(1892) The New World and the New Book: An Address Delivered Before the Nineteeth Century Club

8/14/2019 (1892) The New World and the New Book: An Address Delivered Before the Nineteeth Century Club

1/266


2/266

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS,

ShelfUN^^-I'-

UNITED STATE.^^F AMERICA.


3/266

9*AiJit>p


4/266

Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2009 with funding from

Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/newworldnewbookaOOhigg


5/266


6/266


7/266


8/266

BY TH0MI8 WENTWORTH H1GG1N80Noutdoor papers $1.50Atlantic Essays 1.50Oldport Days 1.50Malbonb: An Oldport Romance 1.50Army Life in a Black regiment . . . 1.50Young Folks' History op the United

States, net 1.20a larger history op the united states.8vo 3.50

Young Folks' Book op American Ex-plorers 1.50

Common Sense about Women ... 1.50Short Studies op American authors . .50Margaret puller Ossoli 1.25Wendell Phillips : a biographical essay.

PAPER 25The Monarch op Dreams 50Hints on Wrtiing and Speech-Making. .50

special editionsCommon sense about women w. o. t. u. edition

CLOTH. $1 00 RETAILShort Studies of American Authors, school edition.

BOARDS. 30 CENTS NET. BY MAIL, 35 CENTS.


9/266

THE NEW WORLD ANDTHE NEW BOOK

Delivered before the Nineteenth Century Club of NewYork City, Jan. 15, 1891

WITH KINDBED ESSAYS

BYifTHOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

NOV 6 1391 ,

BOSTONLEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS1892


10/266

COPTRIGHT, 1891, BY THOMAS WEXTWORTH HIGQINSON

All R'tyhts Reserved

The New World and The New Book

Typography A^D Electeotypino btC. J. Petebs & Son, Boston.


11/266

PREFACE

The address which forms the first chapter inthese pages was given originally before theNineteenth Century Club of New York Cityon January 15, 1891, and was written outafterward. Its title was suggested by that ofa remarkable essay contributed many years agoto the Atlantic Monthly, by my friend DavidAtwood Wasson and entitled, " The NewWorld and the New Man." I am indebted tothe proprietors of the Century, the Independ-ent, the Christian Union, and Harper s Bazarfor permission to reprint such of the remain-ing chapters as appeared in their respectivecolumns.Nothing is farther from the present writer's

wish than to pander to any petty national van-ity, his sole desire being to assist in creating amodest and reasonable self-respect. The civilwar bequeathed to us Americans, twenty-five


12/266

VI PREFACEyears ago, a great revival of national feelingbut this has been followed in some quarters,during the last few years, by a curious relapseinto something of the old colonial and apolo-getic attitude ; enhanced, no doubt, by thevexations and humiliations of the long strugglefor international copyright. Tliis is the frameof mind which is deprecated in this volume,because it is the last source from which anystrong or self-reliant literary work can proceed.In the words of Thoreau, " I do not propose toAvrite an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustilyas chanticleer in the morning, standing on hisroost, if only to wake my neighbors up."Cambridge, Mass., October 1, 1891.


13/266

CONTENTSPAGE

I. The New World and the New Book . 1II. An American Temper ament .... 19

III. The Shadow of Europe 27IV. On Taking Ourselves Seriously . . 35V. A Cosmopolitan Standard .... 43

VI. A Contemporaneous Posterity ... 51VII. On Literary Tonics 62VIII. The Fear of the Dead Levkl ... 70IX. Do We need a Literary Centre? . 77X. The Equation of Fame 88XL Concerning High-water Marks . . 97

XII. Personal Ideals 106XIII. On the Need of a Background . . 113XIV. Unnecessary Apologies 120XV. The Perils of American Humor . . 128XVI. On the Proposed Abolition of the

Plot 135XVII. American Translators 144XVIII. The Westminster Abbey of a Book

Catalogue 152XIX. Town and Gown 161XX. " Make Thy Option Which of Two " . 170

vii


14/266

Vlll CONTENTSPAGE

XXI. The Decline of the Sentimental . 178XXII. CONCEKNING GlANTS 185XXIII. Weapons of Precision 192XXIV. The Test of the Dime Novel ... 198XXV. The Thick of Self-depeeciation . . 206XXVI. The Literary Pendulum 213XXVII. The Evolution of an American . . 221XXVIII. A World-literature 228


15/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THENEW BOOK[An Address delivered before the " Nineteenth

Century Club," January 15, 1891.]

T T is a remarkable fact that the man who lias,among all American authors, made the mostdaring and almost revolutionary claims in

behalf of American literature should yet havebeen, among all these authors, the most equablein temperament and the most cosmopolitan intraining.Washington Irving was, as one may say,

born a citizen of the world, for he was bornin New York City. He was not a rustic nora Puritan, nor even, in the American sense, aYankee. He spent twenty-one years of his lifein foreign countries. He was mistaken inEngland for an English writer. He wasaccepted as an adopted Spaniard in Spain. He

1


16/266

1 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKdied before the outbreak of the great CivilWar, which did so much to convince us, for atime at least, that we were a nation. Yet itwas Washington Irving who wrote to JohnLothrop Motley, in 1857, two years before hisown death :

" You are properly sensible of the high call-ing of the American press, that rising tribunalbefore which the history of all nations is to berevised and rewritten, and the judgment of pastages to be corrected or confirmed." ^

The utmost claim of the most impassionedFourth of July orator has never involved anydeclaration of literary independence to be com-pared with this deliberate utterance of theplacid and world-experienced Irving. It wasthe fashion of earlier critics to pity him for hav-ing been born into a country without a past.This passage showed him to have rejoiced inbeing born into a country with a future. His" broad and eclectic genius," as Warner wellcalls it, was surely not given to bragging orto vagueness. He must have meant somethingby this daring statement. What did he mean ?

1 July 17, 1857. ^Motley Correspondence, i. 203.


17/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 3There are some things which it is very cer-

tain that he did not mean. He certainly didnot accept the Matthew Arnold attitude, that totalk of a distinctive American press at all is anabsurdity. Arnold finds material for profoundridicule in the fact that there exists a " Primerof American Literature ; " this poor little Cin-derella, cut off from all schooling, must noteven have a primer of her own. Irving cer-tainly did not assume the Goldwin Smith atti-tude, that this nation is itself but a schism, andshould be viewed accordingly ; as if one shouldtalk of there being only a schism between anoak-tree and its seedling, and should try tocorrect the unhappy separation by trowel andgardener's wax. He certainly did not acceptthe theory sometimes so earnestly advocatedamong us, of a " cosmopolitan tribunal," whichalways turns out to mean a tribunal where allother nations are to be admitted to the jury-box,while America is to get no farther than theprisoners' dock. Irving would have made asshort work with such a cosmopolitan tribunalas did Alice in Wonderland with the jury-boxof small quadrupeds, when she refused to obey


18/266

4 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKthe king's order that all persons over a milehigh should leave the court-room. In truth,the tone of Irving's remark carries us back, byits audacious self-reliance, to the answer said tohave been given bj^ the Delphic oracle toCicero in his youth. It told him, accordingto Plutarch, to live for himself, and not to takethe opinions of others for his guide ; and theGerman Niebulir thinks that " if the answer wasreally given, it might well tempt us to believe inthe actual inspiration of the priestess," ^

At any rate, Irving must have meant some-thing by the remark. What could he havemeant? What is this touchstone that theAmerican press must apply to the history andthe thought of the world? The touchstone, Ishould unhesitatingl}^ I'eply, of the Declarationof Independence ; or rather, perhaps, of thosefive opening words into which the essence of theDeclaration of Independence was concentratedthe five words within which, as Lincoln said,Jefferson embodied an eternal truth. " Allmen are created equal;'' that is, equallymen, and each entitled to be counted and con-sidered as an iiidividual.

