LITERATURE IN AMERICA
“Fix’t in sublimest thought behold them rise
World after world unfolding to their eyes,
Lead, light, allure them thro’ the total plan
And give new guidance to the paths of man.”
These were the modest aspirations for American genius, and especially
American literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, the once famous
author, in his “Columbiad” of 1807.
It was not a democratic literature, as we understand the term, that
Barlow, and hundreds of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped
and expected to see arise in the new republic. It was not a literature
that would interpret the homely, though vigorous, personality of a new
nation. Nothing so concrete and so commonplace as this would have
raised their ardor to such a pitch. The excitable critics of that
day were concerned with the absolute, the ideal, and the abstract.
Liberty, not equality, had at last found a dwelling-place, and the
free spirit of man was to expand in an illimitable continent as never
before, and create the poetry of freedom and the epic of liberated
mankind. But their vast expectations were based upon a misconception
and surrounded by fallacies. They have not been realized; and this is
one reason for the prevailing idea that literary America has been a
disappointment, that the life of the mind in America has lagged behind
its opportunities, that we are a backward race in literature and the
arts. We seem children to-day beside the dreams of our ancestors.
It is easy enough to see now that a race which had to construct a
nation in a continent in large part scarcely habitable was not ready
to sing the epic of freedom. Freedom had been won, but whether it
would be possible to possess and enjoy it depended not upon lyrical
interpretation, but upon statecraft, the broadax, toil, transportation,
and the rifle. And when the pioneering days were over, political
freedom, freedom of conscience and the individual man, belonged as
truly to other great nations who were equally entitled to create the
literature of the free mind. To expect the ideals of liberty to appear
in American literature was legitimate, but to look for a great poetic
outburst in nineteenth-century America just because this republic first
established a new political order was no more reasonable than to demand
a new style in architecture from the erectors of the first capitol in
the trans-Alleghany wilderness.
What should have been asked of us, at least after the defeat of the
Federalist party had made certain, what before was only probable, that
America would become a democracy, was a literature which should express
the ideals pervading our particular brand of democratic life, a
literature which should describe a society in which social distinctions
were elastic, opportunity was superabundant, and, for the first time
in the modern world, the common people become more powerful than the
uncommon. A democratic literature could rightly have been expected from
America. But such a literature would never have been termed “sublimest
thought” by our early enthusiasts. It would have to suffer from the
tawdriness of the masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. It
would have to be more prose than poetry, for American life outwardly
was prosaic except upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous
there. It would have to struggle upward like a flapping heron, not soar
like the eagle of our dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in
most periods of the republic, few literary dreamers even wished that
America should become a democracy.
In many respects we got, and got very soon, such a literature, and
much of it has endured. The prose or poetry that took upon itself
to let the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally gone into
oblivion, and with reason; it is either crude and blatant, or solemn
and hackneyed pretentiousness, like Barlow’s “Columbiad” and much
of Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan.” The “less enraptured” strains of
Irving and Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and Bret Harte, in which
the hopes, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a
nascent civilization were expressed in prose as well as poetry, and in
humor more frequently than in epic grandeur, have had a thousand times
more virility. They have sprung from a social and esthetic need, not
a romantic conception, and though not an epoch-making celebration of
freedom finally brought to earth, they have been a solid contribution
to the literature of the world and a beginning of the literature of the
American democracy.
The real issue of course was not Freedom and Liberty and the other
capitalizations of the abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real
question is whether American literature has met its proper, not its
assumed, specifications. If one considers the past, the answer inclines
toward the affirmative.
There have been two chief strains in American literature, not always
distinct, but in origin different. In the first belong those writers
whose dominant purpose has been to appeal to the best in the many; and
by the best I mean the finest or the deepest emotions, and by the many
I mean the accessible minds of the democracy. Emerson belongs primarily
here, and Hawthorne, and, though he would have denied it, Whitman.
Henry James in his earlier stories is a lovable example; and when he
pursued his magical art into realms where only the trained appreciation
could follow, Mrs. Wharton put on the mantle. In the second have been
the more numerous writers whose chief purpose, not always a conscious
one, has been to touch and interest and arouse not so much the best
as the commonest, the most universal emotions. Cooper is the most
excellent example of great writing in this group. Mark Twain when not
misanthropic, Bret Harte in all moods, Whittier and Longfellow, Riley
and 0. Henry, and a host of the less distinguished, also belong there.
But far more important than this division in purpose, which, after
all, is hard to make and harder still to keep, is the fact, if one may
speak of high esthetic matters in a biological fashion, of constant
cross-fertilization between these strains, and especially in the men we
call great. Americans who felt impelled to write of the ideal best have
not forgotten the needs of a nation slowly moving toward democracy.
