On the evening of the Tuesday following the first Monday next November,
after the citizens of the several States shall have cast their ballots
for the candidates of their choice, the boys of New York, in accord with
their immemorial custom on election night, will illuminate the streets
of the city with countless bonfires, not knowing, any of them, that they
are thus commemorating Guy Faux and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.
And yet such is the fact, as Doctor Eggleston has ascertained beyond all
question. What British boys are pleased to remember on the 5th of
November, American boys have forgotten, although they keep alive the
memorial fires on the evening of the Tuesday following the first Monday
in November, be that the 5th or not, as the almanac may declare. In
like manner the "dressing up as a Guy" still survives also in New York,
in the parades of the "fantasticals" on Thanksgiving Day--the last
Thursday in November. So hard is it for old customs to die out. Perhaps
the British 5th of November was in its turn a survival of some pagan
rite ignorantly lingering as late as the Gunpowder Plot, and thereafter
identified with the fate of Guy Faux.
We cannot help being the descendants of our ancestors; and no tariff,
however high and however complicated by _ad valorem_ duties, can keep
out of these United States the traditions, the beliefs, the habits, the
feelings of the immigrants whose children we are. That those who have
left a great country, England or France or Germany, should look back to
that country as the centre of light, is natural--perhaps it is
inevitable. But that their children should continue to do so, natural
enough for a while, is not inevitable. Even though the colonist succeeds
in breaking the political tie which binds him to the country whence his
fathers came, there is no real independence unless he lays aside also
the habit of intellectual deference; and that is as arduous, as
difficult, and as long a task as any one ever undertook. None the less
is it absolutely necessary if a people is to speak with its own voice
and not with borrowed tongues--if its independence is to be complete and
final.
In Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge's interesting and stimulant volume called
_Studies in History_ there is no essay more interesting or more
stimulating than that on "Colonialism in the United States." In
two-score pages Mr. Lodge distinguishes colonialism from provincialism,
with which it is sometimes confounded, and then shows how the thirteen
United States, having once been colonies, still breathed the colonial
spirit long after their political independence was fully established. He
recalls the fact that one half of the people disliked Washington's
proclamation of neutrality as between France and Great Britain, because
it seemed "hostile to France," while the other approved of it for the
same reason. We Americans at the beginning of this century were still
engaged in fighting over again all the battles of Europe. But
Washington was an American, not a European, and so was Hamilton; and
they kept us true to the line of our national development.
Even before the Revolution, when "the travelled American, the
_petit-maitre_ of the colonies," so Hawthorne reminds us, was "the ape
of London foppery, as the newspaper was the semblance of the London
journals"--even then there were Americans, like Franklin, for example,
who had nothing of the colonist about them, who were at once
cosmopolitan and American. Mr. Lodge is right in calling Franklin's
_Autobiography_ "the corner-stone, the first great work of American
literature."
After the War of 1812 the politics of the United States ceased to depend
in any way on the politics of Europe; and our elections began to turn
solely on questions of domestic policy. So our commerce and our
manufactures freed themselves from reliance on England or France. An
unending succession of inventions showed the ingenuity of the American.
In law, the autonomy of the separate States permitted a variety of
juristic experiment, the best results of which have been copied now in
the legislature of Great Britain. "But the colonial spirit"--to quote
Mr. Lodge again--"cast out from our politics and fast disappearing from
business and the professions, still clung closely to literature, which
must always be the best and last expression of a national mode of
thought."
The colonial attitude in literature was unwittingly encouraged by
Congress, which, by refusing to pass an international copyright bill,
and thus secure to the British author the control of his own works,
permitted the foreigner to be plundered, and forced the native author to
sell his wares in competition with stolen goods. Sir Henry Sumner Maine
declared--in his work on _Popular Government_ (p. 247)--that the neglect
to give copyright to foreign "writers has condemned the whole American
community to a literary servitude unparalleled in the history of
thought." This, of course, is the violent over-statement of an enemy;
but there was a percentage of truth in it once. To show just what the
American literary attitude was in the early years of this century, Mr.
