prejudice, from bigotry, from fanaticism, from superstition. It is open
to invasion by strange and uncouth forms of religiosity. America has
offered a fertile soil for the culture of new and queer religions. But
on the whole,--yes, in immensely the larger proportion,--the old
religion prevails, and a rather simple and primitive type of
Christianity keeps its hold upon the hearts and minds of the majority.
The consequence of this is (to quote again from Professor Münsterberg,
lest you should think me a prejudiced reporter), that "however many sins
there are, the life of the people is intrinsically pure, moral, and
devout." "The number of those who live above the general level of moral
requirement is astonishingly large."
Now this habit of soul, this tone of life, is reflected in American
literature. Whatever defects it may have, a lack of serious feeling and
purpose is not among them. It is pervaded, generally, by the spiritual
preconception. It approaches life from the point of view of
responsibility. It gives full value to those instincts, desires, and
hopes in man which have to do with the unseen world.
Even in those writers who are moved by a sense of revolt against the
darkness and severity of certain theological creeds, the attempt is not
to escape from religion, but to find a clearer, nobler, and more loving
expression of religion. Even in those works which deal with subjects
which are non-religious in their specific quality,--stories of
adventure, like Cooper's novels; poems of romance, like the ballads of
Longfellow and Whittier,--one feels the implication of a spiritual
background, a moral law, a Divine providence,--
"Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."
This, hitherto, has been the characteristic note of the literature of
America. It has taken for granted that there is a God, that men must
answer to Him for their actions, and that one of the most interesting
things about people, even in books, is their moral quality.
(2) Another trait which seems to me strongly marked in the American
temperament and clearly reflected in American literature is the love of
nature. The attractions of the big out-of-doors have taken hold upon the
people. They feel a strong affection for their great, free, untended
forests, their swift-rushing rivers, their bright, friendly brooks,
their wooded mountain ranges of the East, their snowy peaks and vast
plains and many-coloured canyons of the West.
I suppose there is no other country in the world where so many people
break away from the fatigues of civilization every year, and go out to
live in the open for a vacation with nature. The business of making
tents and camp outfits for these voluntary gypsies has grown to be
enormous. In California they do not even ask for a tent. They sleep _à
la belle étoile_.
The Audubon societies have spread to every State. You will not find
anywhere in Europe, except perhaps in Switzerland, such companies of
boys and girls studying the wild flowers and the birds. The interest is
not altogether, nor mainly, scientific. It is vital and temperamental.
It is the expression of an inborn sympathy with nature and a real
delight in her works.
This has found an utterance in the large and growing "nature-literature"
of America. John James Audubon, Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, Clarence
King, John Muir, Ernest Seton, Frank Chapman, Ernest Ingersoll,--these
are some of the men who have not only carefully described, but also
lovingly interpreted, "nature in her visible forms," and so have given
to their books, beyond the value of accurate records of observation, the
charm of sympathetic and illuminative writing.
But it is not only in these special books that I would look for evidence
of the love of nature in the American temperament. It is found all
through the poetry and the prose of the best writers. The most perfect
bit of writing in the works of that stern Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards,
is the description of an early morning walk through a field of wild
flowers. Some of the best pages of Irving and Cooper are sketches of
landscape along the Hudson River. The scenery of New England is drawn
with infinite delicacy and skill in the poetry of Bryant, Whittier, and
Emerson. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller make as see the painted desert
and the ragged Sierras. James Lane Allen shows us the hemp fields of
Kentucky, George Cable the bayous of Louisiana. But the list of
illustrations is endless. The whole literature of America is filled with
pictures of nature. There is hardly a familiar bird or flower for which
some poet has not tried to find a distinct, personal, significant
expression in his verse.
(3) A third trait of the American temperament is the sense of humour.
This is famous, not to say notorious. The Americans are supposed to be a
nation of jokers, whose daily jests, like their ready-made shoes, have a
peculiar oblique form which makes it slightly difficult for people of
other nationalities to get into them.
There may be some truth in the latter part of this supposition, for I
have frequently observed that a remark which seemed to me very amusing
only puzzled a foreigner. For example, a few years ago, when Mark Twain
was in Europe, a despatch appeared in some of the American newspapers
giving an account of his sudden death. Knowing that this would trouble
his friends, and being quite well, he sent a cablegram in these words,
"Report of my death grossly exaggerated, Mark Twain." When I repeated
this to an Englishman, he looked at me pityingly and said: "But how
could you exaggerate a thing like that, my dear fellow? Either he was
dead, or he was alive, don't you know." This was perfectly
incontestable, and the statement of it represented the English point of
view.
