Chapter VII: Part 7

We were not undertaking to determine rank or to appraise values, we said, but so much as this we will venture upon suggesting: that a piece of pure art--“The Scarlet Letter,” if you will--is not on that ground alone to be considered as worthier in itself, or better assured of lasting honor, than some work less perfectly constructed, but, it may be, more nobly inspired. In the final result of things, literary merit and literary fame are not portioned out by any critical yardstick. Lowell complained of Thoreau that “he had no artistic power such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness.” True enough. It is the same criticism which Carlyle, and Arnold after him, brought against Emerson; in whose case, also, we need not dispute the point. But Lowell said further of Thoreau, “His work gives me the feeling of a sky full of stars;” and again: “As we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne.... Compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s ‘Selborne,’ seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological journal in an old almanac.” In other words, Thoreau was not an artist, but he did something new, and something grandly worth doing. Emerson, likewise, was not an artist; but the critic who tells us so tells us in the same breath that Emerson’s essays are the most important work done in English prose during their century.

Whether Emerson will outlive Hawthorne, or Hawthorne outlive Emerson, who can say? It would be rash guessing to attempt a prophecy. As for Thoreau, there are some, perhaps, who would bid higher for his chance of immortality than for that of either of his two famous townsmen.

Let such things turn out as they may, Emerson and Thoreau have each given to American literature, and better still to American life, something that can never be lost, even though their works and their names together should be forgotten; and they have done this partly by reason of their very limitations, their making of sentences and paragraphs--portable wisdom--instead of “artistic bronze statues.” “Wisdom is the principal thing,” said an ancient writer; and an English critic and statesman of our own day has uttered the same truth in more modern fashion. “Aphorism or maxim,” says Mr. John Morley, “let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it; and that it is one of the main objects, apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the reading of books.”

Yes, and it is one of the objects that men do seek; for the history of literature proves abundantly that the world keeps a relish for that which feeds the soul as well as for that which ministers to the passion for beauty; if it crowns the literary artist, it has a wreath also for his humbler brother--if he _is_ humbler--the originator and disseminator of thought. For it is to be considered that a man with a genius for writing is not therefore a man of original ideas, or indeed, so far as the necessity of the case goes, of any ideas at all. His gift may be--nay, perhaps is likely to be--purely artistic and literary, a faculty for seeing and describing. Thus we read of Sterne that he was a great author, “not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a sentence in his writings which can be called a thought, ... but because of his wonderful sympathy with and wonderful power of representing simple human nature.” Obviously, it is not to such as he that we are to go in search of wisdom. The man who furnishes us with that commodity, the quotable man, be his rank higher or lower, is one who thinks, or, lacking that, has an instinct for the discovery and expression of thought,--a man under the friction of whose pen ideas crystallize into handy and final shape, and so become current coin.

THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY

THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY

Clearness, directness, ease, precision,--these are literary virtues of a homely and primary sort. Reserve, urbanity, depth, force, suggestiveness,--these, too, are virtues, and happy the writer who has them. He is master of his art.

No good workman likes to be praised overmuch for the elementary qualities. Let some things be taken for granted, or touched upon lightly. Tell a schoolboy that he writes grammatically,--if you can,--but not the editor of a newspaper. Almost as well confide to your banker that you hold him for something better than a thief. “Simplicity be cursed!” a sensitive writer used to exclaim, as book after book elicited the same good-natured verdict. “They mean that I am simple, easily seen through. Henceforth I will be muddy, seeing it is beyond me to be deep.” But nature is inexorable, and with the next book it was the same story. Probably there is not a line of his work over which any two readers ever disputed as to its meaning. In vain shall such a man dream of immortality. Great books, books to which readers return, books that win vogue and maintain it, books for the study of which societies are organized and about which libraries accumulate, must be of a less flimsy texture,--in his own testy phrase, less “easily seen through.”

Consider the great classics of all races, the Bibles of the world. Not one but abounds in dark sayings. What another book the Hebrew Scriptures would be if the same text could never be interpreted in more than one way, if some texts could ever be interpreted at all! How much less matter for preaching! How much less motive for exegetical research! And withal, how much less appeal to the deepest of human instincts, the passion for the vague, the far-away, and the mysterious!

