The most painful event since the bombardment of Alexandria has been what
is called by an English writer the “invasion” of “American Literature in
England.” The hostile forces, with an advanced guard of what was regarded
as an “awkward squad,” had been gradually effecting a landing and a
lodgment not unwelcome to the unsuspicious natives. No alarm was taken
when they threw out a skirmish-line of magazines and began to deploy an
occasional wild poet, who advanced in buckskin leggings, revolver in
hand, or a stray sharp-shooting sketcher clad in the picturesque robes of
the sunset. Put when the main body of American novelists got fairly
ashore and into position the literary militia of the island rose up as
one man, with the strength of a thousand, to repel the invaders and sweep
them back across the Atlantic. The spectacle had a dramatic interest. The
invaders were not numerous, did not carry their native tomahawks, they
had been careful to wash off the frightful paint with which they usually
go into action, they did not utter the defiant whoop of Pogram, and even
the militia regarded them as on the whole “amusin' young 'possums” and
yet all the resources of modern and ancient warfare were brought to bear
upon them. There was a crack of revolvers from the daily press, a lively
fusillade of small-arms in the astonished weeklies, a discharge of
point-blank blunderbusses from the monthlies; and some of the heavy
quarterlies loaded up the old pieces of ordnance, that had not been
charged in forty years, with slugs and brickbats and junk-bottles, and
poured in raking broadsides. The effect on the island was something
tremendous: it shook and trembled, and was almost hidden in the smoke of
the conflict. What the effect is upon the invaders it is too soon to
determine. If any of them survive, it will be God's mercy to his weak and
innocent children.
It must be said that the American people--such of them as were aware of
this uprising--took the punishment of their presumption in a sweet and
forgiving spirit. If they did not feel that they deserved it, they
regarded it as a valuable contribution to the study of sociology and race
characteristics, in which they have taken a lively interest of late. We
know how it is ourselves, they said; we used to be thin-skinned and
self-conscious and sensitive. We used to wince and cringe under English
criticism, and try to strike back in a blind fury. We have learned that
criticism is good for us, and we are grateful for it from any source. We
have learned that English criticism is dictated by love for us, by a warm
interest in our intellectual development, just as English anxiety about
our revenue laws is based upon a yearning that our down-trodden millions
shall enjoy the benefits of free-trade. We did not understand why a
country that admits our beef and grain and cheese should seem to seek
protection against a literary product which is brought into competition
with one of the great British staples, the modern novel. It seemed
inconsistent. But we are no more consistent ourselves. We cannot
understand the action of our own Congress, which protects the American
author by a round duty on foreign books and refuses to protect him by
granting a foreign copyright; or, to put it in another way, is willing to
steal the brains of the foreign author under the plea of free knowledge,
but taxes free knowledge in another form. We have no defense to make of
the state of international copyright, though we appreciate the
complication of the matter in the conflicting interests of English and
American publishers.
Yes; we must insist that, under the circumstances, the American people
have borne this outburst of English criticism in an admirable spirit. It
was as unexpected as it was sudden. Now, for many years our international
relations have been uncommonly smooth, oiled every few days by
complimentary banquet speeches, and sweetened by abundance of magazine
and newspaper “taffy.” Something too much of “taffy” we have thought was
given us at times for, in getting bigger in various ways, we have grown
more modest. Though our English admirers may not believe it, we see our
own faults more clearly than we once did--thanks, partly, to the faithful
castigations of our friends--and we sometimes find it difficult to
conceal our blushes when we are over-praised. We fancied that we were
going on, as an English writer on “Down-Easters” used to say, as “slick
as ile,” when this miniature tempest suddenly burst out in a revival of
the language and methods used in the redoubtable old English periodicals
forty years ago. We were interested in seeing how exactly this sort of
criticism that slew our literary fathers was revived now for the
execution of their degenerate children. And yet it was not exactly the
same. We used to call it “slang-whanging.” One form of it was a blank
surprise at the pretensions of American authors, and a dismissal with the
formula of previous ignorance of their existence. This is modified now by
a modest expression of “discomfiture” on reading of American authors
“whose very names, much less peculiarities, we never heard of before.”
This is a tribunal from which there is no appeal. Not to have been heard
of by an Englishman is next door to annihilation. It is at least
discouraging to an author who may think he has gained some reputation
over what is now conceded to be a considerable portion of the earth's
surface, to be cast into total obscurity by the negative damnation of
English ignorance. There is to us something pathetic in this and in the
surprise of the English critic, that there can be any standard of
respectable achievement outside of a seven-miles radius turning on
Charing Cross.
