by trying to be American, we have been conscious of this weak-
rootedness in our literature and trying to remedy it. This is why
our flood of nature books for a century is so significant. They
may seem peculiar instruments for probing tradition--particularly
the sentimental ones. The critic has not yet admitted some of the
heartiest among them--Audubon's sketches of pioneer life, for
example--into literature at all. And yet, unless I am mightily
mistaken, they are signs of convalescence as clearly as they are
symptoms of our disease. These United States, of course, are
infinitely more important than the plot of mother earth upon which
they have been erected. The intellectual background that we have
inherited from Europe is more significant than the moving spirit
of woods and soil and waters here. The graft, in truth, is less
valuable than the tree upon which it is grafted. Yet it determines
the fruit. So with the books of our nature lovers. They represent
a passionate attempt to acclimatize the breed. Thoreau has been
one of our most original writers. He and his multitudinous
followers, wise and foolish, have helped establish us in our new
soil.
I may seem to exaggerate the services of a group of writers who,
after all, can show but one great name, Thoreau's. I do not think
so, for if the heart of the nature lover is sometimes more active
than his head, the earth intimacies he gives us are vital to
literature in a very practical sense. Thanks to the modern science
of geography, we are beginning to understand the profound and
powerful influence of physical environment upon men. The
geographer can tell you why Charleston was aristocratic, why New
York is hurried and nervous, why Chicago is self-confident. He can
guess at least why in old communities, like Hardy's Wessex or the
North of France, the inhabitants of villages not ten miles apart
will differ in temperament and often in temper, hill town varying
from lowland village beneath it sometimes more than Kansas City
from Minneapolis. He knows that the old elemental forces--wind,
water, fire, and earth--still mold men's thoughts and lives a
hundred times more than they guess, even when pavements, electric
lights, tight roofs, and artificial heat seem to make nature only
a name. He knows that the sights and sounds and smells about us,
clouds, songs, and wind murmurings, rain-washed earth, and fruit
trees blossoming, enter into our sub-consciousness with a power
but seldom appraised. Prison life, factory service long continued,
a clerk's stool, a housewife's day-long duties--these things stunt
and transform the human animal as nothing else, because of all
experiences they most restrict, most impoverish the natural
environment. And it is the especial function of nature books to
make vivid and warm and sympathetic our background of nature. They
make conscious our sub-conscious dependence upon earth that bore
us. They do not merely inform (there the scientist may transcend
them), they enrich the subtle relationship between us and our
environment. Move a civilization and its literature from one
hemisphere to another, and their adapting, adjusting services
become most valuable. Men like Thoreau are worth more than we have
ever guessed.
No one has ever written more honest books than Thoreau's "Walden,"
his "Autumn," "Summer," and the rest. There is not one literary
flourish in the whole of them, although they are done with
consummate literary care; nothing but honest, if not always
accurate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, flowers,
birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philosophizing as to what it
all meant for him, an American. Here is a man content to take a
walk, fill his mind with observation, and then come home to think.
Repeat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change or expand
the thought, and you have Thoreau. No wonder he brought his first
edition home, not seriously depleted, and made his library of it!
Thoreau needs excerpting to be popular. Most nature books do. But
not to be valuable!
For see what this queer genius was doing. Lovingly, laboriously,
and sometimes a little tediously, he was studying his environment.
For some generations his ancestors had lived on a new soil, too
busy in squeezing life from it to be practically aware of its
differences. They and the rest had altered Massachusetts.
