AMERICAN LITERATURE.
There can, in fact, be no clearer proof that the tradition of literature is stronger than the tradition of life than the experience of America. The new world, to its honour be it said, has discovered no new art. The ancient masters of our English speech are the masters also of America. The golden chain of memory cannot be shaken off, and many of those who raise with the loudest voice the cry of freedom have shown themselves the loyal and willing slaves of the past.
The truth is that from the first the writers of America have lagged honourably behind their age. The wisest of them have written with a studious care and quiet reverence. As if to mark the difference between the written language and the vernacular, they have assumed a style which belonged to their grandfathers. This half-conscious love of reaction has been ever present with them. Tou may find examples at each stage of their history. Cotton Mather, who armed his hand and tongue against the intolerable sin of witchcraft, wrote when Dutch William was on our throne, and in style he was but a belated Elizabethan. There is no other writer with whom we may compare him, save Robert Burton, who also lived out of his due time. Take this specimen of his prose, and measure its distance from the prose of Swift and Addison, his younger contemporaries: "Wherefore the Devil," writes Mather in the simplicity of his faith, "is now making one Attempt more upon us; an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprising, more snarl'd with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered; an Attempt so Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell trodden under our feet." In sound and structure Mather's style is what the critics call "archaistic." It is all untouched by the influences of another world, and though "the New Englanders were," in Mather's view, "a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's Territories," they carried their prose from the old country, and piously bowed before an old tradition.
Thus has it been with each generation of men. Thoreau fondly believed that Walden had brought him near to nature, and he wrote with the accumulated artifice of the centuries. Hawthorne's language was as old in fashion as the Salem which he depicted, as "the grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor, who came so early with his Bible and his sword, and trode the common street with such stately port, and made so large a figure as a man of war and peace." But it was. upon Emerson that tradition has most strangely exercised its imperious sway. Now Emerson was an anarch who flouted the conventions of art and life. It was his hope to see the soul of this world "clean from all vestige of tradition." He did not understand that what is? proceeded inevitably from what was He affected to spurn the past as a clog upon his individuality. Anticipating Walt Whitman, he would have driven away his nearest friends, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." So lightly did he pretend to esteem history that he was sure that an individual experience could explain all the ages, that each man went through in his own lifetime the Greek period, the medieval period—every period, in brief—until he attained to the efflorescence of Concord. "What have I to do with the sacredness of tradition," he asked proudly, "if I live wholly from within?" So much had he to do with it that he never wrote a line save in obedience. Savage as he was in the declaration of his own individuality, he expressed it in the gracious terms of an inherited art. To this age Emerson's provincialism appears sad enough. It would not have been remembered had it not been set forth in a finely studied and mellifluous prose. No sooner did Emerson take pen in hand than his anarchy was subdued. He instantly became the slave of all the periods which he despised. He was a faithful follower of the best models, a patient student of masters dead and gone. Though he aspired to live wholly from within, he composed his works wholly from without, and fashioned an admirable style for himself, more antique in shape and sound than the style affected by the Englishmen of his time. But it is Edgar Allan Poe who most eloquently preached the gospel of style, and who most honourably defended the cause of art pursued without the aid of the pulpit. Taste he declared to be the sole arbiter of Poetry. "With the intellect or the Conscience," said he, "it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally it has no concern whatever either with Duty or Truth." Not that he belittled the exigence of Truth; he did but insist on a proper separation. "The demands of Truth," he admitted, "are severe; she has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do." And thus it followed that he had small sympathy with Realism, which he denounced in the clear spirit of prophecy many years before it had become a battle-cry of criticism:
The defenders of this pitiable stuff [he wrote] uphold it on the ground of its truthfulness. Taking the thesis into question, this truthfulness is the one overwhelming defect. An original idea that—to laud the accuracy with which the stone is hurled that knocks us in the head. A little less accuracy might have left us more brains. And here are critics absolutely commending the truthfulness with which the disagreeable is conveyed! In my view, if an artist must paint decayed cheeses, his merit will lie in their looking as little like decayed cheeses as possible.