The pathetic aspect of the case has not, however, we are sorry to say,
struck the American press, which has too often treated with unbecoming
levity this unaccountable exhibition of English sensitiveness. There has
been little reply to it; at most, generally only an amused report of the
war, and now and then a discriminating acceptance of some of the
criticism as just, with a friendly recognition of the fact that on the
whole the critic had done very well considering the limitation of his
knowledge of the subject on which he wrote. What is certainly noticeable
is an entire absence of the irritation that used to be caused by similar
comments on America thirty years ago. Perhaps the Americans are reserving
their fire as their ancestors did at Bunker Hill, conscious, maybe, that
in the end they will be driven out of their slight literary
entrenchments. Perhaps they were disarmed by the fact that the acrid
criticism in the London Quarterly Review was accompanied by a cordial
appreciation of the novels that seemed to the reviewer characteristically
American. The interest in the tatter's review of our poor field must be
languid, however, for nobody has taken the trouble to remind its author
that Brockden Brown--who is cited as a typical American writer, true to
local character, scenery, and color--put no more flavor of American life
and soil in his books than is to be found in “Frankenstein.”
It does not, I should suppose, lie in the way of The Century, whose
general audience on both sides of the Atlantic takes only an amused
interest in this singular revival of a traditional literary animosity--an
anachronism in these tolerant days when the reading world cares less and
less about the origin of literature that pleases it--it does not lie in
the way of The Century to do more than report this phenomenal literary
effervescence. And yet it cannot escape a certain responsibility as an
immediate though innocent occasion of this exhibition of international
courtesy, because its last November number contained some papers that
seem to have been irritating. In one of them Mr. Howells let fall some
chance remarks on the tendency of modern fiction, without adequately
developing his theory, which were largely dissented from in this country,
and were like the uncorking of six vials in England. The other was an
essay on England, dictated by admiration for the achievements of the
foremost nation of our time, which, from the awkwardness of the eulogist,
was unfortunately the uncorking of the seventh vial--an uncorking which,
as we happen to know, so prostrated the writer that he resolved never to
attempt to praise England again. His panic was somewhat allayed by the
soothing remark in a kindly paper in Blackwood's Magazine for January,
that the writer had discussed his theme “by no means unfairly or
disrespectfully.” But with a shudder he recognized what a peril he had
escaped. Great Scott!--the reference is to a local American deity who is
invoked in war, and not to the Biblical commentator--what would have
happened to him if he had spoken of England “disrespectfully”!
We gratefully acknowledge also the remark of the Blackwood writer in
regard-to the claims of America in literature. “These claims,” he says,
“we have hitherto been very charitable to.” How our life depends upon a
continual exhibition by the critics of this divine attribute of charity
it would perhaps be unwise in us to confess. We can at least take
courage that it exists--who does not need it in this world of
misunderstandings?--since we know that charity is not puffed up, vaunteth
not itself, hopeth all things, endureth all things, is not easily
provoked; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish; but charity never faileth. And when all our
“dialects” on both sides of the water shall vanish, and we shall speak no
more Yorkshire or Cape Cod, or London cockney or “Pike” or “Cracker”
vowel flatness, nor write them any more, but all use the noble simplicity
of the ideal English, and not indulge in such odd-sounding phrases as
this of our critic that “the combatants on both sides were by way of
detesting each other,” though we speak with the tongues of men and of
angels--we shall still need charity.
It will occur to the charitable that the Americans are at a disadvantage
in this little international “tiff.” For while the offenders have
inconsiderately written over their own names, the others preserve a
privileged anonymity. Any attempt to reply to these voices out of the
dark reminds one of the famous duel between the Englishman and the
Frenchman which took place in a pitch-dark chamber, with the frightful
result that when the tender-hearted Englishman discharged his revolver up
the chimney he brought down his man. One never can tell in a case of this
kind but a charitable shot might bring down a valued friend or even a
peer of the realm.
In all soberness, however, and setting aside the open question, which
country has most diverged from the English as it was at the time of the
separation of the colonies from the motherland, we may be permitted a
word or two in the hope of a better understanding. The offense in The
Century paper on “England” seems to have been in phrases such as these:
“When we began to produce something that was the product of our own soil
and of our own social conditions, it was still judged by the old
standards;” and, we are no longer irritated by “the snobbishness of
English critics of a certain school,” “for we see that its criticism is
only the result of ignorance simply of inability to understand.”
