But surely it was not to be insisted upon, nor even expected, that all American authors should break away thus suddenly and completely from the past. Perhaps it was not even to be desired: partly because variety is better than the best of sameness, and partly because so abrupt a change might in the long run have hindered our emancipation. Some readers would have been puzzled, others would have been offended. Here and there one, at least, would have been ready to say, with Wordsworth,—
“Me this unchartered freedom tires.”
Little by little a reaction would have been produced, the “substratums and objects” of the land would have suffered disastrous eclipse, “feudal processes and poems” would have come in like a flood, and the last state of the national mind would have been worse than the first.
Nor can this extreme of revolt, or any approach to it, be thought necessary to constitute an American writer. “American” and “rebel” are not synonymous at this hour of the day. American literature, if we may assert our American right to speak a truism roundly, is literature written by Americans; that is to say, by the people of the United States. In its subject it may be old or new, domestic or foreign; it may be written in dialect,—sometimes called American,—or in English; in any case, if it is literature at all, it is American literature. And since there is already a body of such writing, we may venture upon another capital letter, by the compositor’s leave, and speak of it—still modestly, and remembering its youth—as American Literature. For youthful it is, in the nature of the case, with its character but imperfectly formed, and its full share of juvenile foibles; still showing, as is inevitable and not discreditable, abundant traces of its English origin.
Thus far, it must be owned, it can boast little or no representation among the supremely great of the earth. The genius of a new country produces men of action rather than poets and philosophers. Washington and Lincoln are names to shine in any company, but as yet the roll of American authors contains few Homers and Shakespeares, and no great number of Dantes and Miltons. Such as they are, however, they are our own, and though in some cases we might have wished them more “distinctively American,” we need not be in haste on that account to tag them with a foreign label. Neither need we delude ourselves with the notion that they might have been transcendent geniuses, all of them, had they but stood up resolutely against the English tradition. How to become a genius is one of the hard problems. There is no likelihood that it can be solved by any process of intellectual jingoism. The secret may consist partly in being one’s self; pretty certainly it does not consist in being different from somebody else. Between imitation and a set attempt to avoid imitation there is not so very much to choose. Either of them stamps the work as secondary. As for Homers and Shakespeares, we may remember for our comfort that names like these are not to be found, in any country, among the living: they never have been.[12]
For our comfort, too, though not in the every-day sense of that word, we do well to remind ourselves that as the greatness of our American authors is but relative, so is the newness of our American spirit. All that is called new is born of the old, and is itself in part old. The movement of history is not by successive creations of something out of nothing, but by the development of one thing from another; and whether we like to believe it or not, this that we call the American idea stands within the general law: it has been evolved, or rather it is being evolved, out of what was before it. The public mind, stirred by patriotic impulses and restive under criticism, may clamor for originality, meaning by that absolute novelty, and North, South, East, and West may exhaust themselves to answer the appeal: we shall never see an absolutely new book, be it the “great American novel” or anything else. As time goes on, we shall have, by the slow processes of nature, a literature more and more distinctive, more and more independent, and more and more unlike the English, more and more American; but to the end its originality, like that of all literature, will be but relative. Though men cross the sea, they can never escape the spirit of their forerunners. Our very rebelliousness against English domination is an English trait. The great American book, when it comes, will not spring from virgin soil, but from seed, and the seed will have had an age-long ancestry. “Works proceed from works,” says a learned French critic; and the most searching of American critics had something of the same thought in mind when he wrote, fifty years ago, in response to inquiries “in Cambridge orations and elsewhere” for “that great absentee,” an American literature, “A literature is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result.”
What then? Shall we cease effort, and leave it to blind law to work out for us our intellectual salvation? That would be childish. Because one thing is true, it does not follow that another and seemingly contradictory thing may not be true likewise. The same Emerson who spoke of literature as a “generic result,”—a word so anticipatory of later thought as to seem like a flash of genius,—and therefore “no man’s private concern,” was never done with proclaiming the power of the individual soul and the omnipotence of individual faith. He never scolded his countrymen; he cherished no illusion about the ability of the American people or any other to hurry the accomplishment of a “secular result;” but he, more than all others combined, enforced the duty of American scholars to free themselves from the swaddling-clothes of tradition; to live in the present, think in the present, believe in the present, and speak always their own word. And the French critic just now quoted, so modern in his point of view, so very different in many respects from Emerson,—though Emerson, too, believed the laws and powers of the intellect to be “facts in a natural history,” and so “objects of science,”—was quoted but in part. “In literature as in art,” he says, “the great operative cause—after the influence of individuality—is that of works upon works.” The words are those of M. Brunetière, who, in his attempt to apply to literary criticism the methods of natural science, has seemed sometimes to allow more than enough to the power of things over thought; yet he, too, treating of the evolution of literary forms, gives the first place in that evolution, not to changed conditions, nor to the germinal force of great models, nor to the “moment,” a word on which he greatly insists, but to the power of the individual.
And where ought this power of the individual to be quickly and strongly felt, if not in a democracy and in a new world?
Like many other good things, nevertheless, individuality, though it may properly be sought, is not to be gone after too directly,—as if it could be carried by assault. Originality has often suffered violence, it is true, but the violent have never taken it by force. We are not to hope for intellectual life by any process of spontaneous generation; nor are we to dread abjectly the influence of other minds over our own. Individuality is a gift rarely lost, except by those who lose it before they are born. Franklin, it is universally agreed, was an American of the most pronounced type, one of our greatest and most original men. His style, as Mr. James says of Lowell’s, was “an indefeasible part of him;” yet all the world knows that he formed it, or believed that he formed it, by a studious imitation of Addison. Originality is theirs to whom it is given. With it a man may drench himself in the wisdom of the ages, and take no harm; without it he may eschew books never so jealously, and look into his own heart with never so complete a faith, and come to no good.
All of which is not to say that a scholar may not occupy himself too much with the thoughts of others to the neglect of his own, or that Americans as a people may not defer unreasonably to foreign standards. Between the two extremes, excessive dependence upon tradition and a too exclusive confidence in one’s own genius, there is a middle course. If we cannot find it, then we are not yet ripe for a great national literature, which must be the result of the old culture bestowed upon new soil in a new time and under new conditions.