And give new guidance to the paths of man.”
THESE were the modest aspirations for American genius, and especially American literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, the once famous author, in his “Columbiad” of 1807.
It was not a democratic literature, as we understand the term, that Barlow, and hundreds of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped and expected to see arise in the new republic. It was not a literature that would interpret the homely, though vigorous, personality of a new nation. Nothing so concrete and so commonplace as this would have raised their ardor to such a pitch. The excitable critics of that day were concerned with the absolute, the ideal, and the abstract. Liberty, not equality, had at last found a dwelling-place, and the free spirit of man was to expand in an illimitable continent as never before, and create the poetry of freedom and the epic of liberated mankind. But their vast expectations were based upon a misconception and surrounded by fallacies. They have not been realized; and this is one reason for the prevailing idea that literary America has been a disappointment, that the life of the mind in America has lagged behind its opportunities, that we are a backward race in literature and the arts. We seem children to-day beside the dreams of our ancestors.
It is easy enough to see now that a race which had to construct a nation in a continent in large part scarcely habitable was not ready to sing the epic of freedom. Freedom had been won, but whether it would be possible to possess and enjoy it depended not upon lyrical interpretation, but upon statecraft, the broadax, toil, transportation, and the rifle. And when the pioneering days were over, political freedom, freedom of conscience and the individual man, belonged as truly to other great nations who were equally entitled to create the literature of the free mind. To expect the ideals of liberty to appear in American literature was legitimate, but to look for a great poetic outburst in nineteenth-century America just because this republic first established a new political order was no more reasonable than to demand a new style in architecture from the erectors of the first capitol in the trans-Alleghany wilderness.
What should have been asked of us, at least after the defeat of the Federalist party had made certain, what before was only probable, that America would become a democracy, was a literature which should express the ideals pervading our particular brand of democratic life, a literature which should describe a society in which social distinctions were elastic, opportunity was superabundant, and, for the first time in the modern world, the common people become more powerful than the uncommon. A democratic literature could rightly have been expected from America. But such a literature would never have been termed “sublimest thought” by our early enthusiasts. It would have to suffer from the tawdriness of the masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. It would have to be more prose than poetry, for American life outwardly was prosaic except upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous there. It would have to struggle upward like a flapping heron, not soar like the eagle of our dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in most periods of the republic, few literary dreamers even wished that America should become a democracy.
In many respects we got, and got very soon, such a literature, and much of it has endured. The prose or poetry that took upon itself to let the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally gone into oblivion, and with reason; it is either crude and blatant, or solemn and hackneyed pretentiousness, like Barlow’s “Columbiad” and much of Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan.” The “less enraptured” strains of Irving and Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and Bret Harte, in which the hopes, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a nascent civilization were expressed in prose as well as poetry, and in humor more frequently than in epic grandeur, have had a thousand times more virility. They have sprung from a social and esthetic need, not a romantic conception, and though not an epoch-making celebration of freedom finally brought to earth, they have been a solid contribution to the literature of the world and a beginning of the literature of the American democracy.
The real issue of course was not Freedom and Liberty and the other capitalizations of the abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real question is whether American literature has met its proper, not its assumed, specifications. If one considers the past, the answer inclines toward the affirmative.
There have been two chief strains in American literature, not always distinct, but in origin different. In the first belong those writers whose dominant purpose has been to appeal to the best in the many; and by the best I mean the finest or the deepest emotions, and by the many I mean the accessible minds of the democracy. Emerson belongs primarily here, and Hawthorne, and, though he would have denied it, Whitman. Henry James in his earlier stories is a lovable example; and when he pursued his magical art into realms where only the trained appreciation could follow, Mrs. Wharton put on the mantle. In the second have been the more numerous writers whose chief purpose, not always a conscious one, has been to touch and interest and arouse not so much the best as the commonest, the most universal emotions. Cooper is the most excellent example of great writing in this group. Mark Twain when not misanthropic, Bret Harte in all moods, Whittier and Longfellow, Riley and 0. Henry, and a host of the less distinguished, also belong there.
But far more important than this division in purpose, which, after all, is hard to make and harder still to keep, is the fact, if one may speak of high esthetic matters in a biological fashion, of constant cross-fertilization between these strains, and especially in the men we call great. Americans who felt impelled to write of the ideal best have not forgotten the needs of a nation slowly moving toward democracy. Those who wrote to amuse and interest the populace have felt in a curious fashion their responsibility for what they considered American ideals. Tribute has been paid by both sides, though each in its own fashion, to democracy; and this makes an unexpected congruity between appeals to the best and satisfactions for the many, between Emerson and popular fiction. The scholar presents his idealistic optimism as an attempt to explain where the eager swarm ought to be winging. The story-teller, though inspired not by ideas, but by the chance to interest an energetic society absorbed in the conquest of nature and hot-blooded with the taste of success, yet feels bound to urge what he feels to be American morality and American idealism.
