American literature (as many a writer directly or by implication
would have us) in order to become 100 per cent American, let us
first take breath long enough to reflect that, first, such a
madcap career is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly
impossible. It is a literature which by general admission is now
the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech.
English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than
French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more
flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no
burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the
bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in
general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. That
we have sprung from a Puritanical loin, and been nourished in the
past from the breast of Victorianism, is obvious. In this we have
been not too much, but too narrowly, English. We have read
Tennyson when it might have been better to have read Shakespeare
or Chaucer. But to wish to break with English literature in order
to become altogether American is like desiring to invent an
entirely new kind of clothes. I shall not give up trousers because
my fourth great-grandfather, who was a Yorkshireman, wore them,
and his pattern no longer fits my different contour. I shall make
me a pair better suiting my own shanks--yet they shall still be
trousers. But in any case, language binds us.
Indeed, in this welter of newcomers here in America, whose children
learn, read, write only English, the tradition of Anglo-
American literature is all that holds us by a thread above chaos.
If we could all be made to speak German, or Italian, or Spanish,
there would be cause, but no excuse, for an attempted revolution.
But English is dominant here and will remain so. Could we hope to
make an American literary language without dependence on English
literature, a protective tariff on home-made writing, or an
embargo against books more than a year old, or imported from
across the Atlantic, would be worth trying; but the attempts so
far are not encouraging. This has not been the way in the past by
which original literatures have been made. They have sucked
nourishment where it could best be found, and grown great from the
strength that good food gave them.
One can sympathize with the desire to nationalize our literature
at all costs; and can understand lashings out at the tyranny of
literary prestige which England still exercises. But the real
question is: shall the English of Americans be good English or bad
English; shall a good tradition safeguard change and experiment,
or shall we have chaotic vulgarity like the Low Latin of the late
Roman Empire?
The truth is that our language is tradition, for it holds
tradition in solution like iron in wine. And here lie the secret
and the power of American, "Anglo-Saxon" domination.
What is to be done about it? Shall anything be done about it? The
Anglomaniac is helpless before the fact of language. The most he
can do is to attack, and uproot if he can, the American tradition.
There is nothing sacrosanct in this American tradition. Like all
traditions it is stiff, it will clasp, if we allow it, the future
in the dead hand of precedent. It can be used by the designing to
block progress. But as traditions go it is not conservative.
Radicalism, indeed, is its child. Political and religious
radicalism brought the Pilgrims to New England, the Quakers to
Pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism made the
Revolution against the will of American conservatives; political
and social radicalism made the Civil War inevitable and gave it
moral earnestness. Radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much
more American than what some people mean by "Americanism" to-day.
And its bitterest opponents in our times would quite certainly
have become Nova Scotian exiles if they had been alive and
likeminded in 1783.
Nor is this American tradition impeccable in the political ideas,
the literary ideals, the social customs it has given us. We must
admit a rampant individualism in our political practices which is
in the very best Anglo-American tradition, and yet by no means
favorable to cooperative government. We admit also more Puritanism
in our standard literature than art can well digest; and more
sentiment than is good for us; nor is it probable that the
traditions and the conventions which govern American family life
are superior to their European equivalents. We should welcome (I
do not say that we do) liberalizing, broadening, enriching
influences from other traditions. And whether we have welcomed
them or not, they have come, and to our great benefit. But to
graft upon the plant is different from trying to pull up the
roots.
We want better arguments than the fear of Anglo-Saxon domination
before the root pulling begins. We wish to know what is to be
planted. We desire to be convinced that the virtue has gone out of
the old stock. We want examples of civilized nations that have
profited by borrowing traditions wholesale, or by inventing them.
We wish to know if a cultural, a literary sans-culottism is
possible, except with chaos as a goal. Most of all, we expect to
fight for and to hold our Anglo-American heritage.
It is not surprising that discontent with our own ultimately
English tradition has expressed itself by a kind of Freudian
transformation in anti-English sentiment. Every vigorous nation
strains and struggles with its tradition, like a growing boy with
his clothes, and this is particularly true of new nations with old
traditions behind them. Our pains are growing pains--a malady we
have suffered from since the early eighteenth century at the
latest. Tradition, our own tradition, pinches us; but you cannot
punch tradition for pinching you, or call it names to its face,
especially if it proves to be your father's tradition, or your
next-door neighbor's. Therefore, since that now dim day when the
Colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, many good
Americans have chosen England and the English to symbolize
whatever irked them in their own tradition. It is from England and
the English that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which
we had to grow away in order to be ourselves and not a shadow--
imitators, second-bests, Colonials. England and the English have
had our vituperation whenever the need to be American has been
greatest. And when an English government like Palmerston's, or
Salisbury's, or Lloyd George's, offends some group or race among
us, a lurking need to assert our individuality, or prove that we
are not Colonials, leads thousands more to join in giving the
lion's tail an extra twist.
