Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

The real issue of course was not Freedom and Liberty and the other capitalizations of the abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real question is whether American literature has met its proper, not its assumed, specifications. If one considers the past, the answer inclines toward the affirmative.

There have been two chief strains in American literature, not always distinct, but in origin different. In the first belong those writers whose dominant purpose has been to appeal to the best in the many; and by the best I mean the finest or the deepest emotions, and by the many I mean the accessible minds of the democracy. Emerson belongs primarily here, and Hawthorne, and, though he would have denied it, Whitman. Henry James in his earlier stories is a lovable example; and when he pursued his magical art into realms where only the trained appreciation could follow, Mrs. Wharton put on the mantle. In the second have been the more numerous writers whose chief purpose, not always a conscious one, has been to touch and interest and arouse not so much the best as the commonest, the most universal emotions. Cooper is the most excellent example of great writing in this group. Mark Twain when not misanthropic, Bret Harte in all moods, Whittier and Longfellow, Riley and 0. Henry, and a host of the less distinguished, also belong there.

But far more important than this division in purpose, which, after all, is hard to make and harder still to keep, is the fact, if one may speak of high esthetic matters in a biological fashion, of constant cross-fertilization between these strains, and especially in the men we call great. Americans who felt impelled to write of the ideal best have not forgotten the needs of a nation slowly moving toward democracy. Those who wrote to amuse and interest the populace have felt in a curious fashion their responsibility for what they considered American ideals. Tribute has been paid by both sides, though each in its own fashion, to democracy; and this makes an unexpected congruity between appeals to the best and satisfactions for the many, between Emerson and popular fiction. The scholar presents his idealistic optimism as an attempt to explain where the eager swarm ought to be winging. The story-teller, though inspired not by ideas, but by the chance to interest an energetic society absorbed in the conquest of nature and hot-blooded with the taste of success, yet feels bound to urge what he feels to be American morality and American idealism.

This common sympathy with democracy is the hope of American literature in the sharp tests of our nationality now almost upon us. Emerson and Cooper, Hawthorne and Mark Twain, are examples of what once it could do.

Emerson was a man who never courted or obtained popularity, who hitched his readers to a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who wrote always for minds that may have been democratic, but certainly could not have been common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an aristocrat in tastes, a democrat by sympathy and conviction, whose stories, even his bad stories, contained that essential adventure, that rapid and unexpected and successful action, which satisfies the universal craving for struggle well ended, stories so popular that his enemies were entranced by them even while they abused him.

The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the greatness of Emerson is the airy strength of his ideology, his permanence in the history of American civilization is determined by the expression he gave to the moral optimism of the typical American. And if the popularity of Cooper was due to the unflagging interest of his adventure and the romance of his actors and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him more than a good story-teller and gives him great place in the social history of America is his incarnation of the ideals and the morality of a native democracy in Deerslayer, whom all Americans could understand and admire.

Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Hawthorne was a moralist romancer whose austere talents forced admiration and a somewhat doubtful popularity. Twain touched the universal note of humorous exaggeration so early and so readily that his stern moral basis went unremarked. Men read him for humor as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing the ideas of each as unconsciously as the child takes medicine in a sugared glass.

Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of lofty moral ideals is more evident than any appeal to the masses, yet the most careless reader feels that his warnings are for a new world that has broken with tradition and must face its problems of sin and sex in a democracy of conscience. And if Mark Twain writes obviously to amuse the democracy, yet he seldom fails to preach to them also. “Huckleberry Finn,” to the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other things an epic of the injustice, the inconsistency of sophisticated man and his social system, seen through the eyes of the new world on the Mississippi, where tradition, in the fresh, crude light, showed its seams of decay. There is a tract upon slavery in “Huckleberry Finn,” and another upon dueling, and a third on social distinctions, and a fourth upon conventionalized religion. And readers of Clemens will not forget how the bones of his acrid philosophy wore through the skin of his humor in those later books, especially in “The Mysterious Stranger,” where a hatred of social injustice and the melancholy foreboding which has always accompanied the optimism of American democracy had such full escape that the publishers were led to print it as a fairytale for children that it might be enjoyed by minds too unobservant to trouble with its warnings.

I do not wish to seem to be docketing all American literature in these brief comparisons. What I desire is to point to this common interest of our writers in the needs of democracy. Whitman, who wrote always for the most vigorous and sometimes for the best emotions of the many, might continue the argument. Howells, whose zest for the familiar experience kept his penetrating intellect busy with problems important for democracy, is another example. Poe, and Henry James in his later years, fall without both groups, being as indifferent to democracy as they are solicitous for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it is by such men that the writers who sway the masses are trained in the technique of their craft.

In short, by and large, our literature is remarkable for its substructure of what might be called democratic idealism—idealism applied to the needs of a growing democracy. If the reader doubts, let him compare Emerson with Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and answer whether our writers have not been formed by the social needs of America.