literature, to consist solely of such happy strokes. Let no man write
anything till he can write a masterpiece, they say. Yes, and let no
boy go near the water till he has learned to swim; and since crows
have waxed destructive, let cornfields be planted hereafter with no
outside rows; and lest malarial fevers should make an end of the human
race, let all plains and valleys be filled up, and nothing remain but
mountains. In short, seeing that failure has been the rule hitherto,
let us abolish rules, and get on with exceptions alone; a condition
of things curiously prefigured in certain Grammars of the Latin
Language, of a kind still sorrowfully remembered by elderly people. A
fine economy, surely, and well worth thinking about. But for the time
being, till dreams become substantial, this present evil world, as we
reverently call it, remembering its Creator, must be suffered to jog
along in its ancient, expensive, wasteful-seeming, happy-go-lucky,
highly-exceptionable manner: a million seeds, and one tree; a million
books, and one _chef-d’œuvre_. Classics are not yet produced of set
purpose, nor do they make their advent in royal isolation, starred and
wearing the laurel. They come, as was said just now, with the crowd,
the “spawn of the press,” if they come at all, and are only sifted out
by the slow hand of time. And meanwhile their humbler fellows, missing
of immortality, may nevertheless have their day and serve their turn.
Readers, fortunately or unfortunately, are of many grades, and even the
wisest of them--in some unwiser but not infrequent mood--desire not a
classic, but something a shade less excellent. “There is no book that
is acceptable, unless at certain seasons.” So said Milton; and the
saying is true, even of “Paradise Lost.” In the great sea of literature
there is room both for the big fish and for “the other fry.” Let us be
thankful; and if we are scribblers, by nature or by conceit, let us
scribble on.
CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE
CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE
“Writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no
future.”--LOWELL.
It is an old story that the people of the United States have been slow
in achieving their intellectual independence. The British yoke has
remained upon our minds, though we have cast it off our necks. Our
literary men, especially, have deferred to English models and English
ideas. So we have been told till the tale has become monotonous.
What everybody says must be true--perhaps; but even so, there may
be something to offer on the other side, or by way of extenuation,
although the man who should venture to offer it--such is the
peculiarity of the case and the perversity of human nature--might find
himself accounted unpatriotic for coming to the defense of his own
countrymen.
In times past, assuredly, whatever may be true now, the condition of
things so much complained of was little reprehensible. Good or bad, it
was nothing more than was to have been expected as circumstances then
were. We had been English to begin with, and, for better or worse, the
English nature is not of a sort to be put off with a turn of the hand,
at the signing of a political document. It is self-evident, also, that
in the world of ideas every people, whether it will or no, must live
largely upon its ancestry. The utmost that any generation can hope to
do is to contribute its mite to the intellectual tradition. The better
part of its reading must be out of books that its predecessors have
sifted from the mass and handed down. If it adds a few of its own--two
or three, by good luck--to the permanent literature of the race, it
does all that can reasonably be demanded of it. And even so much as
this was hardly to be looked for from the American people during its
colonial period and for some decades afterwards, with a wilderness to
be subdued, savage neighbors to be held in check, and all the machinery
of civilization to be newly set up. Books are a record and criticism
of life, and those to whom life itself is an absorbing occupation are
not likely, unless they are almost insanely intellectual, to spend
any very considerable share of their days in work of a secondary and
postponable character. Life is more than criticism, and the best and
greatest people are those whose deeds give other people something to
write about. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if American books
of a kind to be called literature were slow in coming; and we may
confess without shame that up to the year 1820 or thereabouts--say till
the advent of Irving and Cooper--the people of this country, if they
read anything better than sermons and almanacs, were obliged to depend
chiefly upon foreign authors. To which confession it may be added,
equally without shame, that even the works of Cooper and Irving were
scarcely sufficient of themselves to satisfy for many years together
the cravings of eager and serious minds. At all times and in all
countries, such minds, with the best will in the world to be loyal to
their own day, have been obliged to look mainly to old books.
