Men and Letters

THE DEMAND FOR AN AMERICAN LITERATURE.

“ Writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no future.”— LOWELL.

IT is an old story that the people of the United States have been slow in achieving their intellectual independence. The British yoke has remained upon our minds, though we have cast it off our necks. Our literary men, especially, have deferred to English models and English ideas. So we have been told till the tale has become monotonous.

What everybody says must be true — perhaps ; but even so, there may be something to offer on the other side, or by way of extenuation, although the man who should venture to offer it — such is the peculiarity of the case and the perversity of human nature — might find himself accounted unpatriotic for coming to the defense of his own countrymen.

In times past, assuredly, whatever may be true now, the condition of things so much complained of was little reprehensible. Good or bad, it was nothing more than was to have been expected as circumstances then were. We had been English to begin with, and, for better or worse, the English nature is not of a sort to be put off with a turn of the hand, at the signing of a political document. It is self-evident, also, that in the world of ideas every people, whether it will or no, must live largely upon its ancestry, The utmost that any generation can hope to do is to contribute its mite to the intellectual tradition. The better part of its reading must be out of books that its predecessors have sifted from the mass and handed down. If it adds a few of its own, a very few, to the permanent literature of the race, it does all that can reasonably be demanded of it. And even so much as this was hardly to be looked for from the American people during its colonial period and for some decades afterward, with a wilderness to be subdued, savages to be held in check, and all the machinery of civilization to be newly set up. Books are a record and criticism of life, and those to whom life itself is an absorbing occupation are not likely, unless they are almost insanely intellectual, to spend any very considerable share of their days in work of a secondary and postponable character. Life is more than criticism, and the best and greatest people are those whose deeds give other people something to write about. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if American books of a kind to be called literature were slow in coming; and we may confess without shame that up to the year 1820 or thereabouts — say till the advent of Irving and Cooper — the people of this country, if they read anything better than sermons and almanacs, were obliged to depend chiefly upon foreign authors. To which confession it may be added, equally without shame, that even the works of Cooper and Irving were scarcely sufficient of themselves to satisfy for many years together the cravings of eager and serious minds. At all times and in all countries, such minds, with the best will in the world to be loyal to their own day, have been obliged to look mainly to old books.

About the past, then, we need not spend time in mourning. If we play our part as well as the fathers played theirs, we shall have no great cause to blush. Since their day, what with Irving and Cooper and their contemporaries and successors, there has been no dearth of books written on this side of the water; but the complaint is still rife that we have little or nothing in the way of a national literature : by which it is meant, apparently, that our writers are not yet Americans, or do not succeed in expressing the national spirit. Only the other day, a critic, discoursing on “ the conservatism and timidity of our literature,” charged it against Lowell that “ in his habits of writing he continued English tradition,”whatever that may mean. “ Our best scholar” allowed his real self to speak but twice, we are given to understand ; then he spoke in dialect. His Commemoration Ode was a splendid failure, because it was “ imitative and secondary.” Whether it too should have been written in dialect we are not informed ; but it appears to be taken for granted that its failure, if it was a failure, came, not from lack of genius or inspiration, but from deference to foreign models. One cannot help wondering what Lowell himself would have said to such a criticism : that he wrote in English and like an Englishman because he dared not write in his own tongue and in his own way. When a Scotchman complimented him upon his English, — “ so like a native’s,” — and asked him bluntly where he got it, he answered with equal bluntness, in the words of an old song, —

Yet Lowell, who spoke but twice in his own character, seems to have done better than most of his fellows ; for he and Curtis are the only men of letters to find a place in Mr. Woodrow Wilson’s recent Calendar of Great Americans. All their contemporaries and predecessors were either not great, or else were something other than American, — cosmopolitan, provincial, or English. Irving, Cooper, Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne,

Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Parkman, — not one of these will bear Mr. Wilson’s test. As for Emerson, he is ruled out by name, because he was “ the author of such thought as might have been native to any clime.” He is of the world, and therefore is not American. It seems a hard judgment that the man who wrote The Fortune of the Republic, The Young American, and the Concord Hymn, — the man of whom it was recently said, so finely and so truly, that “ he sent ten thousand sons to the war,” — should find himself at this late hour a man without a country. On such terms it is doubtful praise to be called a cosmopolitan ; and in view of such a ruling it becomes evident that the exact nature of Americanism as a literary quality is yet to be defined. Lowell’s attempt in that direction, by the bye, is probably among the best. An American, according to Lowell’s idea of him, — so Mr. James says, — was a man at once fresh and ripe.

