CHAPTER III.
AMERICANISM IN FICTION.
Contemporary criticism will have it that, in order to create an American Literature, we must use American materials. The term "Literature" has, no doubt, come to be employed in a loose sense. The London Saturday Review has (or used to have until lately) a monthly two-column article devoted to what it called "American Literature," three-fourths of which were devoted to an examination of volumes of State Histories, Statistical Digests, Records of the Census, and other such works as were never, before or since, suspected of being literature; while the remaining fourth mentioned the titles (occasionally with a line of comment) of whatever productions were at hand in the way of essays, novels, and poetry. This would seem to indicate that we may have—nay, are already possessed of—an American Literature, composed of American materials, provided only that we consent to adopt the Saturday Review's conception of what literature is.
Many of us believe, however, that the essays, the novels, and the poetry, as well as the statistical digests, ought to go to the making up of a national literature. It has been discovered, however, that the existence of the former does not depend, to the same extent as that of the latter, upon the employment of exclusively American material. A book about the census, if it be not American, is nothing; but a poem or a romance, though written by a native-born American, who, perhaps, has never crossed the Atlantic, not only may, but frequently does, have nothing in it that can be called essentially American, except its English and, occasionally, its ideas. And the question arises whether such productions can justly be held to form component parts of what shall hereafter be recognized as the literature of America.
How was it with the makers of English literature? Beginning with Chaucer, his "Canterbury Pilgrims" is English, both in scene and character; it is even mentioned of the Abbess that "Frenche of Paris was to her unknowe"; but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faërie Queene" numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid in Faërie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it; yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus," bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to-day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to "Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le Sage, goes on to say: "The following sheets I have modelled on his plan"; and Sterne was always talking and thinking about Cervantes, and comparing himself to the great Spaniard: "I think there is more laughable humor, with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last," he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work. Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality; and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly imbued with Germanism, while the "Romola" of George Eliot and the "Cloister and the Hearth" of Charles Reade are by many considered to be the best of their works. In the above enumeration innumerable instances in point are, of course, omitted; but enough have been given, perhaps, to show that imaginative writers have not generally been disowned by their country on the ground that they have availed themselves, in their writings, of other scenes and characters than those of their own immediate neighborhoods.
The statistics of the work of the foremost American writers could easily be shown to be much more strongly imbued with the specific flavor of their environment. Benjamin Franklin, though he was an author before the United States existed, was American to the marrow. The "Leather-Stocking Tales" of Cooper are the American epic. Irving's "Knickerbocker" and his "Woolfert's Roost" will long outlast his other productions. Poe's most popular tale, "The Gold-Bug," is American in its scene, and so is "The Mystery of Marie Roget," in spite of its French nomenclature; and all that he wrote is strongly tinged with the native hue of his strange genius. Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" and "Miles Standish," and such poems as "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Building of the Ship," crowd out of sight his graceful translations and adaptations. Emerson is the veritable American eagle of our literature, so that to be Emersonian is to be American. Whittier and Holmes have never looked beyond their native boundaries, and Hawthorne has brought the stern gloom of the Puritan period and the uneasy theorizings of the present day into harmony with the universal and permanent elements of human nature. There was certainly nothing European visible in the crude but vigorous stories of Theodore Winthrop; and Bret Harte, the most brilliant figure among our later men, is not only American, but Californian,—as is, likewise, the Poet of the Sierras. It is not necessary to go any further. Mr. Henry James, having enjoyed early and singular opportunities of studying the effects of the recent annual influx of Americans, cultured and otherwise, into England and the Continent, has very sensibly and effectively, and with exquisite grace of style and pleasantness of thought, made the phenomenon the theme of a remarkable series of stories. Hereupon the cry of an "International School" has been raised, and critics profess to be seriously alarmed lest we should ignore the signal advantages for mise-en-scène presented by this Western half of the planet, and should enter into vain and unpatriotic competition with foreign writers on their own ground. The truth is, meanwhile, that it would have been a much surer sign of affectation in us to have abstained from literary comment upon the patent and notable fact of this international rapprochement,—which is just as characteristic an American trait as the episode of the Argonauts of 1849,—and we have every reason to be grateful to Mr. Henry James, and to his school, if he has any, for having rescued us from the opprobrium of so foolish a piece of know-nothingism. The phase is, of course, merely temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but, because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale? As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a characteristic literature than does any amount of gadding abroad.
That must be a very shallow literature which depends for its national flavor and character upon its topography and its dialect; and the criticism which can conceive of no deeper Americanism than this is shallower still. What is an American book? It is a book written by an American, and by one who writes as an American; that is, unaffectedly. So an English book is a book written by an unaffected Englishman. What difference can it make what the subject of the writing is? Mr. Henry James lately brought out a volume of essays on "French Poets and Novelists." Mr. E. C. Stedman recently published a series of monographs on "The Victorian Poets." Are these books French and English, or are they nondescript, or are they American? Not only are they American, but they are more essentially American than if they had been disquisitions upon American literature. And the reason is, of course, that they subject the things of the old world to the tests of the new, and thereby vindicate and illustrate the characteristic mission of America to mankind. We are here to hold up European conventionalisms and prejudices in the light of the new day, and thus afford everybody the opportunity, never heretofore enjoyed, of judging them by other standards, and in other surroundings than those amidst which they came into existence. In the same way, Emerson's "English Traits" is an American thing, and it gives categorical reasons why American things should be. And what is an American novel except a novel treating of persons, places, and ideas from an American point of view? The point of view is the point, not the thing seen from it.
