"In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" asked
Sydney Smith in the _Edinburgh Review_, in 1820; and for years the
American people writhed under the query as though they had been put to
the question themselves. In those days the American cuticle was
extraordinarily sensitive, and the gentlest stroke of satire caused
exquisite pain. But although Sydney Smith was unkind, he was not unjust;
in the four quarters of the globe nobody to-day reads any American book
published before 1820--except Irving's _Knickerbocker_. In the very year
that Sydney Smith wrote there was published in England a book which
might have arrested the dean's sarcastic inquiry had it appeared a few
months earlier. This was Irving's _Sketch Book_. The Americans of
seventy years ago did not know it; but none the less is it a fact that
American literature made a very poor showing then, and that there was in
existence in those days scarcely a single book with vitality enough to
survive threescore years and ten. The men who were to make our
literature what it is were then alive--Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Emerson,
Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Poe, Hawthorne, Bancroft,
Prescott, and Motley; but Irving's _Knickerbocker_ was the only book
then in print which to-day is read or readable. It was only in 1821 that
Cooper published the _Spy_, the first American historical novel, and the
first of the _Leatherstocking Tales_ did not appear until 1823.
Reverberations of the angry roar which answered Sydney Smith's question
must have reached his ears, for, in 1824, again in the _Edinburgh
Review_, he wondered at our touchiness: "That Americans ... should be
flung into such convulsions by English Reviewers and Magazines is really
a sad specimen of Columbian juvenility."
Now we have changed all that. In less than three-quarters of a century
(a very short time in the history of a nation) our cuticle has
toughened--perhaps the process was hastened by the strokes of a long war
fought for conscience' sake. It is not so easy now to wring our withers,
and more often than not it is on the other side of the Atlantic that the
galled jade winces. John Bull is not as pachydermatous as once he was,
and a chance word of Brother Jonathan's penetrates and rankles. Mr.
Charles Dudley Warner once let fall an innocent remark about the British
strawberry; and more than one British journal flushed with rage till it
rivalled the redness of that worthy but hollow-hearted fruit. Mr. W. D.
Howells suggested a criticism of two British novelists; and the editor
of the _Saturday Review_ made ready to accept the command of the Channel
Fleet. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt rebuked a British general for insulting
Robert E. Lee with blundering laudation; and Mr. Andrew Lang promptly
wrote a paper on "International Girlishness," in which he very
courteously offered himself as an example of the failing he described.
In a little essay on the centenary of Fenimore Cooper, I remarked that
the reader of Professor Lounsbury's admirable biography could "see how
bravely Cooper fought for our intellectual emancipation from the
shackles of the British criticism of that time, more ignorant then and
even more insular than it is now;" and against this casual accusation
that British criticism is or was ignorant and insular, Mr. Andrew Lang
again protested, with his wonted suavity, of course, but with energy
nevertheless and with emphasis.
Turn about is fair enough. When Time plays the fiddle, the dancers must
needs change places; and we Americans have no call for weeping that the
British attitude to-day resembles ours in the early part of the century
more than our own does. The change is pleasant, and Mr. Andrew Lang
ought not to object to our enjoyment of it. As regards the special
charge that British criticism was more ignorant and more insular fifty
odd years ago than it is now--well, I do not think that Mr. Andrew Lang
ought to object to that either. If I understand my own statement, it
means that there has been an improvement in British criticism in the
past half-century; and I do not think that this assertion affords a fair
ground for a quarrel. Still, when Mr. Andrew Lang throws down the
gauntlet, I cannot refuse to put on the gloves; and I decline to avail
myself of the small side door he kindly left ajar for my escape.
First, it is to be noted that when Mr. Andrew Lang writes about
"critics," and when I wrote, we were discussing different things. There
are two kinds of critics, and the word criticism may mean either of two
things. The writer of an anonymous book-review printed in a daily or
weekly paper considers himself a critic, and the product of his pen is
accepted as a criticism. But there is no other word than criticism to
describe the finest work (in prose) of James Russell Lowell and of
Matthew Arnold. Mr. Andrew Lang chooses to consider chiefly what might
be called the higher criticism, and he sets aside the lower critics as
"reviewers," declaring that "reviewers are rarely critics, and they are
often very tired, very casual, very flippant." Now, it was this sort of
British critic, the very casual and very flippant reviewer, that I meant
when I spoke of the ignorance and insularity of British criticism; and
it was the attitude of British critics of this type towards America that
I had in mind. It was to their ignorance of America and Americans that
I referred, and to the insularity of their position towards us. This
ignorance is now less than it was in Cooper's time, and of late the
insularity has been modified for the better. But that they were "very
tired, very casual, and very flippant" is not an excuse for their
constant attitude towards most American authors; it is not even an
adequate reason. No doubt Mr. Andrew Lang knows the anecdote--is there
any Merry Jest that he has not heard?--of the Judge who chafed under the
insulting demeanor of a certain barrister until at last he was forced to
protest: "Brother Blank," he said, "I know my great inferiority to you;
but, after all, I am a vertebrate animal, and your manner towards me
would be unbecoming from God Almighty to a black beetle!"