When it comes to practice, however, there is one American poet whose literary patriotism was never called in question. The reference is of course to Whitman. Listen to him, as he appeals to whoever “ would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in the States: ”

“ Conservatism and timidity ” ! Here is one man, at all events, who is not to be accused of “ continuing English tradition.”He, if nobody else, breathes a “ haughty defiance of the Year One.” He may or may not be “ ripe ; ” he certainly is “ fresh.” If there be some who fail to enjoy his verse, there can be none who do not admire his courage.

But surely it was not to be insisted upon, nor even expected, that all American authors should break away thus suddenly and completely from the past. Perhaps it was not even to be desired: partly because variety is better than the best of sameness, and partly because so abrupt a change might in the long run have hindered our emancipation. Some readers would have been puzzled, others would have been offended. Here and there, one, at least, would have been ready to say with Wordsworth, —

Little by little a reaction would have been produced, “feudal processes and poems ” would have come in like a flood, and the last state of the national mind would have been worse than the first.

Nor can this extreme of revolt, or any approach to it, be thought necessary to constitute an American writer. “ American " and “rebel” are not synonymous at this hour of the day. American literature, if we may assert our American right to speak a truism roundly, is literature written by Americans ; that is to say, by the people of the United States. In its subject it may be old or new, domestic or foreign ; it may be written in dialect,—sometimes called American, — or in English : in any case, if it is literature at all, it is American literature. And since there is already a body of such writing, we may venture upon another capital letter, by the compositor’s leave, and speak of it — still modestly, and remembering its youth — as American Literature. For youthful it is, in the nature of the case, with its character but imperfectly formed, and its full share of juvenile foibles ; still showing, as is inevitable and not discreditable, abundant traces of its English origin.

Thus far, it must be owned, it can boast little or no representation among the supremely great of the earth. The genius of a new country produces men of action rather than poets and philosophers. Washington and Lincoln are names to shine in any company, but as yet the roll of American authors contains few Homers and Shakespeares, and no great number of Dantes and Miltons. Such as they are, however, they are our own, and though in some cases we might have wished them more “ distinctively American,” we need not be in haste on that account to set upon them a foreign label. Neither need we delude ourselves with the notion that they might have been transcendent geniuses, all of them, had they but stood up resolutely against English tradition. How to become a genius is one of the hard questions. There is no likelihood that it can be solved by any process of intellectual jingoism. The secret may consist partly in being one’s self ; pretty certainly it does not consist in being different from somebody else. Between imitation and a set attempt to avoid imitation there is not so very much to choose. Either of them stamps the work as secondary. As for Homers and Shakespeares, we may remember for our comfort that names like these are not to be found, in any country, among the living : they never have been.¹

For our comfort, too, though not in the every-day sense of that word, we do well to remind ourselves that as the greatness of our American authors is but relative, so is the newness of our American spirit. All that is called new is born of the old, and is itself in part old. The movement of history is not by successive creations of something out of nothing, but by the development of one thing from another; and whether we like to believe it or not, this that we call the American idea stands within the general law: it has been evolved, or rather it is being evolved, out of what was before it. The public mind, stirred by patriotic impulses and restive under criticism, may clamor for originality, meaning by that absolute novelty, and North, South, East, and West may exhaust themselves to answer the appeal: we shall never see an absolutely new book, he it the “ great American novel ” or anything else. As time goes on, we shall have, by the slow processes of nature, a literature more and more distinctive, more and more independent, more and more unlike the English, more and more American; but to the end its originality, like that of all literature, will be but relative. Though men cross the sea, they can never escape the spirit of their forerunners. Our very rebelliousness against English domination is an English trait. The great American book, when it comes, will not spring from virgin soil, but from seed, and the seed will have had an age-long history. “Works proceed from works,” says a learned French critic ; and the most searching of American critics had something of the same thought in mind when he wrote, fifty years ago, in response to inquiries “in Cambridge orations and elsewhere ” for “ that great absentee,” an American literature, “ A literature is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result.”

