Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]

by Henry Seidel Canby

The analysis of conditions and tendencies in contemporary American literature which I wish to present in this lecture, requires historical background, detailed criticism, and a study of development. I have time for reference to none of these, and can only summarize the end of the process. If, therefore, I seem to generalize unduly, I hope that my deficiencies may be charged against the exigencies of the occasion. But I generalize the more boldly because I am speaking, after all, of an English literature; not in a Roman-Greek relationship of unnaturalized borrowings (for we Americans imitate less and less), but English by common cultural inheritance, by identical language, and by deeply resembling character. Nevertheless, the more American literature diverges from British (and that divergence is already wide) the more truly English, the less colonial does it become. A Briton should not take unkindly assertions of independence, even such ruffled independence as Lowell expressed in "The Biglow Papers":

I guess the Lord druv down Creation's spiles
'Thout no gret helpin' from the British Isles,
An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff
Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff;
I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez
Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses.

I desire neither to apologize for American literature, nor to boast of it. No apology is necessary now, whatever Sydney Smith may have thought in earlier days: and it is decidedly not the time to boast, for so far literature has usually been a by-product in the development of American aptitudes. But it may be useful to state broadly at the beginning some of the difficulties and the closely related advantages that condition the making of literature in the United States.

The critic of American literature usually begins in this fashion: America, in somewhat over a century, has built up a political and social organization admittedly great. She has not produced, however, a great literature: great writers she has produced, but not a great literature. The reason is, that so much energy has been employed in developing the resources of a great country, that little has been left to expend in creative imagination. The currents of genius have flowed toward trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, not aesthetics.

This explanation is easy to understand, and is therefore plausible, but I do not believe that it is accurate. It is not true that American energy has been absorbed by business. Politics, and politics of a creative character, has never lacked good blood in the United States. Organization, and organization of a kind requiring the creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our energies, especially since the Civil War, and by no means all of it has been business organization. Consider our systems of education and philanthropy, erected for vast needs. And I venture to guess that more varieties of religious experience have arisen in America than elsewhere in the same period. After all, why expect a century and a half of semi-independent intellectual existence to result in a great national literature? Can other countries, other times, show such a phenomenon?

No, if we have been slow in finding ourselves in literature, in creating a school of expression like the Elizabethan or the Augustan, the difficulties are to be sought elsewhere than in a lack of energy.

Seek them first of all in a weakening of literary tradition. The sky changes, not the mind, said Horace, but this is true only of the essentials of being. The great writers of our common English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others—are as good for us as they are good for you. It is even whispered that our language is more faithful to their diction than is yours. But the conditions of life in a new environment bring a multitude of minor changes with them. To begin with little things, our climate, our birds, our trees, our daily contact with nature, are all different. Your mellow fluting blackbird, your wise thrush that sings each song twice over, your high-fluttering larks we do not know. Our blackbird creaks discordantly, our plaintive lark sings from the meadow tussock, our thrush chimes his heavenly bell from forest dimness. And this accounts, may I suggest in passing, for the insistence upon nature in American writing, from Thoreau down. Our social and economic experience has been widely different also; and all this, plus the results of a break in space and time with the home country of our language, weakened that traditional influence which is so essential for the production of a national literature. It had to be; good will come of it; but for a time we vacillated, and we still vacillate, like a new satellite finding its course.

Again, the constant shift of location within America has been a strong delaying factor. Moving-day has come at least once a generation for most American families since the days of William Penn or The Mayflower, The president of a Western university, who himself, as a baby, had been carried across the Alleghenies in a sling, once told me the history of his family. It settled in Virginia in the seventeenth century, and moved westward regularly each generation, until his father, the sixth or seventh in line, had reached California. On the return journey he had got as far as Illinois, and his son was moving to New York! The disturbing effect upon literature of this constant change of soils and environment is best proved by negatives. Wherever there has been a settled community in the United States—in New England of the 'forties and again in the 'nineties, in the Middle West and California to-day—one is sure to find a literature with some depth and solidity to it. The New England civilization of the early nineteenth century, now materially altered, was a definable culture, with five generations behind it, and strong roots in the old world. From it came the most mature school of American literature that so far we have possessed.

Still another difficulty must be added. The social. Pessimists, who see in our Eastern states a mere congeries of all the white races, and some not white, bewail the impossibility of a real nation in America. But the racial problem has always been with us, nor has it by any means always been unsolved. Before the Revolution, we were English, Scottish, Welsh, Low German, Huguenot, Dutch, and Swedish. Before the Civil War, we were the same plus the Irish and the Germans of '48. And now we add Slavs, Jews, Greeks, and Italians. I do not minimize the danger. But let it be understood that while our civilization has always been British (if that term is used in its broadest sense) our blood has always been mixed, even in Virginia and New England. This has made it hard for us to feel entirely at home in the only literary tradition we possessed and cared to possess. We have been like the man with a ready-made suit. The cloth is right, but the cut must be altered before the clothes will fit him.

And finally, America has always been decentralized intellectually. It is true that most of the books and magazines are published in New York, and have always been published there, or in Boston or Philadelphia. But they have been written all over a vast country by men and women who frequently never see each other in the flesh. There has been no center like London, where writers can rub elbows half-a-dozen times a year. Boston was such a capital once; only, however, for New England. New York is a clearing-house of literature now; but the writing is, most of it, done elsewhere. It is curious to speculate what might have happened if the capital of the United States had been fixed at New York instead of Washington!