This may be unfortunate, but it argues curiously enough respect
and affection rather than the reverse, and it is very human. It is
a fact, like growing, and is likely to continue until we are fully
grown. It will reassert itself vehemently until upon our English
tradition we shall have built an American civilization as
definitely crystallized, a literature as rich and self-sufficing,
as that of France and England to-day. Three-quarters of our
national genius went into the creating of our political system.
Three-quarters of our national genius since has gone into the
erecting of our economic system. Here we are independent--and
thick skinned. But a national civilization and a national
literature take more time to complete.
Cool minds were prepared for a little tail-twisting after the
great war, even though they could not foresee the unfortunate
Irish situation in which a British government seemed determined to
make itself as un-English as possible. If there had not been the
patriotic urge to assert our essential Americanism more strongly
than ever, there still would have been a reaction against all the
pledging and the handshaking, the pother about blood and water,
the purple patches in every newspaper asserting Anglo-Saxonism
against the world. I remember my own nervousness when, in 1918,
after the best part of a year in England, in England's darkest
days, I came back full of admiration for the pluck of all England
and the enlightenment of her best minds in the great struggle, to
hear men who knew little of England orating of enduring
friendship, and to read writers who had merely read of England,
descanting of her virtues. I felt, and many felt, that excess of
ignorant laudation which spells certain reaction into ignorant
dispraise. No wonder that Americans whose parents happened to be
Germans, Italians, Jews, or Irish grew weary of hearing of the
essential virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race. There never was such a
race. It was not even English blood, but English institutions that
created America; but Liberty Loan orators had no time to make fine
distinctions of that kind. They talked, and even while the cheers
were ringing and the money rolled in dissent raised its tiny head.
Dissent was to be expected; antagonism against a tradition made by
English minds and perpetuated in English was natural after a war
in which not merely nationalism, but also every racial instinct,
has been quickened and made sensitive. But _tout comprendre, c'est
tout pardonner_, is only partly true in this instance. We should
understand, and be tolerant with, the strainings against tradition of
folk to whom it is still partly alien; we should diagnose our own
growing pains and not take them too seriously. Nevertheless, the
better more violent movements of race and national prejudice are
understood, the less readily can they be pardoned, if by pardon one
means easy tolerance.
It is not inconceivable that we shall have to face squarely a
split between those who prefer the American tradition and those
who do not, although where the cleavage line would run, whether
between races or classes, is past guessing. There are among us
apparently men and women who would risk wars, external or
internal, in order to hasten the discordant day; although just
what they expect as a result, whether an Irish-German state
organized by German efficiency and officered by graduates of
Tammany Hall, or a pseudo-Russian communism, is not yet clear. In
any case, the time is near when whoever calls himself American
will have to take his stand and do more thinking, perhaps, than
was necessary in 1917. He will need to know what tradition is,
what his own consists of, and what he would do without it. He will
need especially to rid himself of such simple and fallacious ideas
as that what was good enough for his grandfather is good enough
for him; or that, as some of our more reputable newspapers profess
to think, the Constitution has taken the place once held by the
Bible, and contains the whole duty of man and all that is
necessary for his welfare. He will need to think less of 100
percent Americanism, which, as it is commonly used means not to
think at all, and more of how he himself is molding American
tradition for the generation that is to follow. If he is not to be
a pawn merely in the struggle for American unity, he must think
more clearly and deeply than has been his habit in the past.
But whatever happens in America (and after the sad experiences of
prophets in the period of war and reconstruction, who would
prophesy), let us cease abusing England whenever we have
indigestion in our own body politic. It is seemingly inevitable
that the writers of vindictive editorials should know little more
of England as she is to-day than of Russia or the Chinese
Republic; inevitable, apparently, that for them the Irish policy
of the Tory group in Parliament, Indian unrest, and Lloyd George,
are all that one needs to known about a country whose liberal
experiments in industrial democracy since the war, and whose
courage in reconstruction, may well make us hesitate in dispraise.
But it is not inevitable that Americans who are neither headline
and editorial writers, nor impassioned orators, regardless of
facts, should continue to damn the English because their ancestors
and ours founded America.
