Part 5 (1/2)
That is the language of cla.s.sicism. The epithets are not far-sought.
They come naturally to the mind. The hero's s.h.i.+eld is round and white; his lance is tall; long are the scalp-locks of his enemies. Thus would Homer and Virgil have heightened the picture, and Park-man is clearly attentive to the best models. Even when he describes what his eye has seen he cannot disengage his impression from the a.s.sociations of literature. It is thus that he sets before us Braddock's line of march:
It was like a thin, party-coloured snake, red, blue, and brown, trailing slowly through the depth of leaves, creeping round inaccessible heights, crawling over ridges, moving always in dampness and shadow, by rivulets and waterfalls, crags and chasms, gorges and s.h.a.ggy steeps. In glimpses only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue.
As you read these words you are less keenly conscious of a visual impression than of a verbal effect, and it may be said without reserve that never for a page of his many volumes does Park-man forget the demands of dignity and restraint.
Excellent as is the style, it is never American. Parkman does not reveal his origin in a single phrase. He has learned to write not in his own land, but in the England of the eighteenth century. When he speaks of ”the pampered Sardanapalus of Versailles,” and of ”the silken favourites' calculated adultery,” we are conscious that he has learnt whatever lesson Gibbon has to teach. In other words, he, too, is obedient to the imperious voice of convention. And the novelists follow the same path as the historians. Mr Henry James, in his patient a.n.a.lysis of human character, has evoked such subtle harmonies as our English speech has not known before. Mr Howells, even when he finds his material in the land of his birth, shows himself the master of a cla.s.sic style, exquisite in balance and perfect in tone. And both share the common inheritance of our tongue, are links in the central chain of our tradition, and in speech, if not in thought, are sternly conservative.
This, then, is an irony of America, that the country which has a natural dislike of the past still dances to the ancient measures, that the country which has invented so much has not invented a new method of expression, that the country which questions all things accepts its literature in simple faith. The advantages of conformity are obvious.
Tradition is nine-tenths of all the arts, and the writers of America have escaped the ruin which overtakes the bold adventurer who stakes his all upon first principles. But sometimes we miss the one-tenth that might be added. How much is there in the vast continent which might be translated into words! And how little has achieved a separate, living utterance! Mr Stedman has edited an American Anthology, a stout volume of some eight hundred pages, whose most obvious quality is a certain technical accomplishment. The unnumbered bards of America compose their verses with a diffident neatness, which recalls the Latin style of cla.s.sical scholars. The workmans.h.i.+p is deft, the inspiration is literary. If many of the authors' names were transposed small injustice would be done them. The most of the work might have been written anywhere and under any conditions. Neither sentiment nor local colour suggests the prairie or the camp.
It is the intervention of dialect which alone confers a distinctive character upon American verse. Wisely is Mr Stedman's collection called an Anthology. It has something of the same ingenuity, the same impersonality, which marks the famous Anthology of the Greeks; it ill.u.s.trates the temper not of a young but of an old people.
How shall we surprise in her literature the true spirit of America?
Surely not in Walt Whitman, whose work is characteristic not of his country, but of himself, who fondly believed that he would make a loud appeal to the democracy because he stamped upon the laws of verse, and used words which are not to be found in the dictionary. Had the people ever encountered his 'Leaves of Gra.s.s,' it would not have understood it.
The verse for which the people craves is the ditties of the music-hall.
It has no desire to consider its own imperfections with a self-conscious eye. It delights in the splendour of mirrors, in the sparkle of champagne, in the trappings of a sordid and remote romance. The praise of liberty and equality suits the ear not of the democrat, but of the politician and dilettante, and it was to the dilettante and politician that Walt Whitman addressed his exhortations. Even his studied contempt for the literary conventions is insincere, and falls away from Kim when he sees and feels most vividly. He attempted to put into practice Emerson's theory of anarchy. He was at the pains to prove that he was at once a savage and a poet. That he had moments of poetic exaltation is true. The pomp of Brooklyn Ferry lives in his stately verse.
But he was no savage. It was his culture that spoke to the culture of others; it was a worn-out commonplace which won him the regard of politicians. He inspired parodists, not poets. And he represented America as little as he echoed the voice of the people.
Nor is it in the works of the humourists that we shall catch a glimpse of the national character. They, too, cast no shadow but their own.
They attain their effects by bad spelling, and a simple transliteration reveals the poverty of their wit. There is but one author who represents with any clarity the spirit of his country, and that author is Mark Twain. Not Mark Twain the humourist, the favourite of the reporters, the facile contemner of things which are n.o.ble and of good report, but Mark Twain, the pilot of the Mississippi, the creator of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He is national as Fielding is national. Future ages will look upon Huck Finn as we look upon Tom Jones,--as an embodiment of national virtue. And Mark Twain's method is his own as intimately as the puppets of his imagining. It is impossible to read a page of his masterpieces without recognising that they could have been composed only in an American environment. The dialect in which they are written enhances their verisimilitude without impairing their dignity; and the flashes of humour which light up the gravity of the narrative are never out of place nor out of tune. The cunning and resourcefulness of his boyish heroes are the cunning and resourcefulness of America, and the sombre Mississippi is the proper background for this national epic. The danger, the excitement, the solemnity of the great river are vividly portrayed.
They quicken his narrative; they inspire him to eloquence. He remembers with a simple enthusiasm the glory of the sun setting upon its broad expanse; he remembers also that the river and its shoals are things to fear and to fight.
Fully to realise the marvellous precision [he writes] required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pa.s.s almost within arm's reach of a sunken and visible wreck that would s.n.a.t.c.h the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steamboat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain.
