuine distinction, or a
single factory devoted to the making of beautiful things, or a single
poet, novelist, historian, musician, painter or sculptor whose
reputation extends beyond his own country. Between the Mason and Dixon
line and the mouth of the Mississippi there is but one opera-house, and
that one was built by a Frenchman, and is now, I believe, closed. The
only domestic art this huge and opulent empire knows is in the hands of
Mexican greasers; its only native music it owes to the despised negro;
its only genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley like a stray dog.
§ 2
In studying the anatomy and physiology of American Puritanism, and its
effects upon the national literature, one quickly discerns two main
streams of influence. On the one hand, there is the influence of the
original Puritans--whether of New England or of the South--, who came to
the New World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity,
positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such a
position of political and intellectual leadership that they were able
to force it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and to endow it
with such vitality that it successfully resisted alien opposition later
on. And on the other hand, one sees a complex of social and economic
conditions which worked in countless irresistible ways against the rise
of that dionysian spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that
philosophy of the _Ja-sager_, which offers to Puritanism, today as in
times past, its chief and perhaps only effective antagonism. In other
words, the American of the days since the Revolution has had Puritanism
diligently pressed upon him from without, and at the same time he has
led, in the main, a life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to
it, or at all events to its salient principles, within.
Dr. Kellner accurately describes the process whereby the aesthetic
spirit, and its concomitant spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the
original New Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their
literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a half after the
first settlements. "Absorption in God," he says, "seems incompatible
with the presentation (_i.e._, aesthetically) of mankind. The God of the
Puritans was in this respect a jealous God who brooked no sort of
creative rivalry. The inspired moments of the loftiest souls were filled
with the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life was wholly
dominated by solicitude regarding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how
could such petty concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, the
transports or the pangs of love, find utterance? What did a lyric
occurrence like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or
the first sight of the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sunday's
sermon and the new interpretation of the old riddle of evil in the
world? And apart from the fact that everything of a personal nature must
have appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric poetry were
offensive and impious to Puritan theology.... One thing is an
established fact: up to the close of the eighteenth century America had
no belletristic literature."
This Puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal sin, this reign of the
God-crazy, gave way in later years, as we shall see, to other and
somewhat milder forms of pious enthusiasm. At the time of the
Revolution, indeed, the importation of French political ideas was
accompanied by an importation of French theological ideas, and such men
as Franklin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days at least, was
regarded as downright atheism. Even in New England this influence made
itself felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism to the
softness of Unitarianism, and that change was presently to flower in the
vague temporizing of Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the strict
sense, declined in virulence and took deceptive new forms, there was a
compensating growth of its brother, Philistinism, and by the first
quarter of the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and of the
joy that is its object, was as firmly established throughout the land as
it had ever been in New England. The original Puritans had at least been
men of a certain education, and even of a certain austere culture. They
were inordinately hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehow
suspects that much of their hostility was due to a sense of their
weakness before it, a realization of its disarming psychical pull. But
the American of the new republic was of a different kidney. He was not
so much hostile to beauty as devoid of any consciousness of it; he stood
as unmoved before its phenomena as a savage before a table of
logarithms. What he had set up on this continent, in brief, was a
commonwealth of peasants and small traders, a paradise of the
third-rate, and its national philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by the
more sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy, was precisely
the philosophy that one finds among peasants and small traders at all
times and everywhere. The difference between the United States and any
other nation did not lie in any essential difference between American
peasants and other peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone,
the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the nation--that here,
alone, the only way to eminence and public influence was the way of
acquiescence in the opinions and prejudices of the untutored and
Philistine mob. Jackson was the _Stammvater_ of the new statesmen and
philosophers; he carried the mob's distrust of good taste even into the
field of conduct; he was the first to put the rewards of conformity
above the dictates of common decency; he founded a whole hierarchy of
Philistine messiahs, the roaring of which still belabours the ear.