Massachusetts had altered them. Why? To what? The answer is not
yet ready. But here is one descendant who will know at least what
Massachusetts _is_--wave, wind, soil, and the life therein and
thereon. He begins humbly with the little things; but humanly, not
as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify or to
study the narrower laws of organic development; or romantically as
the sentimentalist, who intones his "Ah!" at the sight of dying
leaves or the cocoon becoming moth. It is all human, and yet all
intensely practical with Thoreau. He envies the Indian not because
he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for his
instinctive adaptations to his background,--because nature has
become traditional, stimulative with him. And simply, almost
naively, he sets down what he has discovered. The land I live in
is like this or that; such and such life lives in it; and this is
what it all means for me, the transplanted European, for us,
Americans, who have souls to shape and characters to mold in a new
environment, under influences subtler than we guess. "I make it my
business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish
me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and
the earth." And again: "Surely it is a defect in our Bible that it
is not truly ours, but a Hebrew Bible. The most pertinent
illustrations for us are to be drawn not from Egypt or Babylonia,
but from New England. Natural objects and phenomena are the
original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings.
Yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil,
commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the
imported symbols alone. All the true growth and experience, the
living speech, they would fain reject as 'Americanisms.' It is the
old error which the church, the state, the school, ever commit,
choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and
to tradition. When I really know that our river pursues a
serpentine course to the Merrimac, shall I continue to describe it
by referring to some other river, no older than itself, which is
like it, and call it a meander? It is no more meandering than the
Meander is musketaquiding."
This for Thoreau was going back to nature. Our historians of
literature who cite him as an example of how to be American
without being strenuous, as an instance of leisure nobly earned,
are quite wrong. If any man has striven to make us at home in
America, it is Thoreau. He gave his life to it; and in some
measure it is thanks to him that with most Americans you reach
intimacy most quickly by talking about "the woods."
Thoreau gave to this American tendency the touch of genius and the
depth of real thought. After his day the "back-to-nature" idea
became more popular and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature
becomes more and more aware of an American background. Bobolinks
and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to
be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear,
high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the
misty England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our ancestors had
seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. Nature literature
becomes a category. Men make their reputations by means of it.
No one has yet catalogued--so far as I am aware--the vast
collection of back-to-nature books that followed Thoreau. No one
has ever seriously criticized it, except Mr. Roosevelt, who with
characteristic vigor of phrase, stamped "nature-faking" on its
worser half. But every one reads in it. Indeed, the popularity of
such writing has been so great as to make us distrust its serious
literary value. And yet, viewed internationally, there are few
achievements in American literature so original. I will not say
that John Muir and John Burroughs, upon whom Thoreau's mantle
fell, have written great books. Probably not. Certainly it is too
soon to say. But when you have gathered the names of Gilbert
White, Jeffries, Fabre, Maeterlinck, and in slightly different
_genres_, Izaak Walton, Hudson, and Kipling from various literatures
you will find few others abroad to list with ours. Nor do our men owe
one jot or title of their inspiration to individuals on the other side
of the water.
Locally, too, these books are more noteworthy than may at first
appear. They are curiously passionate, and passion in American
literature since the Civil War is rare. I do not mean sentiment,
or romance, or eroticism. I mean such passion as Wordsworth felt
for his lakes, Byron (even when most Byronic) for the ocean, the
author of "The Song of Roland" for his Franks. Muir loved the
Yosemite as a man might love a woman. Every word he wrote of the
Sierras is touched with intensity. Hear him after a day on Alaskan
peaks: "Dancing down the mountain to camp, my mind glowing like
the sunbeaten glaciers, I found the Indians seated around a good
fire, entirely happy now that the farthest point of the journey
was safely reached and the long, dark storm was cleared away. How
hopefully, peacefully bright that night were the stars in the
frosty sky, and how impressive was the thunder of icebergs,
rolling, swelling, reverberating through the solemn stillness! I
was too happy to sleep."
Such passion, and often such style, is to be found in all these
books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the
early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon
Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English
magazines used to publish, and you will feel it.
Compare any of the lesser nature books of the mid-nineteenth
century--Clarence King's "Mountaineering in the Sierras," for
example--with the current novel writing of the period and you will
feel the greater sincerity. A passion for nature! Except the New
England passion for ideals, Whitman's passion for democracy, and
Poe's lonely devotion to beauty, I sometimes think that this is
the only great passion that has found its way into American
literature.