About the past, then, we need not spend time in mourning. If we play
our part as well as the fathers played theirs, we shall have no great
cause to blush. Since their day, what with Irving and Cooper and their
contemporaries and successors, there has been no dearth of books
written on this side of the water; but the complaint is still rife
that we have little or nothing in the way of a national literature: by
which it is meant, apparently, that our writers are not yet Americans,
or do not succeed in expressing the national spirit. Only the other
day, a critic, discoursing on “the conservatism and timidity of our
literature,” charged it against Lowell that “in his habits of writing
he continued English tradition,” whatever that may mean. “Our best
scholar” allowed his real self to speak but twice, we are given to
understand; then he spoke in dialect. His “Commemoration Ode” was a
splendid failure, because it was “imitative and secondary.” Whether it,
too, should have been written in dialect, we are not informed; but it
appears to be taken for granted that its failure, if it was a failure,
came, not from lack of genius or inspiration, but from deference to
foreign models. One cannot help wondering what Lowell himself would
have said to such a criticism: that he wrote in English and like an
Englishman because he dared not write in his own tongue and in his own
way. When a Scotchman complimented him upon his English,--“so like a
native’s,”--and asked him bluntly where he got it, he answered with
equal bluntness, in the words of the old song,--
“‘I got it in my mither’s wame.’”
Yet Lowell, who spoke but twice in his own character, seems to have
done better than most of his fellows; for he and Curtis are the
only men of letters to find a place in a recent “Calendar of Great
Americans.” All their contemporaries and predecessors were either not
great, or else were something other than American,--cosmopolitan,
provincial, or English. Irving, Cooper, Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft,
Parkman,--not one of these will bear the test. As for Emerson, he is
ruled out by name, because he was the “author of such thought as might
have been native to any clime.” He is of the world, and therefore not
American. It seems a hard judgment that the man who wrote “The Fortune
of the Republic,” “The Young American,” and the “Concord Hymn,”--the
man of whom it was recently said, so finely and so truly, that “he sent
ten thousand sons to the war,”--should find himself at this late hour
a man without a country. On such terms it is doubtful praise to be
called a cosmopolitan: and in view of such a ruling it becomes evident
that the exact nature of Americanism as a literary quality is yet to be
defined. Lowell’s attempt in that direction, by-the-bye, is probably
among the best. An American, according to Lowell’s idea of him,--so Mr.
James says,--was a man at once fresh and ripe.
When it comes to practice, however, there is one American poet whose
literary patriotism was never called in question. The reference is of
course to Whitman. Listen to him, as he appeals to whoever “would
assume a place to teach or be a poet here in the States:”--
“Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,
pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first
year of Independence, signed by the Commissioners, ratified by the
States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?
Have you possessed yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them,
and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?”
“Conservatism and timidity”! Here is one man, at all events, who is not
to be accused of “continuing English tradition.” He, if nobody else,
breathes a “haughty defiance of the Year One.” He may or may not be
“ripe;” he certainly is “fresh.” If there be some who fail to enjoy his
verse, there can be none who do not admire his courage.
But surely it was not to be insisted upon, nor even expected, that
all American authors should break away thus suddenly and completely
from the past. Perhaps it was not even to be desired: partly because
variety is better than the best of sameness, and partly because so
abrupt a change might in the long run have hindered our emancipation.
Some readers would have been puzzled, others would have been offended.
Here and there one, at least, would have been ready to say, with
Wordsworth,--
“Me this unchartered freedom tires.”
Little by little a reaction would have been produced, the “substratums
and objects” of the land would have suffered disastrous eclipse,
“feudal processes and poems” would have come in like a flood, and the
last state of the national mind would have been worse than the first.
Nor can this extreme of revolt, or any approach to it, be thought
necessary to constitute an American writer. “American” and “rebel” are
not synonymous at this hour of the day. American literature, if we may
assert our American right to speak a truism roundly, is literature
written by Americans; that is to say, by the people of the United
States. In its subject it may be old or new, domestic or foreign; it
may be written in dialect,--sometimes called American,--or in English;
in any case, if it is literature at all, it is American literature.
And since there is already a body of such writing, we may venture
upon another capital letter, by the compositor’s leave, and speak of
it--still modestly, and remembering its youth--as American Literature.
