XXIV
A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (1857-1907)
I
The brilliant French author, Stendhal, used to describe his ideal of a happy life as dwelling in a Paris garret and writing endless plays and novels. This might seem to any Anglo-American a fantastic wish; and no doubt the early colonists on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, after fighting through the Revolution by the aid of Rochambeau and his Frenchmen, might have felt quite out of place had they followed their triumphant allies back to Europe, in 1781, and inspected their way of living. We can hardly wonder, on the other hand, that the accomplished French traveler, Philarète Chasles, on visiting this country in 1851, looked through the land in despair at not finding a humorist, although the very boy of sixteen who stood near him at the rudder of a Mississippi steam-boat may have been he who was destined to amuse the civilized world under the name of Mark Twain.[23]
That which was, however, to astonish most seriously all European observers who were watching the dawn of the young American republic, was its presuming to develop itself in its own original way, and not conventionally. It was destined, as Cicero said of ancient Rome, to produce its statesmen and orators first, and its poets later. Literature was not inclined to show itself with much promptness, during and after long years of conflict, first with the Indians, then with the mother country. There were individual instances of good writing: Judge Sewall’s private diaries, sometimes simple and noble, sometimes unconsciously eloquent, often infinitely amusing; William Byrd’s and Sarah Knight’s piquant glimpses of early Virginia travel; Cotton Mather’s quaint and sometimes eloquent passages; Freneau’s poetry, from which Scott and Campbell borrowed phrases. Behind all, there was the stately figure of Jonathan Edwards standing gravely in the background, like a monk at the cloister door, with his treatise on the “Freedom of the Will.”