failings of American literature as for its excellences; most of all for
the lack of shading and twilight tones, of all that is dreamy,
pessimistic, sentimental, and “decadent.” This is a lack in the American
life which in other important connections is doubtless a great
advantage. There are no old castles, no crumbling ruins, no picturesque
customs, no church mysticism, nor wonderful symbols; there are no
striking contrasts between social groups, no romantic vagabondage, and
none of the fascinating pomp of monarchy. Everywhere is solid and
healthy contentment, thrifty and well clothed, on broad streets, and
under a bright sun. It is no accident that true poets have not described
their own surroundings, but have taken their material so far as it has
been American, as did Hawthorne, from the colonial times which were
already a part of the romantic past, or out of the Indian legends, or
later from the remote adventurous life of the West, or from the negro
life in far Southern plantations; the daily life surrounding the poet
was not yet suitable for poetry. And by being so cruelly clear and
without atmosphere as not to invite poetic treatment, it has left the
whole literature somewhat glaringly sharp, sane, and homely.
Fiction stands in the centre of the characteristic literary productions;
but also literature in the broader sense, including everything which
interprets human destinies, as history and philosophy, or even more
broadly including all the written products of the nation, everything
reflects the essential traits of the literary temperament. In fact, the
practical literature, especially the newspaper, reveals the American
physiognomy most clearly. In better circles in America, it is proper to
deplore the newspaper as a literary product, and to look on it as a
necessary evil; and doubtless most newspapers serve up a great deal that
is trivial and vulgar, and treat it in a trivial and vulgar way. But no
one is forced, except by his own love for the sensational, to choose his
daily reading out of this majority. Everybody knows that there is a
minority of earnest and admirable papers at his disposal. Apart from
newspaper politics and apart from the admirable industrial organization
of the newspaper—both of which we have previously spoken of—the
newspapers of the country are a literary product whose high merit is too
often underestimated. The American newspapers, and of these not merely
the largest, are an intellectual product of well-maintained uniformity
of standard.
To be sure, the style is often light, the logic unsound, the information
superficial; but, taken as a whole, the newspaper has unity and
character. Thousands of loose-jointed intellects crowd into journalism
every year—more than in any other country; but American journalism, like
the nation as a whole, has an amazing power of assimilation. Just as
thousands of Russians and Italians land every year in the rags of their
wretchedness, and in a few years become earnest American citizens, so
many land on the shores of American journalism who were not intended to
be the teachers or entertainers of humanity, and who nevertheless in a
few years are quite assimilated. The American newspapers, from Boston to
San Francisco, are alike in style and thought; and it must be said, in
spite of all prejudices, that the American newspaper is certainly
literature. The American knows no difference between unpolitical chatter
written with a literary ambition and unliterary comment written with a
political ambition. In one sense the whole newspaper is political, while
at the same time it is nothing but feuilleton, from the editorials, of
which every large newspaper has three or four each day, to the small
paragraphs, notes, and announcements with which the editorial page
generally closes. From the Washington letter to the sporting gossip,
everything tries in a way to have artistic merit, and everything bears
the stamp of American literature. Nothing is pedantic. There is often a
great lack of information and of perspective—perhaps, even, of
conscientiousness in the examination of complaints—but everything is
fresh, optimistic, clear and forcible, and always humorous between the
lines.
In the weekly papers, America achieves still more. The light, fresh, and
direct American style there finds its most congenial field. The same is
true of the monthly papers in a somewhat more ambitious and permanent
way. The leading social and political monthlies, like the venerable
_North American Review_, which errs merely in laying too much emphasis
on the names of its well-known contributors, and others are quite up to
the best English reviews. The more purely literary _Atlantic Monthly_,
which was founded in 1857 by a small circle of Boston friends, Lowell,
Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, and Motley, and which has always
attracted the best talent of the country, is most nearly comparable to
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Every monthly paper specially cultivates
that literary form for which America has shown the most pronounced
talent—the essay. The magazine essay entirely takes the place of the
German brochure, a form which is almost unknown in America. The
brochure, depending as it does wholly on its own merits to attract the
attention of the public, must be in some way sensational to make up for
its diminutive size; while an essay which is brought before the reader
on the responsibility of a magazine needs no such motive power. It is
one among many, and takes its due place, being only one of the items of
interest that make up the magazine.