All religious teachers, in so far as they are competent and sincere, address themselves to this instinct. The worthier they are of their calling, the better do they appreciate the value of paradox and parable. The greatest of them made open profession of his purpose to speak over the heads of his hearers; and his followers are still true to his example in that particular, however they may have improved upon it in other respects. They no longer encourage evil by turning the other cheek to the smiter; not many of them foster indolence by selling all that they have and giving to the poor; but without exception they speak things hard to be understood. Therein, in part at least, lies their power; for mankind craves a religion, a revelation of the unseen and the unprovable, and is not to be put off with simple morality, with such commonplace and worldly things as honesty, industry, purity, and brotherly love. No church ever waxed great by the inculcation of these humble, earthly, every-day virtues.

In literature, the value of half-lights is recognized, consciously or not, by all who dabble in foreign tongues. Indeed, so far, at least, as amateurs are concerned, it is one of the chief encouragements to linguistic studies, the heightened pleasure of reading in a language but half understood. The imagination is put freshly in play, and time-worn thoughts and too familiar sentiments are again almost as good as new. Doudan, writing to a friend in trouble, drops suddenly into English, with a sentence or two about the universality of misfortune. “Commonplaces regain their truth in a strange language,” he explains; “if we complain of ordinary evils, we ought to do it in Latin.” The hint is worth taking. So long as we have something novel and important to communicate, we may choose the simplest words. “Clearness is the ornament of profound thoughts,” says Vauvenargues; but we need not go quite so far as the same philosopher when he bids us reject all thoughts that are “too feeble to bear a simple expression.” That would be to reduce the literary product unduly. Joubert is a more comforting adviser. “Banish from words all uncertainty of meaning,” he says, “and you have made an end of poetry and eloquence.” “It is a great art,” he adds, “the art of being agreeably ambiguous.”

Such tributes to the vague are the more significant as coming from Frenchmen, who, of all people, may be said to worship lucidity. Let us add, then, the testimony of one of the younger French writers, a man of our own day. “Humanity hardly attaches itself with passion to any works of poetry and art,” says M. Anatole France, “unless some parts of them are obscure and susceptible of diverse interpretations.” And in another place in the same volume (“Le Jardin d’Épicure”) we come upon this fine saying: “What life has of the best is the idea it gives us of an unknown something which is not in it.” How true that is of literature, also! The best thing we derive from a book is something that the author never quite succeeded in putting into it. What good reader (and without good reading there is no good writing) has not found a glimpse, a momentary brightness as of something infinitely far off, more exciting and memorable than whole pages of crystalline description?

Vagueness like this is one of the noblest gifts of a writer. Artifice cannot compass it. If a man would have it, let him pray for a soul, and refresh himself continually with dreams and high imaginings. Then if, in addition, he have genius, knowledge, and literary tact, there may be hope for him. But even then the page must find the reader.

Of vagueness of a lower order there is always plenty; some of it a matter of individual temperament, some of it a matter of art, and some a matter of a want of art. It is not to be despised, perhaps, since it has utility and a marketable value. It results in the formation of clubs, and so is promotive of social intercourse. It makes it worth men’s while to read the same book twice, or even thrice, and so is of use in relieving the tedium of the world. It renders unspeakable service to worthy people who would fain have a fine taste in literature, but for whom, as yet, it is more absorbing to guess riddles than to read poems; and it is almost as good as a corruption of the text to the favored few who have an eye for invisible meanings,--men like the famous French philosopher who discovered extraordinary beauty in certain profundities of Pascal, which turned out to be errors of a copyist.

This inferior kind of obscurity, like most things of a secondary rank, is open to cultivation, although the greater number of those who profit by such husbandry are slow to acknowledge the obligation. A bright exception is found in Thoreau. He was one who believed in telling the truth. “I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity,” he writes. But he was too modest by half. He did attain to it, and in both kinds: sometimes in willful paradox and exaggeration, a sort of “Come, now, good reader, no falling asleep!” and sometimes, but less often,--for such visitations are rare with the best of men,--in some quick, unstudied phrase that opens, as it were, an unsuspected door within us, and makes us forget for the time being both the author and his book.

Perhaps it would be true to say that when men are most inspired, their speech becomes most like Nature’s own,--inarticulate, and so capable of expressing things inexpressible. What book, what line of verse, ever evoked those unutterable feelings--feelings beyond even the _thought_ of utterance--that are wakened in us now and then, in divinely favorable moments, by the plash of waters or the sighing of winds? When an author does aught of this kind for us, we must love and praise him, let his shortcomings be what they will. If a man is great enough in himself, or serviceable enough to us, we need not insist upon all the minor perfections.