BACK TO NATURE
No one tendency in life as we live it in America to-day is more
characteristic than the impulse, as recurrent as summer, to take
to the woods. Sometimes it disguises itself under the name of
science; sometimes it is mingled with hunting and the desire to
kill; often it is sentimentalized and leads strings of gaping
"students" bird-hunting through the wood lot; and again it
perilously resembles a desire to get back from civilization and go
"on the loose." Say your worst of it, still the fact remains that
more Americans go back to nature for one reason or another
annually than any civilized men before them. And more Americans, I
fancy, are studying nature in clubs or public schools--or, in
summer camps and the Boy Scouts, imitating nature's creatures, the
Indian and the pioneer--than even statistics could make
believable.
What is the cause? In life, it is perhaps some survival of the
pioneering instinct, spending itself upon fishing, or bird-
hunting, or trail hiking, much as the fight instinct leads us to
football, or the hunt instinct sends every dog sniffing at dawn
through the streets of his town. Not every one is thus atavistic,
if this be atavism; not every American is sensitive to spruce
spires, or the hermit thrush's chant, or white water in a forest
gorge, or the meadow lark across the frosted fields. Naturally.
The surprising fact is that in a bourgeois civilization like ours,
so many are affected.
And yet what a criterion nature love or nature indifference is. It
seems that if I can try a man by a silent minute in the pines, the
view of a jay pirating through the bushes, spring odors, or
December flush on evening snow, I can classify him by his
reactions. Just where I do not know; for certainly I do not put
him beyond the pale if his response is not as mine. And yet he
will differ, I feel sure, in more significant matters. He is not
altogether of my world. Nor does he enter into this essay. There
are enough without him, and of every class. In the West, the very
day laborer pitches his camp in the mountains for his two weeks'
holiday. In the East and Middle West, every pond with a fringe of
hemlocks, or hill view by a trolley line, or strip of ocean beach,
has its cluster of bungalows where the proletariat perform their
_villeggiatura_ as the Italian aristocracy did in the days of
the Renaissance. Patently the impulse exists, and counts for
something here in America.
It counts for something, too, in American literature. Since our
writing ceased being colonial English and began to reflect a race
in the making, the note of woods-longing has been so insistent
that one wonders whether here is not to be found at last the
characteristic "trait" that we have all been patriotically
seeking.
I do not limit myself in this statement to the professed "nature
writers" of whom we have bred far more than any other race with
which I am familiar. In the list--which I shall not attempt--of
the greatest American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson,
Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman. And every one of
these men was vitally concerned with nature, and some were
obsessed by it. Lowell was a scholar and man of the world, urban
therefore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely New
England background than by its European polish. Cooper's ladies
and gentlemen are puppets merely, his plots melodrama; it is the
woods he knew, and the creatures of the woods, Deerslayer and
Chingachgook, that preserve his books. Whitman made little
distinction between nature and human nature, perhaps too little.
But read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" or "The Song of the
Redwood-Tree," and see how keen and how vital was his instinct for
native soil. As for Hawthorne, you could make a text-book on
nature study from his "Note-Books." He was an imaginative moralist
first of all; but he worked out his visions in terms of New
England woods and hills. So did Emerson. The day was "not wholly
profane" for him when he had "given heed to some natural object."
Thoreau needs no proving. He is at the forefront of all field and
forest lovers in all languages and times.
These are the greater names. The lesser are as leaves in the
forest: Audubon, Burroughs, Muir, Clarence King, Lanier, Robert
Frost, and many more--the stream broadening and shallowing
through literary scientists and earnest forest lovers to romantic
"nature fakers," literary sportsmen, amiable students, and tens of
thousands of teachers inculcating this American tendency in
another generation. The phenomenon asks for an explanation. It is
more than a category of American literature that I am presenting;
it _is_ an American trait.
The explanation I wish to proffer in this essay may sound
fantastical; most explanations that explain anything usually do--
at first. I believe that this vast rush of nature into American
literature is more than a mere reflection of a liking for the
woods. It represents a search for a tradition, and its capture.
Good books, like well-built houses, must have tradition behind
them. The Homers and Shakespeares and Goethes spring from rich
soil left by dead centuries; they are like native trees that grow
so well nowhere else. The little writers--hacks who sentimentalize
to the latest order, and display their plot novelties like
bargains on an advertising page--are just as traditional. The only
difference is that their tradition goes back to books instead of
life. Middle-sized authors--the very good and the probably
enduring--are successful largely because they have gripped a
tradition and followed it through to contemporary life. This is
what Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," Howells in "The Rise of Silas
Lapham," and Mrs. Wharton in "The House of Mirth." But the back-
to-nature books--both the sound ones and those shameless exposures
of the private emotions of ground hogs and turtles that call
themselves nature books--are the most traditional of all. For they
plunge directly into what might be called the adventures of the
American sub-consciousness.
