There can, in fact, be no clearer proof that the tradition of literature
is stronger than the tradition of life than the experience of America.
The new world, to its honour be it said, has discovered no new art. The
ancient masters of our English speech are the masters also of America.
The golden chain of memory cannot be shaken off, and many of those who
raise with the loudest voice the cry of freedom have shown themselves
the loyal and willing slaves of the past.
The truth is that from the first the writers of America have lagged
honourably behind their age. The wisest of them have written with a
studious care and quiet reverence. As if to mark the difference between
the written language and the vernacular, they have assumed a style which
belonged to their grandfathers. This half-conscious love of reaction
has been ever present with them. Tou may find examples at each stage of
their history. Cotton Mather, who armed his hand and tongue against
the intolerable sin of witchcraft, wrote when Dutch William was on our
throne, and in style he was but a belated Elizabethan. There is no other
writer with whom we may compare him, save Robert Burton, who also lived
out of his due time. Take this specimen of his prose, and measure
its distance from the prose of Swift and Addison, his younger
contemporaries: "Wherefore the Devil," writes Mather in the simplicity
of his faith, "is now making one Attempt more upon us; an Attempt
more Difficult, more Surprising, more snarl'd with unintelligible
Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered; an Attempt so
Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days
with all the Vultures of Hell trodden under our feet." In sound and
structure Mather's style is what the critics call "archaistic." It is
all untouched by the influences of another world, and though "the New
Englanders were," in Mather's view, "a People of God settled in those,
which were once the Devil's Territories," they carried their prose from
the old country, and piously bowed before an old tradition.
Thus has it been with each generation of men. Thoreau fondly believed
that Walden had brought him near to nature, and he wrote with the
accumulated artifice of the centuries. Hawthorne's language was as
old in fashion as the Salem which he depicted, as "the grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor, who came so early with
his Bible and his sword, and trode the common street with such stately
port, and made so large a figure as a man of war and peace." But it was.
upon Emerson that tradition has most strangely exercised its imperious
sway. Now Emerson was an anarch who flouted the conventions of art and
life. It was his hope to see the soul of this world "clean from all
vestige of tradition." He did not understand that what is? proceeded
inevitably from what was He affected to spurn the past as a clog upon
his individuality. Anticipating Walt Whitman, he would have driven
away his nearest friends, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be
dependent no more." So lightly did he pretend to esteem history that he
was sure that an individual experience could explain all the ages, that
each man went through in his own lifetime the Greek period, the medieval
period--every period, in brief--until he attained to the efflorescence
of Concord. "What have I to do with the sacredness of tradition," he
asked proudly, "if I live wholly from within?" So much had he to do with
it that he never wrote a line save in obedience. Savage as he was in the
declaration of his own individuality, he expressed it in the gracious
terms of an inherited art. To this age Emerson's provincialism appears
sad enough. It would not have been remembered had it not been set forth
in a finely studied and mellifluous prose. No sooner did Emerson take
pen in hand than his anarchy was subdued. He instantly became the slave
of all the periods which he despised. He was a faithful follower of
the best models, a patient student of masters dead and gone. Though he
aspired to live wholly from within, he composed his works wholly from
without, and fashioned an admirable style for himself, more antique in
shape and sound than the style affected by the Englishmen of his time.
But it is Edgar Allan Poe who most eloquently preached the gospel of
style, and who most honourably defended the cause of art pursued without
the aid of the pulpit. Taste he declared to be the sole arbiter of
Poetry. "With the intellect or the Conscience," said he, "it has only
collateral relations. Unless incidentally it has no concern whatever
either with Duty or Truth." Not that he belittled the exigence of Truth;
he did but insist on a proper separation. "The demands of Truth," he
admitted, "are severe; she has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that
which is so indispensable in song is precisely all that with which she
has nothing whatever to do." And thus it followed that he had small
sympathy with Realism, which he denounced in the clear spirit of
prophecy many years before it had become a battle-cry of criticism:
The defenders of this pitiable stuff [he wrote] uphold it on the ground
of its truthfulness. Taking the thesis into question, this truthfulness
is the one overwhelming defect. An original idea that--to laud the
accuracy with which the stone is hurled that knocks us in the head.
A little less accuracy might have left us more brains. And here
are critics absolutely commending the truthfulness with which the
disagreeable is conveyed! In my view, if an artist must paint decayed
cheeses, his merit will lie in their looking as little like decayed
cheeses as possible.
Of this wise doctrine Poe was always a loyal exponent. The strange
veiled country in which he placed the shadows of his creation lay not
within the borders of the United States. He was the child neither of his
land nor of his century. Dwelling among men who have always worshipped
size, he believed that there was no such thing as a long poem. A
fellow-citizen of bustling men, he refused to bend the knee to industry.
