CHAPTER VI
LITERATURE IN AMERICA
“Fix’t in sublimest thought behold them rise
World after world unfolding to their eyes,
Lead, light, allure them thro’ the total plan
And give new guidance to the paths of man.”
THESE were the modest aspirations for American genius, and especially American literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, the once famous author, in his “Columbiad” of 1807.
It was not a democratic literature, as we understand the term, that Barlow, and hundreds of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped and expected to see arise in the new republic. It was not a literature that would interpret the homely, though vigorous, personality of a new nation. Nothing so concrete and so commonplace as this would have raised their ardor to such a pitch. The excitable critics of that day were concerned with the absolute, the ideal, and the abstract. Liberty, not equality, had at last found a dwelling-place, and the free spirit of man was to expand in an illimitable continent as never before, and create the poetry of freedom and the epic of liberated mankind. But their vast expectations were based upon a misconception and surrounded by fallacies. They have not been realized; and this is one reason for the prevailing idea that literary America has been a disappointment, that the life of the mind in America has lagged behind its opportunities, that we are a backward race in literature and the arts. We seem children to-day beside the dreams of our ancestors.
It is easy enough to see now that a race which had to construct a nation in a continent in large part scarcely habitable was not ready to sing the epic of freedom. Freedom had been won, but whether it would be possible to possess and enjoy it depended not upon lyrical interpretation, but upon statecraft, the broadax, toil, transportation, and the rifle. And when the pioneering days were over, political freedom, freedom of conscience and the individual man, belonged as truly to other great nations who were equally entitled to create the literature of the free mind. To expect the ideals of liberty to appear in American literature was legitimate, but to look for a great poetic outburst in nineteenth-century America just because this republic first established a new political order was no more reasonable than to demand a new style in architecture from the erectors of the first capitol in the trans-Alleghany wilderness.
What should have been asked of us, at least after the defeat of the Federalist party had made certain, what before was only probable, that America would become a democracy, was a literature which should express the ideals pervading our particular brand of democratic life, a literature which should describe a society in which social distinctions were elastic, opportunity was superabundant, and, for the first time in the modern world, the common people become more powerful than the uncommon. A democratic literature could rightly have been expected from America. But such a literature would never have been termed “sublimest thought” by our early enthusiasts. It would have to suffer from the tawdriness of the masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. It would have to be more prose than poetry, for American life outwardly was prosaic except upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous there. It would have to struggle upward like a flapping heron, not soar like the eagle of our dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in most periods of the republic, few literary dreamers even wished that America should become a democracy.
In many respects we got, and got very soon, such a literature, and much of it has endured. The prose or poetry that took upon itself to let the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally gone into oblivion, and with reason; it is either crude and blatant, or solemn and hackneyed pretentiousness, like Barlow’s “Columbiad” and much of Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan.” The “less enraptured” strains of Irving and Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and Bret Harte, in which the hopes, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a nascent civilization were expressed in prose as well as poetry, and in humor more frequently than in epic grandeur, have had a thousand times more virility. They have sprung from a social and esthetic need, not a romantic conception, and though not an epoch-making celebration of freedom finally brought to earth, they have been a solid contribution to the literature of the world and a beginning of the literature of the American democracy.