Hence the "nature fakers." The passion of one generation becomes
the sentiment of the next. And sentiment is easily capitalized.
The individual can be stirred by nature as she is. A hermit thrush
singing in moonlight above a Catskill clove will move him. But the
populace will require something more sensational. To the sparkling
water of truth must be added the syrup of sentiment and the cream
of romance. Mr. Kipling, following ancient traditions of the
Orient, gave personalities to his animals so that stories might be
made from them. Mr. Long, Mr. Roberts, Mr. London, Mr. Thompson-
Seton, and the rest, have told stories about animals so that the
American interest in nature might be exploited. The difference is
essential. If the "Jungle Books" teach anything it is the moral
ideals of the British Empire. But our nature romancers--a fairer
term than "fakers," since they do not willingly "fake"--teach the
background and tradition of our soil. In the process they inject
sentiment, giving us the noble desperation of the stag, the
startling wolf-longings of the dog, and the picturesque outlawry
of the ground hog,--and get a hundred readers where Thoreau got
one.
This is the same indictment as that so often brought against the
stock American novel, that it prefers the gloss of easy sentiment
to the rough, true fact, that it does not grapple direct with
things as they are in America, but looks at them through
optimist's glasses that obscure and soften the scene.
Nevertheless, I very much prefer the sentimentalized animal story
to the sentimentalized man story. The first, as narrative, may be
romantic bosh, but it does give one a loving, faithful study of
background that is worth the price that it costs in illusion. It
reaches my emotions as a novelist who splashed his sentiment with
equal profusion never could. My share of the race mind is willing
even to be tricked into sympathy with its environment. I would
rather believe that the sparrow on my telephone wire is swearing
at the robin on my lawn than never to notice either of them!
How curiously complete and effective is the service of these
nature books, when all is considered. There is no better instance,
I imagine, of how literature and life act and react upon one
another. The plain American takes to the woods because he wants
to, he does not know why. The writing American puts the woods into
his books, also because he wants to, although I suspect that
sometimes he knows very well why. Nevertheless, the same general
tendency, the same impulse, lie behind both. But reading nature
books makes us crave more nature, and every gratification of
curiosity marks itself upon the sub-consciousness. Thus the clear,
vigorous tradition of the soil passes through us to our books, and
from our books to us. It is the soundest, the sweetest, if not the
greatest and deepest inspiration of American literature. In the
confusion that attends the meeting here of all the races it is
something to cling to; it is our own.
THANKS TO THE ARTISTS
It would be a wise American town that gave up paying "boosters"
and began to support its artists. A country is just so much
country until it has been talked about, painted, or put into
literature. A town is just so many brick and wood squares,
inhabited by human animals, until some one's creative and
interpretative mind has given it "atmosphere," by which we mean
significance.
America was not mere wild land to the early colonists: it was a
country that had already been seen through the eyes of
enthusiastic explorers and daring adventurers, whose airs were
sweeter than Europe's, whose fruits were richer, where forest and
game, and even the savage inhabitant, guaranteed a more exciting
life, full of chance for the future.
New England was not just so much stony acre and fishing village
for the men of the 'twenties and 'forties. It was a land haloed by
the hopes and sufferings of forefathers, where every town had its
record of struggle known to all by word of mouth or book.
And when the New Englanders pushed westward, it was to a
wilderness which already had its literature, along trails of which
they had read, and into regions familiar to them in imagination.
Say what you please, and it is easy to say too much, of the
imitativeness of American literature as Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, Thoreau, Twain, and Howells wrote it, nevertheless, it
was more than justified by the human significance it gave to mere
land in America; and it is richer and more valuable than much
later writing just because of this attempt. Without Hawthorne and
Thoreau, New England would have lost its past; without Cooper and
Parkman the word "frontier" would mean no more than "boundary" to
most of us.
