Part 1 (1/2)
The American Mind.
by Bliss Perry.
Preface
_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty of that inst.i.tution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._
_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Inst.i.tute, Boston, the Brooklyn Inst.i.tute, and elsewhere, under the t.i.tle ”American Traits in American Literature.” In revising them for publication a briefer t.i.tle has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of Jefferson's phrase ”The American Mind,” as suggesting, more accurately perhaps than the original t.i.tle, the real theme of discussion._
B. P.
CAMBRIDGE, 1912.
THE AMERICAN MIND
I
Race, Nation, and Book
Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and environment in determining the character of any literary production, what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-a.s.sertive folk that are bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly.
Lat.i.tude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions, must a.s.suredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual writers.
Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold and a.s.serts: ”If there can be a true character given of the Universal Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity, that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely p.r.o.ne to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean, seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our country a Land of Experimental Knowledge.”
The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming pa.s.sage about the relation of literature to the external circ.u.mstances in which it is written.
”If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_.” And he adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: ”There is nothing that requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the _Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful _Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his _Verses_.”
Madame de Stael's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the ”national character” books, begins with a description of the German landscape.
But though n.o.body, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael, questions the general significance of place, time, and circ.u.mstances as affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: ”The figs are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?” The theory of race, in particular, has been sharply questioned by the experts. ”Saxon” and ”Norman,” for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book: ”Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or 'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own.”
There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian which we shall probably persist in calling ”Saxon”; but it is no worse than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on ”The Celtic Spirit”
made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic matters to be hopelessly amateurish.
The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. ”A race psychology,” he declares, ”is still a science for the future to discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties.
The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter.”
Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to intellectual products been more p.r.o.nounced than in the fields of art and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they have no hesitation in exclaiming: ”How truly Hungarian this is!” Or, it may be, how truly ”j.a.panese” is this vase which was made in j.a.pan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely ”Russian” is this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other words, the enthusiastic a.s.sertion that a thing is like itself,--is one of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station.
Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some token of the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations.
These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in America.
There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of Keats. He can no doubt be a.s.signed to the George the Fourth period by a critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fas.h.i.+on, from Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find in Poe, who is one of the indubitable a.s.sets of American literature, anything distinctly American.
Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer, there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature, and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known to-day that the so-called ”cla.s.sic” examples of Greek art, most of which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most characteristic period, had a distinctly ”romantic” tendency which their more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and psychological traits of the Greek people?
One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty years, concerning the representative quality of the art of j.a.pan, and to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the j.a.panese character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to pieces by the Russo-j.a.panese War. This may ill.u.s.trate the blunders of foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially representative character of j.a.panese art. But it is impossible that critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious endeavor to p.r.o.nounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence.
For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not only the ”old, unhappy, far-off” things of racial experience, but the new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet.
Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have pa.s.sed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no one to hold the mirror or even to fas.h.i.+on it. No note of Renaissance criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the rediscovery of the cla.s.sics men had found at last the ”terms of art,”