It is the sub-consciousness that carries tradition into
literature. That curious reservoir where forgotten experiences lie
waiting in every man's mind, as vivid as on the day of first
impression, is the chief concern of psychologists nowadays. But it
has never yet had due recognition from literary criticism. If the
sub-consciousness is well stocked, a man writes truly, his
imagination is vibrant with human experience, he sets his own
humble observation against a background of all he has learned and
known and forgotten of civilization. If it is under-populated, if
he has done little, felt little, known little of the traditional
experiences of the intellect, he writes thinly. He can report what
he sees, but it is hard for him to create. It was Chaucer's rich
sub-consciousness that turned his simple little story of
Chauntecleer into a comment upon humanity. Other men had told that
story--and made it scarcely more than trivial. It is the
promptings of forgotten memories in the sub-consciousness that
give to a simple statement the force of old, unhappy things, that
keep thoughts true to experience, and test fancy by life. The sub-
consciousness is the governor of the waking brain. Tradition--
which is just man's memory of man--flows through it like an
underground river from which rise the springs of every-day
thinking. If there is anything remarkable about a book, look to
the sub-consciousness of the writer and study the racial tradition
that it bears.
Now, I am far from proposing to analyze the American sub-
consciousness. No man can define it. But of this much I am
certain. The American habit of going "back to nature" means that
in our sub-consciousness nature is peculiarly active. We react to
nature as does no other race. We are the descendants of pioneers--
all of us. And if we have not inherited a memory of pioneering
experiences, at least we possess inherited tendencies and desires.
The impulse that drove Boone westward may nowadays do no more than
send some young Boone canoeing on Temagami, or push him up Marcy
or Shasta to inexplicable happiness on the top. But the drive is
there. And furthermore, nature is still strange in America. Even
now the wilderness is far from no American city. Birds, plants,
trees, even animals have not, as in Europe, been absorbed into the
common knowledge of the race. There are discoveries everywhere for
those who can make them. Nature, indeed, is vivid in a surprising
number of American brain cells, marking them with a deep and endurable
impress. And our flood of nature books has served to
increase her power.
It was never so with the European traditions that we brought to
America with us. That is why no one reads early American books.
They are pallid, ill-nourished, because their traditions are
pallid. They drew upon the least active portion of the American
sub-consciousness, and reflect memories not of experience,
contact, live thought, but of books. Even Washington Irving, our
first great author, is not free from this indictment. If,
responding to some obscure drift of his race towards humor and the
short story, he had not ripened his Augustan inheritance upon an
American hillside, he, too, would by now seem juiceless, withered,
like a thousand cuttings from English stock planted in forgotten
pages of his period. It was not until the end of our colonial age
and the rise of democracy towards Jackson's day, that the rupture
with our English background became sufficiently complete to make
us fortify pale memories of home by a search for fresher, more
vigorous tradition.
We have been searching ever since, and many eminent critics think
that we have still failed to establish American literature upon
American soil. The old traditions, of course, were essential. Not
even the most self-sufficient American hopes to establish a brand-
new culture. The problem has been to domesticate Europe, not to
get rid of her. But the old stock needed a graft, just as an old
fruit tree needs a graft. It requires a new tradition. We found a
tradition in New England; and then New England was given over to
the alien and her traditions became local or historical merely. We
found another in border life; and then the Wild West reached the
Pacific and vanished. Time and again we have been flung back upon
our English sources, and forced to imitate a literature sprung
from a riper soil. Of course, this criticism, as it stands, is too
sweeping. It neglects Mark Twain and the tradition of the American
boy; it neglects Walt Whitman and the literature of free and
turbulent democracy; it neglects Longfellow and Poe and that
romantic tradition of love and beauty common to all Western races.
But, at least, it makes one understand why the American writer has
passionately sought anything that would put an American quality
into his transplanted style.
He has been very successful in local color. But then local color
is _local_. It is a minor art. In the field of human nature he has
fought a doubtful battle. An occasional novel has broken through into
regions where it is possible to be utterly American even while writing
English. Poems too have followed. But here lie our great failures. I
do not speak of the "great American novel," yet to come. I refer to
the absence of a school of American fiction, or poetry, or drama, that
has linked itself to any tradition broader than the romance of the
colonies, New England of the 'forties, or the East Side of New York.
The men who most often write for all America are mediocre. They strike
no deeper than a week-old interest in current activity. They aim to
hit the minute because they are shrewd enough to see that for "all
America" there is very little continuity just now between one minute
and the next. The America they write for is contemptuous of tradition,
although worshipping convention, which is the tradition of the
ignorant. The men who write for a fit audience though few are too
often local or archaic, narrow or European, by necessity if not by
choice.