1 Hist, of Rome, tr. by Scliinitz, v. 35.


19/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 5From this simple assumption flowed all that

is distinctive in American society. From itresulted, as a political inference, universal suf-frage ; that is, a suffrage constantly tending tobe universal, although it still leaves out one-half the human race. This universal suffrageis inevitably based on the doctrine of humanequality, as further interpreted by Franklin'sremark that the poor man has an equal right tothe suffrage with the rich man, '' and moreneed," because he has fewer ways in which toprotect himself. But it is not true, as evensuch acute European observers as M. Schererand Sir Henry Maine assume, that " democ-racy is but a form of government; " for democ-racy has just as distinct a place in society,and, above all, in the realm of literature. Thetouchstone there applied is just the same, andit consists in the essential dignity and value ofthe individual man. The distinctive attitudeof the American press must lie, if anywhere, inits recognition of this individual importanceand worth.The five words of Jefferson words which

Matthew Arnold pronounced " not solid," thus


20/266

6 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKprove themselves solid enough to sustain notmerely the government of sixty-three millionpeople, but their literature. Instead of avoid-ing, with Goethe, the common, das Gretneinde,American literature must freely seek the com-mon ; its fiction must record not queens andCleopatras alone, but the emotion in the heartof the schoolgirl and the sempstress : its his-tory must record, not great generals alone, butthe nameless boys whose graves people with un-dying memories every soldiers' cemetery fromArlington to Chattanooga.And Motley the pupil was not unworthy ofIrving from whom the suggestion came. His" Dutch Republic " was written in this Amer-ican spirit. William the Silent remains in ourmemorj' as no more essentially a hei'o than JohnHaring, who held single-handed his submergeddike against an army : and Philip of Burgundyand his knights of the Golden Fleece arepainted as far less important than John Coster,the Antwerp apothecary, printing his littlegrammar with movable types. Motley wrotefrom England, in the midst of an intoxicatingsocial success, that he never should wish America


21/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 7" to be Anglicized in the aristocratic sense " ofthe term ; ^ and he described the beautifulEnglish country-seats as "paradises very per-verting to the moral and politico-economicalsense," and sure to " pass away, one of thesecenturies, in the general progress of humanity." ^And he afterwards said the profoundest thingever uttered in regard to our Civil War, whenhe said that it was not, in the ordinary sense, " amilitary war," but a contest of two principles.^Wendell Phillips once told me that as the anti-slavery contest made him an American, soEurope made Motley one ; and when the twoyoung aristocrats met after years of absence,they both found that they had thus experiencedreligion.When we pass to other great American

authors, we see that Emerson lifted his voiceand spoke even to the humblest of the peopleof the intrinsic dignity of man :

God said, I am tired of kings,I suffer them uo more ;

Up to my ear each morning bringsThe outrage of the poor.1 Corresp. ii. 294. 2 jud. ii. 280. 3 Ibid. ii. 82.


22/266

8 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKI will have never a noble,No lineage counted great;Fishers and choppers and ploughmenShall constitute a State.

To-day unbind the captive,So only are ye unbound :

Lift up a people from the dust,Trump of their freedom, sound !

Pay ransom to the owner.And fill the bag to the brim :

Who is the owner ? The slave is owner.And ever was. Pay him.

That poem was not written for a few culti-vated people only. I heard it read to an armedregiment of freed slaves, standing silent withdusky faces, with the solemn arches of the liveoaks above them, each tree draped with longfestoons of gray moss across its hundred feet ofshade. And never reader had an audience moreserious, more thoughtful. The words which toothers are literature, to them were life.And all of that early transcendental school

which did so much to emancipate and national-ize American literature, did it by recognizingthis same fact. From the depth of their so-calledidealism they recognized the infinite value of


23/266

THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW BOOK 9the individual man. Tlioreaii, who has been soincorrectly and even cruelly described as a manwho spurned his fellows, wrote that noblesentence, forever refuting such critics, " What isnature, without a liuman life passing withinher? Many jo3's and many sorrows are theliofhts and shadows in which she shines mostbeautiful." Hawthorne came nearest to aportrayal of himself in that exquisite prose-poem of " The Threefold Destiny," in wliich theworld-weary man returns to his native villageand finds all his early dreams fulfilled in the lifebeside his own hearthstone. Margaret FullerOssoli wrote the profoundest phrase of criticismwhich has yet proceeded from any Americancritic, when she said that in a work of fictionwe need to hear the excuses that men make tothemselves for their worthlessness.And now that this early ideal movement has

passed by, the far wider movement which isestal)lislung American fiction, not in one local-ity alone, but on a field broad as the continent,unconsciously recognizes this one principle,the essential dio-nitv and worth of the Individ-ual man. This is what enables it to dispense


24/266

10 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKwith the toy of royalty and the mechanism ofseparate classes, and to reach human natureitself. When we look at the masters of Englishfiction, Scott and Jane Austen, we notice thatin scarcely one of their novels does one personever swerve on the closing page from the precisesocial position he has held from- the beginning.Society in their hands is fixed, not fluid. Ofcourse, there are a few concealed heirs, a fewrevealed strawberry leaves, but never any essen-tial change. I can recall no I'eal social promo-tion in all the Waverley novels except whereHalbert Glendinning weds the maid of Avenel,and there the tutelary genius disappearssinging,

" The churl is lord, the maid is bride," and it proved necessary for Scott to write asequel, explaining that the marriage was on thewhole a rather unhappy one, and that luckilythey had no children. Not that Scott did notappreciate with the keenest zest his ownJeannie Deanses and Dandie Dinmonts, but theymust keep their place ; it is not human naturethey vindicate, but peasant virtues.


25/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 11But from the moment American fiction came

upon the scene, it brought a change. Peasantvirtue vanishes when the peasant is a possiblepresident, and what takes its place is individualmanhood, irrespective of social position. Theheroes who successively conquered Europe inthe hands of American authors were of lowestate. a backwoodsman, a pilot, a negro slave,a lamplighter ; to which gallery Bret Harteadded the gambler, and the authors of " Democ-racy " and the " Bread-Winners " flung in thepolitician. In all these figures social distinc-tions disappear: "a man's a man for a' that."And so of our later writers. Miss Wilkins inNew England, Miss Murfree in Tennessee, Mr.Cable in Louisiana, Mr. Howe in Kansas, Dr.Eggleston in Indiana, Julien Gordon in NewYork, all represent the same impulse ; all recog-nize that " all men are created equal " in Jeffer-son's sense, because all recognize the essentialand inalienable value of the individual man.

It would be, of course, absurd to claim thatAmerica represents the whole of this tendency,for the tendency is a part of that wave of demo-cratic feeling which is overflowing the world.


26/266

12 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKBut Dickens, who initiated the movement inEnglish fiction, was unquestionably influencedby that very American life which he dislikedand caricatured, and we have since seen a simi-lar impulse spread through other countries. Inthe Russian, the Norwegian, the Sj)anish, theItalian fiction, we now rarely find a plot turningon some merely conventional difference betweenthe social positions of hero and heroine. InEngland the change has been made more slowlythan elsewhere, so incongruous is it in the midstof a society which still, in the phrase of BranderMatthews, accepts dukes. Indeed, it is curiousto observe that for a time it was still foundnecessary, in the earlier stages of the transition,to label the hero with his precise social posi-tion; as, " Steven Lawrence, Yeoman," " JohnHalifax, Gentleman," whereas in America itwould have been left for the reader to find outwhether John Halifax was or was not a gentle-man, and no label would have been thoughtneedful.And I hasten to add, what I should not always

have felt justified in saying, that this Amer-ican tendency comes to its highest point and is


27/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 13best indicated in the later work of Mr. Howells.Happy is that author whose final admirers are,as heroes used to say, the captives of his bowand spear," the men from whom he met his ear-lier criticism. Happ}^ is that man who has thepatience to follow, like Cicero, his own genius,and not to take the opinions of others for hisguide. And the earlier work of Mr. Howells that is, everything before '' The Rise of SilasLapham," " Annie Kilburn," and " The Hazardof New Fortunes " falls now into its rightplace ; its alleged thinness becomes merely thatof the painter's sketches and studies before hismaturer work begins. As the Emperor Alaricfelt always an unseen power drawing him on toRome, so Howells has evidently felt a magnetdrawing him on to New York, and it was notuntil he set up his canvas there that it had dueproportions. My friend Mr. James Parton usedto say that students must live in New England,where there were better libraries, but that" loafers and men of genius '" should live in NewYork. To me j)ersonally it seems a high priceto pay for the privileges either of genius or ofloafing, but it is well that Howells has at last


28/266

14 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKpaid it for the sake of the results. It is impos-sible to deny that he as a critic has proved him-self sometimes narrow, and has rejected withtoo great vehemence that which lay outside ofhis especial domain. It is not necessary, be-cause one prefers apples, to condemn orangesand he has sometimes needed the caution of theold judge to the young one : " Beware how 3'ougive reasons for your decisions ; for, while yourdecisions will usually be right, your reasons willvery often be wrong." But as he has becometouched more and more with the enthusiasm ofhumanity, he has grown better than his reasons,far better than his criticisms : and it is withhim and with the school he represents that thehope of American literature just now rests. Thereason why he finds no delicate shading or gra-dation of character unimportant is that he rep-resents the dignity and importance of theindividual man.When the future literary historian of the

