Thus much for the scanty literary product; but when we turn to look for a new-born statesmanship in a nation equally new-born, the fact suddenly strikes us that the intellectual strength of the colonists lay there. The same discovery astonished England through the pamphlet works of Jay, Lee, and Dickinson; destined to be soon followed up with a long series of equally strong productions, to which Lord Chatham paid that fine tribute in his speech before the House of Lords on January 20, 1775. “I must declare and avow,” he said, “that in all my reading and observation—and it has been my favorite study—I have read Thucydides and have studied and admired the master-states of the world—for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia.” Yet it is to be noticed further that here, as in other instances, the literary foresight in British criticism had already gone in advance of even the statesman’s judgment, for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant of the literary men of his time, had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in Boston and a Xenophon in New York.
It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of looking over whole boxes of Washington’s yet unprinted letters in the hands of our kind neighbor, Jared Sparks (1834-37); manuscripts whose curved and varied signatures we had the inexhaustible boyish pleasure of studying and comparing; as we had also that of enjoying the pithy wisdom of Franklin in his own handwriting a few years later (1840), in the hands of the same kind and neighborly editor. But it was not always recognized by those who grew up in the new-born nation that in the mother country itself a period of literary ebb tide was then prevailing. When Fisher Ames, being laid on the shelf as a Federalist statesman, wrote the first really important essay on American Literature,—an essay published in 1809, after his death,—he frankly treated literature itself as merely one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, “The time seems to be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least poetry of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If America had not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no longer, it will not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius.” Believing as he did, that human freedom could never last long in a democracy, Ames thought that perhaps, when liberty had given place to an emperor, this monarch might desire to see splendor in his court, and to occupy his subjects with the cultivation of the arts and sciences. At any rate, he maintained, “After some ages we shall have many poor and a few rich, many grossly ignorant, a considerable number learned, and a few eminently learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men of genius, who will be admired and imitated.” The first part of this prophecy failed, but the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite unexpected.
II
The point unconsciously ignored by Fisher Ames, and by the whole Federalist party of his day, was that there was already being created on this side of the ocean, not merely a new nation, but a new temperament. How far this temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how far from a new political organization, no one could then foresee, nor is its origin yet fully analyzed; but the fact itself is now coming to be more and more recognized. It may be that Nature said, at about that time, “‘Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another turning of the globe, and a further novelty. We need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman: let us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.’ With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born.” This remark, which appeared first in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold, who missed the point entirely in calling it “tall talk” or a species of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children in school. In reality, it was a point of the greatest importance. If Americans are to be merely duplicate Englishmen, Nature might have said, the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one finally did more toward recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold himself, when he afterwards wrote, in 1887, “Our countrymen [namely, the English], with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility”; and again in the same essay, “The whole American nation may be called ‘intelligent,’ that is to say, ‘quick.’”[24] This would seem to yield the whole point between himself and the American writer whom he had criticised, and who happened to be the author of this present volume.
One of the best indications of this very difference of temperament, even to this day, is the way in which American journalists and magazinists are received in England, and their English compeers among ourselves. An American author connected with the “St. Nicholas Magazine” was told by a London publisher, within my recollection, that the plan of the periodical was essentially wrong. “The pages of riddles at the end, for instance,” he said, “no child would ever guess them”; and although the American assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in twenty thousand families or more, the publisher still shook his head. As to the element of humor itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant New York talker that he had dined through three English counties on the strength of the jokes which he had found in the corners of an old American “Farmer’s Almanac” which he had happened to put into his trunk when packing for his European trip.
From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crèvecœur, down to Ampère and De Tocqueville, there was a French appreciation, denied to the English, of this lighter quality; and this certainly seems to indicate that the change in the Anglo-American temperament had already begun to show itself. Ampère especially notices what he calls “une veine européenne” among the educated classes. Many years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble, writing in reference to the dramatic stage, pointed out that the theatrical instinct of Americans created in them an affinity for the French which the English, hating exhibitions of emotion and self-display, did not share, she recognized in our nation this tinge of the French temperament, while perhaps giving to it an inadequate explanation.
III
The local literary prominence given, first to Philadelphia by Franklin and Brockden Brown, and then to New York by Cooper and Irving, was in each case too detached and fragmentary to create more than these individual fames, however marked or lasting these may be. It required time and a concentrated influence to constitute a literary group in America. Bryant and Channing, with all their marked powers, served only as a transition to it. Yet the group was surely coming, and its creation has perhaps never been put in so compact a summary as that made by that clear-minded ex-editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the late Horace Scudder. He said, “It is too early to make a full survey of the immense importance to American letters of the work done by half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of the country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come.”
The geographical headquarters of this particular group was Boston, of which Cambridge and Concord may be regarded for this purpose as suburbs. Such a circle of authors as Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Alcott, Thoreau, Parkman, and others had never before met in America; and now that they have passed away, no such local group anywhere remains: nor has the most marked individual genius elsewhere—such, for instance, as that of Poe or Whitman—been the centre of so conspicuous a combination. The best literary representative of this group of men in bulk was undoubtedly the “Atlantic Monthly,” to which almost every one of them contributed, and of which they made up the substantial opening strength.
With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed at that period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself rapidly over the country, and in which most of the above authors took some part and several took leading parts, these lectures having much formative power over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous among the lecturers also were such men as Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and lesser men who are now collectively beginning to fade into oblivion. With these may be added the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to their audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These lectures were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source of popular education; they were subject, however, to the limitation of being rather suggestive than instructive, because they always came in a detached way and so did not favor coherent thinking. The much larger influence now exerted by courses of lectures in the leading cities does more to strengthen the habit of consecutive thought than did the earlier system; and such courses, joined with the great improvement in public schools, are assisting vastly in the progress of public education. The leader who most distinguished himself in this last direction was, doubtless, Horace Mann, who died in 1859. The influence of American colleges, while steadily maturing into universities all over the country, has made itself felt more and more obviously, especially as these colleges have with startling suddenness and comprehensiveness extended their privileges to women also, whether in the form of coeducation or of institutions for women only.