What then ? Shall we cease effort, and leave it to blind law to work out for us our intellectual salvation ? That would be childish. Because one thing is true, it does not follow that another and seemingly contradictory thing may not be true likewise. The same Emerson who spoke of literature as a “generic ” result, — a word so anticipatory of later thought as to seem like a flash of genius, — and therefore “ no man’s private concern,” was never done with proclaiming the power of the individual soul and the omnipotence of individual faith. He never scolded his countrymen ; he cherished no illusion about the ability of the American people or any other to hurry the accomplishment of a “ secular result; ” but he, more than all others combined, enforced the duty of American scholars to free themselves from the swaddling-clothes of tradition ; to live in the present, think in the present, believe in the present, and Speak always their own word. And the French critic just now quoted, so modern in his point of view, so very different in many respects from Emerson, — though Emerson, too, believed the laws and powers of the intellect to be “facts in a natural history,” and so “ objects of science,”— was quoted but in part. “In literature as in art,” he says, “the great operative cause — after the influence of individuality — is that of works upon works.” The words are those of M. Brunetière, who, in his attempt to apply to literary criticism the methods of natural science, has seemed sometimes to allow more than enough to the power of things over thought; yet he, too, treating of the evolution of literary forms, gives the first place in that evolution, not to changed conditions, nor to the germinal force of great models, nor to the “ moment,” a word on which he insists, but to the power of the individual.

And where ought this power of the individual to be quickly and strongly felt, if not in a democracy and in a new world ?

Like many other good things, nevertheless, individuality, though it may properly be sought, is not to be gone after too directly, — as if it could be carried by assault. Originality has often suffered violence, it is true, but the violent have never taken it by force. We are not to hope for intellectual life by any process of spontaneous generation ; nor are we to dread abjectly the influence of other minds over our own. Individuality is a gift rarely lost, except by those who lose it before they are born. Franklin, it is universally agreed, was an American of the most pronounced type, one of our greatest and most original men. His style, as Mr. James says of Lowell’s, was “ an indefeasible part of him; ” yet all the world knows that he formed it, or believed that he formed it, by a studious imitation of Addison. Originality is theirs to whom it is given. With it a man may drench himself in the wisdom of the ages, and take no harm; without it he may eschew books never so jealously, and look into his own heart with never so complete a faith, and come to no good.

All of which is not to say that a scholar may not occupy himself too much with the thoughts of others to the neglect of his own, or that Americans as a people may not defer unreasonably to foreign standards. Between the two extremes, excessive dependence upon tradition and a too exclusive confidence in one’s own genius, there is a middle course. If we cannot find it, then we are not yet ripe for a great national literature, which must be the result of the old culture bestowed upon new soil in a new time and under new conditions.

Bradford Torrey.

A REMINISCENCE OF CHARLES READE.

IF there was a tender spot in Charles Reade’s heart, it was for Scotland, a Scot, and all things Scottish from bannocks to Bruce and Burns. His intimate and affectionate knowledge of the people showed itself in his estimate of them when he wrote, “ They are icebergs with volcanoes underneath: thaw the Scotch ice, which is of the coldest, and you shall get to the Scotch fire, warmer than any sun of Italy or Spain,” Happy he or she who owns the heart-love of the most loyal creature on earth, and the tenderest, — a Scotchman pur sang.

No individual ever deserved it, any more than the Stuarts did. To the feeble, the fickle, the treacherous, the great simple faith of a McLeod of Dare is a perpetual reproach and marvel, — a creature who goes to India to shake the pagoda-tree, stays away seventeen years, comes back to his own land and lass, pays his dead father’s debts, buys the very property he picked out before he started, settles down like a bit of heather on it, and never knows the temptations, qualms, misgivings, that afflict lesser souls.