For the rest, these things remain true: language is the work of the people, and belongs to the people, however lexicographers and grammarians may codify, and possibly, in rare instances, improve it. Commonplaces are the staple of literature. The great books appeal to men as men, not as scholars. A fog is not a cloud, though a man with his feet in the mud may hug himself and say, “Look, how I soar!” Preciosity is good for those that like it; they have their reward; but to set up a conventicle, with passwords and a private creed, is not to found a religion. In the long run, nothing is supremely beautiful but genuine simplicity, which may be a perfection of nature or the perfection of art; and the only obscurity that suits with it and sets it off is occasional, unexpected, momentary,--a sudden excess of light that flashes and is gone, surprising the writer first, and afterward the reader.

IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTE-BOOK

IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTE-BOOK

It is a more or less common habit of Americans to cry out against the conceit of foreigners, Englishmen especially, who, after a run through “the States,” publish their impressions of the country. These outcries--though that may seem too strong a word--are supposed to be quite independent of the character of the comments in question, whether favorable or unfavorable. In the tourist’s eyes, Americans may be an uninteresting, boastful, worldly-minded people. The magnitude of our lakes may not blind him to the imperfections of our newspapers, and in spite of Niagara and the prairies, he may esteem our politicians, for the most part, a vulgar and time-serving set. Whatever criticisms of this sort he in his unwisdom may feel called upon to express are likely to have their modicum of truth; at least they would have, if any one but a foreigner were to utter them. Americans are not slow to say similar things of each other, and especially of their public men. Except on the Fourth of July, we are far from constituting anything fairly to be called a mutual admiration society. The complaint, then, is not that the tourist offers criticism of such and such a tenor, but that he takes it upon himself to offer any criticism at all. What business has he with “impressions of America” after a visit of a month or two? And even if he has impressions, why should he be so presumptuous as to print them? A great people cannot be understood after this haphazard, percursory fashion. True; but the objection is futile, if for no other reason, because it goes wide of the mark. The question is not of understanding a people, but of having something to say about them.

Since the world began, men have traveled, and, having traveled, have recounted their adventures. The two things go together, and are alike inevitable. And the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be. Some authors travel in other men’s books; some travel in the outward and literal sense of the word; and both tell as good a story as they can of the wonders they have seen. It is only here and there a philosopher who can sit at home and spin his web out of his own insides. Thoreau delighted to talk as if Concord were the centre and sum of the world. Everything grew there, everything happened there. Why should a Concord man ever stir beyond the town limits? Sure enough! And yet what are Thoreau’s books but records of his journeys: “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;” “The Maine Woods;” “Cape Cod;” “A Yankee in Canada;” “Excursions.” With him, as with the rest of us, it was the volume he had just read that he liked to talk about; it was the country he had just seen that his pen naturally busied itself with describing. Even his one Concord book is really a book of travels. To write it he went into camp, that he might study the world on its off side, as it were, and feel his life new.

In other words, for here we come to the pith of the matter, it is the fresh impression that is vivid, and therefore will have itself expressed. We may almost say that it is the only thing that can be expressed. This is what Bagehot had in mind. “Those who know a place or a person best,” he said, “are not those most likely to describe it best; their knowledge is so familiar that they cannot bring it out in words.” And this truth, partial though it be, and, like all truth, liable to misunderstanding and abuse, is the scribbling tourist’s encouragement, and, if he be supposed to need it, his perennial justification.

More than one scholar has failed to produce the great work that was expected of him,--that he of all men seemed elected to produce,--simply because he put off the doing of it till his knowledge should be something like complete. So monumental a structure could not be too carefully prepared for, he thought: a conscientiousness most scholarly and honorable, but deadly in its result; for by the time he had laid in his stores, he had lost the freshness of his enthusiasm; a palsy had stricken his pen; and by and by the night came, and his knowledge perished with him.