Lodge instances Cooper's first novel, _Precaution_, now wholly
forgotten, and fortunately, for its characters, its scenery, "its
conventional phrases were all English; worst and most extraordinary of
all, it professed to be by an English author, and was received on that
theory without suspicion." And Mr. Lodge tersely sums up the situation
by saying that "the first step of an American entering upon a literary
career was to pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the
approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen."
Cooper was too good an American to be content with the cast-off garments
of British novelists; and in 1821, a year after the appearance of
_Precaution_, he published _The Spy_, and never thereafter was there any
need for an American novelist to masquerade as an Englishman. Yet his
fellow-countrymen thought to compliment Cooper by calling him "the
American Scott." And more than a quarter of a century later, when Lowell
put forth his _Fable for Critics_ there was abundant colonialism in our
literature, if we may accept the satirist's picture of the mass-meeting
of
"The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts.
By the way, 'tis a fact that displays what profusions
Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions,
That while the Old World has produced barely eight
Of such poets as all men agree to call great,
And of other great characters nearly a score--
One might safely say less than that rather than more--
With you every year a whole crop is begotten,
They're as much of a staple as corn is or cotton;
Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties
That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,
Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles,
Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,
One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,
A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons--
In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,
He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain
Will be some very great person over again."
After Cooper came Hawthorne and Poe, intensely American, both of them,
although in different fashion. In due season Mrs. Stowe brought out one
book which set forth fearlessly a situation undeniably (and most
unfortunately) American. Then came the war, which stiffened our national
consciousness, and by giving us something to be proud of, killed the
earlier habit of brag. Among later story-tellers who study American life
as it is, and without any taint of Briticism, are the author of _The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, the author of _The Rise of Silas
Lapham_, the author of _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, and the author of
_Old Creole Days_, all aggressively American, all devoid of the
slightest suggestion of colonialism, all possessing a wholesome mistrust
of British traditions, British standards, and British methods. Some of
his fellow-countrymen and contemporaries complained that Cooper was not
proud of being called "the American Scott;" and if we want to see how
far we have travelled away from colonialism of this sort we have only to
imagine the laughter with which Mark Twain would greet any critic who
thought to compliment him by calling him the American Burnand!
That this is an enormous gain is obvious enough. American authors are
now writing for their fellow-countrymen and about their
fellow-countrymen. If, as Matthew Arnold declared, "the end and aim of
all literature is, if one considers it attentively, nothing but that--a
criticism of life," then the literature likely to be most useful, most
invigorating, and most satisfactory to Americans should be a criticism
of life in America. Whether or not the spirit of colonialism still
survives in these United States sufficiently to make the majority of
readers here prefer books of British authorship is a question hardly
worth asking, it seems to me, although there are some, both in London
and in New York, who would answer it in the affirmative. To those of us
who happened to be in London during the closing days of our long
struggle for the Copyright act of 1891 it was obvious that many British
authors believed that unbounded affluence was about to burst upon them.
They accepted Sir Henry Maine's view as to the literary poverty of
America, and apparently did not know that there were American authors
standing ready to supply the American demand as soon as they should be
relieved from an enforced competition with stolen goods.
These British authors thought that the passage of the act opened a
boundless field for them to enter in and take possession of; and no
doubt some of the American opponents of the bill were of the same
opinion. Of course we all see now, what some of us who had studied the
conditions of the book-trade foresaw, that the instant result of the
Copyright act must needs be a decrease in the number of books of British
authorship sold in the United States. As soon as there was only one
authorized publisher engaged in pushing a British book in America, in
the place of a dozen unauthorized publishers forced to a frantic and
cut-throat competition, the British book had to sell on its merits
alone, without the aid of any premium of cheapness. As soon as all books
had to be paid for by the publisher, the book of native authorship had
its natural preference; and now the inferior and doubtful books of
foreign authorship are ceasing to be reprinted here. This is a tendency
which will increase with time, and very properly, since every nation
ought to be able to supply its own second-rate books, and to borrow from
abroad only the best that the foreigner has to offer it. And it cannot
be said too often or too emphatically that the British are foreigners,
and that their ideals in life, in literature, in politics, in taste, in
art, are not our ideals.