Reade felt about Scotland as Story did about Italy, with better reason. It was his native land, — the atmosphere he best liked, the air he breathed with most delight. He spent a great deal of time there with a friend, a “ meenester ” of the Kirk, of the strictest sect. He soaked himself in its mists with a great thankfulness that it was " no Lun’non.” He partook genially of its “ whuskey,” and endeared himself to every Laird and Tammas of them all by his ardent affection for everything in the Land o’ Cakes. I once spent a summer in the neighborhood, on an estate that had belonged for a thousand years to the family of my host, — a place with a round tower and a moat: a tower with slits for cross-bowmen in it, a tower from which Queen Mary used to issue with all her train for hunting and hawking, which King David occupied for months when he set out to crush a too powerful vassal ; a moat that held for me all mediæval Europe, being the first on which my American eyes had ever rested.

“ I must tell you about the ‘ meenester,’ ” said Sir John at breakfast one day bored, I am afraid, by my appalling interest in the ruins and legends and history of the neighborhood. “ He has always been a great friend of Reade’s and is a very interesting man, and it was through Reade that he made a marriage that was the talk of the county for many a year. " Reade asked him down to London once, and persuaded him to go with him to see a play of his which was then being ' tried ' at one of the minor theatre in town. Mr. L—’s parishioners were afar, and his principles melted before the urgency of his friend ; so he went where ‘meenesters ’ never are seen, he sat on a front seat, and he beheld a figurante, beautiful beyond all the high-shouldered, high-cheeked lassies of his ' ain countrie.’ And he fell that instant five hundred thousand fathoms deep in love with the girl, went behind the scenes with Reade and met her, married her in a month, and brought her back to the Manse and a horrified community. She is lovely, she is good, she is a model wife and mother, but society would not receive an angel, you know, if she appeared on earth as a figurante ; so Mrs. L— was completely ignored until the Duke of — met her at a garden party and pronounced her charming, and introduced her to the Duchess, who took her up and made her quite the rage. Would you care to drive over there this morning ? ”

Of course I cared to ; and how well I remember the long, lovely succession of views, lake and moors and mountains seen through a Scotch mist, before we drew up in front of a stone farmhouse set on a bleak hillside ! We were shown into a long, low parlor. On the table were some well-thumbed playbooks jostling a heap of brown leather volumes, — sermons all. On the mantel - shelf was a pot of beer; above it, on one side, a picture of the figurante in spangles and tights, and on the other a portrait of the “ meenester ” in gown and bands. Everywhere about the room there were the same startling incongruities. The door opened, and in came madame, a rosy, blue-eyed, plump little person, an incarnate sunbeam, quite irresistible in her fresh beauty and candid sweetness. It opened again and admitted her husband, a tall, rigid, frigid dominie of a most dour exterior, but worthy of all respect in his life, and like Chaucer’s priest a follower of the precepts that he inculcated " himselve.” While the wife sparkled and beamed and prattled on the sofa, the dominie entertained us with grave observations about the crops, the weather, the state of the country, until Sir John led the talk to his relations with Reade, when he grew almost eloquent. His hearty love for his friend, his delighted recognition of Reade’s talent, and his admiration for the whole man (Reade’s generosity, his robust virile English quality especially) made him lay aside his reserve and speak as people do only when they speak from the heart. He very kindly got a packet of Reade’s letters and read us some most enjoyable impersonal bits of sledge-hammer criticism of men and things and books.

He finally showed us a manuscript by a relative of Reade, with marginal notes. And to this day I can feel for the author, who doubtless submitted it with the hope of getting some praise and encouragement, and who must have withered and died of a green and yellow melancholy, if he had a single sensitive fibre in him, under the blighting sarcasms, the keen, trenchant, merciless comments upon certain lines and situations.

I am sure that Reade felt it an act of piety and charity to so knout an amiable effort to achieve the impossible, but “ it must have hurt confoundedly,” as my host put it. In one place, where the English hero threatens to “ assassinate ” his wife’s betrayer, Reade wrote with a big black quill: “ ‘Assassinate ’ ! Any Englishman with a drop of red blood in his veins would say, ‘ I ’ll kill you ! ’ and do it, too.” Other passages were marked:

“ Bad ; ” “ Atrocious ; ” “ Very bad ; ”

“ Could scarcely be worse for poverty of invention and triteness of expression ; ”

“ Oh, what a niminy - piminy story of Rimini ! ” “ The smallest possible quantity of idea diluted in the largest imaginable number of ill-chosen words; ” and finally : “ Burn it — BURN it, my boy. Don’t wait a minute. Yours affectionately, Charles Reade.”