Writers of travels, whatever their shortcomings, fall into no error of this kind. They strike while the iron is hot; and whether their subject be Africa or America, that is the true method. The value of such literature depends on the observer’s alertness, fairness, good sense, and general competency, rather than upon the length and leisureliness of his journey. Time of itself never did much for a blind man’s vision; and to come back to our Englishman, he may run through America in a month, or spend a year in his note-taking, and in either event he will discover only what he came prepared to discover. If the photographic plate is sensitive enough, it may need but the briefest exposure. And anyhow, let the picture turn out never so badly, no irreparable harm is done. The object itself is not altered because its portrait is drawn awry. What we have to dread is not the foreigner’s unfair opinion of us, but our unfair opinion of the foreigner. It is our own thoughts that do us injury, not other men’s thoughts about us. And if this be too rare an atmosphere for comfortable every-day breathing, we may come at a similar result on lower ground. Who are we, that we should be treated better than the rest of the world? Must our feelings never be hurt, because we are Americans? Have we never learned that it is a man’s part to be thankful for intelligent and friendly criticism, and to bear all other in silence?

Let visitors to “the States,” then, be “impressed;” and let them print their impressions, the more the better. Some of them will be shallow, some of them unkindly and prejudiced, some, perhaps, ignorantly and foolishly eulogistic. We shall be blamed for faults that are beyond our mending, and praised for virtues that were never ours,--if such virtues there be. At best, the criticism and the comment will fall a little short of inerrancy; for perfection is one of the lost arts, even in England; but in the sum many true things will be said, and in the end the cause of truth will be forwarded; and possibly, if a thousand English pens are thus employed, one of them may happen to make an immortal picture of the Great Republic as it now is, and as it will not be, for better or worse, a hundred years hence. Thus it is, at any rate, by one lucky experimenter out of many, that immortal work is done.

Some critics, it is true, would have literature, even current literature, to consist solely of such happy strokes. Let no man write anything till he can write a masterpiece, they say. Yes, and let no boy go near the water till he has learned to swim; and since crows have waxed destructive, let cornfields be planted hereafter with no outside rows; and lest malarial fevers should make an end of the human race, let all plains and valleys be filled up, and nothing remain but mountains. In short, seeing that failure has been the rule hitherto, let us abolish rules, and get on with exceptions alone; a condition of things curiously prefigured in certain Grammars of the Latin Language, of a kind still sorrowfully remembered by elderly people. A fine economy, surely, and well worth thinking about. But for the time being, till dreams become substantial, this present evil world, as we reverently call it, remembering its Creator, must be suffered to jog along in its ancient, expensive, wasteful-seeming, happy-go-lucky, highly-exceptionable manner: a million seeds, and one tree; a million books, and one _chef-d’œuvre_. Classics are not yet produced of set purpose, nor do they make their advent in royal isolation, starred and wearing the laurel. They come, as was said just now, with the crowd, the “spawn of the press,” if they come at all, and are only sifted out by the slow hand of time. And meanwhile their humbler fellows, missing of immortality, may nevertheless have their day and serve their turn. Readers, fortunately or unfortunately, are of many grades, and even the wisest of them--in some unwiser but not infrequent mood--desire not a classic, but something a shade less excellent. “There is no book that is acceptable, unless at certain seasons.” So said Milton; and the saying is true, even of “Paradise Lost.” In the great sea of literature there is room both for the big fish and for “the other fry.” Let us be thankful; and if we are scribblers, by nature or by conceit, let us scribble on.

CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE

CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE

“Writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no
future.”--LOWELL.

It is an old story that the people of the United States have been slow in achieving their intellectual independence. The British yoke has remained upon our minds, though we have cast it off our necks. Our literary men, especially, have deferred to English models and English ideas. So we have been told till the tale has become monotonous.

What everybody says must be true--perhaps; but even so, there may be something to offer on the other side, or by way of extenuation, although the man who should venture to offer it--such is the peculiarity of the case and the perversity of human nature--might find himself accounted unpatriotic for coming to the defense of his own countrymen.