The decrease in the proportion of British books published in America,
sharply accelerated, no doubt, by the Copyright act of 1891, has been
going on ever since Cooper published _The Spy_, now more than threescore
years and ten ago. It occurred to me that it would be useful to show
exactly the rate at which the American book had been gaining upon the
British book, and to discover whether the native author had overtaken
the foreigner or was likely to do so. To this end I have considered the
books issued during the past thirty years by two of the leading
publishing houses of America: Messrs. Harper & Brothers, and Messrs.
Houghton, Mifflin & Company. Messrs. Harper & Brothers have always
maintained very close relations with the leading authors of Great
Britain; and to them, far more than to any one other American publishing
house, have the most popular writers of England intrusted the American
editions of their works. Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, on the
other hand, succeeding to the firms of Ticknor & Fields, and of Fields,
Osgood & Company, have always devoted themselves more especially to
books of American authorship. These two great houses represent different
traditions, and it seemed to me therefore that a comparison of their
present catalogues with their catalogues of thirty years ago would not
be without profit. I have to thank both these firms for their kindly
assistance, without which it would have been impossible for me to
prepare the present paper.
I have been furnished with a list of the books published by Messrs.
Harper & Brothers in the years 1861, 1871, 1881, and 1891; and I propose
to show how the book of American authorship has gained on the book of
British authorship in three decades. From all the lists I begin by
discarding the classic authors of our language. There was scarcely any
American literature before Cooper's _Spy_, and of course all the
glorious roll of English authors who wrote before 1776 are as much a
part of our having as the common law itself. For kindred reasons I throw
out all new editions and all text-books and all school-books.
Making these deductions (and they naturally decrease very much the
apparent number of books published during any one year), we find that in
the year 1861 Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued twenty-four books, of
which fourteen were of British authorship (including George Eliot's
_Silas Marner_) and seven of American authorship (including Motley's
_United Netherlands_ and Mr. Curtis's _Trumps_); three books sent forth
by them were translated from foreign languages.
In 1871 Messrs. Harper & Brothers published fifty-seven books, and of
these thirty-six were of British authorship, twenty were by American
writers, and one was a translation.
In 1881 they sent forth ninety-eight books, of which sixty-six were by
British authors (including some forty-seven numbers of the Franklin
Square Library) and twenty-six were by American authors, while six were
translations from foreign languages. It is to be noted that in 1881 we
were in the very thick of piracy, and that Messrs. Harper & Brothers
were engaged in pushing vigorously the Franklin Square Library, which
they had devised as a weapon to fight the reprinters with.
In 1891 the Copyright act became operative on the 1st of July. During
that year Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued seventy-six books, of which
twenty-seven were of British authorship and forty-one of American,
while eight were translations. It is to be noted here that the
translations of 1891 were nearly all made in America, while those of
1861 and of 1881 were the work of British writers. In the books of
British authorship are included all those issued only in paper covers in
the new Franklin Square Library. Of course, Messrs. Harper & Brothers
issued every year many more books than I have counted; but I have, as I
said, omitted all new editions, all school-books, and all reprints of
the classics of our own or any other language, as not falling within the
scope of this inquiry. To decide exactly what to include or to exclude
was not always easy, but I have tried to be consistent, and I believe
that the figures here given are fairly accurate. They show that a house
which published in 1861 twice as many books of British authorship as of
American, published in 1891 one-third more books of American authorship
than of British. They show also that the actual number of American books
issued by this firm increased with every decade, and was in 1891 almost
six times as large as it was thirty years before.
The present house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company is descended on one
side from the firm of Hurd & Houghton, and on the other from the firm
which was successively William D. Ticknor & Company, Ticknor & Fields,
Fields, Osgood & Company, and James R. Osgood & Company. I am sorry to
say that I have not been able to get a complete catalogue of the books
published by Ticknor & Fields in 1861, but I have found certain lists of
books published by them about that time: one of these lists contains
four American books, three British, and one translation from a foreign
tongue; in another there are ten books of British authorship and ten of
American; and in a third there are six British authors represented and
eight American.