Once established, this culture of the intellectually disinherited tended
to defend and perpetuate itself. On the one hand, there was no
appearance of a challenge from within, for the exigent problems of
existence in a country that was yet but half settled and organized left
its people with no energy for questioning what at least satisfied their
gross needs, and so met the pragmatic test. And on the other hand, there
was no critical pressure from without, for the English culture which
alone reached over the sea was itself entering upon its Victorian
decline, and the influence of the native aristocracy--the degenerating
_Junkers_ of the great estates and the boorish magnates of the city
_bourgeoisie_--was quite without any cultural direction at all. The
chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter
question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political
difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity,
and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work
of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to
absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so
that devotion to a theory or a candidate became translated into devotion
to a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war.
The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic
concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skilful
persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States.
There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson's day without
its Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses of
gold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians,
beginning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those most adept at
twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisan
uses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on
each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting
up of immoralities.
But it was during the long contest against slavery, beginning with the
appearance of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_ in 1831 and ending at
Appomattox, that this gigantic supernaturalization of politics reached
its most astounding heights. In those days, indeed, politics and
religion coalesced in a manner not seen in the world since the Middle
Ages, and the combined pull of the two was so powerful that none could
quite resist it. All men of any ability and ambition turned to political
activity for self-expression. It engaged the press to the exclusion of
everything else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its hand upon
industry and trade. Drawing the best imaginative talent into its
service--Jefferson and Lincoln may well stand as examples--it left the
cultivation of belles lettres, and of all the other arts no less, to
women and admittedly second-rate men. And when, breaking through this
taboo, some chance first-rate man gave himself over to purely aesthetic
expression, his reward was not only neglect, but even a sort of
ignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting for males with hair on
their chests. I need not point to Poe and Whitman, both disdained as
dreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against with the utmost rigours
of outraged Philistinism.
In brief, the literature of that whole period, as Algernon Tassin shows
in "The Magazine in America,"[39] was almost completely disassociated
from life as men were then living it. Save one counts in such crude
politico-puritan tracts as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," it is difficult to find
a single contemporaneous work that interprets the culture of the time,
or even accurately represents it. Later on, it found historians and
anatomists, and in one work, at least, to wit, "Huckleberry Finn," it
was studied and projected with the highest art, but no such impulse to
make imaginative use of it showed itself contemporaneously, and there
was not even the crude sentimentalization of here and now that one finds
in the popular novels of today. Fenimore Cooper filled his romances, not
with the people about him, but with the Indians beyond the sky-line, and
made them half-fabulous to boot. Irving told fairy tales about the
forgotten Knickerbockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puritans of
Plymouth Rock; Longfellow to the Acadians and the prehistoric Indians;
Emerson took flight from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a
land of fantasy. It was only the frank second-raters--_e.g._, Whittier
and Lowell--who ventured to turn to the life around them, and the
banality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness of
the current taste, and the mean position assigned to the art of letters.
This was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school
book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as
a hand-maiden to politics or religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in
New England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of a
theologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way that
Jonathan Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our own time, indeed,
his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniable
capacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. Kellner to
consider him purely as a literary artist, and to give him due praise for
his skill.
The Civil War brought that era of sterility to an end. As I shall show
later on, the shock of it completely reorganized the American scheme of
things, and even made certain important changes in the national
Puritanism, or, at all events, in its machinery. Whitman, whose career
straddled, so to speak, the four years of the war, was the leader--and
for a long while, the only trooper--of a double revolt. On the one hand
he offered a courageous challenge to the intolerable prudishness and
dirty-mindedness of Puritanism, and on the other hand he boldly sought
the themes and even the modes of expression of his poetry in the
arduous, contentious and highly melodramatic life that lay all about
him. Whitman, however, was clearly before his time. His countrymen could
see him only as immoralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were
dead to any understanding of his stature as artist, and even unaware
that such a category of men existed. He was put down as an invader of
the public decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even his eloquent
war poems, surely the best of all his work, were insufficient to get him
a hearing; the sentimental rubbish of "The Blue and the Gray" and the
ecstatic supernaturalism of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were far
more to the public taste. Where Whitman failed, indeed, all subsequent
explorers of the same field have failed with him, and the great war has
left no more mark upon American letters than if it had never been
fought. Nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam of Tolstoi's "War
and Peace," or, to descend to a smaller scale, Zola's "The Attack on the
Mill," has come out of it. Its appeal to the national imagination was
undoubtedly of the most profound character; it coloured politics for
fifty years, and is today a dominating influence in the thought of whole
sections of the American people. But in all that stirring up there was
no upheaval of artistic consciousness, for the plain reason that there
was no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all we have in the
way of Civil War literature is a few conventional melodramas, a few
half-forgotten short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, and a
half dozen idiotic popular songs in the manner of Randall's "Maryland,
My Maryland."