"Perseverance is one thing," said he, "genius quite another." And it is
not surprising that he lived and died without great honour in his own
country. Even those of his colleagues who guarded the dignity of their
craft with a zeal equal to his own, shrank from the pitiless logic of
his analysis. They loved his work as little as they respected his
life. They judged him by a censorious standard which took no account of
genius. And Poe shared with dignity and without regret the common fate
of prophets. If he is still an exile in American esteem, he long since
won the freedom of the larger world. He has been an inspiration to
France, the inspirer of the nations. He did as much as any one of his
contemporaries to mould the literary art of our day, and in the prose of
Baudelaire and Mallarmé he lives a life whose lustre the indifference of
his compatriots will never dim.
Whence comes it, this sedulous attention to style, which does honour
to American literature? It comes in part, I think, from the fact that,
before the triumph of journalism, American men of letters were secluded
from their fellows. They played no _rôle_ in the national drama. They
did not work for fame in the field of politics. They were a band of
aristocrats dwelling in a democracy, an _imperium in imperio_. They
wrote their works for themselves and their friends. They made no appeal
to the people, and knowing that they would be read by those capable
of pronouncing sentence, they justified their temerity by a proper
castigation, of their style. And there is another reason why American
literature should be honourably formal and punctilious, If the written
language diverges widely from the vernacular, it must perforce be
studied more sedulously than where no such divergence is observed. For
the American, accustomed to the language spoken by his countrymen and
to the lingo of the daily press, literary English is an acquired tongue,
which he studies with diligence and writes with care. He treats it
with the same respect with which some Scots--Drummond, Urquhart, and
Stevenson--have treated it, and under his hand it assumes a classic
austerity, sometimes missed by the Englishman, who writes it with the
fluency and freedom bred of familiar use. The stately and erudite work
of Francis Parkman is a fair example. The historian of 'Montcalm and
Wolfe' has a clear title to immortality. Assuredly he holds a worthy
place among the masters. He is of the breed of Gibbon and Michelet, of
Livy and Froude. He knows how to subordinate knowledge to romance. He
disdains the art of narrative as little as he disdains the management
of the English sentence. He is never careless, seldom redundant. The
plainest of his effects are severely studied. Here, for instance, is his
portrait of an Indian chief, epic in its simplicity, and withal composed
with obvious artistry:
See him as he lies there in the sun, kicking his heels in the air and
cracking jokes with his brother. Does he look like a hero? See him
now in the hour of his glory, when at sunset the whole village empties
itself to behold him, for to-morrow their favourite young partisan
goes out against the enemy. His head-dress is adorned with a crest
of war-eagle's feathers, rising in a waving ridge above his brow, and
sweeping far behind him. His round white shield hangs at his breast,
with feathers radiating from the centre like a star. His quiver is at
his back; his tall lance in his hand, the iron point flashing against
the declining sun, while the long scalp-locks of his enemies flutter
from the shaft. Thus gorgeous as a champion in panoply, he rides round
and round within the great circle of lodges, balancing with a graceful
buoyancy to the free movements of his war-horse, while with a sedate
brow he sings his song to the Great Spirit.
That is the language of classicism. The epithets are not far-sought.
They come naturally to the mind. The hero's shield is round and white;
his lance is tall; long are the scalp-locks of his enemies. Thus would
Homer and Virgil have heightened the picture, and Park-man is clearly
attentive to the best models. Even when he describes what his eye
has seen he cannot disengage his impression from the associations of
literature. It is thus that he sets before us Braddock's line of march:
It was like a thin, party-coloured snake, red, blue, and brown, trailing
slowly through the depth of leaves, creeping round inaccessible heights,
crawling over ridges, moving always in dampness and shadow, by rivulets
and waterfalls, crags and chasms, gorges and shaggy steeps. In glimpses
only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild
primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked
with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue.
As you read these words you are less keenly conscious of a visual
impression than of a verbal effect, and it may be said without reserve
that never for a page of his many volumes does Park-man forget the
demands of dignity and restraint.
Excellent as is the style, it is never American. Parkman does not reveal
his origin in a single phrase. He has learned to write not in his own
land, but in the England of the eighteenth century. When he speaks
of "the pampered Sardanapalus of Versailles," and of "the silken
favourites' calculated adultery," we are conscious that he has learnt
whatever lesson Gibbon has to teach. In other words, he, too, is
obedient to the imperious voice of convention. And the novelists follow
the same path as the historians. Mr Henry James, in his patient analysis
of human character, has evoked such subtle harmonies as our English
speech has not known before. Mr Howells, even when he finds his material
in the land of his birth, shows himself the master of a classic style,
exquisite in balance and perfect in tone. And both share the common
inheritance of our tongue, are links in the central chain of our
tradition, and in speech, if not in thought, are sternly conservative.