Of this wise doctrine Poe was always a loyal exponent. The strange veiled country in which he placed the shadows of his creation lay not within the borders of the United States. He was the child neither of his land nor of his century. Dwelling among men who have always worshipped size, he believed that there was no such thing as a long poem. A fellow-citizen of bustling men, he refused to bend the knee to industry. "Perseverance is one thing," said he, "genius quite another." And it is not surprising that he lived and died without great honour in his own country. Even those of his colleagues who guarded the dignity of their craft with a zeal equal to his own, shrank from the pitiless logic of his analysis. They loved his work as little as they respected his life. They judged him by a censorious standard which took no account of genius. And Poe shared with dignity and without regret the common fate of prophets. If he is still an exile in American esteem, he long since won the freedom of the larger world. He has been an inspiration to France, the inspirer of the nations. He did as much as any one of his contemporaries to mould the literary art of our day, and in the prose of Baudelaire and Mallarmé he lives a life whose lustre the indifference of his compatriots will never dim.
Whence comes it, this sedulous attention to style, which does honour to American literature? It comes in part, I think, from the fact that, before the triumph of journalism, American men of letters were secluded from their fellows. They played no rôle in the national drama. They did not work for fame in the field of politics. They were a band of aristocrats dwelling in a democracy, an imperium in imperio. They wrote their works for themselves and their friends. They made no appeal to the people, and knowing that they would be read by those capable of pronouncing sentence, they justified their temerity by a proper castigation, of their style. And there is another reason why American literature should be honourably formal and punctilious, If the written language diverges widely from the vernacular, it must perforce be studied more sedulously than where no such divergence is observed. For the American, accustomed to the language spoken by his countrymen and to the lingo of the daily press, literary English is an acquired tongue, which he studies with diligence and writes with care. He treats it with the same respect with which some Scots—Drummond, Urquhart, and Stevenson—have treated it, and under his hand it assumes a classic austerity, sometimes missed by the Englishman, who writes it with the fluency and freedom bred of familiar use. The stately and erudite work of Francis Parkman is a fair example. The historian of 'Montcalm and Wolfe' has a clear title to immortality. Assuredly he holds a worthy place among the masters. He is of the breed of Gibbon and Michelet, of Livy and Froude. He knows how to subordinate knowledge to romance. He disdains the art of narrative as little as he disdains the management of the English sentence. He is never careless, seldom redundant. The plainest of his effects are severely studied. Here, for instance, is his portrait of an Indian chief, epic in its simplicity, and withal composed with obvious artistry:
See him as he lies there in the sun, kicking his heels in the air and cracking jokes with his brother. Does he look like a hero? See him now in the hour of his glory, when at sunset the whole village empties itself to behold him, for to-morrow their favourite young partisan goes out against the enemy. His head-dress is adorned with a crest of war-eagle's feathers, rising in a waving ridge above his brow, and sweeping far behind him. His round white shield hangs at his breast, with feathers radiating from the centre like a star. His quiver is at his back; his tall lance in his hand, the iron point flashing against the declining sun, while the long scalp-locks of his enemies flutter from the shaft. Thus gorgeous as a champion in panoply, he rides round and round within the great circle of lodges, balancing with a graceful buoyancy to the free movements of his war-horse, while with a sedate brow he sings his song to the Great Spirit.
That is the language of classicism. The epithets are not far-sought. They come naturally to the mind. The hero's shield is round and white; his lance is tall; long are the scalp-locks of his enemies. Thus would Homer and Virgil have heightened the picture, and Park-man is clearly attentive to the best models. Even when he describes what his eye has seen he cannot disengage his impression from the associations of literature. It is thus that he sets before us Braddock's line of march:
It was like a thin, party-coloured snake, red, blue, and brown, trailing slowly through the depth of leaves, creeping round inaccessible heights, crawling over ridges, moving always in dampness and shadow, by rivulets and waterfalls, crags and chasms, gorges and shaggy steeps. In glimpses only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue.