The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

Now this habit of soul, this tone of life, is reflected in American literature. Whatever defects it may have, a lack of serious feeling and purpose is not among them. It is pervaded, generally, by the spiritual preconception. It approaches life from the point of view of responsibility. It gives full value to those instincts, desires, and hopes in man which have to do with the unseen world.

Even in those writers who are moved by a sense of revolt against the darkness and severity of certain theological creeds, the attempt is not to escape from religion, but to find a clearer, nobler, and more loving expression of religion. Even in those works which deal with subjects which are non-religious in their specific quality,—stories of adventure, like Cooper’s novels; poems of romance, like the ballads of Longfellow and Whittier,—one feels the implication of a spiritual background, a moral law, a Divine providence,—

“Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”

This, hitherto, has been the characteristic note of the literature of America. It has taken for granted that there is a God, that men must answer to Him for their actions, and that one of the most interesting things about people, even in books, is their moral quality.

(2) Another trait which seems to me strongly marked in the American temperament and clearly reflected in American literature is the love of nature. The attractions of the big out-of-doors have taken hold upon the people. They feel a strong affection for their great, free, untended forests, their swift-rushing rivers, their bright, friendly brooks, their wooded mountain ranges of the East, their snowy peaks and vast plains and many-coloured canyons of the West.

I suppose there is no other country in the world where so many people break away from the fatigues of civilization every year, and go out to live in the open for a vacation with nature. The business of making tents and camp outfits for these voluntary gypsies has grown to be enormous. In California they do not even ask for a tent. They sleep à la belle étoile.

The Audubon societies have spread to every State. You will not find anywhere in Europe, except perhaps in Switzerland, such companies of boys and girls studying the wild flowers and the birds. The interest is not altogether, nor mainly, scientific. It is vital and temperamental. It is the expression of an inborn sympathy with nature and a real delight in her works.

This has found an utterance in the large and growing “nature-literature” of America. John James Audubon, Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, Clarence King, John Muir, Ernest Seton, Frank Chapman, Ernest Ingersoll,—these are some of the men who have not only carefully described, but also lovingly interpreted, “nature in her visible forms,” and so have given to their books, beyond the value of accurate records of observation, the charm of sympathetic and illuminative writing.

But it is not only in these special books that I would look for evidence of the love of nature in the American temperament. It is found all through the poetry and the prose of the best writers. The most perfect bit of writing in the works of that stern Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, is the description of an early morning walk through a field of wild flowers. Some of the best pages of Irving and Cooper are sketches of landscape along the Hudson River. The scenery of New England is drawn with infinite delicacy and skill in the poetry of Bryant, Whittier, and Emerson. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller make as see the painted desert and the ragged Sierras. James Lane Allen shows us the hemp fields of Kentucky, George Cable the bayous of Louisiana. But the list of illustrations is endless. The whole literature of America is filled with pictures of nature. There is hardly a familiar bird or flower for which some poet has not tried to find a distinct, personal, significant expression in his verse.

(3) A third trait of the American temperament is the sense of humour. This is famous, not to say notorious. The Americans are supposed to be a nation of jokers, whose daily jests, like their ready-made shoes, have a peculiar oblique form which makes it slightly difficult for people of other nationalities to get into them.