In the seventies and eighties, with the appearance of such men as Henry
James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, a better day
seemed to be dawning. Here, after a full century of infantile
romanticizing, were four writers who at least deserved respectful
consideration as literary artists, and what is more, three of them
turned from the conventionalized themes of the past to the teeming and
colourful life that lay under their noses. But this promise of better
things was soon found to be no more than a promise. Mark Twain, after
"The Gilded Age," slipped back into romanticism tempered by
Philistinism, and was presently in the era before the Civil War, and
finally in the Middle Ages, and even beyond. Harte, a brilliant
technician, had displayed his whole stock when he had displayed his
technique: his stories were not even superficially true to the life they
presumed to depict; one searched them in vain for an interpretation of
it; they were simply idle tales. As for Howells and James, both quickly
showed that timorousness and reticence which are the distinguishing
marks of the Puritan, even in his most intellectual incarnations. The
American scene that they depicted with such meticulous care was chiefly
peopled with marionettes. They shrunk, characteristically, from those
larger, harsher clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all truly
first-rate literature. In particular, they shrunk from any
interpretation of life which grounded itself upon an acknowledgment of
its inexorable and inexplicable tragedy. In the vast combat of instincts
and aspirations about them they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians,
unserious and insignificant. Of the great questions that have agitated
the minds of men in Howells' time one gets no more than a faint and
far-away echo in his novels. His investigations, one may say, are
carried on _in vacuo_; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of
passion, but in terms of giggles.
In the followers of Howells and James one finds little save an empty
imitation of their emptiness, a somewhat puerile parodying of their
highly artful but essentially personal technique. To wade through the
books of such characteristic American fictioneers as Frances Hodgson
Burnett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice Brown, James
Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and
Sarah Orne Jewett is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible.
The flow of words is completely purged of ideas; in place of them one
finds no more than a romantic restatement of all the old platitudes and
formulae. To call such an emission of graceful poppycock a literature,
of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and yet, if the college professors
who write treatises on letters are to be believed, it is the best we
have to show. Turn, for example, to "A History of American Literature
Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee, one of the latest and
undoubtedly one of the least unintelligent of these books. In it the
gifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less than six of the nine
writers I have mentioned, and upon all of them his verdicts are
flattering. He bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon Mrs.
Freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her "repression," her entire lack
of poetical illumination. He compares Miss Jewett to both Howells and
Hawthorne, not to mention Mrs. Gaskell--and Addison! He grows
enthusiastic over a hollow piece of fine writing by Miss Brown. And he
forgets altogether to mention Dreiser, or Sinclair, or Medill Patterson,
or Harry Leon Wilson, or George Ade!...
So much for the best. The worst is beyond description. France has her
Brieux and her Henry Bordeaux; Germany has her Mühlbach, her stars of
the _Gartenlaube_; England contributes Caine, Corelli, Oppenheim and
company. But it is in our country alone that banality in letters takes
on the proportions of a national movement; it is only here that a work
of the imagination is habitually judged by its sheer emptiness of ideas,
its fundamental platitudinousness, its correspondence with the
imbecility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad" books run up
sales of hundreds of thousands. Richard Harding Davis, with his ideals
of a floor-walker; Gene Stratton-Porter, with her snuffling
sentimentality; Robert W. Chambers, with his "society" romances for
shop-girls; Irvin Cobb, with his laboured, _Ayers' Almanac_ jocosity;
the authors of the _Saturday Evening Post_ school, with their heroic
drummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic celebration of the stupid, the
sordid, the ignoble--these, after all, are our typical _literati_. The
Puritan fear of ideas is the master of them all. Some of them, in
truth, most of them, have undeniable talent; in a more favourable
environment not a few of them might be doing sound work. But they see
how small the ring is, and they make their tricks small to fit it. Not
many of them ever venture a leg outside. The lash of the ringmaster is
swift, and it stings damnably....