It is in relation to America and to American workers that we find
British criticism ignorant and insular. The ordinary British critic
assumes a very different tone towards us from that he assumes towards
the French or the Germans. He may dislike these, but he accepts them as
equals. Us he regards as inferiors--as degenerate Englishmen
unfortunately cut off from communion with the father-land and the
mother-tongue, and to be chided because we do not humbly acknowledge our
deficiencies. He does not know that we are now no more English than the
English themselves are now Germans. He does not guess that we are proud
that we are not English--prouder, perhaps, of nothing else. He does not
think that we do not like being treated as though we were younger sons
in exile--wandering prodigals, deserving no better fare than the husks
of patronizing criticism. No American likes to be patronized, and even
some Englishmen seem to object to it; apparently Mr. Andrew Lang did not
approve of the critical nepotism of a certain Teutonic reviewer. But the
lordliness of the eminent German who reviewed Mr. Andrew Lang's book
without reading it was tempered by the good faith with which he
confessed his ignorance; and his offence was less heinous than that of
the critic in the _Saturday Review_, who dismissed Mr. Aldrich's "Queen
of Sheba" with a curt assertion that it was like the author's other
poems.
As the Greek felt towards the Barbarian and as the Jew towards the
Gentile, so does the ordinary British critic feel towards America. The
feeling of the Greek and of the Jew was perhaps based on a serious
reason; but what justifies the lofty superiority of the British critic?
Is not its cause the self-satisfaction of ignorant insularity?--using
neither word in any offensive sense. And does it not result in a
willingness to condemn without knowledge and without any effort to
acquire knowledge? Any one who recalls Brougham's review of Byron's
first book, or Jeffrey's attack on Keats, or Wilson's dissection of
Tennyson, knows that there are British criticisms which are not models
of sweetness and light; never are sweetness and light more frequently
absent than in British criticism of America and of Americans. "Light," I
take it, means knowledge; and "sweetness" is incompatible with that form
of _morgue britannique_ which one may call insularity.
The higher criticism in England, which Mr. Andrew Lang praises perhaps
not more than it deserves, has developed greatly within the last twenty
years. It is not ignorant like the very tired, very casual, and very
flippant reviewing, nor in the same fashion; but it has an ignorance of
its own, compounded of many simples. Its attitude towards us is not as
offensive, but it is not without its touch of superiority now and again.
Mr. Andrew Lang himself, for example, is ignorant of our best critics,
and confesses his ignorance as frankly as did his Teutonic reviewer; and
then he reveals what is not wholly unlike insularity in his readiness,
despite this ignorance, to make comparisons between American critics and
British.
On Mr. Andrew Lang's list of British critics are the names of Mr.
Ruskin, Mr. J. A. Symonds, Mr. R. L. Stevenson, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr.
Walter Pater, Mr. George Saintsbury, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor
Robertson Smith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Theodore Watts--and every reader
must instinctively add Mr. Andrew Lang's own name to a list on which it
will find no superior. The list seems oddly chosen; an American misses
the name of Mr. John Morley, perhaps the foremost of British critics of
our day, and those of Mr. Austin Dobson, and of Mr. William Archer. Of
American critics Mr. Andrew Lang can recall of his own accord,
apparently, only the name of Lowell, and he remarks that "Mr. Howells,
in an essay on this subject, mentions Mr. Stedman and Mr. T. S. Perry,
doubtless with justice." If there were any advantage in making out a
list of American critics to place beside the list of British critics, I
should put down the names of Mr. Curtis, Col. Higginson, Mr. Warner, Mr.
R. H. Stoddard, Professor Lounsbury, Professor T. F. Crane, Mr. W. C.
Brownell, Mr. John Burroughs, Mr. George E. Woodberry, and Mr. Henry
James--adding, of course, the names of Mr. Stedman and of Professor
Child, mentioned by Mr. Andrew Lang in another part of his paper. But I
fear me greatly that this is idle; it is but the setting up of one
personal equation over against another. Orthodoxy is my doxy and
heterodoxy is your doxy. Counting of noses is not the best way to settle
a dispute about literature.
Indeed there is no way to settle such a dispute, and there is no hope of
coming to an agreement. "It is a very pretty quarrel as it stands;" and
if "we quarrel in print, by the book," let us stop at the first degree,
the Retort Courteous, not going on even to the third, the Reply
Churlish. Also is there much virtue in an If. "If you said so, then I
said so." Let us then, while there is yet time, shake hands across the
Atlantic and swear brothers.
1890