But to the American incontestable things often have a double aspect:
first that of the solemn fact; and then that of the curious, unreal,
pretentious shape in which it is dressed by fashion, or vanity, or
stupid respectability. In this region of incongruities created by the
contrast between things as they really are and the way in which dull or
self-important people usually talk about them, American humour plays.
It is not irreverent toward the realities. But for the
conventionalities, the absurdities, the pomposities of life, it has a
habit of friendly satire and good-tempered raillery. It is not like the
French wit, brilliant and pointed. It is not like the English fun, in
which practical joking plays so large a part. It is not like the German
joke, which announces its arrival with the sound of a trumpet. It
usually wears rather a sober face and speaks with a quiet voice. It
delights in exposing pretensions by gravely carrying them to the point
of wild extravagance. It finds its material in subjects which are
laughable, but not odious; and in people who are ridiculous, but not
hateful.
Its favourite method is to exaggerate the foibles of persons who are
excessive in certain directions, or to make a statement absurd simply
by taking it literally. Thus a Yankee humorist said of a certain old
lady that she was so inquisitive that she put her head out of all the
front windows of the house at the same time. A Westerner claimed the
prize of inventiveness for his town on the ground that one of its
citizens had taught his ducks to swim on hot water in order that they
might lay boiled eggs. Mr. Dooley described the book in which President
Roosevelt gave his personal reminiscences of the Spanish-American War
under the title "_Alone in Cubea_."
Once, when I was hunting in the Bad Lands of North Dakota, and had lost
my way, I met a solitary horseman in the desert and said to him, "I want
to go to the Cannonball River." "Well, stranger," he answered, looking
at me with a solemn air of friendly interest, "I guess ye can go if ye
want to; there ain't no string on ye." But when I laughed and said what
I really wanted was that he should show me the way, he replied, "Why
didn't ye say so?" and rode with me until we struck the trail to camp.
All this is typical of native American humour, quaint, good-natured,
sober-faced, and extravagant. At bottom it is based upon the democratic
assumption that the artificial distinctions and conventional phrases of
life are in themselves amusing. It flavours the talk of the street and
the dinner-table. It makes the Americans inclined to prefer farce to
melodrama, comedietta to grand opera. In its extreme and degenerate form
it drifts into habitual buffoonery, like the crude, continuous jests of
the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers. In its better shape it
relieves the strenuousness and the monotony of life by a free and kindly
touch upon its incongruities, just as a traveller on a serious errand
makes the time pass by laughing at his own mishaps and at the queer
people whom he meets by the way.
You will find it in literature in all forms: in books of the
professional humorists from Artemus Ward to Mr. Dooley: in books of
_genre_ painting, like Mark Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Pudd'nhead
Wilson_, or like _David Harum_, which owed its immense popularity to the
lifelike portrait of an old horse trader in a rural town of central New
York: in books of sober purpose, like the essays of Lowell or Emerson,
where a sudden smile flashes out at you from the gravest page. Oliver
Wendell Holmes shows it to you, in _The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table_, dressed in the proper garb of Boston; you may recognize it on
horseback among the cowboys, in the stories of Owen Wister and O. Henry;
it talks the Mississippi River dialect in the admirable pages of Charles
D. Stewart's _Partners with Providence_, and speaks with the local
accent of Louisville, Kentucky, in _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_.
Almost everywhere you will find the same general tone, a compound of
mock gravity, exaggeration, good nature, and inward laughter.
You may catch the spirit of it all in a letter that Benjamin Franklin
sent to a London newspaper in 1765. He was having a little fun with
English editors who had been printing wild articles about America. "All
this," wrote he, "is as certainly true as the account, said to be from
Quebec, in all the papers of last week, that the inhabitants of Canada
are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery this summer in the
upper Lakes. Ignorant people may object that the upper Lakes are fresh,
and that cod and whales are salt-water fish; but let them know, Sir,
that cod, like other fish, when attacked by their enemies, fly into any
water where they can be safest; that whales, when they have a mind to
eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; and that the grand leap of the
whale in the chase up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed, by those who
have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in Nature."
(4) The last trait of the American temperament on which I wish touch
briefly is the sentiment of humanity.
