a new-born statesmanship in a nation equally new-born, the fact suddenly
strikes us that the intellectual strength of the colonists lay there. The
same discovery astonished England through the pamphlet works of Jay,
Lee, and Dickinson; destined to be soon followed up with a long series of
equally strong productions, to which Lord Chatham paid that fine tribute
in his speech before the House of Lords on January 20, 1775. “I must
declare and avow,” he said, “that in all my reading and observation—and
it has been my favorite study—I have read Thucydides and have studied
and admired the master-states of the world—for solidity of reasoning,
force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication
of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in
preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia.” Yet it is to be
noticed further that here, as in other instances, the literary foresight
in British criticism had already gone in advance of even the statesman’s
judgment, for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant of the literary men
of his time, had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the
Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in
Boston and a Xenophon in New York.
It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed
forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those
of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of
looking over whole boxes of Washington’s yet unprinted letters in the
hands of our kind neighbor, Jared Sparks (1834-37); manuscripts whose
curved and varied signatures we had the inexhaustible boyish pleasure
of studying and comparing; as we had also that of enjoying the pithy
wisdom of Franklin in his own handwriting a few years later (1840), in
the hands of the same kind and neighborly editor. But it was not always
recognized by those who grew up in the new-born nation that in the mother
country itself a period of literary ebb tide was then prevailing. When
Fisher Ames, being laid on the shelf as a Federalist statesman, wrote the
first really important essay on American Literature,—an essay published
in 1809, after his death,—he frankly treated literature itself as merely
one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, “The time seems to
be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least poetry
of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a
long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If America had
not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no longer, it will
not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius.” Believing as
he did, that human freedom could never last long in a democracy, Ames
thought that perhaps, when liberty had given place to an emperor, this
monarch might desire to see splendor in his court, and to occupy his
subjects with the cultivation of the arts and sciences. At any rate, he
maintained, “After some ages we shall have many poor and a few rich, many
grossly ignorant, a considerable number learned, and a few eminently
learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men
of genius, who will be admired and imitated.” The first part of this
prophecy failed, but the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite
unexpected.
II
The point unconsciously ignored by Fisher Ames, and by the whole
Federalist party of his day, was that there was already being created on
this side of the ocean, not merely a new nation, but a new temperament.
How far this temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how
far from a new political organization, no one could then foresee, nor
is its origin yet fully analyzed; but the fact itself is now coming to
be more and more recognized. It may be that Nature said, at about that
time, “‘Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen
enough; now for another turning of the globe, and a further novelty. We
need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman: let us
lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one
drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.’ With that drop, a new
range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more
highly organized type of mankind was born.” This remark, which appeared
first in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold,
who missed the point entirely in calling it “tall talk” or a species
of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological
caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children
in school. In reality, it was a point of the greatest importance. If
Americans are to be merely duplicate Englishmen, Nature might have
said, the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to
represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one
finally did more toward recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold
himself, when he afterwards wrote, in 1887, “Our countrymen [namely, the
English], with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good
deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility”; and again in the same essay,
“The whole American nation may be called ‘intelligent,’ that is to say,
‘quick.’”[24] This would seem to yield the whole point between himself
and the American writer whom he had criticised, and who happened to be
the author of this present volume.
One of the best indications of this very difference of temperament, even
to this day, is the way in which American journalists and magazinists
are received in England, and their English compeers among ourselves.
An American author connected with the “St. Nicholas Magazine” was told
by a London publisher, within my recollection, that the plan of the
periodical was essentially wrong. “The pages of riddles at the end, for
instance,” he said, “no child would ever guess them”; and although the
American assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in
twenty thousand families or more, the publisher still shook his head. As
to the element of humor itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant
New York talker that he had dined through three English counties on
the strength of the jokes which he had found in the corners of an old
American “Farmer’s Almanac” which he had happened to put into his trunk
when packing for his European trip.
From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crèvecœur, down to Ampère and
De Tocqueville, there was a French appreciation, denied to the English,
of this lighter quality; and this certainly seems to indicate that the
change in the Anglo-American temperament had already begun to show
itself. Ampère especially notices what he calls “une veine européenne”
among the educated classes. Many years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne
Kemble, writing in reference to the dramatic stage, pointed out that the
theatrical instinct of Americans created in them an affinity for the
French which the English, hating exhibitions of emotion and self-display,
did not share, she recognized in our nation this tinge of the French
temperament, while perhaps giving to it an inadequate explanation.