English-speaking world looks back to thisperiod he will be compelled to say, " WhileEngland hailed as great writing and significantadditions to literature the brutalities of Haggard


29/266

THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW BOOK 15^and the garlic flavors of Kipling, there was inAmerica a student of life, who painted with theskill that Scott revered in Miss Austen, but noton the two inches of ivory that Miss Austenchose. He painted on a canvas large enoughfor the tragedies of New York, large enoughfor the future of America. Rich and luminousas George Eliot, he had the sense of form andsymmetry which she had not ; graphic in hischaracterization as Hardy, he did not stop, likeHardy, with a single circle of villagers. Whatthe future critic will say, we too should beready to perceive. If England finds him tire-some, so much the worse for England ; if Eng-land prefers dime novels and cut-and-thrustChristmas melodramas, and finds in whatHowells writes only " transatlantic kickshaws "because he paints character and life, we mustsay, as our fathers did, " Farewell, dear Eng-land," and seek what is our own. Emerson setfree our poetry, our prose ; Howells is settingfree our fiction ; he himself is as yet only halfout of the chrysalis, but the wings are there.

It must always be remembered that in litera-ture, alone of all arts, place is of secondary im-


30/266

16 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKportance, for its masterpieces can be carriedround the world in one's pockets. We need togo to Europe to see the great galleries, to hearthe music of Wagner, but the boy who reads^schylus and Horace and Shakespeare by hispine-knot fire has at his command the essenceof all universities, so far as literary traininggoes. But were this otherwise, we mustremember that libraries, galleries, and buildingsare all secondary to that great human life ofwhich they are only the secretions or appen-dages. " My Madonnas " thus wrote to methat recluse woman of genius, Emily Dickinson " are the women who pass my house to theirwork, bearing Saviours in their arms." Wordswait on thoughts, thoughts on life ; and afterthese, technical training is an easy thing.' The ai't of composition,'" wrote Thoreau, " isas simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle,and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greaterforce behind them." What are the two urnnis-takable rifle-shots in American literature thusfar? John Brown's speech in the court-roomand Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

Yielding to no one in the desire to see our


31/266

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK 17land tilled with libraries, with galleries, withmuseums, with fine buildings, I must still main-tain that all those things are secondary to thatvio-orous American life, which is destined toassimilate and digest them all. We are still inallegiance to Europe for a thousand things;

clothes, art, scholarship. For many years wemust yet go to Europe as did Robinson Crusoeto his wreck, for the very materials of living.But materials take their value from him whouses them, and that wreck would have longsince passed from memory had there not beena Robinson Crusoe. I am willing to be cen-sured for too much national self-confidence, forit is still true that we, like the young Cicero,need that quality. Goethe's world-literature is,no doubt, the ultimate aim, but a strong nationalliterature must come first. The new book mustexpress the spirit of the New World. We needsome repressing, no doubt, and every Europeannewspaper is free to apply it; we listen withexemplary meekness to every little Europeanlecturer who comes to enlighten us, in words ofone syllable, as to what we knew very wellbefore. We need something of repression, but


32/266

18 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKmuch more of stimulus. So Spenser's Brito-mart, when she entered the enchanted hall,found above four doors in succession theinscription, " Be bold ! be bold ! be bold ! bebold!" and only over the fifth door was theinscription, needful but wholly subordinate," Be not too bold !

"


33/266

AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 19

II

AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENTn^HE recent assertion of the London corre-

spondent of the New York Tribune, thatEnglishmen like every American to be an Amer-ican, has a cnrious interest in connection withsome remarks of the late Matthew Arnold, whichseem to look in an opposite direction. LordHoughton once told me that the earlier Ameri-can guests in London society were often cen-sured as being too English in appearance andmanner, and as wanting in a distinctive flavorof Americanism. He instanced Ticknor andSumner ; and we can all remember that therewere at first similar criticisms on Lowell. It isindeed a form of comment to which all Ameri-cans are subject in England, if they have theill-luck to have color in their cheeks and not tospeak very much through their noses ; in thatcase they are apt to pass for Englishmen by nowish of their own, and to be suspected of a littledouble dealing when they hasten to reveal their


34/266

20 THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW BOOKbirthplace. It very often turns out that thedemand for a distinctive Americanism reallyseeks only the external peculiarities that madeJoaquin Miller and Buffalo Bill popular ; anAmericanism that can at any moment be anni-hilated by a pair of scissors. It is something,no doubt, to be allowed even such an amountof nationality as this ; and Washington Irvingattributed the English curiosity about him tothe fact that he held a quill in his fingers insteadof sticking it in his hair, as was expected.But it would seem that Mr. Arnold, on the

other hand, disapproved the attempt to set upany claim whatever to a distinctive Americantemperament; and he has twice held up oneof our own authors for reprobation as havingasserted that the American is, on the whole, oflighter build and has " a drop more of nervousfluid " than the Englishman. This is not theway, he thinks, in which a serious literature isto be formed. But it turns out that the im-mediate object of the writer of the objection-able remark was not to found a literature, butsimply to utter a physiological caution : theobject of the essay in which it occurs one


35/266

AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 21called " The Murder of the Innocents," ^ beingsimply to caution this more nervous race againstoverworking tlieir children in school ; an aimwhich was certainly as far as possible from whatMr. Arnold calls ''tall talk and self-glorification."If a nation is not to be saved by pointingout is own physiological perils, what is tosave it?As a matter of fact, it will be generally

claimed by Americans, I fancy, that whateverelse their much-discussed nation may have, ithas at least developed a temperament for itself;"an ill-favored thing, but mine own," as Touch-stone says of Audrey. There is no vanity orself-assertion involved in this, any more thanwhen a person of blond complexion claims notto be a brunette or a brunette meekly insistsupon not being regarded as fair-haired. If theAmerican is expected to be in all respects theduplicate of the Englishman, and is only chargedwith inexpressible inferiority in quality andsize, let us know it ; but if two hundred andfifty years of transplantation under a new skyand in new conditions have made any difference

1 Out-Door Papers, p. 104.


36/266

22 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKin the type, let us know that also. In truth,the difference is already so marked that Mr.Arnold himself concedes it at every step inhis argument, and has indeed stated it in verymuch the same terms which an American wouldhave employed. In a paper entitled " FromEaster to August," ^ he says frankly : " Ourcountrymen [namely, the English], with a thou-sand good qualities, are really perhaps a gooddeal wanting in lucidity and flexibility ; " andagain in the same essa}^ : " The whole Americannation may be called intelligent; that is, quick."This would seem to be conceding the very pointat issue between himself and the Americanwriter whom he is criticising.The same difference of temperament, in the

direction of a greater quickness what the witof Edmund Quincy once designated as " specificlevity " on the part of Americans is certainlyvery apparent to every one of us who visitsEngland ; and not infrequently makes itselfperceptible, even without a surgical operation,to our English visitors. Professor Tyndall isreported to have said and if he did not say it,

1 Nineteenth Century for September, 1887.


37/266

AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 23some one else pointed it out for him that,whereas in his London scientific lectures healways had to repeat his explanations threetimes ; first telling his audience in advancewhat his experiments were to accomplish, thenduring the process explaining what was beingaccomplished, and then at last recapitulatingwhat had actually been done ; he found it best,in America, to omit one, if not two, of theseexpositions. In much the same way, the directorof a company of English comedians complainedto a friend of mine that American audienceslaughed a great deal too soon for them, and tookthe joke long before it was properly elucidated.In the same way an American author, who hadformerly been connected with the St. Nicholasmagazine, was told by a London publisher thatthe plan of it was all wrong. " These pages ofriddles at the end, for instance : no child wouldever guess them." And though the Americanassured him that they were guessed regularlyevery month in twenty thousand families, theEnglishmen still shook his head. Certainly thedifference between the national temperamentwill be doubted by no American public speaker


38/266

24 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKin England who has had one of his hearers callupon him the next morning to express satis-faction in the clever anecdote which it had takenhis English auditor a night's meditation to com-prehend.

