Part 3 (1/2)

These facts ill.u.s.trate anew that standing temptation of the critic of American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very well. The characteristic American retort to this a.s.sertion would be: Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans

”eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,-- They go to church on Sunday; And many are afraid of G.o.d-- And more of Mrs. Grundy.”

Now Mrs. Grundy is a.s.suredly not the most desirable of literary divinities, but the student of cla.s.sical literature can easily think of other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.

”Not pa.s.sion, but sentiment,” said Hawthorne, in a familiar pa.s.sage of criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular recognition to the many. Take the word ”soul” itself. Calvinism shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual pa.s.sion made the word ”soul” sublime. The reaction against Calvinism has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike, but ”soul” has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards p.r.o.nounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word ”soul”

with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental, after what is called in magazine slang ”heart-interest,”--the word has lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will regain neither until it is p.r.o.nounced once more with spiritual pa.s.sion.

But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get.

The great ma.s.s of our American writing is sentimental, because it has been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between 1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the so-called ”yellow” newspapers and the ill.u.s.trated magazines typified by _Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for ”home consumption” rather than to affect the course of legislation--as are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.

Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of ”Home.” The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel Woodworth's ”Old Oaken Bucket,” the favorite popular song was Stephen Foster's ”My Old Kentucky Home,” the favorite play was Denman Thompson's ”Old Homestead.” Without that appealing word ”mother” the American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of ”the child” the ill.u.s.trated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of ”Oliver Optic” and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.

The sentimental att.i.tude towards women and children, which is one of the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly ill.u.s.trated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of d.i.c.kens as he was, and Romantic as was his fas.h.i.+on of dressing up his miners and gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the ”kid” and the ”woman.” ”Tennessee's Partner,” ”The Luck of Roaring Camp,” ”Christmas at Sandy Bar,” are obvious examples. Owen Wister's stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American girl still does astonis.h.i.+ng things in international novels, as she has continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonis.h.i.+ng mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and encourages this position of the ”young girl” in our social structure is a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of pa.s.sion--in the European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported ”problem-play,” written for an adult public in Paris or London, introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in parting with its ignorance.

That sentimental idealization of cla.s.ses, whether peasant, bourgeois, or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no fixed cla.s.ses in American society. Webster was guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known sentences about ”hired laborers”: ”twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer.” The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions, which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made, no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed, naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of cla.s.s contrast and to stimulate that sentiment of cla.s.s distinction, in which European literature is so rich.

Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring cla.s.s, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, ”To teach the average man the glory of his walk and trade.” Whitman himself sketched the American workman in almost every att.i.tude which appealed to his own sense of the picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ was published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Ess.e.x County farms. That glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could ”hear America singing.” There are few who are singing to-day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. ”Labor” looms vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence of the short story, ill.u.s.trated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the ”frost upon the pumpkin” and ”the fodder in the stock” which Mr. James Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.

Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a cla.s.s, and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither cla.s.s nor calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand, our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly ill.u.s.trated in our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited roll-call of the counties in Whittier's ”Ma.s.sachusetts to Virginia.”

But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of Ma.s.sachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination, of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state convention held in Ma.s.sachusetts, there were no county banners displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and mournful epitaph:--

”Beyond Virginia's border line His patriotism perished.”

The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional antagonism. ”Maryland, my Maryland” gave place to ”Dixie,” just as Whittier's ”Ma.s.sachusetts to Virginia” was forgotten when marching men began to sing ”John Brown's Body” and ”The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past, as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows.

But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that pa.s.sionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so much and, like all true pa.s.sion, antic.i.p.ates so much:--

”O Beautiful! my Country!”

The literary record of American idealism thus ill.u.s.trates how deeply the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of futile echo of Patrick Henry's ”Give me Liberty or give me Death”; and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire caught from France and which was pa.s.sed back to France in turn when her own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists.

It is true that the word ”liberty” has been full of temptation for generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. ”Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh.” A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are significant: ”There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”

There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. n.o.body, even in revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his ”Declaration” are sometimes characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from past political experience. An arbitrary king, a.s.suming a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespa.s.s, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a ”standard maxim for free society.”

It is true, no doubt, that the word ”liberty” became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere partisan or national s.h.i.+bboleth, standing for no reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fas.h.i.+on. The late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an ”1848”

man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American Historical a.s.sociation. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word ”liberty.” One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the ”good old cause,” was not convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that William Vaughn Moody's ”Ode in Time of Hesitation” deserved a place by the side of Lowell's ”Commemoration Ode,” and that when the ultimate day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business, the standard of reckoning must be ”liberty” as Winthrop and Jefferson and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.

In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature, with a few n.o.ble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the pa.s.sion for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about ”Freedom broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent” are perfectly American in their conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and Sh.e.l.ley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican poetry. The ”land of the free” turns to the monarchic mother country, after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea?

Or is it simply another ill.u.s.tration of the defective pa.s.sion of American literature?

Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory and n.o.ble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense, of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in Was.h.i.+ngton's ”Farewell Address.” It is peculiarly a.s.sociated with the name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid peroration of Webster's ”Reply to Hayne” and were willing to ”let the Union go.” But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_ and his later poems, the ”Union of these States” became transfigured with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual ent.i.ty, a new incarnation of the soul of man.

We must deal later with that American instinct of fellows.h.i.+p which Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has come with the twentieth century: ethical, munic.i.p.al, industrial, and artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the activity of the n.o.blest imaginations, and the true literature of internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless a.s.sert themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of the old conditions: of the old ”Reverences”; of the pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the s.h.i.+p may take in the future, but

”We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvil rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!”

IV