III
The local literary prominence given, first to Philadelphia by Franklin
and Brockden Brown, and then to New York by Cooper and Irving, was
in each case too detached and fragmentary to create more than these
individual fames, however marked or lasting these may be. It required
time and a concentrated influence to constitute a literary group in
America. Bryant and Channing, with all their marked powers, served only
as a transition to it. Yet the group was surely coming, and its creation
has perhaps never been put in so compact a summary as that made by
that clear-minded ex-editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the late Horace
Scudder. He said, “It is too early to make a full survey of the immense
importance to American letters of the work done by half-a-dozen great
men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created
by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures
are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of
the country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or
institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully
affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come.”
The geographical headquarters of this particular group was Boston, of
which Cambridge and Concord may be regarded for this purpose as suburbs.
Such a circle of authors as Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell,
Whittier, Alcott, Thoreau, Parkman, and others had never before met in
America; and now that they have passed away, no such local group anywhere
remains: nor has the most marked individual genius elsewhere—such, for
instance, as that of Poe or Whitman—been the centre of so conspicuous a
combination. The best literary representative of this group of men in
bulk was undoubtedly the “Atlantic Monthly,” to which almost every one
of them contributed, and of which they made up the substantial opening
strength.
With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed at that
period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself rapidly over
the country, and in which most of the above authors took some part and
several took leading parts, these lectures having much formative power
over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous among the lecturers also
were such men as Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and
lesser men who are now collectively beginning to fade into oblivion.
With these may be added the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by
Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to
their audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia
Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These lectures
were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source of popular
education; they were subject, however, to the limitation of being rather
suggestive than instructive, because they always came in a detached
way and so did not favor coherent thinking. The much larger influence
now exerted by courses of lectures in the leading cities does more to
strengthen the habit of consecutive thought than did the earlier system;
and such courses, joined with the great improvement in public schools,
are assisting vastly in the progress of public education. The leader
who most distinguished himself in this last direction was, doubtless,
Horace Mann, who died in 1859. The influence of American colleges, while
steadily maturing into universities all over the country, has made itself
felt more and more obviously, especially as these colleges have with
startling suddenness and comprehensiveness extended their privileges to
women also, whether in the form of coeducation or of institutions for
women only.
For many years, the higher intellectual training of Americans was
obtained almost entirely through periods of study in Europe, especially
in Germany. Men, of whom Everett, Ticknor, Cogswell, and Bancroft were
the pioneers, beginning in 1818 or thereabouts, discovered that Germany
and not England must be made our national model in this higher education;
and this discovery was strengthened by the number of German refugees,
often highly trained men, who sought this country for political safety.
The influence of German literature on the American mind was undoubtedly
at its highest point half a century ago, and the passing away of the
great group of German authors then visible was even more striking than
have been the corresponding changes in England and America; but the
leadership of Germany in purely scientific thought and invention has
kept on increasing, so that the mental tie between that nation and our
own was perhaps never stronger than now.
In respect to literature, the increased tendency to fiction, everywhere
visible, has nowhere been more marked than in America. Since the days of
Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the recognized leader in this department has been
Mr. Howells; that is, if we base leadership on higher standards than that
of mere comparison of sales. The actual sale of copies in this department
of literature has been greater in certain cases than the world has before
seen; but it has rarely occurred that books thus copiously multiplied
have taken very high rank under more deliberate criticism. In some cases,
as in that of Bret Harte, an author has won fame in early life by the
creation of a few striking characters, and has then gone on reproducing
them without visible progress; and this result has been most apt to occur
wherever British praise has come in strongly, that being often more
easily won by a few interesting novelties than by anything deeper in the
way of local coloring or permanent delineation.
IV
It is sometimes said that there was never yet a great migration which did
not result in some new form of national genius; and this should be true
in America, if anywhere. He who lands from Europe on our shores perceives
a difference in the sky above his head; the height seems greater, the
zenith farther off, the horizon wall steeper. With this result on the
one side, and the vast and constant mixture of races on the other, there
must inevitably be a change. No portion of our immigrant body desires to
retain its national tongue; all races wish their children to learn the
English language as soon as possible, yet no imported race wishes its
children to take the British race, as such, for models. Our newcomers
unconsciously say with that keen thinker, David Wasson, “The Englishman
is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty
million copies of him do, for the present?” The Englishman’s strong point
is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation.
Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on
his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American’s
disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall. Washington
Irving, who seemed at first to so acute a French observer as Chasles
a mere reproduction of Pope and Addison, wrote to John Lothrop Motley
two years before his own death, “You are properly sensible of the high
calling of the American press,—that rising tribunal before which the
whole world is to be summoned, its history to be revised and rewritten,
and the judgment of past ages to be canceled or confirmed.” For one who
can look back sixty years to a time when the best literary periodical
in America was called “The Albion,” it is difficult to realize how the
intellectual relations of the two nations are now changed. M. D. Conway
once pointed out that the English magazines, such as the “Contemporary
Review” and the “Fortnightly,” were simply circular letters addressed
by a few cultivated gentlemen to the fellow members of their respective
London clubs. Where there is an American periodical, on the other hand,
the most striking contribution may proceed from a previously unknown
author, and may turn out to have been addressed practically to all the
world.
So far as the intellectual life of a nation exhibits itself in
literature, England may always have one advantage over us,—if advantage
it be,—that of possessing in London a recognized publishing centre,
where authors, editors, and publishers are all brought together. In
America, the conditions of our early political activity have supplied us
with a series of such centres, in a smaller way, beginning, doubtless,
with Philadelphia, then changing to New York, then to Boston, and again
reverting, in some degree, to New York. I say “in some degree” because
Washington has long been the political centre of the nation, and tends
more and more to occupy the same central position in respect to science,
at least; while Western cities, notably Chicago and San Francisco,
tend steadily to become literary centres for the wide regions they
represent. Meanwhile the vast activities of journalism, the readiness of
communication everywhere, the detached position of colleges, with many
other influences, decentralize literature more and more. Emerson used to
say that Europe stretched to the Alleghanies, but this at least has been
corrected, and the national spirit is coming to claim the whole continent
for its own.
There is undoubtedly a tendency in the United States to transfer
intellectual allegiance, for a time, to science rather than to
literature. This may be only a swing of the pendulum; but its temporary
influence has nowhere been better defined or characterized than by the
late Clarence King, formerly director of the United States Geological
Survey, who wrote thus a little before his death: “With all its novel
modern powers and practical sense, I am forced to admit that the purely
scientific brain is miserably mechanical; it seems to have become a
splendid sort of self-directed machine, an incredible automaton, grinding
on with its analyses or constructions. But for pure sentiment, for all
that spontaneous, joyous Greek waywardness of fancy, for the temperature
of passion and the subtler thrill of ideality, you might as well look to
a wrought-iron derrick.”
Whatever charges can be brought against the American people, no one has
yet attributed to them any want of self-confidence or self-esteem; and
though this trait may be sometimes unattractive, the philosophers agree
that it is the only path to greatness. “The only nations which ever come
to be called historic,” says Tolstoi in his “Anna Karenina,” “are those
which recognize the importance and worth of their own institutions.”
Emerson, putting the thing more tersely, as is his wont, says that “no
man can do anything well who does not think that what he does is the
centre of the visible universe.” The history of the American republic
was really the most interesting in the world, from the outset, were it
only from the mere fact that however small its scale, it yet showed a
self-governing people in a condition never before witnessed on the globe;
and so to this is now added the vaster contemplation of it as a nation of
seventy millions rapidly growing more and more. If there is no interest
in the spectacle of such a nation, laboring with all its might to build
up an advanced civilization, then there is nothing interesting on earth.
The time will come when all men will wonder, not that Americans attached
so much importance to their national development at this period, but
that they appreciated it so little. Canon Zincke has computed that in
1980 the English-speaking population of the globe will number, at the
present rate of progress, one thousand millions, and that of this number
eight hundred millions will dwell in the United States. No plans can
be too far-seeing, no toils and sacrifices too great, in establishing
this vast future civilization. It is in this light, for instance, that
we must view the immense endowments of Mr. Carnegie, which more than
fulfill the generalization of the acute author of a late Scotch novel,
“The House with Green Shutters,” who says that while a Scotchman has all
the great essentials for commercial success, “his combinations are rarely
Napoleonic until he becomes an American.”
