Writers of travels, whatever their shortcomings, fall into no error of this kind. They strike while the iron is hot; and whether their subject be Africa or America, that is the true method. The value of such literature depends on the observer’s alertness, fairness, good sense, and general competency, rather than upon the length and leisureliness of his journey. Time of itself never did much for a blind man’s vision; and to come back to our Englishman, he may run through America in a month, or spend a year in his note-taking, and in either event he will discover only what he came prepared to discover. If the photographic plate is sensitive enough, it may need but the briefest exposure. And anyhow, let the picture turn out never so badly, no irreparable harm is done. The object itself is not altered because its portrait is drawn awry. What we have to dread is not the foreigner’s unfair opinion of us, but our unfair opinion of the foreigner. It is our own thoughts that do us injury, not other men’s thoughts about us. And if this be too rare an atmosphere for comfortable every-day breathing, we may come at a similar result on lower ground. Who are we, that we should be treated better than the rest of the world? Must our feelings never be hurt, because we are Americans? Have we never learned that it is a man’s part to be thankful for intelligent and friendly criticism, and to bear all other in silence?
Let visitors to “the States,” then, be “impressed;” and let them print their impressions, the more the better. Some of them will be shallow, some of them unkindly and prejudiced, some, perhaps, ignorantly and foolishly eulogistic. We shall be blamed for faults that are beyond our mending, and praised for virtues that were never ours,—if such virtues there be. At best, the criticism and the comment will fall a little short of inerrancy; for perfection is one of the lost arts, even in England; but in the sum many true things will be said, and in the end the cause of truth will be forwarded; and possibly, if a thousand English pens are thus employed, one of them may happen to make an immortal picture of the Great Republic as it now is, and as it will not be, for better or worse, a hundred years hence. Thus it is, at any rate, by one lucky experimenter out of many, that immortal work is done.
Some critics, it is true, would have literature, even current literature, to consist solely of such happy strokes. Let no man write anything till he can write a masterpiece, they say. Yes, and let no boy go near the water till he has learned to swim; and since crows have waxed destructive, let cornfields be planted hereafter with no outside rows; and lest malarial fevers should make an end of the human race, let all plains and valleys be filled up, and nothing remain but mountains. In short, seeing that failure has been the rule hitherto, let us abolish rules, and get on with exceptions alone; a condition of things curiously prefigured in certain Grammars of the Latin Language, of a kind still sorrowfully remembered by elderly people. A fine economy, surely, and well worth thinking about. But for the time being, till dreams become substantial, this present evil world, as we reverently call it, remembering its Creator, must be suffered to jog along in its ancient, expensive, wasteful-seeming, happy-go-lucky, highly-exceptionable manner: a million seeds, and one tree; a million books, and one chef-d’œuvre. Classics are not yet produced of set purpose, nor do they make their advent in royal isolation, starred and wearing the laurel. They come, as was said just now, with the crowd, the “spawn of the press,” if they come at all, and are only sifted out by the slow hand of time. And meanwhile their humbler fellows, missing of immortality, may nevertheless have their day and serve their turn. Readers, fortunately or unfortunately, are of many grades, and even the wisest of them—in some unwiser but not infrequent mood—desire not a classic, but something a shade less excellent. “There is no book that is acceptable, unless at certain seasons.” So said Milton; and the saying is true, even of “Paradise Lost.” In the great sea of literature there is room both for the big fish and for “the other fry.” Let us be thankful; and if we are scribblers, by nature or by conceit, let us scribble on.
CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE
CONCERNING THE LACK OF 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—two or three, by good luck—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 afterwards, with a wilderness to be subdued, savage neighbors 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 the old song,—