American Sketches

by Charles Whibley

As you read these words you are less keenly conscious of a visual impression than of a verbal effect, and it may be said without reserve that never for a page of his many volumes does Park-man forget the demands of dignity and restraint.

Excellent as is the style, it is never American. Parkman does not reveal his origin in a single phrase. He has learned to write not in his own land, but in the England of the eighteenth century. When he speaks of "the pampered Sardanapalus of Versailles," and of "the silken favourites' calculated adultery," we are conscious that he has learnt whatever lesson Gibbon has to teach. In other words, he, too, is obedient to the imperious voice of convention. And the novelists follow the same path as the historians. Mr Henry James, in his patient analysis of human character, has evoked such subtle harmonies as our English speech has not known before. Mr Howells, even when he finds his material in the land of his birth, shows himself the master of a classic style, exquisite in balance and perfect in tone. And both share the common inheritance of our tongue, are links in the central chain of our tradition, and in speech, if not in thought, are sternly conservative.

This, then, is an irony of America, that the country which has a natural dislike of the past still dances to the ancient measures, that the country which has invented so much has not invented a new method of expression, that the country which questions all things accepts its literature in simple faith. The advantages of conformity are obvious. Tradition is nine-tenths of all the arts, and the writers of America have escaped the ruin which overtakes the bold adventurer who stakes his all upon first principles. But sometimes we miss the one-tenth that might be added. How much is there in the vast continent which might be translated into words! And how little has achieved a separate, living utterance! Mr Stedman has edited an American Anthology, a stout volume of some eight hundred pages, whose most obvious quality is a certain technical accomplishment. The unnumbered bards of America compose their verses with a diffident neatness, which recalls the Latin style of classical scholars. The workmanship is deft, the inspiration is literary. If many of the authors' names were transposed small injustice would be done them. The most of the work might have been written anywhere and under any conditions. Neither sentiment nor local colour suggests the prairie or the camp.

It is the intervention of dialect which alone confers a distinctive character upon American verse. Wisely is Mr Stedman's collection called an Anthology. It has something of the same ingenuity, the same impersonality, which marks the famous Anthology of the Greeks; it illustrates the temper not of a young but of an old people.

How shall we surprise in her literature the true spirit of America? Surely not in Walt Whitman, whose work is characteristic not of his country, but of himself, who fondly believed that he would make a loud appeal to the democracy because he stamped upon the laws of verse, and used words which are not to be found in the dictionary. Had the people ever encountered his 'Leaves of Grass,' it would not have understood it. The verse for which the people craves is the ditties of the music-hall. It has no desire to consider its own imperfections with a self-conscious eye. It delights in the splendour of mirrors, in the sparkle of champagne, in the trappings of a sordid and remote romance. The praise of liberty and equality suits the ear not of the democrat, but of the politician and dilettante, and it was to the dilettante and politician that Walt Whitman addressed his exhortations. Even his studied contempt for the literary conventions is insincere, and falls away from Kim when he sees and feels most vividly. He attempted to put into practice Emerson's theory of anarchy. He was at the pains to prove that he was at once a savage and a poet. That he had moments of poetic exaltation is true. The pomp of Brooklyn Ferry lives in his stately verse.

But he was no savage. It was his culture that spoke to the culture of others; it was a worn-out commonplace which won him the regard of politicians. He inspired parodists, not poets. And he represented America as little as he echoed the voice of the people.

Nor is it in the works of the humourists that we shall catch a glimpse of the national character. They, too, cast no shadow but their own. They attain their effects by bad spelling, and a simple transliteration reveals the poverty of their wit. There is but one author who represents with any clarity the spirit of his country, and that author is Mark Twain. Not Mark Twain the humourist, the favourite of the reporters, the facile contemner of things which are noble and of good report, but Mark Twain, the pilot of the Mississippi, the creator of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He is national as Fielding is national. Future ages will look upon Huck Finn as we look upon Tom Jones,—as an embodiment of national virtue. And Mark Twain's method is his own as intimately as the puppets of his imagining. It is impossible to read a page of his masterpieces without recognising that they could have been composed only in an American environment. The dialect in which they are written enhances their verisimilitude without impairing their dignity; and the flashes of humour which light up the gravity of the narrative are never out of place nor out of tune. The cunning and resourcefulness of his boyish heroes are the cunning and resourcefulness of America, and the sombre Mississippi is the proper background for this national epic. The danger, the excitement, the solemnity of the great river are vividly portrayed. They quicken his narrative; they inspire him to eloquence. He remembers with a simple enthusiasm the glory of the sun setting upon its broad expanse; he remembers also that the river and its shoals are things to fear and to fight.

Fully to realise the marvellous precision [he writes] required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and visible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steamboat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain.

In calm, as in flood, Mark Twain has mastered the river, and has made it his own. Once upon a time the Mississippi called up a vision of the great Gulf opening on the sight of La Salle, "tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life." Now a humbler image is evoked, and we picture Huck Finn and Jim floating down the broad stream in the august society of the Duke and the Dauphin.

Though Mark Twain cultivates the South-Western dialect, and does not disdain the speech of Pike County, there is in his two romances no suspicion of provincialism. Style and imagination give them the freedom of the whole world. They are of universal truth and application. But since the days of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer the conditions of American literature have changed, and for the worse. As in England, so in America, a wide diffusion of books, an eager and general interest in printed matter, have had a disastrous effect. The newspapers, by giving an improper advertisement to the makers of books, have rendered the literary craft more difficult of pursuit. The ambition of money has obscured the simple end of literature, and has encouraged a spirit of professionalism eminently characteristic of a practical country. We hear of works of fiction sketched in the back-offices of publishers, whose hands are held upon the public pulse. All is arranged, we are told, by the man of business—period, plot, characters. Nothing is left to the novelist but to carry out the instructions of his taskmaster, and when you contemplate the result you can feel no surprise at this composite authorship. It is no better than a money-making partnership, a return to the miserable practices of Grub Street and its hacks, a curiosity of trade, not of art, and so long as its sorry product is distinguished from genuine literature no great harm is done.