While in German literary circles the problems of the day are mostly
argued in brochures, and the essay is a miniature book really written
for the easy instruction of a public which would not read long books,
the American essay is half-way between. It is living and satirical like
the German brochure, but conservative and instructive like the German
“Abhandlung.” Only when a number of essays on related topics come from
the same pen are they put together and published as a separate book. We
have already mentioned that America is oversupplied with such volumes of
essays, which have almost all the same history—they were first lectures,
then magazine articles, and now they are revised and published in book
form. Their value is, of course, very diverse; but in general, they are
interesting and important, often epoch-making, and the form is
admirable. A distinguished treatment, pointed humour, a rich and clear
diction, uncommonly happy metaphors, and a careful polish are united so
as to make one forget the undeniable haste with which the material is
gathered and the superficiality of the conclusions arrived at. So it
happens that the essayists who appear in book form are much more
appreciated by the reading public than their German colleagues, and that
every year sees several hundred such volumes put on the market. The
motto, “fresh and mature,” is nowhere more appropriate.
But the American remains an American, even in the apparently
international realm of science. It is a matter of course for an
historian to write in the personal style. Parkman, Motley, Prescott, and
Fiske are very different types of historians; and nevertheless, they
have in common the same way of approaching the subject and of giving to
it form and life. But even in so purely a scientific work as William
James’s two-volume “Principles of Psychology,” one finds such forcible
and convincing turns of thought, so personal a form given to abstract
facts, and such freshness together with such ripe mastery, as could come
only from an American.
Oratory may be accounted an off-shoot of actual literature. A nation of
politicians must reserve an honourable place for the orator, and for
many years thousands of factors in public life have contributed to
develop oratory, to encourage the slightest talent for speaking, and to
reward able speakers well. Every great movement in American history has
been initiated by eloquent speakers. Before the Revolution, Adams and
Otis, Quincy and Henry, precipitated the Revolution by their burning
words. And no one can discuss the great movement leading up to the Civil
War without considering the oratory of Choate, Clay, Calhoun, Hayne,
Garrison, and Sumner; of Wendell Phillips, the great popular leader, and
Edward Everett, the great academician, and of Daniel Webster, the
greatest statesman of them all.
In the present times of peace, the orator is less important than the
essayist, and most of the party speeches to-day have not even a modest
place in literature. But if one follows a Presidential campaign, listens
to the leading lawyers of the courts, or follows the parliamentary
debates of university students, one knows that the rhetorical talent of
the American has not died since those days of quickening, and would
spring up again strong and vigorous if any great subject, greater than
were silver coinage or the Philippine policy, should excite again the
nation. Keenness of understanding, admirable sense of form in the single
sentence as in the structure of the whole, startling comparisons,
telling ridicule, careful management of the climax, and the tone of
conviction seem to be everybody’s gift. Here and there the phrase is
hollow and thought is sacrificed to sound, but the general tendency goes
toward brevity and simplicity. A most delightful variation of oratory is
found in table eloquence; the true American after-dinner speech is a
finished work of art. Often, of course, there are ordinary speeches
which simply go from one story to another, quite content merely to
relate them well. In the best speeches the pointed anecdote is not
lacking either, but it merely decorates the introduction; the speaker
then approaches his real subject half playfully and half in earnest,
very sympathetically, and seeming always to let his thoughts choose
words for themselves. The speeches at the Capitol are sometimes better
than those in the Reichstag; but those at American banquets are not only
better than the speeches at Festessen and Kommersen, but they are also
qualitatively different—true literary works of art, for which the
American is especially fitted by the freshness, humour, enthusiasm, and
sense of symmetry which are naturally his.
Whoever looks about among journalists, essayists, historians, and
orators will return more than once to the subject of belles-lettres; and
this is truer in America than elsewhere. As we have already seen, pure
literature is strongly biased toward the practical; it is glad to serve
great ideas, whether moral or social. Poetry itself is sometimes an
essay or sermon. We need not think here of romances which merely
sermonize, and are therefore artistically second-rate, such as “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” or of such literary rubbish as Bellamy’s “Utopia”; even
true poets like Whittier must, in the history of emancipation, be
classed with the political writers. And although the problem novel in
the three-volume English form is not favoured in America because of its
poor literary form, the short satirical and clean-cut society novel,
which may break away at any moment into the essay or journalistic
manner, has become all the more popular. Further, this being the time of
America’s industrial struggle, society has not become so intellectually
aristocratic that being a poet is a life profession. The leading
novelists have had to be active in almost all fields of literature; they
have frequently begun as journalists, and have generally been essayists,
editors, or professors at the same time.
The eighteenth century was unfruitful for the New World, in lyric as in
epic literature. The literary history discovers many names, but they are
of men who created nothing original, and who cannot be compared with the
great English geniuses. America was internally as well as externally
dependent on England; and if one compares the utter intellectual
unfruitfulness of Canada to-day with the feverish activity of her
southern neighbour, one will inevitably ask whether political colonies
can ever create literature. When freedom was first obtained by the
colonies, a condition of new equilibrium was reached after a couple of
decades of uncertainty and unrest, and then American literature woke up.
