TWO UNACCREDITED AMBASSADORS
They were both from Boston. In the days when they first became known
in England and began their work of conciliation as between England
and the United States, Boston was still Boston, and New York had only
begun to be New York. The latter statement may be challenged, but
the very men who take most pride in the New York of to-day ought to
be the first to accept it. For Manhattan was not then the magnet, as
London has always been, which drew to itself whatever was best from
other parts of the land. Boston was still the Athens of America.
There were excellent names elsewhere and at least one man of genius
who owed neither birth nor culture to Boston; but the capital of
Massachusetts was none the less the literary capital of the United
States. Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, Agassiz, R. H. Dana,
Jr., were all living and all in the fulness of their powers.
Theodore Parker, the greatest force in the American pulpit, was just
dead. Chief Justice Shaw had been for thirty years the head of the
judiciary of his own state and a revered authority throughout the
Union. {213} Wendell Phillips had no rival as an orator. Harvard
was the first of American colleges. The ideas of New England, which
were the ideas of Boston, had spread and taken root, and new
commonwealths in the West were nourished on them; nay, these ideas
and these conceptions of law and social order were the foundation
stones on which new States were built. No theologian had arisen to
dim the fame--a great yet sombre fame--of Jonathan Edwards. Daniel
Webster, "disappointed, defeated, slept by the solemn waves of the
Atlantic," but you cannot think of Boston or of Massachusetts without
him; nor did the disasters of his last years much lessen the homage
paid him at death or his immense influence on the political thought
of the whole country.
If the intellectual pre-eminence of Boston in those days was somewhat
grudgingly admitted by New York, it was incontestable. New York
presently redressed the balance, not so much by her own creative
efforts as by drawing much of what there was best in Boston to the
banks of the Hudson. I believe Mr. Howells's migration at a later
period was thought to be the decisive sign; one of many. Commercial
influences prevailed over the purer influences of literature. The
publisher took command. But I apprehend that Mr. Howells did not
forsake the Charles for the Hudson without many regrets. The
atmosphere was not the same. Old Abernethy used to say: "If you live
in the best air in the world, leave it and go to the second best."
Unconsciously, {214} perhaps, Mr. Howells obeyed that medical
prescription. He went to the second best.
Did he find a Tavern Club in New York? Over the _noctes coenæque_ of
that pleasant company in Boston Mr. Howells used to preside, with a
genial charm all his own. It was so long ago that I may be forgiven
if I remember in print one of those evenings which owed so much to
his presiding genius. He spoke and was the cause of speaking in
others. He had the tact which drew from others more than they
supposed they had to give. He gently compelled the most reluctant of
guests from their chairs. There was a brief eulogy on the victim.
It was Mr. Howells's art to paint a portrait so vivid, albeit
flattering, it needed no name to be recognized. "If," said he, "you
were in any doubt of his identity, you will recognize him by the look
of determined unconsciousness on his face."
I reckon it among the highest of Mr. Howells's many services that he
has been at times an interpreter between England and America, and in
more senses than one. There is a sense in which every American
writer who reaches an English audience is an interpreter, or, better
still, an Ambassador, the business of an Ambassador being to keep the
peace. For when Lord Dufferin was complimented on his diplomatic
fame he answered: "Ah, that is all a mistake. So long as we succeed
you never hear of us. It is when we have failed that the world
begins to know of our existence."
That, however, is a _malàpropos_ anecdote, and {215} tells the other
way; but in such papers as these there must be anecdotes. Mr.
Howells was not a silent Ambassador, and he would not have been an
Ambassador had he been silent. His books spoke for him. The English
thought, and still think, that his writings had some qualities which
it does not suit the parent stock to consider distinctively American.
They liked the reserve, the simplicity, the continual though implicit
reference to English literature. It was partly because of the homage
he paid to the great masters that they presently came to accept him
also as a master. They were quite aware that his homage was
sometimes reluctant. When it went further and, as in his unlucky
criticism of the greatest of English masters in fiction, became a
caricature, they resented it but they bore no malice. How can you
bear malice against a writer with so much sweetness of nature as Mr.
Howells?
Besides, what he has written about England is sympathetic; and is
thought sympathetic by the English. If it be also at times critical,
the English accept the criticism as it is meant. Nothing is truer
about them than their indifference to criticism. They regard Mr.