It is impossible to overrate the value, indeveloping an independent national feeling inAmerica, of the prolonged series of leather un-amiable criticisms that have proceeded from theEnglish press and public men since the days ofMrs. Trollope and down to our own day. It hasde-colonized us ; and all the long agony of theCivil War, when all the privileged classes inEngland, after denouncing us through long-years for tolerating slavery, turned and de-nounced us yet more bitterly for abolishing itat the cost of our own heart's blood, onlj^ com-pleted the emancipation. The way out of pro-vincialism is to be frankl}' and even brutallycriticised; we thus learn not merely to see ourown faults, which is comparatively easy, but toput our own measure on the very authority thatcondemns us : voir le monde, cest juger lesjuges. We thus learn to trust our own tem-perament ; to create our own methods ; or, at


39/266

AN AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT 25least, to select our own teachers. At thismoment we go to France for our art and toGermany for our science as completely as ifthere were no such nation as England in theworld. In literature the tie is far closer withwhat used to be called the mother country, andthis because of the identity of language. Allretrospective English literature that is, allliterature more than a century or two old iscommon to the two countries. All contemporaryliterature cannot yet be judged, because it iscontemporary. The time may come when nota line of current English poetry may remainexcept the four quatrains hung up in St. Marga-ret's Church, and when the Matthew Arnoldof Macaulay's imaginary New Zealand mayfind with surprise that Whittier and Lowellproduced something more worthy of that acci-dental immortality than Browning or Tenny-son. The time may come when a careful studyof even the despised American newspapers mayreveal them to have been in one respect nearerto a high civilization than any of their Euro-pean compeers ; since the leading Americanliterary journals criticise their own contributors


40/266

26 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKwith the utmost freedom, while there does notseem to be a journal in London or Paris thateven attempts that courageous candor. Todwell merely on the faults and follies of anascent nation is idle ; vitality is always hope-ful. To complain that a nation's very strengthcarries with it plenty of follies and excesses is,as Joubert says, to ask for a breeze that shallhave the attribute of not blowing; demanderdu vent qui nait point de mohilite.


41/266

THE SHADOW OF EUEOPE 27

III

THE SHADOW OF EUROPETTTHEN the first ocean steamers crossed the

Atlantic, about 1838, Willis predictedthat they would only make American literaturemore provincial, by bringing Europe so muchnearer than before. Yet Emerson showed thatthere was an influence at work more potent thansteamers, and the colonial spirit in our literaturebegan to diminish from his time. In the daysof those first ocean voyages, the favorite literaryjournal of cultivated Americans was the NewYork Albion, which was conducted expresslyfor English residents on this continent ; and itwas considered a piece of American audacitywhen Horace Greeley called Margaret Fuller toNew York, that the Tribune might give to ourliterature an organ of its own. Later, on theestablishment of Putnam's Magazine, in 1853, Iremember that one of the most enlightened NewYork journalists predicted to me the absolutefailure of the whole enterprise. " Either an


42/266

28 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKAmerican magazine will command no respect,"he said, " or it must be better than Blackwoodor Fraser, which is an absurd supposition."But either of our great illustrated magazineshas now more readers in England than Fraseror Blackwood had then in America ; and to thisextent Willis's prediction is unfulfilled, and theshadow of Europe is lifted, not deepened, overour literature. But in many ways the glamourof foreign superiority still holds ; and we stillsee much of the old deferential attitude prevail-ing. Prince Albert said of German}^, in 1859,that its rock ahead was self-sufficiency. In ourown country, as to literature and science, to saynothing of art, our rock ahead is not self-suffi-ciency, but self-depreciation. Men still smileat the Congressman who said, " What have weto do with Europe ? " but I sometimes wish, forthe credit of the craft, that it had been a literaryman who said it. After all, it was only arougher paraphrase of Napoleon's equally trench-ant words : " Cette vieille Europe m''ennuie.^^The young American who goes to London,

and finds there the most agreeable literarysocietv in the world, because the most central-


43/266

THE SHADOW OF EUROPE 29ized and compact, can hardly believe at firstthat the authors around him are made of thesame clay with those whom he has often jostledon the sidewalk at home. He finds himselfdividing his scanty hours between celebratedwriters on the one side, and great historicremains on the other; as I can remember, oneday, to have weighed a visit to Darwin againstone to York Minster, and later to have post-poned Stonehenge, which seemed likely toendure, for Tennyson, who perhaps might not.The young American sees in London, to quoteWillis again, " whole shelves of his librarywalking about in coats and gowns," and theyseem for the moment far more interesting thanthe similar shelves in home-made garmentsbehind him. He is not cured until he is someday startled with the discovery that there arecultivated foreigners to whom his own world isforeign, and therefore fascinating ; men whothink the better of him for having known MarkTwain, and women who are unwearied in theircuriosity about the personal ways of Longfel-low. Nay, when I once mentioned to that fineold Irish gentleman, the late Richard D. Webb,


44/266

30 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKat his house in Dublin, that I had felt a thrillof pleasure on observing the street sign, denot-ing Fishamble Lane, at Cork, and recalling theballad about "Misthress Judy McCarty, ofFishamble Lane," he pleased me hy saying thathe had felt just so in New York, when he sawthe name of Madison Square, and thought ofMiss Flora McFlimsey. So our modest conti-nent had already its storied heroines and itshallowed ground

There are, undoubtedly, points in whichEurope, and especially England, has still theadvantage of America; such, for instance, asweekly journalism. In regard to printed booksthere is also still an advantage in quantity, butnot in quality ; while in magazine literature thebalance seems to incline just now the otherway. I saw it claimed confidently, not longsince, that the English magazines had " moresolid value " than our own ; but this solidity nowconsists, I should say, more in the style than inthe matter, and is a doubtful benefit, like solid-ity in a pudding. When the writer whom Iquote went on to cite the saying of a younggirl, that she could always understand an


45/266

THE SHADOW OF EUIIOPE 31American periodical, but never opened anEnglish one without something unintelligible, itseemed to me a bit of evidence whose bearingwas quite uncertain. It reminded me of adelightful old lady, well known to me, who,when taxed by her daughter with reading a bookquite beyond her comprehension, replied: "Butwhere is the use of reading a book that you canunderstand? It does you no good." As amatter of fact, the English magazines arecommonly not magazines at all, in the Americansense. Mr. M. D. Conway well said that theContemporary Revietv and the Fortnightly weresimply circular letters addressed by a few culti-vated gentlemen to those belonging to the sameclub. It is not until a man knows himself tobe writing for a hundred thousand readers thathe is compelled to work out his abstrusestthought into clearness, just as a sufficient pres-sure transforms opaque snow into pellucid ice.In our great American magazines, history andscience have commonly undergone this process,and the reader may be gratified, not ashamed,at comprehending them.The best remedy for too profound a deference


46/266

82 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKtoward European literary work is to test theauthor on some ground with which we in Amer-ica cannot help being familiar. It is this whichmakes a book of travels among us, or even alecturing trip, so perilous for a foreign reputa-tion ; and among the few who can bear this test as De Tocqueville, Von Hoist, the Comte deParis it is singularly rare to find an English-man. If the travellers liave been thus unfortu-nate, how much more those who have riskedthemselves on cis-Atlantic themes without trav-elling. No living English writer stood higherin America than Sir Henry Maine until wewatched him as he made the perilous transitionfrom " Ancient Law " to modern " PopularGovernment," and saw him approaching whathe himself admits to be the most important themein modern history, with apparently but some half-dozen authorities to draw upon, the UnitedStates Constitution, the Federalist, and two orthree short biographies. Had an American writ-ten on the most unimportant period of the mostinsignificant German principality with a basis ofreading no larger, we should have wished thathis nationality had been kept a secret. It is


47/266

THE SHADOW OP EUROPE 33not strange, on such a method, tnat Maineshould inform us that the majority of the pres-ent State sfovernments were formed before theUnion, and that only half the original thirteencolonies held slaves. So Mr. John A. Doyle,writing an extended history of American coloni-zation, put into his first volume a map makingthe lines of all the early grants run north andsouth instead of east and west ; and this havingbeen received with polite incredulity, gave usanother map depicting the New England colo-nies in 1700, with Plymouth still delineated as aseparate government, although it had beenunited with Massachusetts eight years before.When a lady in a London drawing-room

sends, by a returning New Yorker, an urgentmessage to her cousin at Coloi-ado Springs, werather enjoy it, and call it only pretty Fanny'sway ; she is not more ignorant of North Ameri-can geography than we ourselves may be of thatof South America. But when we find thatEnglish scholars of established reputation be-tray, when on ground we know, defects ofmethod that seem hopeless, what reverence isleft for those who keep on ground that we do


48/266

34 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKnot know? In time, the shadow of Europemust lose something of its impressiveness. Dr.Creighton, in his preface to the English " His-torical Review," counts in all Americans asmerely so many " outlying English ; " but it istime to recognize that American literature isnot, and never again can be, merely an outlyingportion of the literature of England.