Frances Courtenay Baylor.

THE BOOK THAT IS NOT WRITTEN.

PERHAPS every author carries around in his mind a book he is going to write some time, but which he never does write. He may devote a desk pigeonhole to storing material for this book. The nest of paper scraps grows, but nothing is hatched therefrom. It is a book for which there is no demand except in the mind that conceived it,—a leisure, loafing, loving volume. Bits of grotesque humanity and deliberate experience are saved for it. The stress and passion of life are not to mar this nursling, and no mercantile consideration enters into its making.

I once hid a story of mine, called The Little Renault, three months in a desk, before I could bring myself to part with it to Pharaoh, the press ; for that was before the typewriting machine made the transition to print an easy sequence. But the unwritten book is hidden deeper still, and its author shall die without uttering it. Because of the unwritten book Pierre Loti’s Romance of a Child causes a swell of the spirit like the gush of the lakes. He wrote of his childhood ; but I want to picture motherhood in its long delight of rearing, — a world outside the ken of some who are used to the sight of children, though abhorrence of it is seldom found in any form of masculine existence.

Custom has made all of us indifferent to the miracle of existence. If we had never until to-day seen little creatures no higher than our knees, the antics of these droll unfinished men and women would keep us merry till nightfall, and then we should worship at their bedsides. How delightsome are the feet and hands of children, their soft limbs and manikin size ! We accept their animal limitations as a matter of course, and watch indulgently the growth of reason in them. Their very lack of it is an alluring charm. The little daughter of four knows nothing about propriety, but stands on the seat in sermon-time, feeling her affection overflow all bounds, and publicly embraces you, with a smack heard by the congregation, and the assurance, “ I love you ev’y day.” Her witnesses smile, but the church is sweeter for it.

As soon as a woman becomes a mother she has the incipient fierce motherin-law in her. It is so singular that other folks’ sons should never be quite equal to your own daughter ; or, if you have a son, that other folks’ daughters should be such trivial, hen-brained creatures! Besides, nothing can be more insolent than a young man’s approach to pluck your child out of your bosom, and his assumption that she was made for him ! In this unwritten book the mother traces the ancestry of playmates, and even learns what diseases their folks died of. She must be sure of offspring that approaches her own at the most impressionable time of life.

She is, moreover, chummy with her little girl. They sit on the rug before winter fires, and discuss fairy-lore and mysteries, and the remote, seemingly impossible time before mamma was mamma. The child learns to regard her own body as a temple, not to be defiled, and asks about its functions ; receiving honest answers which make her reverent of the secrets betwixt her Maker and herself. She literally turns the wonderful gift of life in her hands to examine it. The Hindoo discerns a brother even in a parasite, and she, also, invokes her cat without the least irreligion : “ Kitty, come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” But in the book such simple doings are steeped in the very atmosphere of Eden, — an atmosphere still around us all, sifting unaccountable joy through our dull senses unless they have grown too dense. It is worth being written, — the homely wonder-story of common household life, the evanescent beauty of which may be so sordidly missed. It is a cry to the care-eaten : “ Mother, watch the wonderful little child that has been sent. Never mind the hardships : they will pass. Let nothing rob you of that miracle-play, that most stupendous spectacle of unfolding nature, — the child.”

There are tragedies in the book: hands are slapped for naughtiness. Some people can beat their children for their children’s good, without loss of appetite for their meals. But here the brokenhearted slapper has finally to be comforted by the repentant and reformed slappee.

Armies of minor existences — ponies, dogs, cats, guinea-pigs, birds, tadpoles, bullheads, lambs, donkeys — adorn the margins, sane companions which from primitive times have cheered man’s lot. Trees and flowers, Christmas candles, Santa Claus magic, the rapture of recurring birthdays, journeys, the march of the seasons, a whole panorama of common joys rolls along its pages.

But how is this book to be written so that a publisher will see in it the virtue of a salable commodity ? Publishers do not dote. Clearly, no mercantile considerations can enter into it; it must be a leisure, loafing, loving book. And while the stress and strain of achievement last, it must remain the book unwritten.

Happier than the majority of such volumes, however, this book will not rank a failure if it never sees type ; for it goes on being lived.

Mary Hartwell Catherwood.