Those who wrote to amuse and interest the populace have felt in a
curious fashion their responsibility for what they considered American
ideals. Tribute has been paid by both sides, though each in its own
fashion, to democracy; and this makes an unexpected congruity between
appeals to the best and satisfactions for the many, between Emerson
and popular fiction. The scholar presents his idealistic optimism
as an attempt to explain where the eager swarm ought to be winging.
The story-teller, though inspired not by ideas, but by the chance to
interest an energetic society absorbed in the conquest of nature and
hot-blooded with the taste of success, yet feels bound to urge what he
feels to be American morality and American idealism.
This common sympathy with democracy is the hope of American literature
in the sharp tests of our nationality now almost upon us. Emerson and
Cooper, Hawthorne and Mark Twain, are examples of what once it could do.
Emerson was a man who never courted or obtained popularity, who hitched
his readers to a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who wrote
always for minds that may have been democratic, but certainly could
not have been common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an aristocrat in
tastes, a democrat by sympathy and conviction, whose stories, even
his bad stories, contained that essential adventure, that rapid and
unexpected and successful action, which satisfies the universal craving
for struggle well ended, stories so popular that his enemies were
entranced by them even while they abused him.
The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the greatness of Emerson is the airy
strength of his ideology, his permanence in the history of American
civilization is determined by the expression he gave to the moral
optimism of the typical American. And if the popularity of Cooper was
due to the unflagging interest of his adventure and the romance of his
actors and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him more than a good
story-teller and gives him great place in the social history of America
is his incarnation of the ideals and the morality of a native democracy
in Deerslayer, whom all Americans could understand and admire.
Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Hawthorne was a moralist romancer
whose austere talents forced admiration and a somewhat doubtful
popularity. Twain touched the universal note of humorous exaggeration
so early and so readily that his stern moral basis went unremarked. Men
read him for humor as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing the ideas
of each as unconsciously as the child takes medicine in a sugared glass.
Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of lofty moral ideals is more
evident than any appeal to the masses, yet the most careless reader
feels that his warnings are for a new world that has broken with
tradition and must face its problems of sin and sex in a democracy of
conscience. And if Mark Twain writes obviously to amuse the democracy,
yet he seldom fails to preach to them also. “Huckleberry Finn,” to
the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other things an epic of the
injustice, the inconsistency of sophisticated man and his social
system, seen through the eyes of the new world on the Mississippi,
where tradition, in the fresh, crude light, showed its seams of decay.
There is a tract upon slavery in “Huckleberry Finn,” and another
upon dueling, and a third on social distinctions, and a fourth upon
conventionalized religion. And readers of Clemens will not forget how
the bones of his acrid philosophy wore through the skin of his humor
in those later books, especially in “The Mysterious Stranger,” where
a hatred of social injustice and the melancholy foreboding which has
always accompanied the optimism of American democracy had such full
escape that the publishers were led to print it as a fairytale for
children that it might be enjoyed by minds too unobservant to trouble
with its warnings.
I do not wish to seem to be docketing all American literature in these
brief comparisons. What I desire is to point to this common interest
of our writers in the needs of democracy. Whitman, who wrote always
for the most vigorous and sometimes for the best emotions of the many,
might continue the argument. Howells, whose zest for the familiar
experience kept his penetrating intellect busy with problems important
for democracy, is another example. Poe, and Henry James in his later
years, fall without both groups, being as indifferent to democracy as
they are solicitous for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it is
by such men that the writers who sway the masses are trained in the
technique of their craft.
In short, by and large, our literature is remarkable for its
substructure of what might be called democratic idealism--idealism
applied to the needs of a growing democracy. If the reader doubts, let
him compare Emerson with Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with
Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and answer whether our writers have
not been formed by the social needs of America.
That this is true of so many men, and has led to the
cross-fertilization between popular writers and intellectuals of
which I have written above, is perhaps more readily explained when
one considers how homogeneous our society has been, how few and how
slight its mental cleavages. Conservative and radical, traditionalist
and anti-traditionalist, democrat and aristocrat--such clefts have
not gone so deep with us as with other nations. Except for times of
stress, as in the decade between 1765 and 1775, or in the years just
before the Civil War, it would be hard to group, for example, our
writers by fundamental differences in their philosophy of living.
Whitman one could classify, and Poe and Irving, but the difficulty
rapidly increases as the list lengthens. We have been homogeneous by
a common tradition of liberalism, by a common environment varying not
too greatly between Boston and the newer West. And our literature has
resembled us.
