Great Britain and the United States are sister Commonwealths, enjoying
the advantages and exposed to the dangers of sisterhood. The dangers are
as real, though we trust not as great, as the advantages. Family
quarrels are apt to be bitterest; a chance word will seem unkind and
unbearable from a near kinsman, which, coming from a stranger, would
carry no sting at all. As Lowell very truly said, "The common blood, and
still more the common language, are fatal instruments of
misapprehension." But behind this statement there lies a far deeper
though still obvious truth. We misunderstand because we understand; and
it would be an extravagance of pessimism to doubt that, in the long run,
understanding will carry the day. Light may dazzle here and bewilder
there; but, after all, it is light and not darkness. We English and
Americans hold a talisman that makes us at home over half, and more than
half, the world; and we are not going to rob it of its virtue by
renouncing our ties, and wantonly declaring ourselves aliens to each
other.
Our unity of speech is such a commonplace that we scarcely notice it.
But, rightly regarded, it is a thing to be rejoiced in with a great joy,
and not without a certain sense of danger happily escaped. He would have
been a bold man who should confidently have prophesied at the Revolution
that American and English would remain the same tongue, and that at the
end of the nineteenth century there would not be the slightest
perceptible cleavage, or threat of ultimate divergence. No doubt there
were forces obviously tending to preserve the linguistic unity of the
two nations. There was the English Bible for one thing, and there was
the whole body of English literature. The Americans, it might have been
said, could scarcely be so foolish as deliberately to renounce their
spiritual birthright, or let it drift little by little away from them.
But, on the other hand, virulent and inveterate political enmity, had it
arisen, might quite conceivably have led the Americans to make it a
point of honour to differentiate their speech from ours, as many
Norwegians are at this moment making it a point of honour to
differentiate their language from the Danish, which was until of late
years the generally accepted medium of literary expression. In the
evolution of their literature, the Americans might purposely have
rejected our classical tradition, making their effort rather to depart
from than to adhere to it. Again, an observer in 1776 could not have
foreseen the practical annihilation, by steam and electricity, of that
barrier which then appeared so formidable--the Atlantic Ocean. He might
have foreseen the immense influx of men of every race and tongue into
the unpeopled West; but he could scarcely have anticipated with
confidence the ready absorption of all these alien elements (save one!)
into the dominant Anglo-Saxon polity. It was quite on the cards that a
new American language might have developed from a fusion of all the
diverse tongues of all the scattered races of the earth.
Nothing of the sort, as we know, has happened. The instinct of kinship
from the first kept political enmity in check; the Atlantic has been
practically wiped out; and English has easily absorbed, in America, all
the other idioms which have been brought into contact, rather than
competition, with it. The result is that the English language occupies a
unique position among the tongues of the earth. It is unique in two
dimensions--in altitude and in expanse. It soars to the highest heights
of human utterance, and it covers an unequalled area of the earth's
surface. Undoubtedly it is the most precious heirloom of our race, and
as such we must reverence and guard it. Nor must we islanders talk as
though we hold it in fee-simple, and allowed our trans-Atlantic kinsfolk
merely a conditional usufruct of it. Their property in it is as complete
and indefeasible as our own; and we should rejoice to accept their aid
in the conversation and renovation (equally indispensable processes) of
this superb and priceless heritage.
English critics of the beginning of the century so convincingly set
forth the reasons why America, absorbed in the conquest of nature and in
material progress, could not produce anything great in the way of
literature, that their arguments remain embedded in many minds even to
this day, when events have conclusively falsified them. It is a
commonplace with some people that America has not developed a great
_American_ literature. If this merely means that, in casting off her
allegiance to George III., America did not cast off her allegiance to
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, the
reproach, if it be one, must be accepted. If it be a humiliation to
American authors to own the traditions and standards established by
these men, and thereby to enrol themselves in their immortal fellowship,
why, then it must be owned that they have deliberately incurred that
humiliation. One American of vivid originality tried to escape it, and
with what result? Simply that Whitman holds a place of his own, somewhat
like that of Blake one might say, in the literature of the English
language, and has produced at least as much effect in England as in
America. If, on the other hand, it be implied that American literature
feebly imitates English literature, and fails to present an original and
adequate interpretation of American life, no reproach could well be more
flagrantly unjust. It is not only the abstract merit of American
literature, though that is very high, but precisely the Americanism of
it, that gives it its value in the eyes of all thinking Englishmen. Only
one American author of the first rank could possibly, at a superficial
glance, appear--not so much English as--European, cosmopolitan. I mean,
of course, Edgar Allan Poe, who has left perhaps a deeper impress upon
literature outside the English-speaking countries than any other
imaginative writer of the century, with the exception of Byron. Poe was
a born idealist, a creature of pure intelligence. Whether in poetry or
fiction, he was always solving problems; and it is hard to be
distinctively national in an exercise of pure intelligence. We do not
look for local colour in, for example, the agreeable essays of Euclid.