In times past, assuredly, whatever may be true now, the condition of things so much complained of was little reprehensible. Good or bad, it was nothing more than was to have been expected as circumstances then were. We had been English to begin with, and, for better or worse, the English nature is not of a sort to be put off with a turn of the hand, at the signing of a political document. It is self-evident, also, that in the world of ideas every people, whether it will or no, must live largely upon its ancestry. The utmost that any generation can hope to do is to contribute its mite to the intellectual tradition. The better part of its reading must be out of books that its predecessors have sifted from the mass and handed down. If it adds a few of its own--two or three, by good luck--to the permanent literature of the race, it does all that can reasonably be demanded of it. And even so much as this was hardly to be looked for from the American people during its colonial period and for some decades afterwards, with a wilderness to be subdued, savage neighbors to be held in check, and all the machinery of civilization to be newly set up. Books are a record and criticism of life, and those to whom life itself is an absorbing occupation are not likely, unless they are almost insanely intellectual, to spend any very considerable share of their days in work of a secondary and postponable character. Life is more than criticism, and the best and greatest people are those whose deeds give other people something to write about. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if American books of a kind to be called literature were slow in coming; and we may confess without shame that up to the year 1820 or thereabouts--say till the advent of Irving and Cooper--the people of this country, if they read anything better than sermons and almanacs, were obliged to depend chiefly upon foreign authors. To which confession it may be added, equally without shame, that even the works of Cooper and Irving were scarcely sufficient of themselves to satisfy for many years together the cravings of eager and serious minds. At all times and in all countries, such minds, with the best will in the world to be loyal to their own day, have been obliged to look mainly to old books.

About the past, then, we need not spend time in mourning. If we play our part as well as the fathers played theirs, we shall have no great cause to blush. Since their day, what with Irving and Cooper and their contemporaries and successors, there has been no dearth of books written on this side of the water; but the complaint is still rife that we have little or nothing in the way of a national literature: by which it is meant, apparently, that our writers are not yet Americans, or do not succeed in expressing the national spirit. Only the other day, a critic, discoursing on “the conservatism and timidity of our literature,” charged it against Lowell that “in his habits of writing he continued English tradition,” whatever that may mean. “Our best scholar” allowed his real self to speak but twice, we are given to understand; then he spoke in dialect. His “Commemoration Ode” was a splendid failure, because it was “imitative and secondary.” Whether it, too, should have been written in dialect, we are not informed; but it appears to be taken for granted that its failure, if it was a failure, came, not from lack of genius or inspiration, but from deference to foreign models. One cannot help wondering what Lowell himself would have said to such a criticism: that he wrote in English and like an Englishman because he dared not write in his own tongue and in his own way. When a Scotchman complimented him upon his English,--“so like a native’s,”--and asked him bluntly where he got it, he answered with equal bluntness, in the words of the old song,--

“‘I got it in my mither’s wame.’”

Yet Lowell, who spoke but twice in his own character, seems to have done better than most of his fellows; for he and Curtis are the only men of letters to find a place in a recent “Calendar of Great Americans.” All their contemporaries and predecessors were either not great, or else were something other than American,--cosmopolitan, provincial, or English. Irving, Cooper, Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Parkman,--not one of these will bear the test. As for Emerson, he is ruled out by name, because he was the “author of such thought as might have been native to any clime.” He is of the world, and therefore not American. It seems a hard judgment that the man who wrote “The Fortune of the Republic,” “The Young American,” and the “Concord Hymn,”--the man of whom it was recently said, so finely and so truly, that “he sent ten thousand sons to the war,”--should find himself at this late hour a man without a country. On such terms it is doubtful praise to be called a cosmopolitan: and in view of such a ruling it becomes evident that the exact nature of Americanism as a literary quality is yet to be defined. Lowell’s attempt in that direction, by-the-bye, is probably among the best. An American, according to Lowell’s idea of him,--so Mr. James says,--was a man at once fresh and ripe.

When it comes to practice, however, there is one American poet whose literary patriotism was never called in question. The reference is of course to Whitman. Listen to him, as he appeals to whoever “would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in the States:”--

“Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,
pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first
year of Independence, signed by the Commissioners, ratified by the
States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?
Have you possessed yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them,
and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?”

“Conservatism and timidity”! Here is one man, at all events, who is not to be accused of “continuing English tradition.” He, if nobody else, breathes a “haughty defiance of the Year One.” He may or may not be “ripe;” he certainly is “fresh.” If there be some who fail to enjoy his verse, there can be none who do not admire his courage.

But surely it was not to be insisted upon, nor even expected, that all American authors should break away thus suddenly and completely from the past. Perhaps it was not even to be desired: partly because variety is better than the best of sameness, and partly because so abrupt a change might in the long run have hindered our emancipation. Some readers would have been puzzled, others would have been offended. Here and there one, at least, would have been ready to say, with Wordsworth,--

“Me this unchartered freedom tires.”

Little by little a reaction would have been produced, the “substratums and objects” of the land would have suffered disastrous eclipse, “feudal processes and poems” would have come in like a flood, and the last state of the national mind would have been worse than the first.

Nor can this extreme of revolt, or any approach to it, be thought necessary to constitute an American writer. “American” and “rebel” are not synonymous at this hour of the day. American literature, if we may assert our American right to speak a truism roundly, is literature written by Americans; that is to say, by the people of the United States. In its subject it may be old or new, domestic or foreign; it may be written in dialect,--sometimes called American,--or in English; in any case, if it is literature at all, it is American literature. And since there is already a body of such writing, we may venture upon another capital letter, by the compositor’s leave, and speak of it--still modestly, and remembering its youth--as American Literature. For youthful it is, in the nature of the case, with its character but imperfectly formed, and its full share of juvenile foibles; still showing, as is inevitable and not discreditable, abundant traces of its English origin.

Thus far, it must be owned, it can boast little or no representation among the supremely great of the earth. The genius of a new country produces men of action rather than poets and philosophers. Washington and Lincoln are names to shine in any company, but as yet the roll of American authors contains few Homers and Shakespeares, and no great number of Dantes and Miltons. Such as they are, however, they are our own, and though in some cases we might have wished them more “distinctively American,” we need not be in haste on that account to tag them with a foreign label. Neither need we delude ourselves with the notion that they might have been transcendent geniuses, all of them, had they but stood up resolutely against the English tradition. How to become a genius is one of the hard problems. There is no likelihood that it can be solved by any process of intellectual jingoism. The secret may consist partly in being one’s self; pretty certainly it does not consist in being different from somebody else. Between imitation and a set attempt to avoid imitation there is not so very much to choose. Either of them stamps the work as secondary. As for Homers and Shakespeares, we may remember for our comfort that names like these are not to be found, in any country, among the living: they never have been.[12]

For our comfort, too, though not in the every-day sense of that word, we do well to remind ourselves that as the greatness of our American authors is but relative, so is the newness of our American spirit. All that is called new is born of the old, and is itself in part old. The movement of history is not by successive creations of something out of nothing, but by the development of one thing from another; and whether we like to believe it or not, this that we call the American idea stands within the general law: it has been evolved, or rather it is being evolved, out of what was before it. The public mind, stirred by patriotic impulses and restive under criticism, may clamor for originality, meaning by that absolute novelty, and North, South, East, and West may exhaust themselves to answer the appeal: we shall never see an absolutely new book, be it the “great American novel” or anything else. As time goes on, we shall have, by the slow processes of nature, a literature more and more distinctive, more and more independent, and more and more unlike the English, more and more American; but to the end its originality, like that of all literature, will be but relative. Though men cross the sea, they can never escape the spirit of their forerunners. Our very rebelliousness against English domination is an English trait. The great American book, when it comes, will not spring from virgin soil, but from seed, and the seed will have had an age-long ancestry. “Works proceed from works,” says a learned French critic; and the most searching of American critics had something of the same thought in mind when he wrote, fifty years ago, in response to inquiries “in Cambridge orations and elsewhere” for “that great absentee,” an American literature, “A literature is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result.”

What then? Shall we cease effort, and leave it to blind law to work out for us our intellectual salvation? That would be childish. Because one thing is true, it does not follow that another and seemingly contradictory thing may not be true likewise. The same Emerson who spoke of literature as a “generic result,”--a word so anticipatory of later thought as to seem like a flash of genius,--and therefore “no man’s private concern,” was never done with proclaiming the power of the individual soul and the omnipotence of individual faith. He never scolded his countrymen; he cherished no illusion about the ability of the American people or any other to hurry the accomplishment of a “secular result;” but he, more than all others combined, enforced the duty of American scholars to free themselves from the swaddling-clothes of tradition; to live in the present, think in the present, believe in the present, and speak always their own word. And the French critic just now quoted, so modern in his point of view, so very different in many respects from Emerson,--though Emerson, too, believed the laws and powers of the intellect to be “facts in a natural history,” and so “objects of science,”--was quoted but in part. “In literature as in art,” he says, “the great operative cause--after the influence of individuality--is that of works upon works.” The words are those of M. Brunetière, who, in his attempt to apply to literary criticism the methods of natural science, has seemed sometimes to allow more than enough to the power of things over thought; yet he, too, treating of the evolution of literary forms, gives the first place in that evolution, not to changed conditions, nor to the germinal force of great models, nor to the “moment,” a word on which he greatly insists, but to the power of the individual.