This, then, is an irony of America, that the country which has a natural
dislike of the past still dances to the ancient measures, that the
country which has invented so much has not invented a new method of
expression, that the country which questions all things accepts its
literature in simple faith. The advantages of conformity are obvious.
Tradition is nine-tenths of all the arts, and the writers of America
have escaped the ruin which overtakes the bold adventurer who stakes
his all upon first principles. But sometimes we miss the one-tenth that
might be added. How much is there in the vast continent which might be
translated into words! And how little has achieved a separate, living
utterance! Mr Stedman has edited an American Anthology, a stout volume
of some eight hundred pages, whose most obvious quality is a certain
technical accomplishment. The unnumbered bards of America compose their
verses with a diffident neatness, which recalls the Latin style
of classical scholars. The workmanship is deft, the inspiration is
literary. If many of the authors' names were transposed small injustice
would be done them. The most of the work might have been written
anywhere and under any conditions. Neither sentiment nor local colour
suggests the prairie or the camp.
It is the intervention of dialect which alone confers a distinctive
character upon American verse. Wisely is Mr Stedman's collection
called an Anthology. It has something of the same ingenuity, the same
impersonality, which marks the famous Anthology of the Greeks; it
illustrates the temper not of a young but of an old people.
How shall we surprise in her literature the true spirit of America?
Surely not in Walt Whitman, whose work is characteristic not of his
country, but of himself, who fondly believed that he would make a loud
appeal to the democracy because he stamped upon the laws of verse, and
used words which are not to be found in the dictionary. Had the people
ever encountered his 'Leaves of Grass,' it would not have understood it.
The verse for which the people craves is the ditties of the music-hall.
It has no desire to consider its own imperfections with a self-conscious
eye. It delights in the splendour of mirrors, in the sparkle of
champagne, in the trappings of a sordid and remote romance. The praise
of liberty and equality suits the ear not of the democrat, but of the
politician and dilettante, and it was to the dilettante and politician
that Walt Whitman addressed his exhortations. Even his studied contempt
for the literary conventions is insincere, and falls away from Kim
when he sees and feels most vividly. He attempted to put into practice
Emerson's theory of anarchy. He was at the pains to prove that he was
at once a savage and a poet. That he had moments of poetic exaltation is
true. The pomp of Brooklyn Ferry lives in his stately verse.
But he was no savage. It was his culture that spoke to the culture
of others; it was a worn-out commonplace which won him the regard
of politicians. He inspired parodists, not poets. And he represented
America as little as he echoed the voice of the people.
Nor is it in the works of the humourists that we shall catch a glimpse
of the national character. They, too, cast no shadow but their own.
They attain their effects by bad spelling, and a simple transliteration
reveals the poverty of their wit. There is but one author who represents
with any clarity the spirit of his country, and that author is Mark
Twain. Not Mark Twain the humourist, the favourite of the reporters, the
facile contemner of things which are noble and of good report, but Mark
Twain, the pilot of the Mississippi, the creator of Huck Finn and Tom
Sawyer. He is national as Fielding is national. Future ages will look
upon Huck Finn as we look upon Tom Jones,--as an embodiment of national
virtue. And Mark Twain's method is his own as intimately as the puppets
of his imagining. It is impossible to read a page of his masterpieces
without recognising that they could have been composed only in an
American environment. The dialect in which they are written enhances
their verisimilitude without impairing their dignity; and the flashes
of humour which light up the gravity of the narrative are never out of
place nor out of tune. The cunning and resourcefulness of his boyish
heroes are the cunning and resourcefulness of America, and the sombre
Mississippi is the proper background for this national epic. The danger,
the excitement, the solemnity of the great river are vividly portrayed.
They quicken his narrative; they inspire him to eloquence. He remembers
with a simple enthusiasm the glory of the sun setting upon its broad
expanse; he remembers also that the river and its shoals are things to
fear and to fight.
Fully to realise the marvellous precision [he writes] required in laying
the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should
know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and
blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to
brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must
pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and visible wreck that would
snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and
destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steamboat and cargo
in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the
bargain.
In calm, as in flood, Mark Twain has mastered the river, and has made
it his own. Once upon a time the Mississippi called up a vision of
the great Gulf opening on the sight of La Salle, "tossing its restless
billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without
a sail, without a sign of life." Now a humbler image is evoked, and we
picture Huck Finn and Jim floating down the broad stream in the august
society of the Duke and the Dauphin.