Even then it was not free, and did not care to be free, from English
precedents; and yet there were original personalities which came to the
front. Washington Irving was, as Thackeray said, the first ambassador
which the New World of literature sent to the Old. English influences
are unmistakable in the tales of Irving, although he was a strong and
original writer. His “Sketch-Book,” published in 1819, has remained the
most popular of his books, and the poetic muse has never been hunted
away from the shores of the Hudson where Rip Van Winkle passed his long
slumbers.
The American novel had still not appeared. The romances of Brown, laid
in Pennsylvania, were highly inartistic in spite of their forcible
presentation. Then James Fenimore Cooper discovered the untouched
treasures of the infinite wilderness. His “Spy” appeared in 1821, and he
was at once hailed as the American Scott. In the next year appeared “The
Pioneers,” the first of his Leather-stocking Tales of wild Indian life.
And after Cooper’s thirty-two romances there followed many tales by
lesser writers. Miss Sedgwick was the first woman to attain literary
popularity, and her romances were the first which depicted the life of
New England. At the same time a New England youth began to write verses
which, by their serene beauty, were incomparably above all earlier lyric
attempts of his native land. Bryant’s first volume of poems appeared in
1821, and therewith America had a literature, and England’s sarcastic
question, “Who ever reads an American book?” was not asked again.
The movement quickly grew to its first culmination. A brilliant period
commenced in the thirties, when Hawthorne, Holmes, Emerson, Longfellow,
Thoreau, Curtis, and Margaret Fuller, all of New England, became the
luminaries of the literary New World. And like the prelude to a great
epoch rings the song of the one incomparable Edgar Allan Poe, who did
not fight for ideas like a moral New Englander, but sang simply in the
love of song. Poe’s melancholy, demoniacal, and melodious poetry was a
marvellous fountain in the country of hard and sober work. And Poe was
the first whose fantasy transformed the short story into a thing of the
highest poetical form. In New England no one was so profoundly a poet as
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of “The Scarlet Letter.” His “Marble
Faun,” of which the scene is laid in Italy, may show him in his fullest
maturity, but his greatest strength lay in the romances of
Massachusetts, which in their emotional impressiveness and artistic
finish are as beautiful as an autumn day in New England. Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the rhapsodical philosopher, wrote poems teeming over with
thought, and yet true poems, while Whittier was the inspired bard of
freedom; and besides these there was the trio of friends, Longfellow,
Lowell, and Holmes. Harvard professors they were, and men of
distinguished ability, whose literary culture made them the proper
educators of the nation. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the only one of
this circle now living, remaining over, as it were, from that golden
age. He fought at first to free the slaves, and then he became the stout
defender of the emancipation of women, and is to-day, as then, the
master of the reflective essay. His life is full of “cheerful
yesterdays”; his fame is sure of “confident tomorrows.”
Longfellow is, to the German, mainly the sensitive transposer of German
poetry; his sketch-book, “Hyperion,” opened up the German world of myth,
and brought the German romance across the ocean. His ballads and his
delightful idyll of “Evangeline” clothed New England life, as it were,
in German sentiment; and even his Indian edda, “Hiawatha,” sounds as if
from a German troubadour wandering through the Indian country.
Longfellow became the favourite poet of the American home, and American
youth still makes its pilgrimage to the house in Cambridge where he once
lived. Lowell was perhaps more gifted than Longfellow, and certainly he
was the more many-sided. His art ranged from the profoundest pathos by
which American patriotism was aroused in those days of danger, to the
broadest and most whimsical humour freely expressed in dialect verses;
and he also wrote the most finished idyllic poetry and keenly satirical
and critical essays. It is common to exalt his humorous verses, “The
Biglow Papers,” to the highest place of typical literary productions of
America; nevertheless, his essential quality was fine and academic. Real
American humour undoubtedly finds its truer expression in Holmes. Holmes
was also a lyric poet, but his greatest work was the set of books by the
“Autocrat.” His “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” has that serious smile
which makes world literature. It was the first of a long series, and at
the writing he was a professor of anatomy, sixty-four years old.
Then there were many lesser lights around these great ones. At the
middle of the century Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,” of which ten thousand copies were sold every day for many
months. And romance literature in general began to increase. At the same
time appeared the beautiful songs of Bayard Taylor, whose later
translation of Faust has never been surpassed, and the scarcely less
admirable lyrics of Stedman and Stoddard. So it happened that at the
time when the Civil War broke out, America, although deficient in every
sort of productive science except history, had a brilliant literature.
Science needed, first of all, solid academic institutions, which could
only be built patiently, stone on stone—a work which has been witnessed
by the last three decades of the century. Poetry, however, needed only
the inner voice which speaks to the susceptible heart, and the
encouragement of the people. For science there has been a steady, quiet
growth, parallel with the growth of the institutions; for letters there
have been changing fortunes, times of prosperity and times of
stagnation. When the powder and smoke of the Civil War had blown away
the happy days of literature were over; it began to languish, and only
at the present day is it commencing to thrive once more.