49/266

ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 35

IVON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLYrpOLSTOi says, in " Anna Kar^nina," that no

nation will ever come to anything- unless itattaches some importance to itself. (^Les seulesnations qui aient de Vavenh\ les seules qu'onpuisse nommer historiques, sont celles qui sententVimportance et le valeur de leur institutions.}It is curious that ours seems to be the only con-temporary nation which is denied this simpleprivilege of taking itself seriously. What iscriticised in us is not so much that our sociallife is inadequate, as that we find it worth study-ing ; not so much that our literature is insufh-cient, as that we think it, in Matthew Arnold'sdisdainful phrase, " important." In short, weare denied not merely the pleasure of being at-tractive to other people, which can easily bespared, but the privilege that is usually con-ceded to the humblest, of being of some inter-est to ourselves.The bad results of this are very plain. They


50/266

36 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKare, indeed, so great that the evils which weresupposed to come to our literature, for instance,from the absence of international copyright,seem trivial in comparison. The very personswho are working the hardest to elevate our civ-ilization are constantly called from their duties,and, what is worse, are kept in a constant stateof subdued exasperation, by the denial of theirvery right to do these duties. "My work,"says Emerson, " may be of no impoi'tance, but Imust not think it of no importance if I woulddo it well." Those of us who toiled for yearsto remove from this nation the stain of slavery,remember how, when the best blood of our kin-dred was lavished to complete the sacrifice, allthe intellectual society of England turned uponus and reproached us for the deed. " The great-est war of principle which has been waged in thisgeneration," wrote Motley in one of his letters," was of no more interest to her, except as it boreupon the cotton question, than the wretched littlesquabbles of Mexico or South America." ^ Andso those Americans who are spending their lives inthe effort to remove the very defects visible in our

1 Letters, I., 373.


51/266

ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 87letters, our arts, our literature, are met con-stantly by the insolent assumption, not thatthese drawbacks exist, but that they are notworth removing.How magnificent, for instance, is the work con-

stantly done among us, by private and publicmunificence, in the support of our libraries andschools. Carlyle, in one of his early journals, de-plores that while every village around liim has itsplace to lock up criminals, not one has a publiclibrary. In the State of Massachusetts thiscondition of things is coming to be reversed,since many villages have no jail, and free libra-ries will soon be universal. The writer is at thismoment one of the trustees of three admirabledonations just given b}^ a young man not thirty-five to the city of his birth, a city hall, a pub-lic library, and a manual training school. Heis not a man of large fortune, as fortunes go,and his personal expenditures are on a verymodest scale ; he keeps neither yachts nor race-horses ; his name never appears in the lists offashionables, summer or winter ; but he simplydoes his duty to American civilization in thiswav. There are multitudes of others, all over


52/266

38 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKthe land, who do the same sort of thing ; theyare the most essentially indigenous and Ameri-can type we have, and their strength is in this,that they find their standard of action notabroad, but at home ; they take their nationseriously. Yet this, which should be the thingthat most appeals to every foreign observer, is,on the contrary, the very thing which the aver-age foreign observer finds most offensive. " Donot tell me only," says Matthew Arnold,'^ ... of the great and growing number ofyour churches and schools, libraries and news-papers ; tell me also if your civilization whichis the grand name you give to all this develop-ment tell me if your civilization is interest-ing:'

Set aside the fact of transfer across an oceanset aside the spectacle of a self-governing peo-ple; if there is no interest in the spectacle ofa nation of sixty million people laboring withall its might to acquire the means and resourcesof civilized life, then there is nothing interest-ing on earth. A hundred years hence, thewonder will be, not that we Americans attachedso much importance, at this stage, to these


53/266

ON TAKING OUESELVES SERIOUSLY 39efforts of ours, but that even we appreciatedtheir importance so little. If the calculationsof Canon Zincke are correct, in his celebratedpamphlet, the civilization which we are organ-izing is the great civilization of the future. Hecomputes that in 1980 the English-speakingpopulation of the globe will be, at the presentrate of progress, one billion ; and that of thisnumber, eight hundred million will dwell in theUnited States. Now, all the interest we takein our schools, colleges, libraries, galleries, isbut preliminary work in founding this greatfuture civilization. Toils and sacrifices for thisend may be compared, as Longfellow comparesthe secret studies of an author, to the sub-merged piers of a bridge : they are out of sight,but without them no structure can endure. IfAmerican society is really unimportant, and isforedoomed to fail, all these efforts will go withit ; but if it has a chance of success, these areto be its foundations. If they are to be laid,they must be laid seriously. " No man can doanything well," says Emerson, " who does notthink that what he does is the centre of thevisible universe."


54/266

40 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKThere is a prevailing theory, which seems to

me largely flavored with cant, that we mustaccept with the utmost humility all foreigncriticism, because it represents a remotertribunal than our own. But the fact stillremains, that while some things in art and litera-ture are best judged from a distance, otherthings including the whole department oflocal coloring can be only judged near home.The better the work is done, in this aspect, themore essential it is that it should be viewedwith knowledge. Looking at some marinesketches by a teacher of a good deal of note,the other day, I was led to point out the factthat she had given her schooner a jib, but hadattached it to no bowsprit, and had anchored awhole fleet of dories by the stern instead ofthe bow. When I called the artist's attentionto these peculiarities, the simple answer was :" I know nothing whatever about boats. Ipainted only what I saw, or thought I saw."In the same way one can scarcely open a foreigncriticism on an American book, without seeingthat, however good may be the abstract canonsof criticism adopted, the detailed comment is as


55/266

ON TAKING OURSELVES SERIOUSLY 41confused as if a landsman were writing aboutseamanship. When, for instance, a vivaciousLondoner like Mr. Andrew Lang attempts todeal with that profound imaginative creation,Arthur Dimmesdale, in the " Scarlet Letter,"he fails to comprehend him from an obviousand perhaps natural want of acquaintance withthe whole environment of the man. To Mr.Lang he is simply a commonplace clerical Love-lace, a dissenting clergyman caught in a shabbyintrigue. But if this clever writer had knownthe Puritan clergy as we know them, the high-priests of a Jewish theocracy, with the wholework of God in a strange land resting ontheir shoulders, he would have comprehendedthe awful tragedy in this tortured soul, andwould have seen in him the profoundest andmost minutely studied of all Hawthorne'scharacterizations. The imaginary offender forwhom that great author carried all winter, asMrs. Hawthorne told me, "a knot in his fore-head," is not to be viewed as if his tale were amere chapter out of the " Mdmoires de Casa-nova."When, at the beginning of this century,


56/266

42 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKIsaiah Thomas founded the American Anti-quarian Society, he gave it as one of his avowedobjects " that the library should contain acomplete collection of the works of Americanauthors." There was nothing extravagant, atthat time, in the supposition that a singlelibrary of moderate size might do this ; andthe very impossibility of such an inclusion, atthis day, is in part the result of the honest zealwith which Isaiah Thomas recognized the " im-portance " of our nascent literature. A dis-paraging opinion of any of these Americanbooks, or of all of them, does no more harmthan the opinion of Pepys, that " Comus " was" an insipid, ridiculous play." In many casesthe opinion will be well deserved ; in few caseswill it do any permanent harm. Since Emer-son, we have ceased to be colonial, and havetherefore ceased to be over-sensitive. The onlydanger is that, Emerson being dead, there shouldbe a slight reaction toward colonial diffidenceonce more ; that we should again pass throughthe apologetic period ; that we should cease fora time to take ourselves seriously.