And now, when at last our literature, like our politics and our
economics, must at last challenge world scrutiny, this national
character, and all that represents it, has come suddenly to seem of
vast importance. We have become vividly aware of it, and we realize
that we are in dire need of self-expression--of self-expression by
new literature. The self-consciousness of Americans throughout the
nineteenth century, which showed itself keenly in their restlessness
under foreign criticism and their irrepressible desire to talk about
God’s country, was of a different kind. It was due to a nervous
uncertainty as to the success of the American experiment. We were
more concerned with what others thought of our qualities than with
what we were or had been. But three things have altered our situation
radically, and made us think more of character and less of reputation.
The first is the absolute success, as success is measured by the
world’s finger, of this American experiment. The hope of the founders
to establish a stable and prosperous republican government where life,
property, conscience, and opinion were safe has been realized.
The second and more sensational change came from the Great War, which
gave us that quiet confidence in our national strength that comes when
recognition from without confirms the fact and makes self-assertion
unnecessary.
The third, and probably the most important, has been the rise to
intellectual influence and cultural and social power of aliens--Irish,
German, most of all Jews--who, unlike the earlier immigrants, do
not cherish as their chief wish the desire to become in every sense
American. Such phenomena as an Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Paine,
becoming almost from the day of their landing more native than the
natives, are becoming rarer and rarer. More and more we must count
upon cosmopolitans of brains and ability among us who know not Israel,
though they may love the traditions of their home lands even less. It
is this new America, heterogeneous, brilliant, useful, but disturbing,
that has more than anything else sharpened the self-consciousness
of America, turned us toward introspection, made us sensible of our
homogeneity, and the new alignments inevitable for the future.
And just as at the turn of the eighteenth century enthusiasts were
clamoring for a new literature from America, in which freedom and
liberty should have their apotheosis, so now the awakened consciousness
of Americans of the older stock is clamoring for the expression of
what they vaguely denominate, and still more vaguely describe, as
Americanism. Like all such terms called forth by a crisis and displayed
like a flag or a button, the term is at the same time indefinite and
full of significance. Ten men and women will in ten different ways
define it. And yet none can doubt that vast feeling lies behind the
word, and would crystallize, if power were given it, into an expression
of our national experience and aspirations and ideals as we have lived
with them and seen them develop for a century.
And opposed to this clamor for a literature of Americanism is
another call, not loud yet, but rising--a demand for a different
literature, mordant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, which will cut at
the sentimentalities in which our idealism has involved us, strike
at the moribund liberalism which we still regard as our basis of
action, take issue with the moral standards that have been received
as irrevocable because they were American. Keenly aware of the need
for a more honest and more vigorous expression of what America means
to-day, and sensitive to these caustic attacks upon all that we have
called American, the thoughtful mind finds little to console it in
the clever, sentimental writing which, with sewing machines, dental
pastes, ready-made clothes, and cheap motor-cars, has become one of the
standardized products of America.
There has been one response already to the awakening national
consciousness, and this, curiously enough, has been almost identical
with the reaction of the new republic a century and more ago to its
responsibilities. Then the first writing which commanded attention here
and abroad was to be found in so-called state papers, declarations
of Congress and legislatures, pamphlets by Adams and Hamilton and
Jefferson. And the first response to our modern clamor for Americanism
has also been in state papers, beginning perhaps with Roosevelt’s
administration and continuing through Wilson’s messages and the many
documents on the war. The worth and significance of many of these
public utterances have commanded world-wide respect, and possible
permanence in literature.
Yet it is rarely that state papers can satisfy a national need for
literature. They are too restricted in their interests and too
occasional in their provenance. It is only once in a century that a
Gettysburg Address sums up the political and moral philosophy of
millions or a discourse on the needs and obligations of democracy
unites public opinion in America and Europe. The emotions of the
race seek outlet and interpretation in pure literature, and here the
American response is more doubtful.
None of the more popular brands of contemporary writing seems to
satisfy the craving for national self-expression. It is true that we
are going in for universals. Our books reach the hundred thousands, and
our magazines the millions. The successful writer of plays, stories, or
special articles trades in the thoughts that circulate through a vast
community of common education, experience, and environment. The result
is to spread and perpetuate the ideals and the liberal hopes that we
call American, but also to stereotype and thus weaken their influence.
