“O mother of a mighty race,
Yet lovely in thy youthful grace!
The elder dames, thy haughty peers,
Admire and hate thy blooming years;
With words of shame
And taunts of scorn they join thy name.”
There are eight verses, and four of them repeat Mr. Bryant’s conviction that the nations of Europe united in envying and insulting us. To be hated because we were young, and strong, and good, and beautiful, seemed, to my childish heart, a noble fate; and when a closer acquaintance with history dispelled this pleasant illusion, I parted from it with regret. France was our ally in the Revolutionary War. Russia was friendly in the Civil War. England was friendly in the Spanish War. If the repudiation of state debts left a bad taste in the mouths of foreign investors, they might be pardoned for making a wry face. Most of them were subsequently paid; but the phrase “American revoke” dates from the period of suspense. By the time we celebrated our hundredth birthday with a world’s fair, we were on very easy terms with our neighbours. Far from taunting us with shameful words, our “haughty peers” showed on this memorable occasion unanimous good temper and good will; and “Punch’s” congratulatory verses were among the most pleasant birthday letters we received.
The expansion of national life, fed by the great emotions of the Civil War, and revealed to the world by the Centennial Exhibition, found expression in education, art, and letters. Then it was that Americanism took a new and disconcerting turn. Pleased with our progress, stunned by finding that we had poets, and painters, and novelists, and magazines, and a history, all of our own, we began to say, and say very loudly, that we had no need of the poets, and painters, and novelists, and magazines, and histories of other lands. Our attitude was not unlike that of George Borrow, who, annoyed by the potency of Italian art, adjured Englishmen to stay at home and contemplate the greatness of England. England, he said, had pictures of her own. She had her own “minstrel strain.” She had all her sons could ask for. “England against the world.”
In the same exclusive spirit, American school boards proposed that American school-children should begin the study of history with the colonization of America, ignoring the trivial episodes which preceded this great event. Patriotic protectionists heaped duties on foreign art, and bade us buy American pictures. Enthusiastic editors confided to us that “the world has never known such storehouses of well-selected mental food as are furnished by our American magazines.” Complacent critics rejoiced that American poets did not sing like Tennyson, “nor like Keats, nor Shelley, nor Wordsworth”; but that, as became a new race of men, they “reverberated a synthesis of all the poetic minds of the century.” Finally, American novelists assured us that in their hands the art of fiction had grown so fine and rare that we could no longer stand the “mannerisms” of Dickens, or the “confidential attitude” of Thackeray. We had scaled the empyrean heights.
There is a brief paragraph in Mr. Thayer’s “Life and Letters of John Hay,” which vividly recalls this peculiar phase of Americanism. Mr. Hay writes to Mr. Howells in 1882: “The worst thing in our time about American taste is the way it treats James. I believe he would not be read in America at all if it were not for his European vogue. If he lived in Cambridge, he could write what he likes; but because he finds London more agreeable, he is the prey of all the patriotisms. Of all vices, I hold patriotism the worst, when it meddles with matters of taste.”