But Poe's intelligence was, at bottom, of a characteristically American
type. He was the Edison of romance.[N] As for the other great writers of
America, what can be more patent than their Americanism? Speaking only,
for the present, of those who have joined the majority, I would name two
who seem to me to stand with Poe in the very front rank of original
genius. They are Emerson, that starlike spirit, dwelling in a serener
ether than ours, which, though we may never attain, it is yet a
refreshment to look up to; and Hawthorne, not perhaps the greatest
romancer in the English tongue, but certainly the purest artist in that
sphere of fiction. Now, it is a mere truism to say that each of these
men was, in his way, a typical product of New England, inconceivable as
the offspring of any other soil in the world. Emerson, it has been said,
not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying
into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole
which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the
conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and
reproduced the physical charm of Rome more subtly than any other artist,
his genius drew at once its strength and its delicacy from his Puritan
ancestry and environment. To realise how intimately he smacks of the
soil, we have but to think of that marvellous scene in _The Blithedale
Romance_, the search for Zenobia's body. From what does it derive its
peculiar quality, its haunting savour? Simply from the presence of Silas
Foster, that delightful incarnation of the New England yeoman. "If I
thought anything had happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o'
sorrowful," said the grim Silas; and there never was a speech more
dramatically true, or, in its context, more bitterly pathetic.
Even while English critics were proving that there could be no such
thing as an American literature, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper
were laying its foundations on a thoroughly American basis. Irving was
none the less American for loving the picturesque traditions of his
English ancestry; Cooper, a gallant and fertile genius, did his country
and our language an inestimable service by adding a whole group of
specifically American figures to the deathless aristocracy of the realms
of romance. Then, in the generation which has just passed away, we have
such men as Thoreau, racy of his native soil; Longfellow, in his day and
way the chief interpreter of America to England; Whittier, so intensely
local that, as Professor Matthews puts it, "he wrote for New England
rather than for the whole of the United States;" Lowell, courtly,
cultured, cosmopolitan, and yet the creator of Hosea Biglow; Holmes, as
American in his humour as Lamb was English, who justly ranks with Lamb
and Goldsmith among the personally best-beloved writers of the English
tongue. Prescott, in the sphere of history, paralleled the achievement
of Cooper in fiction, by giving literary form to the romance of the New
World; while Motley was inspired (too ardently, perhaps) by the spirit
of free America in writing the great epic of religious and political
freedom in Europe. Finally, it must not be forgotten that in _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, a tragically American production, Mrs. Beecher Stowe added
to the literature of the English language the most potent, the most
dynamic, pamphlet ever hurled into the arena of national life.
Of all that living Americans are doing for the literature of our common
tongue it is as yet impossible to speak adequately. Since 1870, a new
spirit of nationalism has entered into American literature, which has
not yet been thoroughly studied in America or appreciated in England. So
far from having no national literature, America has now, perhaps, the
most intimately national body of fiction in the modern world. Before the
Civil War there was practically no deliberate and systematic study of
local and racial idiosyncracies. Hosea Biglow was a mask, not a
character, and Parson Wilbur was a literary device. Even Hawthorne
thought primarily of the element of imagination in the romances--the
universal, not the local, element. His leading characters are
psychological creations, with nothing specifically American about them;
his local colour and local character-study, though admirable, are
incidental, or at any rate stand on a secondary plane. In the South
there was no literature at all, local or otherwise, with the one
startling exception of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.[O] But since 1870, and
mainly, indeed, within the past twenty years, a marvellous change has
come over the scene. Not only the national but the local
self-consciousness of America has sprung to literary life, until at the
present day there is scarcely a corner of the country, scarcely an
aspect of social life, that has not found its special, and, as a rule,
very able interpreter through the medium of fiction. Pursuing technical
methods partly borrowed from abroad (from France rather than from
England), American writers have undertaken what one is tempted to call a
sociological ordnance-survey of the Republic from Maine to Arizona, from
Florida to Oregon. There is scarcely a human being in the United States,
from the Newport society belle to the "greaser" of New Mexico, that has
not his or her more or less faithful counterpart in fiction. No European
country, so far as I know, has achieved anything like such comprehensive
self-realisation. Comprehensive, I say--not necessarily profound.
Perhaps France in Balzac, perhaps Russia in Turgueneff and Tolstoï,
found more searching interpretation than America has found even in her
host of novelists. But never, surely, was there a body of fiction that
touched life at so many points, to mirror if not to probe it. And in
many cases to probe it as well.