Howells's essays as so many studies, and these studies as
interpretative. What he has lately been writing of provincial towns
is almost a revelation to the Londoner, who himself is sometimes
called provincial, and does not mind.
Another Bostonian, Mr. Henry James, took a longer flight still; all
the way from Boston to {216} London and so to Paris and Italy, in all
of which he is equally at home. It was, I think, Colonel Higginson
who, in his patriotic impatience of the expatriated American, winged
a shaft at Mr. James, and at those who called him cosmopolitan. "In
order to be truly cosmopolitan," said this eminent colonel, "a man
ought to know something of his own country." To which Mr. James has
lately made the best possible reply by a book on his own country
which is an appreciation like no other of recent days. And I will
say this, that if Colonel Higginson supposes an American or a Russian
or a Japanese can win favour with the English by trying to be English
he is profoundly mistaken. The English like an American to be an
American. If he is a writer, they like his writings to be American.
Who are the American authors most popular in England? I will take
the dead only. They are Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow,
Holmes, Dana, and Walt Whitman; others, perhaps, but if there are
others they are all like these I have named, American to the
finger-tips, American in thought, in language, in method; nay, if you
like, in accent. That is why they are relished in England. I do not
include Poe. He is better understood in France than in England; his
genius is perhaps more Gallic than Saxon. So much so that when the
American Ambassador delivered a discourse at the celebration in
London of Poe's centennial, it was as if he had spoken on a topic
remote from the minds of this English people. They read {217} him
because he was American Ambassador, or because he was Mr. Whitelaw
Reid, and for his graceful mastery of the topic and of the English
language. But to them he seemed to be announcing a discovery.
When Mr. Henry James adopted his new manner--the manner in which all
his books since _The Awkward Age_ have been produced--his English
readers turned away from him, or many of them did. The change
coincided, or nearly so, with his change from pen and ink to
dictation; a perilous experiment. But, whatever else may be said of
it, Mr. James has gradually won back his English public. To them the
matter is more than the manner, as in Mr. Meredith's case also. The
American is now thought a more distinguished writer than before. I
use the word distinguished as he uses it, meaning that he has more
distinction as a writer and turns out more distinguished work. They
are no longer repelled by his colloquialisms, by his Gallicisms, by
his obscurities, by his involutions of structure, or by the
labyrinthine length of his sentences. Through all these, they now
perceive, pierces the true genius of the man. Therefore is he
another Ambassador, another of those Americans who, from having
become known abroad, have added lustre to the fame of their own
country where, in European estimation, it most needs lustre, namely,
in the domain of letters.
By the time the New Yorker of to-day has read thus far, if he has
read, it may have become clear {218} to him how great a part of all
the renown in literature we have abroad comes to us from Boston. All
the American writers best known here and most read, Whitman excepted,
are of Boston, or of the State of which Boston is, or was, the final
expression. If another exception were to be made it would be
Lincoln, whose greatest pieces of prose, and most of all the
Gettysburg address, are well known to Englishmen who know anything of
America. If what Dr. Jonson said in the preface to his dictionary,
"The chief glory of every people arises from its authors," be true,
then what do we Americans not owe to Boston? Supposing, that is, we
care for the judgment of a foreign nation, which Browning declared to
be like the judgment of posterity.
For some of these Bostonians London has a personal affection.
Emerson is beloved. Lowell was an immense favourite; a favourite
notwithstanding his combativeness in a society which prefers
toleration to excursions on the warpath. Holmes during his visits
here was idolized, and as the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table he is
idolized, and quoted day in and day out. Of Longfellow's Poems in
the pre-copyright days more copies were sold than of Tennyson, and
when he was here the English thought him almost one of themselves.
Dana's _Two Years Before the Mast_ is the one story of the sea which,
among many rivals, seems likely to be immortal in England, and is,
meantime, the one which in circulation year after year far exceeds
all others. And Dana was one of those {219} Americans on whom the
English found an English birthmark.
There was a time when Mr. James and Mr. Howells used to be bracketed,
as if they hunted in couples; which was not a discriminating view,
though a popular view. It expressed itself in the jingle about
"Howells and James Young Men," of which the music-hall was the proper
home; and there it related to a firm in Regent Street, now extinct.
But it was sung by the daughters of a house where Mr. James was a
guest, and almost in his hearing, to the horror of its mistress. To
all popularity there are penalties. But the popularity of Mr. James
is perennial.
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