57/266

A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 43

A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD"TT has lately become the fashion in the United

States to talk of the cosmopolitan standardas the one thing needful ; to say that formerlyAmerican authors were judged by their ownlocal tribunals, but henceforth they must beappraised by the world's estimate. The troubleis, that for most of those who reason in thisway, cosmopolitanism does not really mean theworld's estimate, but only the judgment ofEurope a judgment in which America itselfis to have no voice. Like the trade-winds whichso terrified the sailors of Columbus, it blowsonly from the eastward. There is no mannerof objection to cosmopolitanism, if the word betaken in earnest. There is something fine inthe thought of a federal republic of letters, avast literary tribunal of nations, in which eachnation has a seat; but this is just the kind ofcosmopolitanism which these critics do not seek.They seek merely a far-off judgment, and this


58/266

44 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKis no better than a local tribunal ; in somerespects it is worse. The remotest standard ofjudgment that I ever encountered was thatof the late Professor Ko-Kun-Hua, of HarvardUniversity. There was something delicious inlooking into his serene and inscrutable face, andin trying to guess at the operations of a highlytrained mind, to which the laurels of Plato andShakespeare were as absolutely unimportant asthose of the Sweet Singer of Michigan ; yet thetribunal which he afforded could hardly be calledcosmopolitan. He undoubtedly stood, however,for the oldest civilization ; and it seemed trivialto turn from his serene Chinese indifference,and attend to children of a day like the Revuedes deux Mondes and the Saturday Review. Ifwe are to recognize a remote tribunal, let usby all means prefer one that has some maturityabout it.But it is worth while to remember that, as a

matter of fact, the men who created the Ameri-can government gave themselves very littleconcern about cosmopolitanism, but simply wentabout their own work. They took hints fromolder nations, and especially from the mother


59/266

A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 45country, but they acknowledged no jurisdictionthere. The consensus of the civilized world,then and for nearly a century after, viewed theAmerican government as a mere experiment,and republican institutions as a bit of short-lived folly ; yet the existence of the new nationgave it a voice henceforth in every tribunal call-ing itself cosmopolitan. Henceforth that wordincludes the judgment of the New World onthe Old, as well as that of the Old World on theNew ; and when we construe literary cosmo-politanism in the same way, we shall be on asfirm ground in literature as in government.

So long as we look merely outside of ourselvesfor a standard, we are as weak as if we lookedmerely inside of ourselves ; probably weaker,for timidity is weaker than even the arroganceof strengfth. There is no danger that the for-eign judgment will not duly assert itself ; thedanger is, that our own self-estimate will be tooapologetic. What Avith courtesy and good-nature, and a lingering of the old colonialism,we are not yet beyond the cringing period inour literary judgment. The obeisance of allgood society in London before a successful cir-


60/266

46 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKcus-manager from America was only a shademore humiliating than the reverential attentionvisible in the American press when MatthewArnold was kind enough to stand on tiptoe uponour lecture-platform and apply his little meas-uring-tape to the great shade of Emerson. Ishould like to see in our literature some of thehonest self-assertion shown by Senator Tracy ofLitchfield, Connecticut, during Washington'sadministration, in his reply to the British Min-ister's praises of Mrs. Oliver Wolcott's beauty." Your countrywoman,'" said the Englishman," would be admired at the Court of St. James." "Sir," said Tracy, "she is admired even onLitchfield Hill."

In that recent book of aphorisms which hasgiven a fresh impulse to the fading fame of Di-.Channing, he points out that the hope of theworld lies in the fact that parents can not makeof their children what they will. It is equallytrue of parent nations. How easily we acceptthe little illusions offered us by our elders inthe world's literature, almost forgetting thattwo and two make four, in the innocent delightwith which they inspire us ! In re-reading Scott's


61/266

A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 47" Old Mortality " the other day, I was pleasedto find myself still carried away by the author'sown grandiloquence, where he describes theapproach of Claverhouse and his men to thecastle of Tillietudlem. " The train was long andimposing, for there were about two hundredand iifty horse upon the march." Two hundredand fifty ! Yet I read it for the moment withas little demur at these trivial statistics as ifour own Sheridan had never ridden out of Win-chester at the head of ten thousand cavalry.It is the same with all literature : we are askedto take Europe at Europe's own valuation, andthen to take America at Europe's valuation also ;and whenever we speak of putting an Americanvaluation upon the four quarters of the globe,we are told that this will not do ; this is notcosmopolitan.We are too easily misled, in exhorting Ameri-

can authors to a proper humility, because weforget that the invention of printing has in amanner placed all nations on a level. Litera-ture is the only art whose choicest works areeasily transportable. Once secure a public li-brary in every town a condition now in pro-


62/266

48 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKcess of fulfilment in our older American States and every bright boy or girl has a literaryLouvre and Vatican at command. Given ataste for literature, and there are at hand all themasters of the art Plato and Homer, Ciceroand Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.Travel is still needed, but not for books onlyfor other forms of art, for variety of acquaint-anceship, and for the habit of dealing with menand women of many nationalities. The mostfastidious American in Europe should not lookwith shame, but with pride and hope, upon thosethrongs of his fellow-countrymen whom he seescrowding the art-galleries of Europe, lookingabout them as ignorantly, if you please, as theGerman barbarians when they entered Rome.It is not so hard to gain culture ; the thingalmost impossible to obtain, unless it be born inus, is the spirit of initiative, of self-confidence.That is the gift with which great nations beginwe now owe our chief knowledge of Romanliterature and art to the descendants of thoseNorthern barbarians.And it must be kept in view, finally, that a

cosmopolitan tribunal is at best but a court of


63/266

A COSMOPOLITAN STANDARD 49appeal, and is commonly valuable in proportionas the courts of preliminary jurisdiction havedone their duty. The best preparation forgoingabroad is to know the worth of what one hasseen at home. I remember to have been im-pressed with a little sense of dismay, on firstHearing the shores of Europe, at the thoughtof what London and Paris might show me inthe way of great human personalities; but Isaid to myself, " To one who has heard Emer-son lecture, and Parker preach, and Garrisonthunder, and Phillips persuade, there is no rea-son why Darwin or Victor Hugo should passfor more than mortal ; " and accordingly theydid not. We shall not prepare ourselves for acosmopolitan standard by ignoring our owngreat names or undervaluing the literary traditionthat has produced them. When Stuart Newton,the artist, was asked, on first arriving in Londonfrom America, whether he did not enjoy thechange, he answered honestly, ^' I here see suchsociety occasionally, as I saw at home all thetime." At this day the self-respecting Amer-ican sometimes hears admissions in Europewhich make him feel that we are already ere-


64/266

50 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKating a standard, not waiting to be judged byone. The most variously accomplished literarycritic in England, the late Mark Pattison, saidto me of certain American books then latelypublished, " Is such careful writing appreciatedin the United States ? It would not be in Eng-land." On the shores of a new continent, then,there was already a standard which was in onerespect better than the cosmopolitan.


65/266

A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 51

VIA CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY

^T^HERE is an American novel, now prettyeffectually forgotten, which yet had the

rare honor of contributing one permanent phraseto English literature. I remember well the sur-prise produced, in my boyhood, by the appear-ance of "Stanley; or, The Recollections of aMan of the World." It was so crammed withmiscellaneous literary allusion and criticism,after the fashion of those days, that it was at-tributed by some critics to Edward Everett, thenthe standing representative of omniscience inour Eastern States. This literary material wasstrung loosely upon a plot wild and improbableenough for Brockden Brown, and yet vividenough to retain a certain charm, for me atleast, even until this day. It was this plot,perhaps, which led the late James T. Fields tomaintain that Maturin was the author of thenovel in question ; but it is now known to havebeen the production of Horace Binney Wallace


66/266

52 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKof Philadelphia, then a youth of twenty-one.In this book occurs the sentence : " Byron'sEuropean fame is the best earnest of his immor-tality, for a foreign nation is a kind of contem-poraneous posterity." ^Few widely quoted phrases have had, I fancy,

less foundation. It is convenient to imasfinethat an ocean or a mountain barrier, or even aline of custom houses, may furnish a sieve thatshall sift all true reputations from the chaffbut in fact, I suspect, Avhatever whims may varyor unsettle immediate reputations on the sj^ot,these disturbing influences are only redistrib-uted, not abolished, by distance. Whether welook to popular preference or to the judgmentof high authorities, the result is equally baf-fling. Napoleon Bonaparte preferred Ossian, itis said, to Shakespeare ; and Voltaire placed thelatter among the minor poets, viewing him atbest as we now view Marlowe, as the author ofan occasional mighty line. It was after Mrs.Elizabeth Montagu had been asked to hear Vol-taire demolish Shakespeare at an evening partyin Paris that she made her celebrated answer,

1 ii. 89.