For youthful it is, in the nature of the case, with its character but
imperfectly formed, and its full share of juvenile foibles; still
showing, as is inevitable and not discreditable, abundant traces of its
English origin.
Thus far, it must be owned, it can boast little or no representation
among the supremely great of the earth. The genius of a new country
produces men of action rather than poets and philosophers. Washington
and Lincoln are names to shine in any company, but as yet the roll of
American authors contains few Homers and Shakespeares, and no great
number of Dantes and Miltons. Such as they are, however, they are
our own, and though in some cases we might have wished them more
“distinctively American,” we need not be in haste on that account
to tag them with a foreign label. Neither need we delude ourselves
with the notion that they might have been transcendent geniuses,
all of them, had they but stood up resolutely against the English
tradition. How to become a genius is one of the hard problems. There
is no likelihood that it can be solved by any process of intellectual
jingoism. The secret may consist partly in being one’s self; pretty
certainly it does not consist in being different from somebody else.
Between imitation and a set attempt to avoid imitation there is not so
very much to choose. Either of them stamps the work as secondary. As
for Homers and Shakespeares, we may remember for our comfort that names
like these are not to be found, in any country, among the living: they
never have been.[12]
For our comfort, too, though not in the every-day sense of that
word, we do well to remind ourselves that as the greatness of our
American authors is but relative, so is the newness of our American
spirit. All that is called new is born of the old, and is itself in
part old. The movement of history is not by successive creations of
something out of nothing, but by the development of one thing from
another; and whether we like to believe it or not, this that we call
the American idea stands within the general law: it has been evolved,
or rather it is being evolved, out of what was before it. The public
mind, stirred by patriotic impulses and restive under criticism, may
clamor for originality, meaning by that absolute novelty, and North,
South, East, and West may exhaust themselves to answer the appeal:
we shall never see an absolutely new book, be it the “great American
novel” or anything else. As time goes on, we shall have, by the slow
processes of nature, a literature more and more distinctive, more and
more independent, and more and more unlike the English, more and more
American; but to the end its originality, like that of all literature,
will be but relative. Though men cross the sea, they can never escape
the spirit of their forerunners. Our very rebelliousness against
English domination is an English trait. The great American book, when
it comes, will not spring from virgin soil, but from seed, and the seed
will have had an age-long ancestry. “Works proceed from works,” says
a learned French critic; and the most searching of American critics
had something of the same thought in mind when he wrote, fifty years
ago, in response to inquiries “in Cambridge orations and elsewhere”
for “that great absentee,” an American literature, “A literature is no
man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result.”
What then? Shall we cease effort, and leave it to blind law to work
out for us our intellectual salvation? That would be childish. Because
one thing is true, it does not follow that another and seemingly
contradictory thing may not be true likewise. The same Emerson who
spoke of literature as a “generic result,”--a word so anticipatory of
later thought as to seem like a flash of genius,--and therefore “no
man’s private concern,” was never done with proclaiming the power of
the individual soul and the omnipotence of individual faith. He never
scolded his countrymen; he cherished no illusion about the ability
of the American people or any other to hurry the accomplishment of a
“secular result;” but he, more than all others combined, enforced the
duty of American scholars to free themselves from the swaddling-clothes
of tradition; to live in the present, think in the present, believe in
the present, and speak always their own word. And the French critic
just now quoted, so modern in his point of view, so very different in
many respects from Emerson,--though Emerson, too, believed the laws
and powers of the intellect to be “facts in a natural history,” and
so “objects of science,”--was quoted but in part. “In literature as
in art,” he says, “the great operative cause--after the influence of
individuality--is that of works upon works.” The words are those of
M. Brunetière, who, in his attempt to apply to literary criticism the
methods of natural science, has seemed sometimes to allow more than
enough to the power of things over thought; yet he, too, treating
of the evolution of literary forms, gives the first place in that
evolution, not to changed conditions, nor to the germinal force of
great models, nor to the “moment,” a word on which he greatly insists,
but to the power of the individual.
And where ought this power of the individual to be quickly and strongly
felt, if not in a democracy and in a new world?