Upon this the reviewer affects to lose his respiration, and with “a gasp
of incredulity” wants to know what the writer means, “and what standards
he proposes to himself when he has given up the English ones?” The
reviewer makes a more serious case than the writer intended, or than a
fair construction of the context of his phrases warrants. It is the
criticism of “a certain school” only that was said to be the result of
ignorance. It is not the English language nor its body of enduring
literature--the noblest monument of our common civilization--that the
writer objected to as a standard of our performances. The standard
objected to is the narrow insular one (the term “insular” is used purely
as a geographical one) that measures life, social conditions, feeling,
temperament, and national idiosyncrasies expressed in our literature by
certain fixed notions prevalent in England. Probably also the expression
of national peculiarities would diverge somewhat from the “old
standards.” All we thought of asking was that allowance should be made
for this expression and these peculiarities, as it would be made in case
of other literatures and peoples. It might have occurred to our critics,
we used to think, to ask themselves whether the English literature is not
elastic enough to permit the play of forces in it which are foreign to
their experience. Genuine literature is the expression, we take it, of
life-and truth to that is the standard of its success. Reference was
intended to this, and not to the common canons of literary art. But we
have given up the expectation that the English critic “of a certain
school” will take this view of it, and this is the plain reason--not
intended to be offensive--why much of the English criticism has ceased to
be highly valued in this country, and why it has ceased to annoy. At the
same time, it ought to be added, English opinion, when it is seen to be
based upon knowledge, is as highly respected as ever. And nobody in
America, so far as we know, entertains, or ever entertained, the idea of
setting aside as standards the master-minds in British literature. In
regard to the “inability to understand,” we can, perhaps, make ourselves
more clearly understood, for the Blackwood's reviewer has kindly
furnished us an illustration in this very paper, when he passes in
patronizing review the novels of Mr. Howells. In discussing the character
of Lydia Blood, in “The Lady of the Aroostook,” he is exceedingly puzzled
by the fact that a girl from rural New England, brought up amid
surroundings homely in the extreme, should have been considered a lady.
He says:
“The really 'American thing' in it is, we think, quite undiscovered
either by the author or his heroes, and that is the curious confusion of
classes which attributes to a girl brought up on the humblest level all
the prejudices and necessities of the highest society. Granting that
there was anything dreadful in it, the daughter of a homely small farmer
in England is not guarded and accompanied like a young lady on her
journeys from one place to another. Probably her mother at home would be
disturbed, like Lydia's aunt, at the thought that there was no woman on
board, in case her child should be ill or lonely; but, as for any
impropriety, would never think twice on that subject. The difference is
that the English girl would not be a young lady. She would find her
sweetheart among the sailors, and would have nothing to say to the
gentlemen. This difference is far more curious than the misadventure,
which might have happened anywhere, and far more remarkable than the fact
that the gentlemen did behave to her like gentlemen, and did their best
to set her at ease, which we hope would have happened anywhere else. But
it is, we think, exclusively American, and very curious and interesting,
that this young woman, with her antecedents so distinctly set before us,
should be represented as a lady, not at all out of place among her
cultivated companions, and 'ready to become an ornament of society the
moment she lands in Venice.”
Reams of writing could not more clearly explain what is meant by
“inability to understand” American conditions and to judge fairly the
literature growing out of them; and reams of writing would be wasted in
the attempt to make our curious critic comprehend the situation. There is
nothing in his experience of “farmers' daughters” to give him the key to
it. We might tell him that his notion of a farmer's daughters in England
does not apply to New England. We might tell him of a sort of society of
which he has no conception and can have none, of farmers' daughters and
farmers' wives in New England--more numerous, let us confess, thirty or
forty years ago than now--who lived in homely conditions, dressed with
plainness, and followed the fashions afar off; did their own household
work, even the menial parts of it; cooked the meals for the “men folks”
and the “hired help,” made the butter and cheese, and performed their
half of the labor that wrung an honest but not luxurious living from the
reluctant soil. And yet those women--the sweet and gracious ornaments of
a self-respecting society--were full of spirit, of modest pride in their
position, were familiar with much good literature, could converse with
piquancy and understanding on subjects of general interest, were trained
in the subtleties of a solid theology, and bore themselves in any company
with that traditional breeding which we associate with the name of lady.
Such strong native sense had they, such innate refinement and courtesythe
product, it used to be said, of plain living and high thinking--that,
ignorant as they might be of civic ways, they would, upon being
introduced to them, need only a brief space of time to “orient”
themselves to the new circumstances. Much more of this sort might be said
without exaggeration. To us there is nothing incongruous in the
supposition that Lydia Blood was “ready to become an ornament to society
the moment she lands in Venice.”
But we lack the missionary spirit necessary to the exertion to make our
interested critic comprehend such a social condition, and we prefer to
leave ourselves to his charity, in the hope of the continuance of which
we rest in serenity.