For many years, the higher intellectual training of Americans was obtained almost entirely through periods of study in Europe, especially in Germany. Men, of whom Everett, Ticknor, Cogswell, and Bancroft were the pioneers, beginning in 1818 or thereabouts, discovered that Germany and not England must be made our national model in this higher education; and this discovery was strengthened by the number of German refugees, often highly trained men, who sought this country for political safety. The influence of German literature on the American mind was undoubtedly at its highest point half a century ago, and the passing away of the great group of German authors then visible was even more striking than have been the corresponding changes in England and America; but the leadership of Germany in purely scientific thought and invention has kept on increasing, so that the mental tie between that nation and our own was perhaps never stronger than now.
In respect to literature, the increased tendency to fiction, everywhere visible, has nowhere been more marked than in America. Since the days of Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the recognized leader in this department has been Mr. Howells; that is, if we base leadership on higher standards than that of mere comparison of sales. The actual sale of copies in this department of literature has been greater in certain cases than the world has before seen; but it has rarely occurred that books thus copiously multiplied have taken very high rank under more deliberate criticism. In some cases, as in that of Bret Harte, an author has won fame in early life by the creation of a few striking characters, and has then gone on reproducing them without visible progress; and this result has been most apt to occur wherever British praise has come in strongly, that being often more easily won by a few interesting novelties than by anything deeper in the way of local coloring or permanent delineation.
IV
It is sometimes said that there was never yet a great migration which did not result in some new form of national genius; and this should be true in America, if anywhere. He who lands from Europe on our shores perceives a difference in the sky above his head; the height seems greater, the zenith farther off, the horizon wall steeper. With this result on the one side, and the vast and constant mixture of races on the other, there must inevitably be a change. No portion of our immigrant body desires to retain its national tongue; all races wish their children to learn the English language as soon as possible, yet no imported race wishes its children to take the British race, as such, for models. Our newcomers unconsciously say with that keen thinker, David Wasson, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present?” The Englishman’s strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American’s disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall. Washington Irving, who seemed at first to so acute a French observer as Chasles a mere reproduction of Pope and Addison, wrote to John Lothrop Motley two years before his own death, “You are properly sensible of the high calling of the American press,—that rising tribunal before which the whole world is to be summoned, its history to be revised and rewritten, and the judgment of past ages to be canceled or confirmed.” For one who can look back sixty years to a time when the best literary periodical in America was called “The Albion,” it is difficult to realize how the intellectual relations of the two nations are now changed. M. D. Conway once pointed out that the English magazines, such as the “Contemporary Review” and the “Fortnightly,” were simply circular letters addressed by a few cultivated gentlemen to the fellow members of their respective London clubs. Where there is an American periodical, on the other hand, the most striking contribution may proceed from a previously unknown author, and may turn out to have been addressed practically to all the world.
So far as the intellectual life of a nation exhibits itself in literature, England may always have one advantage over us,—if advantage it be,—that of possessing in London a recognized publishing centre, where authors, editors, and publishers are all brought together. In America, the conditions of our early political activity have supplied us with a series of such centres, in a smaller way, beginning, doubtless, with Philadelphia, then changing to New York, then to Boston, and again reverting, in some degree, to New York. I say “in some degree” because Washington has long been the political centre of the nation, and tends more and more to occupy the same central position in respect to science, at least; while Western cities, notably Chicago and San Francisco, tend steadily to become literary centres for the wide regions they represent. Meanwhile the vast activities of journalism, the readiness of communication everywhere, the detached position of colleges, with many other influences, decentralize literature more and more. Emerson used to say that Europe stretched to the Alleghanies, but this at least has been corrected, and the national spirit is coming to claim the whole continent for its own.
There is undoubtedly a tendency in the United States to transfer intellectual allegiance, for a time, to science rather than to literature. This may be only a swing of the pendulum; but its temporary influence has nowhere been better defined or characterized than by the late Clarence King, formerly director of the United States Geological Survey, who wrote thus a little before his death: “With all its novel modern powers and practical sense, I am forced to admit that the purely scientific brain is miserably mechanical; it seems to have become a splendid sort of self-directed machine, an incredible automaton, grinding on with its analyses or constructions. But for pure sentiment, for all that spontaneous, joyous Greek waywardness of fancy, for the temperature of passion and the subtler thrill of ideality, you might as well look to a wrought-iron derrick.”