When one looks at the apparently uncertain, but really tentative steps
taken by the trustees of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, one
sees how much must yet lie before us in our provisions for intellectual
progress. The numerical increase of our common schools and universities
is perhaps as rapid as is best, and the number of merely scientific
societies is large, but the provision for the publication of works of
real thought and literature is still far too small. The endowment of the
Smithsonian Institution now extends most comprehensively over all the
vast historical work in American history, now so widely undertaken, and
the Carnegie Institution bids fair to provide well for purely scientific
work and the publication of its results. But the far more difficult task
of developing and directing pure literature is as yet hardly attempted.
Our magazines tend more and more to become mainly picture-books, and
our really creative authors are geographically scattered and, for the
most part, wholesomely poor. We should always remember, moreover, what
is true especially in these works of fiction, that not only individual
books, but whole schools of them, emerge and disappear, like the flash of
a revolving light; you must make the most of it while you have it. “The
highways of literature are spread over,” said Holmes, “with the shells
of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the
public, and is done with.”
In America, as in England, the leading literary groups are just now to be
found less among the poets than among the writers of prose fiction. Of
these younger authors, we have in America such men as Winston Churchill,
Robert Grant, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Arthur S. Pier, and George
Wasson; any one of whom may at any moment surprise us by doing something
better than the best he has before achieved. The same promise of a high
standard is visible in women, among whom may be named not merely those of
maturer standing, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, who is the leader, but
her younger sisters, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Josephine
Preston Peabody. The drama also is advancing with rapid steps, and is
likely to be still more successful in such hands as those of William
Vaughn Moody, Ridgely Torrence, and Percy McKaye. The leader of English
dramatic criticism, William Archer, found within the last year, as he
tells us, no less than eight or nine notable American dramas in active
representation on the stage, whereas eight years earlier there was but
one.
Similar signs of promise are showing themselves in the direction of
literature, social science, and higher education generally, all of which
have an honored representative, still in middle life, in Professor
George E. Woodberry. Professor Newcomb has just boldly pointed out that
we have intellectually grown, as a nation, “from the high school of our
Revolutionary ancestors to the college; from the college we have grown
to the university stage. Now we have grown to a point where we need
something beyond the university.” What he claims for science is yet more
needed in the walks of pure literature, and is there incomparably harder
to attain, since it has there to deal with that more subtle and vaster
form of mental action which culminates in Shakespeare instead of Newton.
This higher effort, which the French Academy alone even attempts,—however
it may fail in the accomplished results,—may at least be kept before us
as an ideal for American students and writers, even should its demands be
reduced to something as simple as those laid down by Coleridge when he
announced his ability to “inform the dullest writer how he might write
an interesting book.” “Let him,” says Coleridge, “relate the events of
his own life with honesty, not disguising the feeling that accompanied
them.”[25] Thus simple, it would seem, are the requirements for a really
good book; but, alas! who is to fulfill them? Yet if anywhere, why not in
America?
FOOTNOTES
[1] _Outlook_, October, 1907.
[2] Bancroft’s _History of the United States_, i, 247.
[3] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_.
[4] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 158.
[5] Thatcher’s _Lives of Indians_, i, 119.
[6] Thatcher’s _Lives of Indians_, i, 120.
[7] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 194.
[8] Belknap’s _American Biography_, ii, 214.
[9] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 194, note.
[10] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_, 22.
[11] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_, 25.
[12] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, ii, 566.
[13] _Emerson in Concord_, 120.
[14] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, i, 264.
[15] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, i, 262.
[16] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, ii, 477.
[17] _Memoirs_, ii, 473.
[18] _Address before the Alumni of Andover_, 1.
[19] _Address before the Alumni of Andover_, 10.
[20] _Address to Workingmen in Providence_, April 11, 1886, p. 19.
[21] Lodge’s _George Cabot_, 12, note.
[22] _Harvard Reminiscences_, by Andrew Preston Peabody, D. D., LL. D.,
p. 18.
[23] “Toute l’Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste.” _Études sur la
Littérature et les Mœurs des Anglo-Américains_, Paris, 1851.
[24] _Nineteenth Century_, xxii, 324, 319.
[25] _Quarterly Review_, xcviii, 456.
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