67/266

A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 53when the host expressed the hope that she hadnot been pained by the criticism : " Why shouldI be pained ? I have not the honor to be amongthe intimate friends of M. de Voltaire." Evenat this day the French journalists are quite be-wildered by the Pall 3Iall Gazette s lists ofEnglish immortals ; and ask who Tennyson is,and what plays Ruskin has written. Thosewho happened, like myself, to be in Paris dur-ing the Exposition of 1878 remember well theastonishment produced in the French mind bythe discovery that any pictures Avere painted inEngland ; and the French Millet was at thattime almost as little known in London as washis almost namesake, the English Millais, inParis. If a foreign nation represented poster-ity, neither of these eminent artists appearedthen to have a chance of lasting fame.When we see the intellectual separation thus

maintained between England and France, withonly the width of the Channel between them,we can understand the separation achieved bythe Atlantic, even where there is no essentialdifference of language. M. Taine tries to con-vince Frenchmen that the forty English " im-


68/266

54 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKmortals " selected by the readers of the PallMall Grazette are equal, taken together, to theFrench Academicians. " You do not knowthem, you say? " he goes on. " That is not asufficient reason. The English, and all whospeak English, know them well, but, on theother hand, know little of our men of letters."After this a French paper, reprinting a similarEnglish list, added comments on the names,like this : " Robert Browning, the Scotch poet."There is probably no better manual of universalknowledge than the great French dictionary ofLarousse. When people come with miscella-neous questions to the Harvard College libra-rians, they often say in return, " Have youlooked in Larousse? " Now, when one looks inLarousse to see who Robert Browning was, onefinds the statement that the genius of Browningis more analogous to that of his American con-temporaries " Emerton, Wendell Holmes, andBigelow "' than to that of any English poet(^celle de n^importe quel poete atiglais.^ Thistransformation of Emerson into Emerton, andof Lowell, probably, to Bigelow, is hardly moreextraordinary than to link together three such


69/266

A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 55dissimilar poets, and compare Browning to allthree of them, or, indeed, to either of the three.Yet it gives us the high-water mark of what"contemporaneous posterity" has to offer. Thecriticism of another nation can, no doubt, offersome advantages of its own a fresh pair ofeyes and freedom from cliques ; but a foreignercan be no judge of local coloring, whether innature or manners. The mere knowledsre ofthe history of a nation may be essential to aknowledge of its art.

So far as literature goes, the largest elementof foreign popularity lies naturally in some kin-ship of language. Reputation follows the lineof least resistance. The Germanic races takenaturally to the literature of their own con-geners, and so with the Latin. As these lasthave had precedence in organizing the sociallife of the world, so they still retain it in theirliterary sway. The French tongue, in particu-lar, while ceasing to be the vehicle of alltravelling intercourse, is still the second lan-guage of all the world. A Portuguese gentle-man said once to a friend of mine that he wasstudying French " in order to have something


70/266

56 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKto read." All the empire of Great Britain,circling the globe, affords to her poets ornovelists but a petty and insular audience com-pared with that addressed by George Sand orVictor Hugo. A Roman Catholic convert fromAmerica, going from Paris to Rome, and havingaudience with a former pope, is said to havebeen a little dismayed when his Holinessinstantly inquired, with eager solicitude, as tothe rumored illness of Paul de Kock themilder Zola of the last generation. In con-temporaneous fame, then, the mere accident ofnationality and language plays an enormouspart ; but this accident will clearly have nothingto do with the judgment of posterity.

If any foreign country could stand for acontemporaneous posterit}^ one would think itmight be a younger nation judging an olderone. Yet how little did the American reputa-tions of fifty years ago afford any sure predic-tion of permanent fame in respect to Englishwriters ! True, we gave early recognition toCarlyle and Tennyson, but scarcely greaterthan to authors now faded or fading into ob-scurity, Milnes (Lord Houghton), Sterling,


71/266

A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 57Trench, Alford, and Bailey. No English poem,it was said, ever sold through so many Ameri-can editions as " Festus ; " nor was Tupper's" Proverbial Philosophy " far behind it. Trans-lators and publishers quarrelled bitterly for theprivilege of translating Frederika Bremer'snovels ; but our young people, who alreadystand for posterity, hardly recall her name. Iasked a Swedish commissioner at our Centen-nial Exhibition in 1876, " Is Miss Bremer stillread in Sweden?" He shook his head; andwhen I asked, "Who has replaced her?" hesaid, " Bret Harte and Mark Twain." It seemedthe irony of fame ; and there is no guarantythat this reversed national compliment will, anymore than our recognition of her, predict thejudgment of the future.

If this uncertainty exists when the NewWorld judges the Old, of which it knows some-thing, the insecurity must be greater when theOld World judges the New, of which it knowsnext to nothing. If the multiplicity of trans-lations be any test, Mrs. Stowe's contemporaryfame, the world over, has been unequalled inliterature; but will any one now say that it


72/266

68 THE NEW WOKLD AND THE NEW BOOKsurely predicts the judgment of posterity?Consider the companion instances. Next to" Uncle Tom's Cabin " ranked for a season,doubtless, in European favor, that exceedinglycommonplace novel " The Lamplighter," whosevery name is now almost forgotten at home. Itis impossible to say what law enters into suchsuccesses as this last ; but one of the mostobvious demands made by all foreign contem-porary judgment is, that an American bookshould supply to a jaded public the element ofthe unexpected. Europe demands from Amer-ica not so much a new thought and purpose, assome new dramatis personam ; that an authorshould exhibit a wholly untried type, anIndian, as Cooper; a negro, as Mrs. Stowe ; amountaineer, as Miss Murfree ; a Californiagambler, as Bret Harte ; a rough or roustabout,as Whitman.

There are commonly two ways to eminentsocial success for an American in foreignsociety, to be more European than Europeansthemselves, or else to surpass all other Ameri-cans in some amusing peculiarity which for-eigners suppose to be American. It is much


73/266

A cojnTemi'okaneous posterity 59the same in literature. Lady Morgan, describ-ing the high society of Dublin in her daj'^,speaks of one man as a great favorite whoalways entered every drawing-room by turninga somersault. This is one way of success foran American book ; but the other way, whichis at least more dignified, is rarely successfulexcept when combined with personal residenceand private acquaintance. Down to the year1880 Lowell was known in England, almostexclusively, as the author of the " BiglowPapers," and was habitually classed with Arte-mus Ward and Josh Billings, except that hisaudience was smaller. The unusual experienceof a diplomatic appointment first unveiled tothe English mind the all-accomplished Lowellwhom we mourn. Li other cases, as with Pres-cott and Motley, there was the mingled attrac-tion of European manners and a Europeansubject. But a simple and home-loving Amer-ican, who writes upon the themes furnished byhis own nation, without pyrotechnics or fantas-tic spelling, is apt to seem to the English mindquite uninteresting. There is nothing whichordinarily interests Europeans less than an


74/266

60 THE NE^y WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKAmericanism unaccompanied by a war-whoop.The Saturday Review^ wishing to emphasize itscontempt for Henry Ward Beecher, finally de-clares that one would turn from him with reliefeven to the poems of Whittier.

There could hardly have been a more ex-haustive proof of this local limitation or chau-vmis7ne than I myself noticed at a Londondinner-party some years ago. Our liost was anOxford professor, and the company was an emi-nent one. Being hard pressed about Americanliterature, I had said incidentally that a greatdeal of intellectual activity in America wasoccupied, and rightly, by the elucidation of ourown history, a thing, I added, which inspiredalmost no interest in Eng-land. This fact beinirdisputed, I said, " Let us take a test case. Wehave in America an historian superior toMotley in labors, in originality of treatment,and in style. If he had, like Motley, first goneabroad for a subject, and then for a residence,his European fame would have equalled Mot-ley's. As it is, probably not a person presentexcept our host will recognize his name."When I mentioned Francis Parkman, the predic-


75/266

A CONTEMPORANEOUS POSTERITY 61tion was fulfilled. All, save the host a manbetter acquainted with the United States, per-haps, than any living Englishman confessedutter ignoi'ance : an ignorance shared, it seems,by the only English historian of American liter-ature. Professor Nicliol, who actually does notallude to Parkman. It seems to me that wehad better, in view of such facts, dismiss thetlieory that a foreign nation is a kind of con-temporaneous posterity.


