A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

IV

The period has abounded in critics from the first. The best of Lowell's prose came in the years following the war, and all of Stedman's was written after 1870. The great multiplication of newspapers and the increasing number of magazines led more and more to the production of book reviews. The North American Review no longer said the last word about a book or an author. In 1865 Edwin L. Godkin (1831–1902) founded the New York Nation and contributed to it some of the most fearless and discriminating work of the period; in 1880 Francis F. Browne (1843–1913) founded the Chicago Dial and made its reviews among the best in America; and in 1881 Jeannette L. Gilder (1849–1916) and her brother, Joseph B. Gilder (1858——), established the New York Critic, a journal that for two decades exerted a formative influence upon the period.

A few of the great numbers of book reviewers have done worthy work, some of them even distinctive work, though most of it lies buried now in the great ephemeral mass. Howells and Aldrich, Horace E. Scudder (1838–1902) and Bliss Perry (1860——) in the Atlantic, Henry M. Alden (1836——) in Harper's, Maurice Thompson (1844–1901) in the Independent, and Hamilton W. Mabie (1846–1916) in the Outlook, all did work that undoubtedly helped to shape the period, but not much of it may rank as permanent literature. It has been too often journalistic: hastily prepared, a thing of the day's work.

Much fine criticism has come sporadically from pens consecrated to other literary tasks. Nearly all of the major poets of the period as well as the novelists and essayists have at one time or another made excursions into the field, sometimes producing only a brilliant bit of temperamental impressionism, sometimes working out studies that are systematic and complete. James, Howells, Whitman, Burroughs, Lanier, Crawford, Torrey, John Fiske, Maurice F. Egan, Henry Van Dyke, George E. Woodberry, James Brander Matthews have all added brilliant chapters to the sum of American criticism, but none may be called a critic in the sense Sainte-Beuve was a critic. Their work has been avocational, fitful excursions rather than systematic exploration.

During the later years of the period there has been but one who may be called a critic in the broader sense of the term—scholarly, leisurely of method, systematic, detached, literary in style and finish—a critic and only a critic, Paul Elmer More, whose Shelburne Essays are our nearest approach to those Causeries du Lundi of an earlier age. His birth and education in the West, in St. Louis, was an advantage at the start: it took from his later criticism that New England-centered point of view that is so evident in the work of critics like Richardson and Barrett Wendell. The New England culture he got in due time at Harvard, where he took two advanced degrees, and he broadened his outlook still further by pursuing his studies in European universities, returning at length to teach Sanscrit at Harvard and later at Bryn Mawr. Oriental language was his specialty. One catches the spirit of his earlier period by examining his first publications, among them A Century of Indian Epigram, "Translations or paraphrases in English verse of a hundred epigrams and precepts ascribed to a Hindu sage." This early enthusiasm for things oriental gave him a singularly valuable equipment for criticism. It broadened his view: it put into his hands the two opposite poles of human thought. His essay on Lafcadio Hearn is illuminating, not only of Hearn but of More himself. We can illustrate only lamely with fragments:

Into the study of these by-ways of Oriental literature he has carried a third element, the dominant idea of Occidental science; and this element he has blended with Hindu religion and Japanese æstheticism in a combination as bewildering as it is voluptuous. In this triple union lies his real claim to high originality....

Beauty itself, which forms the essence of Mr. Hearn's art, receives a new content from this union of the East and the West....

Is it not proper to say, after reading such passages as these, that Mr. Hearn has introduced a new element of psychology into literature? We are indeed living in the past, we who foolishly cry out that the past is dead. In one remarkable study of the emotions awakened by the baying of a gaunt white hound, Mr. Hearn shows how even the very beasts whom we despise as unreasoning and unremembering are filled with an articulate sense of this dark backward and abysm of time, whose shadow falls on their sensitive souls with the chill of a vague dread—dread, I say, for it must begin to be evident that this new psychology is fraught with meanings that may well trouble and awe the student.

In the ghostly residuum of these psychological meditations we may perceive a vision dimly foreshadowing itself which mankind for centuries, nay, for thousands of years, has striven half unwittingly to keep veiled. I do not know, but it seems to me that the foreboding of this dreaded disclosure may account for many things in the obscure history of the race, for the long struggle of religion against the observations of science which to-day we are wont to slur over as only a superficial struggle after all. In the haunting fear of this disclosure I seem to see an explanation, if not a justification, of the obscurantism of the early church, of the bitter feud of Galileo and the burning of Giordano Bruno, of the recent hostility to Darwinism, and even of the present-day attempt to invalidate the significance of this long contest.[164]

In another and a far more unusual way he qualified himself for his high office of critic: he immured himself for two years in solitude, with books as his chief companions, and it was in this wilderness that the Shelburne Essays—Shelburne was the name of the town of his hermitage—were born. His own account is illuminating:

In a secluded spot in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit, after a mild Epicurean fashion of my own. Three maiden aunts wagged their heads ominously; my nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there was any taint of insanity in the family; an old gray-haired lady, a veritable saint, who had not been soured by her many deeds of charity, admonished me on the utter selfishness and godlessness of such a proceeding.... As for the hermit ... having found it impossible to educe any meaning from the tangled habits of mankind while he himself was whirled about in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the efficiency of undisturbed meditation at a distance. So deficient had been his education that he was actually better acquainted with the aspirations and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than with those of the modern toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac. He had been deafened by the "Indistinguishable roar" of the streets, and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of the market place.[165]

The period gave him time to read, leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the product of that reading was to be marketable. When he wrote his first papers he wrote with no press of need upon him. He had evolved his own notion of the function of literature and of the critic. This was what he evolved: and it is worthy of study:

There is a kind of criticism that limits itself to looking at the thing in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they successively strike the mind. This is properly the way of sympathy, and those who choose this way are right in saying that it is absurd or merely ill-tempered to dwell on what is ugly in a work of art, or false, or incomplete. But there is a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so much directed to the individual thing as to its relation with other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies. No criticism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of these methods exclusively, as no product of art can ever be entirely isolated in its genesis or altogether merged in the current of the day. The highest criticism would contrive to balance these methods in such manner that neither the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence would be unduly subordinated, and in so far as these essays fail to strike such a balance—I wish this were their only failure—they err sadly from the best model.[166]

In the eight volumes now issued there are eighty-five essays on topics as varied as George Crabbe, Hawthorne, Swinburne, Walt Whitman, The Bhagavad Gita, Pascal, Plato, Nietzsche. Nearly two-thirds of them all deal with representative English writers; some fifteen have to do with Americans. In the criticizing of them he has held steadfastly to the contention that men of letters are to be viewed not alone as individuals but as voices and as spiritual leaders in their generations. The soul of literature is not art and it is not alone beauty. For decadents like Swinburne he has small sympathy and he can even rebuke Charles Lamb for "his persistent refusal to face, in words at least, the graver issues of life." He takes his stand at a point so elevated that only the great masters who have been the original voices of the race are audible. He dares even to speak of "the jaunty optimism of Emerson," and to suggest that his confidence and serenity were all too often taken by his generation for original wisdom.

The foundation of his work is religious—religious in the fundamental, the oriental, sense of the word. He has been consistent and he has been courageous. That America has a critic with standards of criticism, an official critic in the sense that Sainte-Beuve was official, and that as editor of the leading critical review of America this critic has a dominating clientele and a leader's authority, is one of the most promising signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.