In calm, as in flood, Mark Twain has mastered the river, and has made it his own. Once upon a time the Mississippi called up a vision of the great Gulf opening on the sight of La Salle, ”tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life.” Now a humbler image is evoked, and we picture Huck Finn and Jim floating down the broad stream in the august society of the Duke and the Dauphin.
Though Mark Twain cultivates the South-Western dialect, and does not disdain the speech of Pike County, there is in his two romances no suspicion of provincialism. Style and imagination give them the freedom of the whole world. They are of universal truth and application. But since the days of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer the conditions of American literature have changed, and for the worse. As in England, so in America, a wide diffusion of books, an eager and general interest in printed matter, have had a disastrous effect. The newspapers, by giving an improper advertis.e.m.e.nt to the makers of books, have rendered the literary craft more difficult of pursuit. The ambition of money has obscured the simple end of literature, and has encouraged a spirit of professionalism eminently characteristic of a practical country. We hear of works of fiction sketched in the back-offices of publishers, whose hands are held upon the public pulse. All is arranged, we are told, by the man of business--period, plot, characters. Nothing is left to the novelist but to carry out the instructions of his taskmaster, and when you contemplate the result you can feel no surprise at this composite authors.h.i.+p. It is no better than a money-making partners.h.i.+p, a return to the miserable practices of Grub Street and its hacks, a curiosity of trade, not of art, and so long as its sorry product is distinguished from genuine literature no great harm is done.
Of the modern tendencies which affect literature, not commerce, the most conspicuous is the tendency to decentralise. Every province has its coterie, every county its school The whole continent is pegged out in well-acknowledged claims. Boston cultivates one style, Chicago another.
Each corner makes the most of its own material, and cheerfully discovers to the other States its character and temperament. The result is of great and varied interest. The social history of America is being written piecemeal, and written often with a skill and sincerity which merit the highest praise. And not merely has each province found its chronicler, but the immigrants, also, are intent upon self-expression.
The little masterpieces of Abraham Cahan are an earnest of what the Ghetto can achieve, and whether the Jews are faithful to Yiddish, or, like Cahan, acquire the language of their adopted country, there is no reason why they should not atone in a free land for centuries of silence. To enumerate the manifold achievements of the States is impossible. One example will suffice, and no city will better suit my purpose than Chicago. That admirable literature should come from Chicago is of itself a paradox. It is still more surprising that the best writers of Chicago should display the qualities of tranquillity and reticence, which you would expect least of all to find in that monstrous city. Yet it is characteristic of Miss Edith Wyatt and Mr H. B. Fuller, who have painted the manners of Chicago with the greatest skill, that they never force the note. They look upon their fellow-citizens with an amiable sympathy; they describe them with a quiet humour. It is true that they have an excellent opportunity. It is true also that they rise to their occasion. Within the limits of Chicago are met the most diverse of men. On the one hand are the captains of industry, intent to ama.s.s a fortune at all costs; on the other are the sorry prigs who haunt Ibsen clubs and chatter of Browning. Miss Wyatt, with an exquisite irony, makes clear her preference. In her eyes the square-dealing and innocent boodler is a far better man than the sophisticated apostle of culture, and this truth she ill.u.s.trates with a modesty and restraint which are rarely met with in modern fiction. She never insists; she never says a word too much. With exquisite concision she sets her carefully selected facts and types before you, and being the ant.i.thesis of priggishness in a priggish city, she glorifies ”the common growth of Mother Earth,” and compels your agreement. Her collection of stories--'Every One His Own Way'--as free from pretence as from exaggeration, paints the citizens of Chicago with the subtlest fancy and the simplest truthfulness.
Mr H. B. Fuller employs an ampler canvas. His intention is the same. He also discards the artifice of exaggeration. He attempts to harrow your feelings as little as to advertise himself. He displays not the _saeva indignatio_, which won another novelist of Chicago so indiscreet a fame.
He is for gentler methods and plainer judgments. In 'The Cliff Dwellers'
he has given us a picture of the tribe inhabiting the Clifton, a monstrous sky-sc.r.a.per full eighteen stories tall, whose ”hundreds of windows,” he tells you, ”glitter with mult.i.tudinous letterings in gold and in silver, and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on score in the tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana.” His picture is never overcharged; his draughtsmans.h.i.+p is always sincere. He knows the tribe with an easy familiarity, and he bears witness to their good and their evil with perfect impartiality. He is never a partisan.
His portraits are just, and he leaves his reader to sum up the qualities of each. At his hands Chicago suffers no injury. She does not return his generosity. A prophet is not without honour save in his own country, and when I asked for his books at the biggest bookshop in Chicago, I was met with a stare of ignorance.
And what you find in Chicago you may find in New England, in Kentucky, in California, everywhere. The curiosity of this vast continent tempts its writers to explore. Their material varies with the locality of their choice. Their skill is a common inheritance. They cultivate the graces as carefully as did their predecessors. Their artistic conscience is no less acute. Above all, they have brought the short story to a point of singular perfection. If Edgar Poe showed them the way, they have proved themselves apter disciples than any save the most skilful of Frenchmen.
It is, indeed, impossible to look forward to the future of American literature without hopefulness. In that half-discovered country style and invention go hand in hand. The land of Mr Howells and Frank Norris, of Mrs Atherton and Mrs Wharton, of Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic, has accomplished so much that we may look confidently for the master, who in his single achievement will knit up its many diverse qualities and speak to the world with the voice of America.
THE UNDERWORLD.
Nowhere and at no time, save in the England of the eighteenth century, was the underworld so populous or so popular as in the America of to-day. In life, as in letters, crime and criminals hold there a lofty place. They are the romance of the street and the tenement-house. In their adventure and ferocity there is a democratic touch, which endears them to a free people. Nor are they so far remote from the world of prosperity and respect in the cities of the United States as elsewhere.
The police is a firm and constant link between criminal and politician.