Though Mark Twain cultivates the South-Western dialect, and does not
disdain the speech of Pike County, there is in his two romances no
suspicion of provincialism. Style and imagination give them the freedom
of the whole world. They are of universal truth and application. But
since the days of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer the conditions of American
literature have changed, and for the worse. As in England, so in
America, a wide diffusion of books, an eager and general interest in
printed matter, have had a disastrous effect. The newspapers, by giving
an improper advertisement to the makers of books, have rendered the
literary craft more difficult of pursuit. The ambition of money has
obscured the simple end of literature, and has encouraged a spirit of
professionalism eminently characteristic of a practical country. We hear
of works of fiction sketched in the back-offices of publishers, whose
hands are held upon the public pulse. All is arranged, we are told, by
the man of business--period, plot, characters. Nothing is left to the
novelist but to carry out the instructions of his taskmaster, and when
you contemplate the result you can feel no surprise at this composite
authorship. It is no better than a money-making partnership, a return
to the miserable practices of Grub Street and its hacks, a curiosity
of trade, not of art, and so long as its sorry product is distinguished
from genuine literature no great harm is done.
Of the modern tendencies which affect literature, not commerce, the
most conspicuous is the tendency to decentralise. Every province has its
coterie, every county its school The whole continent is pegged out in
well-acknowledged claims. Boston cultivates one style, Chicago another.
Each corner makes the most of its own material, and cheerfully discovers
to the other States its character and temperament. The result is of
great and varied interest. The social history of America is being
written piecemeal, and written often with a skill and sincerity which
merit the highest praise. And not merely has each province found its
chronicler, but the immigrants, also, are intent upon self-expression.
The little masterpieces of Abraham Cahan are an earnest of what the
Ghetto can achieve, and whether the Jews are faithful to Yiddish, or,
like Cahan, acquire the language of their adopted country, there is
no reason why they should not atone in a free land for centuries
of silence. To enumerate the manifold achievements of the States is
impossible. One example will suffice, and no city will better suit my
purpose than Chicago. That admirable literature should come from Chicago
is of itself a paradox. It is still more surprising that the best
writers of Chicago should display the qualities of tranquillity and
reticence, which you would expect least of all to find in that monstrous
city. Yet it is characteristic of Miss Edith Wyatt and Mr H. B. Fuller,
who have painted the manners of Chicago with the greatest skill, that
they never force the note. They look upon their fellow-citizens with
an amiable sympathy; they describe them with a quiet humour. It is true
that they have an excellent opportunity. It is true also that they rise
to their occasion. Within the limits of Chicago are met the most diverse
of men. On the one hand are the captains of industry, intent to amass a
fortune at all costs; on the other are the sorry prigs who haunt Ibsen
clubs and chatter of Browning. Miss Wyatt, with an exquisite irony,
makes clear her preference. In her eyes the square-dealing and innocent
boodler is a far better man than the sophisticated apostle of culture,
and this truth she illustrates with a modesty and restraint which are
rarely met with in modern fiction. She never insists; she never says a
word too much. With exquisite concision she sets her carefully selected
facts and types before you, and being the antithesis of priggishness in
a priggish city, she glorifies "the common growth of Mother Earth," and
compels your agreement. Her collection of stories--'Every One His Own
Way'--as free from pretence as from exaggeration, paints the citizens of
Chicago with the subtlest fancy and the simplest truthfulness.
Mr H. B. Fuller employs an ampler canvas. His intention is the same. He
also discards the artifice of exaggeration. He attempts to harrow your
feelings as little as to advertise himself. He displays not the _sæva
indignatio_, which won another novelist of Chicago so indiscreet a fame.
He is for gentler methods and plainer judgments. In 'The Cliff Dwellers'
he has given us a picture of the tribe inhabiting the Clifton, a
monstrous sky-scraper full eighteen stories tall, whose "hundreds of
windows," he tells you, "glitter with multitudinous letterings in gold
and in silver, and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on
score in the tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana." His
picture is never overcharged; his draughtsmanship is always sincere. He
knows the tribe with an easy familiarity, and he bears witness to their
good and their evil with perfect impartiality. He is never a partisan.
His portraits are just, and he leaves his reader to sum up the qualities
of each. At his hands Chicago suffers no injury. She does not return his
generosity. A prophet is not without honour save in his own country, and
when I asked for his books at the biggest bookshop in Chicago, I was met
with a stare of ignorance.
And what you find in Chicago you may find in New England, in Kentucky,
in California, everywhere. The curiosity of this vast continent tempts
its writers to explore. Their material varies with the locality of their
choice. Their skill is a common inheritance. They cultivate the graces
as carefully as did their predecessors. Their artistic conscience is no
less acute. Above all, they have brought the short story to a point of
singular perfection. If Edgar Poe showed them the way, they have proved
themselves apter disciples than any save the most skilful of Frenchmen.
It is, indeed, impossible to look forward to the future of American
literature without hopefulness. In that half-discovered country style
and invention go hand in hand. The land of Mr Howells and Frank Norris,
of Mrs Atherton and Mrs Wharton, of Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic,
has accomplished so much that we may look confidently for the master,
who in his single achievement will knit up its many diverse qualities
and speak to the world with the voice of America.