This does not mean that there has been no talent for three decades, or
that the general interest in literature has flagged. Ambitious writers
of romance like Howells, James, Crawford, and Cable; novelists like
Aldrich, Bret Harte, and Hale, Mary Wilkins, and Sarah Orne Jewett;
poets like Lanier and Whitman, and humourists like Stockton and Mark
Twain, have done much excellent work, and work that is partly great, and
have shown the way to large provinces of literary endeavour.
Nevertheless, compared with the great achievements which had gone
before, theirs is rather a time of intermission. And yet many persons
are quite prepared to say that Howells is the greatest of all American
authors, and his realistic analyses among the very best modern romances.
And Howells himself pays the same tribute to Mark Twain’s later and
maturer writings.
But there is one poet about whom only the future can really decide; this
is Walt Whitman. His “Leaves of Grass,” with their apparently formless
verse, were greatly praised by some; by others felt to be barbarous and
tasteless. There has been a dispute similar to that over Zarathustra of
Nietzsche. And even as regards content, Whitman may be compared with
Nietzsche, the radical democrat with the extreme aristocrat, for the
exaggerated democratic exaltation of the ego leads finally to a point in
which every single man is an absolute dictator in his own world, and
therefore comes to feel himself unique, and proudly demands the right of
the Uebermensch. “When they fight, I keep silent, go bathing, or sit
marvelling at myself,” says this prophet of democracy. “In order to
learn, I sat at the feet of great masters. Oh, that these great masters
might return once more to learn of me.” The similarity between American
and German intellects could readily be traced further, and was, perhaps,
not wholly unfitted to reveal a certain broad literary perspective. As
we have compared Whitman and Nietzsche, so we might compare Bryant with
Platen, Poe with Heine, Hawthorne with Freytag, Lowell with Uhland,
Whittier with Rückert, Holmes with Keller, Howells with Fontane,
Crawford with Heyse, and so on, and we should compare thus
contemporaries of rather equal rank. But such a parallelism, of course,
could not be drawn too far, since it would be easy to show in any such
pair important traits to belie the comparison.
In the positively bewildering literature of to-day, the novel and the
short story strongly predominate. The Americans have always shown a
special aptitude and fondness for the short story. Poe was the true
master of that form, and the grace with which Aldrich has told the story
of Marjorie Daw, and Davis of Van Bibber, the energy with which Hale has
cogently depicted the Man Without a Country, or Bret Harte the American
pioneer, and the intimacy with which Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett have
perpetuated the quieter aspects of human existence, show a true instinct
for art. A profound appreciation, fresh vigour, and fine feeling for
form, graceful humour and all the good qualities of American literature,
combine to make the short story a perfect thing. It is not the German
_Novelle_, but is, rather, comparable to the French _conte_. The short
stories are not all of the single type; some are masculine and others
feminine in manner. The finely cut story, which is short because the
charm of the incidents would vanish if narrated in greater detail, is of
the feminine type. And, of the masculine, is the story told in cold,
sharp relief, which is short because it is energetic and impatient of
any protracted waits. In both cases, everything unessential is left out.
Perhaps the American is nowhere more himself than here; and short
stories are produced in great numbers and are specially fostered by the
monthly magazines.
Of humourists there are fewer to-day than formerly. Neither the refined
humour of Irving, Lowell, and Holmes, nor the broader humour of Bret
Harte and Mark Twain, finds many representatives of real literary
importance. There are several, it is true, who are delighted with
Dooley’s contemporary comment in the Irish dialect, but there is a much
truer wit in the delicately satirical society novels of Henry James, and
to a less degree in those of Grant, Herrick, Bates, and a hundred
others, or in the romances of common life, such as Westcott’s “David
Harum.”
The historical romance has flourished greatly. At first the fantasy went
to far regions, and the traditional old figures of romance were tricked
out in the gayest foreign costumes. The most popular of all has been
Wallace’s “Ben Hur.” The Americans have long since followed the road
which German writers have taken from Ebers to Dahn and Wildenbruch, and
have revived their own national past. To be sure, the tremendous
editions of these books are due rather to the desire for information
than the love of poetry. The public likes to learn its national history
while being entertained, since the national consciousness has developed
so noticeably in the last decade and the social life of America in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has doubtless become thus living
and real for millions of Americans. Æsthetic motives predominate,
nevertheless, and although books like Churchill’s “The Crisis,”
Bacheller’s “D’ri and I,” Miss Johnston’s “Audrey,” Ford’s “Janice
Meredith,” and others similar are merely books of the day, and will be
replaced by others on the next Christmas-trees, nevertheless they are
works of considerable artistic merit. They are forcibly constructed,
dramatic, full of invention and delightful diction. It is undeniable
that the general level of the American romance is to-day not inferior to
that of Germany.