And where ought this power of the individual to be quickly and strongly felt, if not in a democracy and in a new world?

Like many other good things, nevertheless, individuality, though it may properly be sought, is not to be gone after too directly,--as if it could be carried by assault. Originality has often suffered violence, it is true, but the violent have never taken it by force. We are not to hope for intellectual life by any process of spontaneous generation; nor are we to dread abjectly the influence of other minds over our own. Individuality is a gift rarely lost, except by those who lose it before they are born. Franklin, it is universally agreed, was an American of the most pronounced type, one of our greatest and most original men. His style, as Mr. James says of Lowell’s, was “an indefeasible part of him;” yet all the world knows that he formed it, or believed that he formed it, by a studious imitation of Addison. Originality is theirs to whom it is given. With it a man may drench himself in the wisdom of the ages, and take no harm; without it he may eschew books never so jealously, and look into his own heart with never so complete a faith, and come to no good.

All of which is not to say that a scholar may not occupy himself too much with the thoughts of others to the neglect of his own, or that Americans as a people may not defer unreasonably to foreign standards. Between the two extremes, excessive dependence upon tradition and a too exclusive confidence in one’s own genius, there is a middle course. If we cannot find it, then we are not yet ripe for a great national literature, which must be the result of the old culture bestowed upon new soil in a new time and under new conditions.

The Riverside Press

_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In this Old Colony town, though none of his English biographers appear to know it, the boy Hazlitt lived in the Old North Parsonage, in which had lived some time before a girl named Abigail Smith, afterward better known as Abigail Adams, wife of the second President of the United States, and mother of the sixth. For which fact, more interesting to him than to his readers, it is to be feared, the present writer is indebted to the researches of his old Weymouth schoolmate, now President of the Weymouth Historical Society, Mr. John J. Loud.

[2] As it was to Solomon and, by this time, to William Hazlitt.

[3] “Mr. Johnson, indeed, as he was a very talking man himself, had an idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as conversation.”--Mrs. Piozzi.

[4] Author of _Two Suffolk Friends_.

[5] In a letter to his friend Pollock he says: “To-morrow I am going to one of my great treats, namely, the Assizes at Ipswich: where I shall see little Voltaire Jervis, and old Parke, who I trust will have the gout, he bears it so Christianly.”

[6] In connection with which it is good to remember that when Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of his old friends he had loved most, he replied, “Why, dear old Fitz, to be sure.” After FitzGerald’s death Tennyson wrote of him: “I had no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”

[7] After he began writing, the question of an individual style took on, as was inevitable, a different complexion. In his early days he would not read Carlyle, and (more surprising) at forty or thereabout he discontinued the reading of Livy; dreading in both cases an injury to his own manner.

[8] How largely he profited by his study of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and other poets, especially in the enrichment of his vocabulary, is shown by Mr. E. de Sélincourt in the notes and appendices to his recent admirable edition of Keats’s _Poems_. The subject is interesting, and is treated in the most painstaking manner.

[9] At this very time, by-the-bye, Hazlitt was lecturing, and Keats, after hearing him, reports to his brother (February 14, 1818), “Hazlitt’s last lecture was on Thomson, Cowper, and Crabbe. He praised Thomson and Cowper, but he gave Crabbe an unmerciful licking.”

[10] We speak thus without forgetting that an American poet once wrote (what a reputable American periodical printed) a revised version of one of the odes, just to show how easily Keats could be improved upon. The good man might have been, though we believe he was not, brother to the one of whom we have all heard, who declared his opinion that there weren’t ten men in Boston who could have written Shakespeare’s plays.

[11] Is there a possible connection between this fact and the further one that really magical lines are seldom or never to be found in the work of the more distinctively musical poets,--say in Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne?

[12] According to an eminent French critic, M. de Wyzewa, the United States still has (since Whitman’s death, he means to say) two poets,--Mr. Merril and Mr. Griffin. “Only two” is the critic’s phrase, but the adverb need not disturb us. A busy people who have two poets at once may count themselves rich.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.