It would take a volume to criticise these writers in any detail. I can
attempt no more than a bald and imperfect enumeration. Miss Mary
Wilkins's studies of New England life are well known and appreciated in
England, but the talent of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett is not sufficiently
recognised. In her _Country of the Pointed Firs_, for example, there are
whole chapters that rise to a classical perfection of workmanship. The
novelists of the Eastern cities, with Mr. Howells, a master craftsman,
at their head, are of course numberless. For studies in the local colour
of New York nothing could be better than Professor Brander Matthews'
_Vignettes of Manhattan_, and other stories. Mr. Paul Leicester Ford's
_Honorable Peter Stirling_, though antiquated in style, gives a
remarkable picture of political life in New York. The Bowery Boy is
cleverly represented, so far as dialect at any rate is concerned, by
Mr. E.W. Townsend in his _Chimmie Fadden_. Even the Jewish and the
Italian quarters of New York have their portraitists in fiction. Life in
Washington has been frequently and ably depicted; for instance, in Mrs.
Burnett's _Through one Administration_. Of the many interpreters of the
South I need mention only three: Mr. Cable, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and
Mr. Chandler Harris. Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") has made
the mountains of Tennessee her special province. Chicago has several
novelists of her own: for example, Mr. Henry Fuller, author of _The
Cliff Dwellers_, Mr. Will Payne, and that close student of Chicago
slang, Mr. George Ade, the author of _Artie_. The Middle West counts
such novelists as Miss "Octave Thanet" and Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose
_Main Travelled Roads_ contains some very remarkable work. The Far West
is best represented, perhaps, in the lively and graphic sketches of Mr.
Owen Wister; while California has novelists of talent in Miss Gertrude
Atherton and Mr. Frank Norris. At least two Americans living abroad have
made noteworthy contributions to this sociological survey of their
native land: the late Mr. Harold Frederic, who has dealt mainly with
country life in New York State, and Miss Elizabeth Robins, whose
picture, in _The Open Question_, of a Southern family impoverished by
the war, is exceedingly vivid and bears all the marks of the utmost
fidelity. Nor must I omit to mention that the stage has borne a modest
but not insignificant part in this movement of national
self-portraiture. Mr. Augustus Thomas' _Alabama_ is a delightful picture
of Southern life, while Mr. James A. Herne's _Shore Acres_ takes a
distinct place in the literature of New England, his _Griffith
Davenport_[P] in the literature of Virginia.
There must, of course, be many gaps in this summary enumeration. It is
very probable that many novelists of distinction have altogether escaped
my notice; and I have made no attempt to include in my list the writers
of short magazine stories, many of them artists of high accomplishment.
One omission, however, I must at once repair. "Mark Twain's"
contributions to the work of self-realisation have been in the main
retrospective, but nevertheless of the first importance. He is the
"sacred poet" of the Mississippi. If any work of incontestable genius,
and plainly predestined to immortality, has been issued in the English
language during the past quarter of a century, it is that brilliant
romance of the Great Rivers, _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.
Intensely American though he be, "Mark Twain" is one of the greatest
living masters of the English language. To some Englishmen this may seem
a paradox; but it is high time we should disabuse ourselves of the
prejudice that residence on the European side of the Atlantic confers
upon us an exclusive right to determine what is good English, and to
write it correctly and vigorously. We are apt in England to class as an
"Americanism" every unfamiliar, or too familiar, locution which we do
not happen to like. As a matter of fact, there is a pretty lively
interchange between the two countries of slipshod and vulgar
"journalese;" and as the picturesque reporter is a greater power in
America than he is with us, we perhaps import more than we export of
this particular commodity. But there can be no rational doubt, I think,
that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its
expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language,
after all, is to interpret the "form and pressure" of life--the
experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race
which employs it. This being so, the more tap-roots a language sends
down into the soil of life, and the more varied the strata of human
experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary or
idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of
expression. We must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism
healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue; but to that duty
American writers are quite as keenly alive as we. It is not a source of
weakness but of power and vitality to the English language that it
should embrace a greater variety of dialects than any other civilised
tongue. A new language, says the proverb, is a new sense; but a
multiplicity of dialects means, for the possessors of the main language,
an enlargement of the pleasures of the linguistic sense without the
fatigue of learning a totally new grammar and vocabulary. So long as
there is a potent literary tradition keeping the core of the language
one and indivisible, vernacular variations can only tend, in virtue of
the survival of the fittest, to promote the abundance, suppleness, and
nicety of adaptation of the language as a literary instrument. The
English language is no mere historic monument, like Westminster Abbey,
to be religiously preserved as a relic of the past, and reverenced as
the burial-place of a bygone breed of giants. It is a living organism,
ceaselessly busied, like any other organism, in the processes of
assimilation and excretion. It has before it, we may fairly hope, a
future still greater than its glorious past. And the greatness of that
future will largely depend on the harmonious interplay of spiritual
forces throughout the American Republic and the British Empire.