Fiction stands in the centre of the characteristic literary productions; but also literature in the broader sense, including everything which interprets human destinies, as history and philosophy, or even more broadly including all the written products of the nation, everything reflects the essential traits of the literary temperament. In fact, the practical literature, especially the newspaper, reveals the American physiognomy most clearly. In better circles in America, it is proper to deplore the newspaper as a literary product, and to look on it as a necessary evil; and doubtless most newspapers serve up a great deal that is trivial and vulgar, and treat it in a trivial and vulgar way. But no one is forced, except by his own love for the sensational, to choose his daily reading out of this majority. Everybody knows that there is a minority of earnest and admirable papers at his disposal. Apart from newspaper politics and apart from the admirable industrial organization of the newspaper—both of which we have previously spoken of—the newspapers of the country are a literary product whose high merit is too often underestimated. The American newspapers, and of these not merely the largest, are an intellectual product of well-maintained uniformity of standard.
To be sure, the style is often light, the logic unsound, the information superficial; but, taken as a whole, the newspaper has unity and character. Thousands of loose-jointed intellects crowd into journalism every year—more than in any other country; but American journalism, like the nation as a whole, has an amazing power of assimilation. Just as thousands of Russians and Italians land every year in the rags of their wretchedness, and in a few years become earnest American citizens, so many land on the shores of American journalism who were not intended to be the teachers or entertainers of humanity, and who nevertheless in a few years are quite assimilated. The American newspapers, from Boston to San Francisco, are alike in style and thought; and it must be said, in spite of all prejudices, that the American newspaper is certainly literature. The American knows no difference between unpolitical chatter written with a literary ambition and unliterary comment written with a political ambition. In one sense the whole newspaper is political, while at the same time it is nothing but feuilleton, from the editorials, of which every large newspaper has three or four each day, to the small paragraphs, notes, and announcements with which the editorial page generally closes. From the Washington letter to the sporting gossip, everything tries in a way to have artistic merit, and everything bears the stamp of American literature. Nothing is pedantic. There is often a great lack of information and of perspective—perhaps, even, of conscientiousness in the examination of complaints—but everything is fresh, optimistic, clear and forcible, and always humorous between the lines.
In the weekly papers, America achieves still more. The light, fresh, and direct American style there finds its most congenial field. The same is true of the monthly papers in a somewhat more ambitious and permanent way. The leading social and political monthlies, like the venerable North American Review, which errs merely in laying too much emphasis on the names of its well-known contributors, and others are quite up to the best English reviews. The more purely literary Atlantic Monthly, which was founded in 1857 by a small circle of Boston friends, Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, and Motley, and which has always attracted the best talent of the country, is most nearly comparable to the Revue des Deux Mondes. Every monthly paper specially cultivates that literary form for which America has shown the most pronounced talent—the essay. The magazine essay entirely takes the place of the German brochure, a form which is almost unknown in America. The brochure, depending as it does wholly on its own merits to attract the attention of the public, must be in some way sensational to make up for its diminutive size; while an essay which is brought before the reader on the responsibility of a magazine needs no such motive power. It is one among many, and takes its due place, being only one of the items of interest that make up the magazine.
While in German literary circles the problems of the day are mostly argued in brochures, and the essay is a miniature book really written for the easy instruction of a public which would not read long books, the American essay is half-way between. It is living and satirical like the German brochure, but conservative and instructive like the German “Abhandlung.” Only when a number of essays on related topics come from the same pen are they put together and published as a separate book. We have already mentioned that America is oversupplied with such volumes of essays, which have almost all the same history—they were first lectures, then magazine articles, and now they are revised and published in book form. Their value is, of course, very diverse; but in general, they are interesting and important, often epoch-making, and the form is admirable. A distinguished treatment, pointed humour, a rich and clear diction, uncommonly happy metaphors, and a careful polish are united so as to make one forget the undeniable haste with which the material is gathered and the superficiality of the conclusions arrived at. So it happens that the essayists who appear in book form are much more appreciated by the reading public than their German colleagues, and that every year sees several hundred such volumes put on the market. The motto, “fresh and mature,” is nowhere more appropriate.
But the American remains an American, even in the apparently international realm of science. It is a matter of course for an historian to write in the personal style. Parkman, Motley, Prescott, and Fiske are very different types of historians; and nevertheless, they have in common the same way of approaching the subject and of giving to it form and life. But even in so purely a scientific work as William James’s two-volume “Principles of Psychology,” one finds such forcible and convincing turns of thought, so personal a form given to abstract facts, and such freshness together with such ripe mastery, as could come only from an American.