But it is said that "the great American novel," in order fully to deserve its name, ought to have American scenery. Some thousands of years ago, the Greeks had a novelist—Homer—who evolved the great novel of that epoch; but the scenery of that novel was Trojan, not Greek. The story is a criticism, from a Greek standpoint, of foreign affairs, illustrated with practical examples; and, as regards treatment, quite as much care is bestowed upon the delineation of Hector, Priam, and Paris, as upon Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles. The same story, told by a Trojan Homer, would doubtless have been very different; but it is by no means certain that it would have been any better told. It embodies, whether symbolically or literally matters not, the triumph of Greek ideas and civilization. But, even so, the sympathies of the reader are not always, or perhaps uniformly, on the conquering side. Homer was doubtless a patriot, but he shows no signs of having been a bigot. He described that great international episode with singular impartiality; what chiefly interested him was the play of human nature. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the Greeks were backward in admitting his claims as their national poet; and we may legitimately conclude that were an American Homer—whether in prose or poetry—to appear among us, he might pitch his scene where he liked—in Patagonia, or on the banks of the Zambezi—and we should accept the situation with perfect equanimity. Only let him be a native of New York, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Mullenville, and be inspired with the American idea, and we ask no more. Whatever he writes will belong to our literature, and add lustre to it.
One hears many complaints about the snobbishness of running after things European. Go West, young man, these moralists say, or go down Fifth Avenue, and investigate Chatham Street, and learn that all the elements of romance, to him who has the seeing eye, lie around your own front doorstep and back yard. But let not these persons forget that he who fears Europe is a less respectable snob than he who studies it. Let us welcome Europe in our books as freely as we do at Castle Garden; we may do so safely. If our digestion be not strong enough to assimilate her, and work up whatever is valuable in her into our own bone and sinew, then America is not the thing we took her for. For what is America? Is it simply a reproduction of one of these Eastern nationalities, which we are so fond of alluding to as effete? Surely not. It is a new departure in history; it is a new door opened to the development of the human race, or, as I should prefer to say, of humanity. We are misled by the chatter of politicians and the bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last arrived when man, all over this planet, is entering upon a new career of moral, intellectual, and political emancipation; and America is the concrete expression and theatre of that great fact, as all spiritual truths find their fitting and representative physical incarnation. But what would this huge western continent be, if America—the real America of the mind—had no existence? It would be a body without a soul, and would better, therefore, not be at all. If America is to be a repetition of Europe on a larger scale, it is not worth the pain of governing it. Europe has shown what European ideas can accomplish; and whatever fresh thought or impulse comes to birth in it can be nothing else than an American thought and impulse, and must sooner or later find its way here, and become naturalized with its brethren. Buds and blossoms of America are sprouting forth all over the Old World, and we gather in the fruit. They do not find themselves at home there, but they know where their home is. The old country feels them like thorns in her old flesh, and is gladly rid of them; but such prickings are the only wholesome and hopeful symptoms she presents; if they ceased to trouble her, she would be dead indeed. She has an uneasy experience before her, for a time; but the time will come when she, too, will understand that her ease is her disease, and then Castle Garden may close its doors, for America will be everywhere.
If, then, America is something vastly more than has hitherto been understood by the word nation, it is proper that we attach to that other word, patriotism, a significance broader and loftier than has been conceived till now. By so much as the idea that we represent is great, by so much are we, in comparison with it, inevitably chargeable with littleness and short-comings. For we are of the same flesh and blood as our neighbors; it is only our opportunities and our responsibilities that are fairer and weightier than theirs. Circumstances afford every excuse to them, but none to us. "E Pluribus Unum" is a frivolous motto; our true one should be, "Noblesse oblige." But, with a strange perversity, in all matters of comparison between ourselves and others, we display what we are pleased to call our patriotism by an absurd touchiness as to points wherein Europe, with its settled and polished civilization, must needs be our superior; and are quite indifferent about those things by which our real strength is constituted. Can we not be content to learn from Europe the graces, the refinements, the amenities of life, so long as we are able to teach her life itself? For my part, I never saw in England any appurtenance of civilization, calculated to add to the convenience and commodiousness of existence, that did not seem to me to surpass anything of the kind that we have in this country. Notwithstanding which—and I am far, indeed, from having any pretensions to asceticism—I would have been fairly stifled at the idea of having to spend my life there. No American can live in Europe, unless he means to return home, or unless, at any rate, he returns here in mind, in hope, in belief. For an American to accept England, or any other country, as both a mental and physical finality, would, it seems to me, be tantamount to renouncing his very life. To enjoy English comforts at the cost of adopting English opinions, would be about as pleasant as to have the privilege of retaining one's body on condition of surrendering one's soul, and would, indeed, amount to just about the same thing.