76/266

62 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK

VIION LITERARY TONICS

OOME minor English critic wrote lately ofDr. Holmes's " Life of Emerson : " " The

Boston of his day does not seem to have been avery strong place ; we lack performance." Thisis doubtless to be attributed rather to ignorancethan to that want of seriousness which Mr.Stedman so justly points out among the youngerEnglishmen. The Boston of which he speakswas the Boston of Garrison and Phillips, ofWhittier and Theodore Parker ; it was theheadquarters of those old-time abolitionists ofwhom the English Earl of Carlisle wrote thatthey were " fighting a battle without a parallelin the history of ancient or modern heroism."It was also the place which nurtured those youngHarvard students who are chronicled in the" Harvard Memorial Biographies " those whofell in the war of the Rebellion ; those of whomLord Houghton once wrote tersely to me:" They are men whom Europe has learned to


77/266

ON LITERARY TONICS 63honor and would do well to imitate." Theservice of all these men, and its results, give ameasure of the tonic afforded in the Boston ofthat da}'. Nay, Emerson himself was directlyresponsible for much of their strength. " Tohim more than to all other causes together,"says Lowell, " did the young martyrs of ourCivil War owe the sustaining strength of moralheroism that is so touching in every record oftheir lives." And when the force thus de-veloped in Boston and elsewhere came to do itsperfect work, that work turned out to be thefighting of a gigantic war and the freeing offour millions of slaves ; and this in the teeth ofevery sympathy and desire of all that appearedinfluential in England. This is what is meant,in American history at least, by " performance."

Indeed, as the War of 1812 has been called,following a suggestion of Franklin's, " the sec-ond War for Independence," so the Civil Warmight be called in the same sense the third warof the same kind ; and the evolution of theAmerican as a type wholly new and distinctfrom the Englishman, dates largely from thatevent. We are sometimes misled by a few


78/266

64 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKimitations in respect to visiting cards and ser-vants' liveries, to be solicitous about a revivalof Anglomania, forgetting that the very wordAnglomania implies separation and weaning. Ican recall when there was no more room forAnglomania in New York than in Piccadilly,for the simple reason that all was still Englishwhen the one cultivated newsi:)aper in the coun-try was the Ncav York Albion, conducted forBritish residents ; when the scene of every child'sstory was laid abroad and not at home ; whenIrving was read in America because he wroteof England, and Cooper's novels Avere regardedas a sort of daring eccentricity of the frontier.Fifty years ago Anglomania could scarcely besaid to exist in this country ; for the nation wasstill, for all purposes of art and literature, a mereprovince of England. Now all is changed ; theliterary tone of the United States is more serious,more original, and, in its regard for externalforms, more cultivated than that now prevailingon the other side. Untravelled Americans stillfeel a sense of awe before the English press,which vanishes when they visit London and talkwith the young fellows who write for its jour-


79/266

ON LITERARY TONICS 65nals ; and when these youths visit us, what light-weights they are apt to seemEmerson said of our former literary allegiance

to England that it was the tax we paid for thepriceless gift of Englisli literature ; but this taxshould surely not be now a heavy one : a fewballades and villanelles seem the chief recentimportations. The current American criticismon the latest English literature is that it isbrutal or trivial. The London correspondent ofthe Critic quoted some Englishmen the otherday as saying that the principal results of ourCivil War had been " the development of HenryJames, and the adoption of ]Mr. Robert Steven-son.'" Mr. Stevenson, if adopted, can hardlybe brought into the discussion. Mr. James hasno doubt placed himself as far as possiblebeyond reach of the Civil War by keeping theAtlantic Ocean between him and the scenewdiere it occurred; but when I recall that Imyself saw his youngest brother, still almost aboy, lying near to death, as it then seemed, ina hospital at Beaufort, S. C, after the charge onFort Wagner, I can easily imagine that theCivil War may really have done something


80/266

66 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKfor Mr. James's development, after all. Mr.Howells has scarcely yet given up taking theheroes of his books from among those who hadgone through a similar ordeal, and it will bemany years before the force of that great im-pulse is spent. For one thing, the results of thewar have liberated the Southern literary genius,and that part of the nation, so strangely unpro-lific till within twenty-hve years, is now arrest-ing its full share of attention, and perhaps evenmore than its share.

It is difficult to say just how far the influenceof a literar}^ tonic extends, and Goethe mightdoubtless be cited as an instance where artwas its own sufficient stimulus. In the cases ofa writer like Poe, we trace no tonic element.The great anti-slavery agitation and the generalreformatory mood' of half a century ago un-doubtedly gave us Channing, Emerson, Whit-tier, Longfellow, and Lowell ; not that theywould not have been conspicuous in any case,but that the moral attribute in their naturesmight have been far less marked. The greattemporary fame of Mrs. Stowe was identifiedwith the same influence. Hawthorne and


81/266

ON LITERARY TONICS 67Holmes were utterly nntoiiched by the anti-slavery agitation, yet both yielded to the excite-ment of the war, and felt in some degree itsfflow. It elicited from Aldrich his noble Fred-ericksburg sonnet. Stedman, Stoddard, andBayard Taylor wrote war songs, as did JuliaWard Howe conspicuously. Whitman's poemon the deatli of Lincoln is, in my judgment, oneof the few among his compositions which willlive. Wallace, who must be regarded as onthe whole our most popular novelist whatevermay be tliought of the quality of his workwon his first distinction in the Civil War. Cable,Lanier, Thompson, and otlier strong writerswere also engaged in it, on the Confederate side.It is absolutely impossible to disentangle fromthe work of any but the very youngest of ourliving American authors that fibre of iron whichcame from our great Civil War and the stormyagitation that led up to it.What is to succeed that great tonic ? for

we can hardly suppose that the human race isto be kept forever at war for the sake of sup-plying a series of heroic crises. It is evidentthat no particular source of moral stimulus is


82/266

68 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOKessential ; the Woman Suffrage movement hasmade a dozen and more women into orators andauthors ; and Helen Jackson was as thoroughlythrilled and insjDired by the wrongs of tlie Ameri-can Indians, as was Mrs. Stowe by tliose of theNegroes. The American writers who signedthe petition for tlie pardon of the ChicagoAnarchists, had at least the wholesome experi-ence of standing firmly, whether they were rightor wrong, against the current opinion of thosearound them. The contributions toward thediscussion of social questions which have of lateflowed so freely from clergymen and other non-experts, must undoubtedly do good to thosefrom whom they proceed, if to no others. Theessential thing is that the literary man shouldbe interested in something which he feels to beof incomparably more importance to the uni-verse than the development of his own prettytalent. We see the same thing across the ocean,when Swinburne writes his " Song in Time ofOrder," and Morris marches in a Socialist pro-cession. Here lies the power of the Russianwriters, of Victor Hugo. Probably no man whoever lived had an egotism more colossal than


83/266

ON LITERARY TONICS 69that of Hugo, yet he was Large enough to sub-ordinate even that egotism to the aims thatabsorbed him to abhorrence of Napoleon theLittle to enthusiasm for the golden age ofman. I like to think of him as I saw him at theVoltaire Centenaiy in 18TG, pleading for Uni-versal Peace amid the alternate hush and roarof thousands of excitable Parisians his lion-like head erect, his strong hand uplifted, hisvoice still powerful at nearly eighty years. Sovast was the crowd, so deserted the neighbor-ing streets, that it all recalled the words put byLandor into the lips of Demosthenes : " I haveseen the day when the most august of citieshad but one voice within her walls ; and whenthe' stranger on entering them stopped at thesilence of the gateway, and said, ' Demosthenesis speaking in the assembly of the people.' "


84/266

70 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK

VIIITHE FEAR OF THE DEAD LEVEL

"TT is noticeable that foreign observers, whowere always a little anxious about the pos-

sible monotony of our society, have grown a littlemore so since they have ventured west of theAlleghanies and crossed the long plain to betraversed before reaching the Rocky Mountains.In the days when an American trip culminatedat Niagara, and even Trenton Falls was con-sidered a si^ht so remarkable that CharlesSumner wrote from England to caution atraveller by no means to quit the countrywithout seeing it, there was no complaint thatour scenery was monotonous. The continentwas supposed to have done all, in that line,which could fairly be asked of it. Since then,the criticism has grown with the railway jour-ney, and people fear that the liorizontal line ofthe prairies must more than counterbalance thevertical line of Niagara, in moulding the Ameri-can mind. Then these very travellers are justly

(1892) The New World and the New Book: An Address Delivered Before the Nineteeth Century Club

Documents

Transcript of (1892) The New World and the New Book: An Address Delivered Before the Nineteeth Century Club