He gives a countrywoman of his, Miss Agnes Repplier, quite a scolding for quoting in a little book of hers no less than fifteen British authors of very varying degrees of merit. Why, in the name of common-sense, should she not if they serve her turn? Was a more ludicrous passage than the following ever penned? It follows immediately after the enumeration of the fifteen authors just referred to:
‘But there is nothing from Lowell, than whom a more quotable writer never lived. In like manner, we find Miss Repplier discussing the novels and characters of Miss Austen and of Scott, of Dickens, of Thackeray, and of George Eliot, but never once referring to the novels or characters of Hawthorne. Just how it was possible for any clever American woman to write nine essays in criticism, rich in references and quotations, without once happening on Lowell or on Hawthorne, is to me inexplicable.’
O Patriotism! what follies are committed in thy name!
The fact is, it is a weak point in certain American writers of ‘the patriotic school’ to be for ever dragging in and puffing the native article, just because it is native and for no other reason whatever; as if it mattered an atom whether an author whom, whilst you are discussing literature, you find it convenient to quote was born in Boston, Lincoln, or Boston, Massachusetts. One wearies of it indescribably. It is always Professor This or Colonel That. If you want to quote, quote and let your reader judge your samples; but do not worry him into rudeness by clawing and scraping.
Here we all are, Heaven knows how many million of us, speaking, writing and spelling the English language more or less ungrammatically in a world as full as it can hold of sorrows and cares, and fustian and folly. Literature is a solace and a charm. I will not stop for a moment in my headlong course to compare it with tobacco; though if it ever came to the vote, mine would be cast for letters. Men and women have been born in America, as in Great Britain and Ireland, who have written books, poems, and songs which have lightened sorrow, eased pain, made childhood fascinating, middle-age endurable, and old age comfortable. They will go on being born and doing this in both places. What reader cares a snap of his finger where the man was cradled who makes him for awhile forget himself. Nationality indeed! It is not a question of Puffendorf or Grotius or Wheaton, even in the American edition with Mr. Dana’s notes, but of enjoyment, of happiness, out of which we do not intend to be fleeced. Let us throw all our books into hotch-pot. Who cares about spelling? Milton spelt ‘dog’ with two g’s. The American Milton, when he comes, may spell it with three, while all the world wonders, if he is so minded.
But we are already in hotch-pot. Cooper and Irving, Longfellow, Bryant and Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Whitman, and living writers by the score from the other side of the sea, are indistinguishably mixed with our own books and authors. The boundaries are hopelessly confused, and it is far too late for Mr. Brander Matthews to come upon the scene with chalk and tape, and try to mark us off into rival camps.
There is some girding and gibing, of course. Authors and critics cannot help nagging at one another. Some affect the grand air, ‘assume the god,’ and attempt to distinguish, as Mr. Matthews himself does in this little book of his, ‘between the authors who are not to be taken seriously, between the man of letters who is somebody and the scribbler who is merely, in the French phrase, quelconque, nobody in particular.’ Others, again, though leading quiet, decent lives, pass themselves off in literature as swaggering Bohemians, cut-and-thrust men. When these meet there must be blows—pen-and-ink blows, as bloodless as a French duel. All the time the stream of events flows gigantically along. But to the end of all things Man will require to be interested, to be taken out of himself, to be amused; and that interest, that zest, that amusement, he will find where he can—at home or abroad, with alien friends or alien enemies: what cares he?