It is foolish to lay a burden on art, and to say, for example,
that American novelists must accept the same obligation to cities
and country to-day. But we may justly praise and thank them when
they do enrich this somewhat monotonous America that has been
planed over by the movies, the _Saturday Evening Post_, quick
transportation, and the newspaper with its syndicated features,
until it is as repetitive as a tom-tom.
After the Civil War every one began to move in America, and the
immigrants, moving in, moved also, so that roots were pulled up
everywhere and the town one lived in became as impersonal as a
hotel, the farm no more human than a seed-bed. Literature of the
time shows this in two ways: the rarity of books that give a local
habitation and a name to the familiar, contemporary scene; and a
romantic interest, as of the half-starved, in local color stories
of remote districts where history and tradition still meant
something in the lives of the inhabitants.
It is encouraging to see how rapidly all this is changing. In
poetry the Middle West and New England have been made again to
figure in the imagination. Rural New Hampshire and Illinois are
alive to-day for those who have read Masters, Lindsay, and Frost.
In prose Chicago, New York, New Haven, Richmond, Detroit, San
Francisco, and the ubiquitous Main Street of a hundred Gopher
Prairies have become wayfares for the memory of the reader, as
well as congeries of amusement and trade. In particular our
universities, which in the 'eighties and 'nineties were darkly lit
by a few flaring torches of mawkish romance, have been illumined
for the imagination by a series of stories that already begin to
make the undergraduate comprehend his place in one of the richest
streams of history, and graduates to understand their youth.
Poole's "The Harbor" (which served both college and city), Owen
Johnson's "Stover at Yale," Norris's "Salt," Fitzgerald's "This
Side of Paradise," Stephen Benet's "The Beginning of Wisdom"--
these books and many others have, like the opening chapters of
Compton Mackenzie's English "Sinister Street," given depth, color,
and significance to the college, which may not increase its
immediate and measurable efficiency but certainly strengthen its
grip upon the imagination, and therefore upon life.
Planners, builders, laborers, schemers, executives make a city, a
county, a university habitable, give them their bones and their
blood. Poets and novelists make us appreciate the life we live in
them, give them their souls. The best "boosters" are artists,
because their boosting lasts.
TO-DAY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: ADDRESSED TO THE BRITISH
[Footnote: This lecture was, in fact, delivered in the summer of
1918 at Cambridge University as part of a summer session devoted
to the United States of America. It is reprinted in lecture form
in order that the point of view may carry its own explanation.]
The analysis of conditions and tendencies in contemporary American
literature which I wish to present in this lecture, requires
historical background, detailed criticism, and a study of
development. I have time for reference to none of these, and can
only summarize the end of the process. If, therefore, I seem to
generalize unduly, I hope that my deficiencies may be charged
against the exigencies of the occasion. But I generalize the more
boldly because I am speaking, after all, of an English literature;
not in a Roman-Greek relationship of unnaturalized borrowings (for
we Americans imitate less and less), but English by common
cultural inheritance, by identical language, and by deeply
resembling character. Nevertheless, the more American literature
diverges from British (and that divergence is already wide) the
more truly English, the less colonial does it become. A Briton
should not take unkindly assertions of independence, even such
ruffled independence as Lowell expressed in "The Biglow Papers":
I guess the Lord druv down Creation's spiles
'Thout no _gret_ helpin' from the British Isles,
An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff
Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff;
I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez
Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses.
I desire neither to apologize for American literature, nor to
boast of it. No apology is necessary now, whatever Sydney Smith
may have thought in earlier days: and it is decidedly not the time
to boast, for so far literature has usually been a by-product in
the development of American aptitudes. But it may be useful to
state broadly at the beginning some of the difficulties and the
closely related advantages that condition the making of literature
in the United States.
