CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
The conditions under which the communities of the New World were established, and the terms on which they hitherto existed, have been unfavorable to Art. The religious and commercial enthusiasms of the first adventurers to her shores, supplying themes for the romancers of a later age, were themselves antagonistic to romance. The spirit which tore down the aisles of St. Regulus, and was revived in England in a reaction against music, painting and poetry, the Pilgrim Fathers bore with them in the “Mayflower” and planted across the seas. The life of the early colonists left no leisure for refinement. They had to conquer nature before admiring it, to feed and clothe before analyzing themselves. The ordinary cares of existence beset them to the exclusion of its embellishments. While Dryden, Pope and Addison were polishing stanzas and adding grace to English prose, they were felling trees, navigating rivers, and fertilizing valleys.… An enlightened people in a new land “where almost every one has facilities elsewhere unknown for making his fortune,” it is not to be wondered that the pursuit of wealth has been their leading impulse; nor is it perhaps to be regretted that much of their originality has been expended upon inventing machines instead of manufacturing verses, or that their religion itself has taken a practical turn. One of their own authors confesses that the “common New England life is still a lean, impoverished life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one,” but it is there alone that the speculative and artistic tendencies of recent years have found room and occasion for development. Our travelers find a peculiar charm in the manly force and rough adventurous spirit of the Far West, but the poetry of the pioneer is unconscious. The attractive culture of the South has been limited in extent and degree. The hothouse fruit of wealth and leisure, it has never struck its roots deeply into native soil.… All the best transatlantic literature is inspired by the spirit of confidence—often of over-confidence—in labor. It has only flourished freely in a free soil; and for almost all its vitality and aspirations, its comparatively scant performance and large promise we must turn to New England. Its defects and merits are those of the national character as developed in the northern states, and we must seek for an explanation of its peculiarities in the physical and moral circumstances which surround them.
When European poets and essayists write of nature it is to contrast her permanence with the mutability of human life. We talk of the everlasting hills, the perennial fountains, the ever-recurring seasons.… In America, on the other hand, it is the extent of nature that is dwelt upon—the infinity of space, rather than the infinity of time, is opposed to the limited rather than to the transient existence of man. Nothing strikes a traveler in that country so much as this feature of magnitude. The rivers like rolling lakes, the lakes which are inland seas, the forests, the plains, Niagara itself, with its world of waters, owe their magnificence to their immensity; and by a transference, not unnatural, although fallacious, the Americans generally have modeled their ideas of art after the same standard of size. Their wars, their hotels, their language, are pitched on the huge scale of their distances. “Orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity,” they gain in surface what they have lost in age; in hope, what they have lost in memory.
“That untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when they move,”
is all their own; and they have the area and the expectation of a continent to set against the culture and the ancestral voices of a thousand years. Where Englishmen remember, Americans anticipate. In thought and action they are ever rushing into empty spaces. Except in a few of the older states, a family mansion is rarely rooted to the same town or district; and the tie which unites one generation with another being easily broken, the want of continuity in life breeds a want of continuity in thought. The American mind delights in speculative and practical, social and political experiments, as Shakerism, Mormonism, Pantagamy; and a host of authors from Emerson to Walt. Whitman, have tried to glorify every mode of human life from the transcendental to the brutish. The habit of instability, fostered by the rapid vicissitudes of their commercial life and the melting of one class into another drifts away all their landmarks but that of temporary public opinion; and where there is little time for verification and the study of details, men satisfy their curiosity with crude generalizations. The great literary fault of the Americans has thus come to be impatience. The majority of them have never learned that “raw haste is half-sister to delay,” that “works done least rapidly, art most cherishes.” The make-shifts which were first a necessity with the northern settlers have grown into a custom. They adopt ten half measures instead of one whole one; and, beginning bravely like the grandiloquent preambles to their Constitutions end sometimes in the sublime, and sometimes in the ridiculous.
The critics of one nation must, to a certain extent, regard the works of another from an outside point of view. Few are able to divest themselves wholly of the influence of local standards; and this is preëminently the case when the early efforts of a young country are submitted to the judgment of an older country, strong in its prescriptive rights, and intolerant of changes the drift of which it is unable or unwilling to appreciate. English critics are apt to bear down on the writers and thinkers of the new world with a sort of aristocratic hauteur; they are perpetually reminding them of their immaturity and their disregard of the golden mean. Americans, on the other hand, are impossible to please. Ordinary men among them are as sensitive to foreign, and above all to British censure, as the irritable genus of other lands. Mr. Emerson is permitted to impress home truths on his countrymen, as “your American eagle is all very well, but beware of the American peacock.” Such remarks are not permitted to Englishmen; if they point to any flaws in American manners or ways of thinking, with an effort after politeness, it is “the good natured cynicism of a well-to-do age;” if they commend transatlantic institutions or achievements, it is, according to Mr. Lowell, “with that pleasant European air of self-compliment in condescending to be pleased by American merit which we find so conciliating.” Now that the United States have reached their full majority, it is time that England should cease to assume the attitude of their guardian, and time that they should cease to be on the alert to resent the assumption. Foremost among the more attractive features of transatlantic literature is its freshness. The authority which is the guide of old nations constantly threatens to become tyrannical; they wear their traditions like a chain; and in the canonization of laws of taste, the creative powers are depressed. Even in England we write under fixed conditions; with the fear of critics before our eyes, we are all bound to cast our ideas into similar moulds, and the name of “free-thinkers” has grown into a term of reproach. Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” is perhaps the last book written without a thought of being reviewed. There is a gain in the habit of self-restraint fostered by this state of things; but there is a loss in the consequent lack of spontaneity, and we may learn something from a literature which is ever ready for adventure. In America the love of uniformity gives place to impetuous impulses; the most extreme sentiments are made audible; the most noxious “have their day and cease to be;” and truth being left to vindicate itself, the overthrow of error, though more gradual, may at last prove more complete. A New England poet can write with confidence of his country as the land
“Where no one suffers loss or bleeds
For thoughts that men call heresies.”
Another feature of American literature is its comprehensiveness; what it has lost in depth it has gained in breadth. Addressing a vast audience it appeals to universal sympathies.—Abridged from “American Literature” in Encyclopædia Britannica.