It is not an unkind country, this big republic, where the manners are so
"free and easy," the _tempo_ of life so quick, the pressure of business
so heavy and continuous. The feeling of philanthropy in its broader
sense,--the impulse which makes men inclined to help one another, to
sympathize with the unfortunate, to lift a neighbour or a stranger out
of a tight place,--good will, in short,--is in the blood of the people.
When their blood is heated, they are hard hitters, fierce fighters. But
give them time to cool down, and they are generous peacemakers. Abraham
Lincoln's phrase, "With malice toward none, with charity for all,"
strikes the key-note. In the "mild concerns of ordinary life" they like
to cultivate friendly relations, to show neighbourliness, to do the
useful thing.
There is a curious word of approbation in the rural dialect of
Pennsylvania. When the country folk wish to express their liking for a
man, they say, "He is a very common person,"--meaning not that he is low
or vulgar, but approachable, sympathetic, kind to all.
Underneath the surface of American life, often rough and careless, there
lies this widespread feeling: that human nature everywhere is made of
the same stuff; that life's joys and sorrows are felt in the same way
whether they are hidden under homespun and calico or under silk and
broadcloth; that it is every man's duty to do good and not evil to those
who live in the world with him.
In literature this feeling has shown itself in many ways. It has given a
general tone of sympathy with "the under dog in a fight." It has led
writers to look for subjects among the plain people. It has made the
novel of American "high life" incline generally to satire or direct
rebuke. In the typical American romance the hero is seldom rich, the
villain seldom poor.
In the weaker writers the humane sentiment dwindles into sentimentality.
In the stronger writers it gives, sometimes, a very noble and manly
note. In general you may say that it has impressed upon American
literature the mark of a moral purpose,--the wish to elevate, to purify,
to fortify the mind, and so the life, of those who read.
Is this a merit or a fault in literature? Judge for yourselves.
No doubt a supremely ethical intention is an insufficient outfit for an
author. His work may be
"Chaste as the icicle
That's curded by the frost from purest snow
And hangs on Dian's temple,"
and yet it may be without savour or permanence. Often the desire to
teach a good lesson bends a book from the straight line of
truth-to-the-facts, and makes a so-called virtuous ending at the price
of sincerity and thoroughgoing honesty.
It is not profitable to real virtue to dwell in a world of fiction
where miracles are worked to crown the good and proper folk with
unvarying felicity and to send all the rascals to prison or a miserable
grave. Nor is it a wise and useful thing for literature to ignore the
lower side of life for the sake of commending the higher; to speak a
false and timid language for fear of shocking the sensitive; to evade
the actual problems and conflicts which men and women of flesh and blood
have to meet, for the sake of creating a perfectly respectable
atmosphere for the imagination to live in.
This mistaking of prudery for decency, this unwillingness to deal quite
frankly with life as it is, has perhaps acted with a narrowing and
weakening effect upon the course of American literature in the past. But
just now there seems to be a reaction toward the other extreme. Among
certain English and American writers, especially of the female sex,
there is a new fashion of indiscriminate candour which would make Balzac
blush. But I suppose that this will pass, since every extreme carries
within itself the seed of disintegration.
The _morale_ of literature, after all, does not lie outside of the great
circle of ethics. It is a simple application of the laws which embrace
the whole of human life to the specific business of a writer.
To speak the truth; to respect himself and his readers; to do justly and
to love mercy; to deal with language as a living thing of secret and
incalculable power; not to call good, evil, or evil, good; to honour the
noble and to condemn the base; to face the facts of life with courage,
the humours of life with sympathy, and the mysteries of life with
reverence; and to perform his task of writing as carefully, as lovingly,
as well as he can,--this, it seems to me, is the whole duty of an
author.
This, if I mistake not, has been the effort of the chief writers of
America. They have spoken surely to the heart of a great people. They
have kept the fine ideals of the past alive in the conflicts of the
present. They have lightened the labours of a weary day. They have left
their readers a little happier, perhaps a little wiser, certainly a
little stronger and braver, for the battle and the work of life.
The measure of their contribution to the small group of world-books, the
literature that is universal in meaning and enduring in form, must be
left for the future to determine. But it is sure already that American
literature has done much to express and to perpetuate the Spirit of
America.
* * * * *
HERBERT CROLY'S
The Promise of American Life
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Professor of History in Harvard University
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