In 1871 the firm was James R. Osgood & Company, and the proportion of
books of American authorship was steadily increasing. I have not been
able to find a full and complete list, but I know that the house
published that year at least twenty-eight books by American authors, ten
by British writers, and three translated from a modern language.
In 1881 the firm had become Houghton, Mifflin & Company, and it has
kindly provided me with an accurate list of its publications during
these twelve months. Omitting, as before, all new editions, we find that
the house issued that year thirty-eight books by Americans, seven by
British authors, and eleven volumes of translations.
In 1891 the proportion of native works still further increased. The
American books published in that year by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin &
Company were sixty-nine, while the firm issued only seven volumes by
British authors and two translations. A comparison of these figures with
those of thirty years before show that the predecessors of Messrs.
Houghton, Mifflin & Company published in 1861 about as many books of
British authorship as of American; while in 1891 the firm sent forth ten
times as many American books as it did British.
In going over the lists of Messrs. Harper & Brothers and of Messrs.
Houghton, Mifflin & Company, I have resolutely cast out of account all
school-books, because a consideration of these might have given a false
impression, since the school-books of all Americans who were boys in
1861 were already of American authorship. I was a boy myself in 1861,
and I never saw a school-book of British origin until after I had been
in college for a year or two, and then it was only a single manual of
political economy. When Noah Webster issued, in 1783, the first part of
a _Grammatical Institute of the English Language_, afterwards known as
_Webster's Spelling Book_, and as such sold for half a century to the
extent of a million copies a year, an example was set which other
American educators were prompt to follow.
For nearly a hundred years now the American school-boy has been supplied
with American books suited to American conditions and inculcating
American ideas. Nor is there any likelihood that this fortunate
condition will ever change. The American Book Company, a publishing firm
formed by the consolidation of four or five of the leading school-book
houses of this country, supplies probably four-fifths of the books used
in American schools. I have recently made a careful examination of its
complete classified price-list of school and college text-books, with
the eminently satisfactory result of finding in the first 500 titles
only one book of foreign authorship.
Perhaps it was in consequence of the wholesome Americanism imparted in
the school-room that American boys and girls demanded other books of
American authorship. Certain it was that the department of the
publishing trade which handles "juveniles," as they are called, gave an
early preference to books describing life in America or from an American
point of view. Peter Parley was a pioneer, and Jacob Abbott followed
after; and I confess I am sorry for the boys and girls of Great Britain
who did not know the joy of travelling through Europe with Rollo and
Uncle George, the omniscient. From my own childhood I can recall only
one volume of British origin, although of American manufacture; it was a
sturdy tome called _The Boy's Own Book_, and it had strange wood-cuts of
strangely chubby youths in strange Eton jackets.
In Doctor Holmes's paper on "The Seasons" (to be found in _Pages from an
Old Volume of Life_), it is made evident that the American children of
the second decade of this century were less fortunate than those of the
seventh decade. Doctor Holmes tells us that he was educated on Miss
Edgeworth and _Evenings at Home_. "There we found ourselves in a strange
world, where James was called Jem, not Jim, as we always heard it; where
one found cowslips in the fields, while what we saw were buttercups;
where naughty school-boys got through a gap in the hedge to steal Farmer
Giles's red-streaks, instead of shinning over the fence to hook old
Daddy Jones's Baldwins; where there were larks and nightingales instead
of yellow-birds and bobolinks; where the robin was a little domestic
bird that fed at the table, instead of a great, fidgety, jerky, whooping
thrush; where poor people lived in thatched cottages, instead of
shingled ten-footers; where the tables were made of deal; where every
village had its parson and clerk and beadle, its green-grocer, its
apothecary who visited the sick, and its bar-maid who served out ale"
(pp. 172-3).
