is all their own; and they have the area and the expectation of a continent to set against the culture and the ancestral voices of a thousand years. Where Englishmen remember, Americans anticipate. In thought and action they are ever rushing into empty spaces. Except in a few of the older states, a family mansion is rarely rooted to the same town or district; and the tie which unites one generation with another being easily broken, the want of continuity in life breeds a want of continuity in thought. The American mind delights in speculative and practical, social and political experiments, as Shakerism, Mormonism, Pantagamy; and a host of authors from Emerson to Walt. Whitman, have tried to glorify every mode of human life from the transcendental to the brutish. The habit of instability, fostered by the rapid vicissitudes of their commercial life and the melting of one class into another drifts away all their landmarks but that of temporary public opinion; and where there is little time for verification and the study of details, men satisfy their curiosity with crude generalizations. The great literary fault of the Americans has thus come to be impatience. The majority of them have never learned that “raw haste is half-sister to delay,” that “works done least rapidly, art most cherishes.” The make-shifts which were first a necessity with the northern settlers have grown into a custom. They adopt ten half measures instead of one whole one; and, beginning bravely like the grandiloquent preambles to their Constitutions end sometimes in the sublime, and sometimes in the ridiculous.
The critics of one nation must, to a certain extent, regard the works of another from an outside point of view. Few are able to divest themselves wholly of the influence of local standards; and this is preëminently the case when the early efforts of a young country are submitted to the judgment of an older country, strong in its prescriptive rights, and intolerant of changes the drift of which it is unable or unwilling to appreciate. English critics are apt to bear down on the writers and thinkers of the new world with a sort of aristocratic hauteur; they are perpetually reminding them of their immaturity and their disregard of the golden mean. Americans, on the other hand, are impossible to please. Ordinary men among them are as sensitive to foreign, and above all to British censure, as the irritable genus of other lands. Mr. Emerson is permitted to impress home truths on his countrymen, as “your American eagle is all very well, but beware of the American peacock.” Such remarks are not permitted to Englishmen; if they point to any flaws in American manners or ways of thinking, with an effort after politeness, it is “the good natured cynicism of a well-to-do age;” if they commend transatlantic institutions or achievements, it is, according to Mr. Lowell, “with that pleasant European air of self-compliment in condescending to be pleased by American merit which we find so conciliating.” Now that the United States have reached their full majority, it is time that England should cease to assume the attitude of their guardian, and time that they should cease to be on the alert to resent the assumption. Foremost among the more attractive features of transatlantic literature is its freshness. The authority which is the guide of old nations constantly threatens to become tyrannical; they wear their traditions like a chain; and in the canonization of laws of taste, the creative powers are depressed. Even in England we write under fixed conditions; with the fear of critics before our eyes, we are all bound to cast our ideas into similar moulds, and the name of “free-thinkers” has grown into a term of reproach. Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” is perhaps the last book written without a thought of being reviewed. There is a gain in the habit of self-restraint fostered by this state of things; but there is a loss in the consequent lack of spontaneity, and we may learn something from a literature which is ever ready for adventure. In America the love of uniformity gives place to impetuous impulses; the most extreme sentiments are made audible; the most noxious “have their day and cease to be;” and truth being left to vindicate itself, the overthrow of error, though more gradual, may at last prove more complete. A New England poet can write with confidence of his country as the land
“Where no one suffers loss or bleeds
For thoughts that men call heresies.”
Another feature of American literature is its comprehensiveness; what it has lost in depth it has gained in breadth. Addressing a vast audience it appeals to universal sympathies.—Abridged from “American Literature” in Encyclopædia Britannica.
OUR LITERATURE IMITATIVE.
Literature is a positive element of civilized life; but in different countries and epochs it exists sometimes as a passive taste or means of culture, and at others as a development of productive tendencies. The first is the usual form in colonial societies, where the habit of looking to the fatherland for intellectual nutriment as well as political authority is the natural result even of patriotic feeling. The circumstances, too, of young communities, like those of the individual, are unfavorable to original literary production. Life is too absorbing to be recorded otherwise than in statistics. The wants of the hour and the exigencies of practical responsibility wholly engage the mind. Half a century ago, it was usual to sneer in England at the literary pretensions of America; but the ridicule was quite as unphilosophical as unjust, for it was to be expected that the new settlements would find their chief mental subsistence in the rich heritage of British literature, endeared to them by a community of language, political sentiment, and historical association. And when a few of the busy denizens of a new republic ventured to give expression to their thoughts, it was equally natural that the spirit and the principles of their ancestral literature should reappear. Scenery, border-life, the vicinity of the aborigines, and a great political experiment were the only novel features in the new world upon which to found anticipations of originality; in academic culture, habitual reading, moral and domestic tastes, and cast of mind, the Americans were identified with the mother country, and, in all essential particulars, would naturally follow the style thus inherent in their natures and confirmed by habit and study. At first, therefore, the literary development of the United States was imitative; but with the progress of the country, and her increased leisure and means of education, the writings of the people became more and more characteristic; theological and political occasions gradually ceased to be the exclusive moulds of thought; and didactic, romantic, and picturesque compositions appeared from time to time. Irving peopled “Sleepy Hollow” with fanciful creations; Bryant described not only with truth and grace, but with devotional sentiment, the characteristic scenes of his native land; Cooper introduced Europeans to the wonders of her forest and seacoast; Bancroft made her story eloquent; and Webster proved that the race of orators who once roused her children to freedom was not extinct. The names of Edwards and Franklin were echoed abroad; the bonds of mental dependence were gradually loosened; the inherited tastes remained, but they were freshened with a more native zest; and although Brockden Brown is still compared to Godwin, Irving to Addison, Cooper to Scott, Hoffman to Moore, Emerson to Carlyle, and Holmes to Pope, a characteristic vein, an individuality of thought, and a local significance is now generally recognized in the emanations of the American mind; and the best of them rank favorably and harmoniously with similar exemplars in British literature; while, in a few instances, the nationality is so marked, and so sanctioned by true genius, as to challenge the recognition of all impartial and able critics. The majority, however, of our authors are men of talent rather than of genius; the greater part of the literature of the country has sprung from New England, and is therefore, as a general rule, too unimpassioned and coldly elegant for popular effect. There have been a lamentable want of self-reliance, and an obstinate blindness to the worth of native material, both scenic, historical, and social. The great defect of our literature has been a lack of independence, and too exclusive a deference to hackneyed models; there has been, and is, no deficiency of intellectual life; it has thus far, however, often proved too diffusive and conventional for great results.—Henry T. Tuckerman.