They become counters in a game, or, better still, standardized foods
for the imagination, whose popularity is certain until the fashion
wears out. The writer of adventurous fiction to-day uses the same
formulas as did Cooper, because he writes for a people still true to
the mold of that America which they have inherited directly in family
life, or indirectly in the schools. But his idealism is faint beside
Cooper’s; his “strong, simple Americans” too often mere fabrications
when compared with Deerslayer, or crude, vulgarized approximations,
like sculptures of the decadent fourth century. Vulgarization is the
menace of democratic literature--vulgarization by smart and cheap
short stories, by plays where the wit is raw, the sentiment mushy, the
characters, like their language, cheap and mean. Slang can be racy;
colloquialism belongs to a literature of the people; to be homely is
often to be lovable and true: but a literature, no matter how moral,
which in its lack of clarity and sweetness is like a glass of dirty
water, is a heavy price to pay for mere circulation. The appeal to
universals is essential in a democracy, but unless clarified by love
and hope and conviction, it leads toward universal vulgarity.
Nor does the prospect cheer if one looks to the contemporary Brahmins,
who seek not the universal, but the particular; who write for the
best, not the broadest, emotions of democracy. Lowells and Emersons
have not yet reappeared in our society. No Emerson has philosophized
the reactions of America to international obligation; no Lowell
assailed militarist and pacifist alike in the war; no Whitman even has
sung commonplace America become momentarily heroic in the cause of a
half-understood democracy. We have had an abundance of writing directed
to fine minds and fine souls, but it has lacked the authentic note of
national inspiration.
Perhaps the coldness of our intellectual literature has been due to the
specialization of the age. A Lowell, an Emerson, even a Longfellow,
has been difficult for the last three decades. Learned men, like
these, have been driven by the public opinion of their world toward
investigation and scientific research. They have been weighted with
a frightful responsibility for facts; they have been better scholars
than their predecessors, but less effective citizens. The tool-cutter
nowadays knows only his own operation. The scholar and philosopher have
a lifetime of labor assigned them, with no time to become acquainted
with their United States. In nineteenth-century America there was
little place for the scholar. He was driven into the world, and if
scholarship lost, we profited. Now his corner is built for him, and he
has gone into it.
As a result of all this we face a very real danger. American
literature, with its burden of ideals and experience, being cheapened
by writers for the mob and deserted by the academician, may lose its
virility and pale before a new literature of cosmopolitanism, which
could find no better breeding-place than Chicago or New York.
Artistically, this might be no calamity. Such a society as a great
American city presents has never before been seen in the world, not
even in Rome, and the international democracy which it forecasts is
worthy already of a great literature, has, indeed, already begun one.
But we old Americans, even though our age is of only two generations,
are not yet ready for international democracy. Our own racial character
has not received its final stamp, come to full self-expression,
established itself as the permanent influence upon the world’s
development which our career and our opportunities should make it. To
rush into literary internationalism before the long American experience
has ripened into a national democracy would be to skip a step. It is
to commit again the error of our forefathers, who proposed an epic
of liberty before we had freed ourselves from the burden of economic
development.
And what we need is precisely such a cross-fertilization between the
mind that reaches for the best and the imagination which feels for
the many, as one finds in varying measures in Mark Twain and Holmes,
in Cooper and Whitman and Emerson. It must be a different and perhaps
a more mature product, but nothing else can make American ideals worth
saving in literature, for nothing else can grasp the shrewd native
quality of this people, which is still pervasive through all our alien
swarms.
For three centuries now we have been at our experiment in democracy. We
have been sordid and we have been magnificent. We have been timorous
and we have set examples for hardihood in man. We have stumbled blindly
on our road, and we have had great moments of illumination. We have not
made a perfect democracy, but perhaps more men, women, and children
have been happy in America than elsewhere in world history. And on
the whole our course has been consistently onward. No purpose of the
founders has failed to continue; no valuable element of character has
yet been lost by the way. We are no worse men, by and large, than our
forefathers. And either this great experiment is worth something or it
is not.
If it is worth something, it must pass into literature, and find men to
make it pass. And these men and women must be lovers of what we have
done here and what we are, as the young poets of England at war were
above all lovers of their blessed England. They cannot be scoffers at
our loose-held ideals and our nervous commercialism, who scold, which
is easy, a great, though uneven, nation, but do not search out the
cause of its greatness and proclaim its hope. Nor can they be recluses
contemptuous of that public in whose progressive refinement lies the
only chance for democracy. Nor mere buyers and sellers of emotion who
have learned the speech of the great beast, as Hamilton called the
common people, only to make profit by it.
But you cannot summon a literature from the vasty deep by calling for
it in oratorical vein. Perhaps, even now as I write, some wise youth,
who takes his task more seriously than himself, has begun in humor a
poem that is meant for some newspaper column, but will become a better
description than an essay can give of the American who has been doing
so much, but thinking also, who still knows how to grin at misfortune,
and is not yet ready to declare himself bankrupt in ideas, deficient
in character, or pallid in imaginative faith. As a nation we did our
boasting early and got it out of our system; but the confidence and the
strength and the hope that inspired that boasting remain, and approach
fruition.