The critic of American literature usually begins in this fashion:
America, in somewhat over a century, has built up a political and
social organization admittedly great. She has not produced,
however, a great literature: great writers she has produced, but
not a great literature. The reason is, that so much energy has
been employed in developing the resources of a great country, that
little has been left to expend in creative imagination. The
currents of genius have flowed toward trade, agriculture, and
manufacturing, not aesthetics.
This explanation is easy to understand, and is therefore
plausible, but I do not believe that it is accurate. It is not
true that American energy has been absorbed by business. Politics,
and politics of a creative character, has never lacked good blood
in the United States. Organization, and organization of a kind
requiring the creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our
energies, especially since the Civil War, and by no means all of
it has been business organization. Consider our systems of
education and philanthropy, erected for vast needs. And I venture
to guess that more varieties of religious experience have arisen
in America than elsewhere in the same period. After all, why
expect a century and a half of semi-independent intellectual
existence to result in a great national literature? Can other
countries, other times, show such a phenomenon?
No, if we have been slow in finding ourselves in literature, in
creating a school of expression like the Elizabethan or the
Augustan, the difficulties are to be sought elsewhere than in a
lack of energy.
Seek them first of all in a weakening of literary tradition. The
sky changes, not the mind, said Horace, but this is true only of
the essentials of being. The great writers of our common English
tradition--Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others--are as
good for us as they are good for you. It is even whispered that
our language is more faithful to their diction than is yours. But
the conditions of life in a new environment bring a multitude of
minor changes with them. To begin with little things, our climate,
our birds, our trees, our daily contact with nature, are all
different. Your mellow fluting blackbird, your wise thrush that
sings each song twice over, your high-fluttering larks we do not
know. Our blackbird creaks discordantly, our plaintive lark sings
from the meadow tussock, our thrush chimes his heavenly bell from
forest dimness. And this accounts, may I suggest in passing, for
the insistence upon nature in American writing, from Thoreau down.
Our social and economic experience has been widely different also;
and all this, plus the results of a break in space and time with
the home country of our language, weakened that traditional
influence which is so essential for the production of a national
literature. It had to be; good will come of it; but for a time we
vacillated, and we still vacillate, like a new satellite finding
its course.
Again, the constant shift of location within America has been a
strong delaying factor. Moving-day has come at least once a
generation for most American families since the days of William
Penn or _The Mayflower_, The president of a Western university, who
himself, as a baby, had been carried across the Alleghenies in a
sling, once told me the history of his family. It settled in Virginia
in the seventeenth century, and moved westward regularly each
generation, until his father, the sixth or seventh in line, had
reached California. On the return journey he had got as far as
Illinois, and his son was moving to New York! The disturbing effect
upon literature of this constant change of soils and environment is
best proved by negatives. Wherever there has been a settled community
in the United States--in New England of the 'forties and again in the
'nineties, in the Middle West and California to-day--one is sure to
find a literature with some depth and solidity to it. The New England
civilization of the early nineteenth century, now materially altered,
was a definable culture, with five generations behind it, and strong
roots in the old world. From it came the most mature school of
American literature that so far we have possessed.
Still another difficulty must be added. The social. Pessimists,
who see in our Eastern states a mere congeries of all the white
races, and some not white, bewail the impossibility of a real
nation in America. But the racial problem has always been with us,
nor has it by any means always been unsolved. Before the
Revolution, we were English, Scottish, Welsh, Low German,
Huguenot, Dutch, and Swedish. Before the Civil War, we were the
same plus the Irish and the Germans of '48. And now we add Slavs,
Jews, Greeks, and Italians. I do not minimize the danger. But let
it be understood that while our civilization has always been
British (if that term is used in its broadest sense) our blood has
always been mixed, even in Virginia and New England. This has made
it hard for us to feel entirely at home in the only literary
tradition we possessed and cared to possess. We have been like the
man with a ready-made suit. The cloth is right, but the cut must
be altered before the clothes will fit him.