And with the witty wisdom which is the secret of the Autocrat's power
over us, he continues: "What a mess--there is no other word for it--what
a mess was made of it in our young minds in the attempt to reconcile
what we read about with what we saw! It was like putting a picture of
Regent's Park in one side of a stereoscope and a picture of Boston
Common on the other, and trying to make one of them. The end was that we
all grew up with a mental squint which we could never get rid of. We saw
the lark and the cowslip and the rest on the printed page with one eye,
the bobolink and the buttercup, and so on, with the other in nature.
This world is always a riddle to us at best; but those English
children's books seemed so perfectly simple and natural, and yet were so
alien to our youthful experiences that the Houyhnhnm primer could not
have muddled our intellects more hopelessly."
The colonial habit of dependence on England for literature and of
deference to British opinion is to be seen in the history of the
American drama quite as distinctly as in the other departments of
literature, and it is not yet wholly extinct. At first, of course, all
our actors were of British birth. When the first American comedy, Royall
Tyler's "Contrast," was played at the John Street Theatre in New York in
1787, the character of Jonathan the Yankee was undertaken by Thomas
Wignell, a native of England. Thomas Abthorpe Cooper was criticised in
London as an American, but he had been born in Great Britain. Edwin
Forrest was the first distinguished tragedian who was a native of our
continent. Since he set the example many an American actor has appeared
in England, and Mr. Augustin Daly has taken his whole company of
comedians to Europe repeatedly. Nowadays there are always performers of
American birth and training in half a dozen of the leading London
theatres.
Indeed, it might fairly be said that acting was the first of the arts to
develop here in America; beyond all question it was the first that we
began to export. But the art of the native American dramatist long
lagged behind that of the native American actor. Perhaps even now there
is still a lingering survival of the prejudice in favor of foreign
plays, or, at least, against plays of American authorship. At present
the foreign play most likely to be in favor is the French, but when the
theatre was young in this country our sole reliance was on the British
stage. Now we get light from Berlin and from Paris; then we saw no ray
of hope except from London.
So complete was the dependence of the Park Theatre on Drury Lane and on
Covent Garden in the early part of this century, that when our first
native dramatist, William Dunlap, made adaptations of Kotzebue's plays
he took good care not to avow his share in the work, allowing it to be
supposed that his versions of the German originals were those which had
been made for the London stage. Even as late as 1812, when Mr. J. N.
Barker dramatized _Marmion_ "the prejudice then existing against
American authors"--to quote the words of Mr. Ireland, the historian of
the New York stage--"was so great that the play was announced as the
production of an English dramatist, and thus, with its fine cast,
commanded an extraordinary success." Perhaps this is even more pitiful
than Cooper's pretending to be an Englishman in his first novel.
To show the changes which have taken place in the composition of our
play-bills during the past thirty years, I have had lists made of the
plays which were advertised for performance in the first full week of
January in 1861, 1871, 1881, and 1891. The result of the consideration
of these lists is not as convincing as one could wish, for the
performances of a single week are scarcely enough to furnish matter for
the adequate comparison of one year with another. Yet the comparison is
not without interest, and it seems to me indisputably instructive. All
grand operas, all circuses, all menageries, all dime museums, all negro
minstrel entertainments, and all those strange performances known, for
some inscrutable reason, as "variety shows," are here left out of court,
as having little or no connection with literature.
Making these deductions, we find that there were open in New York in the
first week of January, 1861, seven places of amusement devoted to the
drama, at only two of which were the plays wholly of American
authorship; although at a third, where Edwin Forrest was acting, the
American tragedy of "The Gladiator" shared the bill with the British
tragedy of "Damon and Pythias." At the rest of the theatres the plays
were of British authorship, that at Wallack's being "Pauline," a British
dramatization of a French novel.
In the corresponding week of 1871 after making the same omissions, and
after deducting also the performances in foreign languages, always very
frequent in a city with a population as cosmopolitan as ours--making
these allowances, we find seven theatres, at which three British plays
are being performed and three American plays, and one play, if it can so
be called, "The Black Crook," which was an American adaptation from the
German. There was at this time a temporary prevalence of negro
minstrelsy and the variety show.
