unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism
as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early
American isolation which contributed so effectively to the artistic
setting of _The Scarlet Letter_. But in his doctrine of spiritual
integrity, in the agonized utterance, "Be true--be true!" as well as
in his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was
typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless
artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly
and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all
passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological
students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of
Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating,
alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But no such explanation is at hand to
elucidate the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the
masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's
novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their
tone is consonant with the views of a sound Church of England parson in
the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like
the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in
Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after
all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing
were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes
were predominant. Not one of the three men but would have instantly
sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or
Goethe or Balzac, rather than--in the phrase so often satirized--"bring
a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a
specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic
restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our
imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers.
That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such
full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray--a reticence which men like
Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical
and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their
utmost to abolish--has hitherto dominated our American writing. The
contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence
is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and
drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this
dominant convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But it is only within
recent years that its rule has been questioned.
One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted. While very few
writers of eminence, after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush
to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in
one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a
man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like
English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and
compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct;
and this fact has cooperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps
physiological causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our
books. They are graceful, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool
whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like
certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We
have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical
gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and
romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences,
has this animal life which tingles upon every page. We must confess
that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly
suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation.
Emerson's thin high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk;
Lanier is playing his reproachful flute; Longfellow reads Fremont's
Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the
discomforts!"; Irving's _Astoria_, superb as were the possibilities of
its physical background, tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's
_Before the Mast_ and Parkman's _Oregon Trail_, transcripts of robust
actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical
paleness compared with Turgenieff's _Notes of a Sportsman_ and
Tolstoi's _Sketches_ of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard
undergraduate writing, after all!
These facts illustrate anew that standing temptation of the critic of
American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that
we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant
idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax
upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance
of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very
well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be:
Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces
more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan
restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of
decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in
Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans
"eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,--
They go to church on Sunday;
And many are afraid of God--
And more of Mrs. Grundy."
Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary
divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of
other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who
are distinctly less desirable still.
"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of
criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of
American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he
surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our
earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular
recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism
shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual
passion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism
has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike,
but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards
pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped
from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul"
with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our
day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental,
after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has
lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will
regain neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion.
But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get.
The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has
been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems
in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the
two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the
Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the
school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between
1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the
so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified by
_Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American
oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized
world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of
sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for
"home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation--as
are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.
Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much
so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by
his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of
"Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel
Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen
Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman
Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the
American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures
of "the child" the illustrated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No
country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for
boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's
Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of "Oliver
Optic" and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.
The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of
the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly
illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of Dickens as he
was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and
gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the
"kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring
Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's
stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American
girl still does astonishing things in international novels, as she has
continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonishing
mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European
background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her
mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous
interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European
observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and
encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is
a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of passion--in the
European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported
"problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London,
introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien
to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned
historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a
proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant
and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in
parting with its ignorance.
That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois,
or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and
English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American
literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no
fixed classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no
exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of
laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known
sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired
laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions,
which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made,
no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed,
naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to
stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European
literature is so rich.
Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is
the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to
glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring
class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man
the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American
workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the
picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Grass_ was
published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the
glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy
Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine
idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went
enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or
who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That
glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as
well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of
America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of
the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear
America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the
cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are
Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone
forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the
men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly
aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and
silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social
horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have
turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the
swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the
Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the
old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the
"frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James
Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But
even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a
matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still
have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.
Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class,
and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor
calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or
stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand,
our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short
story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of
American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural
scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the
transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the
larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in
turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in
our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative
visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited
roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia."
But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of
Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack
of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our
political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for
half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination,
of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state
convention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners
displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller
to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened
to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading
away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the
fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of
him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and
mournful epitaph:--
"Beyond Virginia's border line
His patriotism perished."
The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost
unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride
and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional
antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as
Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men
began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more
lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the
fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of
chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our
literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past,
as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows.
But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory
of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is
foreshadowed in that passionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so
much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:--
"O Beautiful! my Country!"
The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply
the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our
countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty
runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think
that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort
of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death";
and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They
grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the
Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have
been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War;
but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire
caught from France and which was passed back to France in turn when her
own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are
inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists.
It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for
generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the
forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat
American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a
Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the
American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye
have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to
the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are
significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or
federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By
this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do
what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty
is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of
liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This
liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist
without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and
honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of
your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is
maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of
the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."
There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of
the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of
the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in
revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is
popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French
theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he
is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes
characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from
past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do
as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and
authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the
Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass, and
incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free
society."
It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's
day, and later, a mere partisan or national shibboleth, standing for no
reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great
Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of
the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital
meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the
end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The
late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848"
man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American
Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he
remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain
during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word
"liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we
had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel
Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not
convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that
William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by
the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate
day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business,
the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson
and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.
In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature,
with a few noble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the passion
for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly
down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their
conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and
Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican
poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country,
after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of
freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of
literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying
the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea?
Or is it simply another illustration of the defective passion of
American literature?
Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by
the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory
and noble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense,
of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about
our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in
Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in
Washington's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the
name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career
of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a
Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of
Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid
peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the
Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the
firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was
made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay
or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty
ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in
editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward
Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most
poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_
and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured
with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact,
dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the
soul of man.