Like many other good things, nevertheless, individuality, though it may
properly be sought, is not to be gone after too directly,--as if it
could be carried by assault. Originality has often suffered violence,
it is true, but the violent have never taken it by force. We are not to
hope for intellectual life by any process of spontaneous generation;
nor are we to dread abjectly the influence of other minds over our own.
Individuality is a gift rarely lost, except by those who lose it before
they are born. Franklin, it is universally agreed, was an American of
the most pronounced type, one of our greatest and most original men.
His style, as Mr. James says of Lowell’s, was “an indefeasible part of
him;” yet all the world knows that he formed it, or believed that he
formed it, by a studious imitation of Addison. Originality is theirs
to whom it is given. With it a man may drench himself in the wisdom of
the ages, and take no harm; without it he may eschew books never so
jealously, and look into his own heart with never so complete a faith,
and come to no good.
All of which is not to say that a scholar may not occupy himself too
much with the thoughts of others to the neglect of his own, or that
Americans as a people may not defer unreasonably to foreign standards.
Between the two extremes, excessive dependence upon tradition and a too
exclusive confidence in one’s own genius, there is a middle course.
If we cannot find it, then we are not yet ripe for a great national
literature, which must be the result of the old culture bestowed upon
new soil in a new time and under new conditions.
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In this Old Colony town, though none of his English biographers
appear to know it, the boy Hazlitt lived in the Old North Parsonage,
in which had lived some time before a girl named Abigail Smith,
afterward better known as Abigail Adams, wife of the second President
of the United States, and mother of the sixth. For which fact, more
interesting to him than to his readers, it is to be feared, the present
writer is indebted to the researches of his old Weymouth schoolmate,
now President of the Weymouth Historical Society, Mr. John J. Loud.
[2] As it was to Solomon and, by this time, to William Hazlitt.
[3] “Mr. Johnson, indeed, as he was a very talking man himself, had an
idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as conversation.”--Mrs.
Piozzi.
[4] Author of _Two Suffolk Friends_.
[5] In a letter to his friend Pollock he says: “To-morrow I am going to
one of my great treats, namely, the Assizes at Ipswich: where I shall
see little Voltaire Jervis, and old Parke, who I trust will have the
gout, he bears it so Christianly.”
[6] In connection with which it is good to remember that when
Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of
his old friends he had loved most, he replied, “Why, dear old Fitz,
to be sure.” After FitzGerald’s death Tennyson wrote of him: “I had
no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never
known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”
[7] After he began writing, the question of an individual style took
on, as was inevitable, a different complexion. In his early days he
would not read Carlyle, and (more surprising) at forty or thereabout he
discontinued the reading of Livy; dreading in both cases an injury to
his own manner.
[8] How largely he profited by his study of Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, and other poets, especially in the enrichment of his
vocabulary, is shown by Mr. E. de Sélincourt in the notes and
appendices to his recent admirable edition of Keats’s _Poems_. The
subject is interesting, and is treated in the most painstaking manner.
[9] At this very time, by-the-bye, Hazlitt was lecturing, and Keats,
after hearing him, reports to his brother (February 14, 1818),
“Hazlitt’s last lecture was on Thomson, Cowper, and Crabbe. He praised
Thomson and Cowper, but he gave Crabbe an unmerciful licking.”
[10] We speak thus without forgetting that an American poet once wrote
(what a reputable American periodical printed) a revised version of
one of the odes, just to show how easily Keats could be improved upon.
The good man might have been, though we believe he was not, brother to
the one of whom we have all heard, who declared his opinion that there
weren’t ten men in Boston who could have written Shakespeare’s plays.
[11] Is there a possible connection between this fact and the further
one that really magical lines are seldom or never to be found in the
work of the more distinctively musical poets,--say in Coleridge,
Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne?
[12] According to an eminent French critic, M. de Wyzewa, the United
States still has (since Whitman’s death, he means to say) two
poets,--Mr. Merril and Mr. Griffin. “Only two” is the critic’s phrase,
but the adverb need not disturb us. A busy people who have two poets at
once may count themselves rich.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.