Oratory may be accounted an off-shoot of actual literature. A nation of politicians must reserve an honourable place for the orator, and for many years thousands of factors in public life have contributed to develop oratory, to encourage the slightest talent for speaking, and to reward able speakers well. Every great movement in American history has been initiated by eloquent speakers. Before the Revolution, Adams and Otis, Quincy and Henry, precipitated the Revolution by their burning words. And no one can discuss the great movement leading up to the Civil War without considering the oratory of Choate, Clay, Calhoun, Hayne, Garrison, and Sumner; of Wendell Phillips, the great popular leader, and Edward Everett, the great academician, and of Daniel Webster, the greatest statesman of them all.
In the present times of peace, the orator is less important than the essayist, and most of the party speeches to-day have not even a modest place in literature. But if one follows a Presidential campaign, listens to the leading lawyers of the courts, or follows the parliamentary debates of university students, one knows that the rhetorical talent of the American has not died since those days of quickening, and would spring up again strong and vigorous if any great subject, greater than were silver coinage or the Philippine policy, should excite again the nation. Keenness of understanding, admirable sense of form in the single sentence as in the structure of the whole, startling comparisons, telling ridicule, careful management of the climax, and the tone of conviction seem to be everybody’s gift. Here and there the phrase is hollow and thought is sacrificed to sound, but the general tendency goes toward brevity and simplicity. A most delightful variation of oratory is found in table eloquence; the true American after-dinner speech is a finished work of art. Often, of course, there are ordinary speeches which simply go from one story to another, quite content merely to relate them well. In the best speeches the pointed anecdote is not lacking either, but it merely decorates the introduction; the speaker then approaches his real subject half playfully and half in earnest, very sympathetically, and seeming always to let his thoughts choose words for themselves. The speeches at the Capitol are sometimes better than those in the Reichstag; but those at American banquets are not only better than the speeches at Festessen and Kommersen, but they are also qualitatively different—true literary works of art, for which the American is especially fitted by the freshness, humour, enthusiasm, and sense of symmetry which are naturally his.
Whoever looks about among journalists, essayists, historians, and orators will return more than once to the subject of belles-lettres; and this is truer in America than elsewhere. As we have already seen, pure literature is strongly biased toward the practical; it is glad to serve great ideas, whether moral or social. Poetry itself is sometimes an essay or sermon. We need not think here of romances which merely sermonize, and are therefore artistically second-rate, such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or of such literary rubbish as Bellamy’s “Utopia”; even true poets like Whittier must, in the history of emancipation, be classed with the political writers. And although the problem novel in the three-volume English form is not favoured in America because of its poor literary form, the short satirical and clean-cut society novel, which may break away at any moment into the essay or journalistic manner, has become all the more popular. Further, this being the time of America’s industrial struggle, society has not become so intellectually aristocratic that being a poet is a life profession. The leading novelists have had to be active in almost all fields of literature; they have frequently begun as journalists, and have generally been essayists, editors, or professors at the same time.
The eighteenth century was unfruitful for the New World, in lyric as in epic literature. The literary history discovers many names, but they are of men who created nothing original, and who cannot be compared with the great English geniuses. America was internally as well as externally dependent on England; and if one compares the utter intellectual unfruitfulness of Canada to-day with the feverish activity of her southern neighbour, one will inevitably ask whether political colonies can ever create literature. When freedom was first obtained by the colonies, a condition of new equilibrium was reached after a couple of decades of uncertainty and unrest, and then American literature woke up. Even then it was not free, and did not care to be free, from English precedents; and yet there were original personalities which came to the front. Washington Irving was, as Thackeray said, the first ambassador which the New World of literature sent to the Old. English influences are unmistakable in the tales of Irving, although he was a strong and original writer. His “Sketch-Book,” published in 1819, has remained the most popular of his books, and the poetic muse has never been hunted away from the shores of the Hudson where Rip Van Winkle passed his long slumbers.
The American novel had still not appeared. The romances of Brown, laid in Pennsylvania, were highly inartistic in spite of their forcible presentation. Then James Fenimore Cooper discovered the untouched treasures of the infinite wilderness. His “Spy” appeared in 1821, and he was at once hailed as the American Scott. In the next year appeared “The Pioneers,” the first of his Leather-stocking Tales of wild Indian life. And after Cooper’s thirty-two romances there followed many tales by lesser writers. Miss Sedgwick was the first woman to attain literary popularity, and her romances were the first which depicted the life of New England. At the same time a New England youth began to write verses which, by their serene beauty, were incomparably above all earlier lyric attempts of his native land. Bryant’s first volume of poems appeared in 1821, and therewith America had a literature, and England’s sarcastic question, “Who ever reads an American book?” was not asked again.