Whatever charges can be brought against the American people, no one has yet attributed to them any want of self-confidence or self-esteem; and though this trait may be sometimes unattractive, the philosophers agree that it is the only path to greatness. “The only nations which ever come to be called historic,” says Tolstoi in his “Anna Karenina,” “are those which recognize the importance and worth of their own institutions.” Emerson, putting the thing more tersely, as is his wont, says that “no man can do anything well who does not think that what he does is the centre of the visible universe.” The history of the American republic was really the most interesting in the world, from the outset, were it only from the mere fact that however small its scale, it yet showed a self-governing people in a condition never before witnessed on the globe; and so to this is now added the vaster contemplation of it as a nation of seventy millions rapidly growing more and more. If there is no interest in the spectacle of such a nation, laboring with all its might to build up an advanced civilization, then there is nothing interesting on earth. The time will come when all men will wonder, not that Americans attached so much importance to their national development at this period, but that they appreciated it so little. Canon Zincke has computed that in 1980 the English-speaking population of the globe will number, at the present rate of progress, one thousand millions, and that of this number eight hundred millions will dwell in the United States. No plans can be too far-seeing, no toils and sacrifices too great, in establishing this vast future civilization. It is in this light, for instance, that we must view the immense endowments of Mr. Carnegie, which more than fulfill the generalization of the acute author of a late Scotch novel, “The House with Green Shutters,” who says that while a Scotchman has all the great essentials for commercial success, “his combinations are rarely Napoleonic until he becomes an American.”
When one looks at the apparently uncertain, but really tentative steps taken by the trustees of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, one sees how much must yet lie before us in our provisions for intellectual progress. The numerical increase of our common schools and universities is perhaps as rapid as is best, and the number of merely scientific societies is large, but the provision for the publication of works of real thought and literature is still far too small. The endowment of the Smithsonian Institution now extends most comprehensively over all the vast historical work in American history, now so widely undertaken, and the Carnegie Institution bids fair to provide well for purely scientific work and the publication of its results. But the far more difficult task of developing and directing pure literature is as yet hardly attempted. Our magazines tend more and more to become mainly picture-books, and our really creative authors are geographically scattered and, for the most part, wholesomely poor. We should always remember, moreover, what is true especially in these works of fiction, that not only individual books, but whole schools of them, emerge and disappear, like the flash of a revolving light; you must make the most of it while you have it. “The highways of literature are spread over,” said Holmes, “with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with.”
In America, as in England, the leading literary groups are just now to be found less among the poets than among the writers of prose fiction. Of these younger authors, we have in America such men as Winston Churchill, Robert Grant, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Arthur S. Pier, and George Wasson; any one of whom may at any moment surprise us by doing something better than the best he has before achieved. The same promise of a high standard is visible in women, among whom may be named not merely those of maturer standing, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, who is the leader, but her younger sisters, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Josephine Preston Peabody. The drama also is advancing with rapid steps, and is likely to be still more successful in such hands as those of William Vaughn Moody, Ridgely Torrence, and Percy McKaye. The leader of English dramatic criticism, William Archer, found within the last year, as he tells us, no less than eight or nine notable American dramas in active representation on the stage, whereas eight years earlier there was but one.
Similar signs of promise are showing themselves in the direction of literature, social science, and higher education generally, all of which have an honored representative, still in middle life, in Professor George E. Woodberry. Professor Newcomb has just boldly pointed out that we have intellectually grown, as a nation, “from the high school of our Revolutionary ancestors to the college; from the college we have grown to the university stage. Now we have grown to a point where we need something beyond the university.” What he claims for science is yet more needed in the walks of pure literature, and is there incomparably harder to attain, since it has there to deal with that more subtle and vaster form of mental action which culminates in Shakespeare instead of Newton. This higher effort, which the French Academy alone even attempts,—however it may fail in the accomplished results,—may at least be kept before us as an ideal for American students and writers, even should its demands be reduced to something as simple as those laid down by Coleridge when he announced his ability to “inform the dullest writer how he might write an interesting book.” “Let him,” says Coleridge, “relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feeling that accompanied them.”[25] Thus simple, it would seem, are the requirements for a really good book; but, alas! who is to fulfill them? Yet if anywhere, why not in America?