In 1881 the New Yorker who went to the theatre during the first week in
January had his choice of fifteen performances, and he could see nine
plays of American authorship, two American adaptations from the German,
two British adaptations from the French, and two plays of British
authorship. The proportion of American plays seems overwhelming, and it
was probably not maintained throughout the year, although the preceding
decade had seen an extraordinary development of the American drama.
Among those to be seen at this time in New York were "The Danites,"
"Hazel Kirke," and "The Banker's Daughter."
When we come to 1891 we see that the list of theatres offering a
dramatic entertainment in the English language has swollen to
twenty-one, and we note that the variety shows and the negro minstrel
performances are now infrequent. At these twenty-one theatres we could
see thirteen plays of American authorship, besides two American
adaptations from the German, while at the same time there were also
visible five plays by British authors and one British adaptation from
the French. I may add also, and of my own knowledge, that the plays
which were most popular, and therefore most profitable at this time,
were all to be found among the thirteen of American authorship. It is a
fact also that for fully forty years now the great pecuniary successes
of the American theatre have been gained by plays of American life, and
more especially of American character. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Rip Van
Winkle," "Colonel Sellers," "My Partner," "The Danites," "The Banker's
Daughter," "Held by the Enemy," and "Shenandoah" have had no foreign
rivals in popularity except "The Two Orphans." Possibly exception
should also be made of "The Shaughraun" and "Hazel Kirke," both written
in America, although dealing with life in Europe.
It is to be noted that the Copyright act of 1891 has had, and will have,
but little effect upon the foreign dramatist, because, for twenty years
and more, judicial decisions in the United States courts had accorded
him a full protection for his stage-right under the common law. Thus the
American dramatist had been freed from the necessity of vending his
wares in competition with stolen goods long before a like privilege had
been vouchsafed to the American novelist.
A careful study of the figures here presented will convince the
disinterested critic that the American dramatist has passed his foreign
rival in the race for popularity, just as a careful study of the
successive lists of Messrs. Harper & Brothers and Messrs. Houghton,
Mifflin & Company will prove that the American author has also overtaken
the foreigner. If there was truth once in Sir Henry Sumner Maine's
assertion that we Americans offered the example of a literary servitude
without parallel, that assertion is true no longer. The American author
is now conscious of a demand from the American public for plays and for
books which reflect American life and embody American character. Before
another decade has closed the century, the proportion of works of
foreign authorship to be seen in our book-stores and in our theatres is
certain to be smaller still. Sooner or later the time will come when it
will be profitable to reproduce in America only the best of books of
foreign authors and only the best plays of foreign dramatists.
At the same time that the American author has been taking possession of
his own country he has also been conquering abroad. I have not had time
for the needful and laborious calculation, but I believe that an
examination of the files of the London _Athenaeum_ and _Saturday Review_
of 1861 would show that very few books of American authorship were
deemed worthy of reprint and review in England, while an examination of
their files for 1891 would reveal a surprisingly large proportion of
books of American origin now considered as entitled to criticism. And I
believe that this proportion is steadily increasing, and that more and
more books published in the United States are every year reprinted in
Great Britain, or exported for sale in London in editions of
satisfactory size.
Of course the reputation of American authors has been spread abroad in
England largely by the agency of the great American illustrated
magazines, which have now an enormous circulation on the other side of
the Atlantic. There are at least two American magazines which far
outsell in England itself any British magazine of corresponding
pretensions. A few British magazines and reviews continue to be imported
into the United States, but they are very few indeed; I think that the
total number of copies imported is less than the number exported of
either of the two great American illustrated monthlies.
It is pleasant to be able to assert that this wide-spread popularity of
the American magazines in England has not been due to any attempt to
cater to the English market. On the contrary, the more obviously and
frankly American these magazines are, the more marked is their success
in England. No doubt a large part of this popularity is due to American
superiority in wood-engraving, in process work, in printing, and to the
liberality of the American publisher in paying for these embellishments;
but a share as large is due to the skill with which the American
magazines are edited, to their freshness, their brightness, their
vivacity, to their national flavor, and especially to their larger scope
and to their stronger understanding of the capabilities and the
opportunities of the modern periodical.
1892