This common sympathy with democracy is the hope of American literature in the sharp tests of our nationality now almost upon us. Emerson and Cooper, Hawthorne and Mark Twain, are examples of what once it could do.
Emerson was a man who never courted or obtained popularity, who hitched his readers to a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who wrote always for minds that may have been democratic, but certainly could not have been common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an aristocrat in tastes, a democrat by sympathy and conviction, whose stories, even his bad stories, contained that essential adventure, that rapid and unexpected and successful action, which satisfies the universal craving for struggle well ended, stories so popular that his enemies were entranced by them even while they abused him.
The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the greatness of Emerson is the airy strength of his ideology, his permanence in the history of American civilization is determined by the expression he gave to the moral optimism of the typical American. And if the popularity of Cooper was due to the unflagging interest of his adventure and the romance of his actors and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him more than a good story-teller and gives him great place in the social history of America is his incarnation of the ideals and the morality of a native democracy in Deerslayer, whom all Americans could understand and admire.Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Hawthorne was a moralist romancer whose austere talents forced admiration and a somewhat doubtful popularity. Twain touched the universal note of humorous exaggeration so early and so readily that his stern moral basis went unremarked. Men read him for humor as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing the ideas of each as unconsciously as the child takes medicine in a sugared glass.
Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of lofty moral ideals is more evident than any appeal to the masses, yet the most careless reader feels that his warnings are for a new world that has broken with tradition and must face its problems of sin and sex in a democracy of conscience. And if Mark Twain writes obviously to amuse the democracy, yet he seldom fails to preach to them also. “Huckleberry Finn,” to the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other things an epic of the injustice, the inconsistency of sophisticated man and his social system, seen through the eyes of the new world on the Mississippi, where tradition, in the fresh, crude light, showed its seams of decay. There is a tract upon slavery in “Huckleberry Finn,” and another upon dueling, and a third on social distinctions, and a fourth upon conventionalized religion. And readers of Clemens will not forget how the bones of his acrid philosophy wore through the skin of his humor in those later books, especially in “The Mysterious Stranger,” where a hatred of social injustice and the melancholy foreboding which has always accompanied the optimism of American democracy had such full escape that the publishers were led to print it as a fairytale for children that it might be enjoyed by minds too unobservant to trouble with its warnings.
I do not wish to seem to be docketing all American literature in these brief comparisons. What I desire is to point to this common interest of our writers in the needs of democracy. Whitman, who wrote always for the most vigorous and sometimes for the best emotions of the many, might continue the argument. Howells, whose zest for the familiar experience kept his penetrating intellect busy with problems important for democracy, is another example. Poe, and Henry James in his later years, fall without both groups, being as indifferent to democracy as they are solicitous for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it is by such men that the writers who sway the masses are trained in the technique of their craft.
In short, by and large, our literature is remarkable for its substructure of what might be called democratic idealism—idealism applied to the needs of a growing democracy. If the reader doubts, let him compare Emerson with Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and answer whether our writers have not been formed by the social needs of America.
That this is true of so many men, and has led to the cross-fertilization between popular writers and intellectuals of which I have written above, is perhaps more readily explained when one considers how homogeneous our society has been, how few and how slight its mental cleavages. Conservative and radical, traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, democrat and aristocrat—such clefts have not gone so deep with us as with other nations. Except for times of stress, as in the decade between 1765 and 1775, or in the years just before the Civil War, it would be hard to group, for example, our writers by fundamental differences in their philosophy of living. Whitman one could classify, and Poe and Irving, but the difficulty rapidly increases as the list lengthens. We have been homogeneous by a common tradition of liberalism, by a common environment varying not too greatly between Boston and the newer West. And our literature has resembled us.
And now, when at last our literature, like our politics and our economics, must at last challenge world scrutiny, this national character, and all that represents it, has come suddenly to seem of vast importance. We have become vividly aware of it, and we realize that we are in dire need of self-expression—of self-expression by new literature. The self-consciousness of Americans throughout the nineteenth century, which showed itself keenly in their restlessness under foreign criticism and their irrepressible desire to talk about God’s country, was of a different kind. It was due to a nervous uncertainty as to the success of the American experiment. We were more concerned with what others thought of our qualities than with what we were or had been. But three things have altered our situation radically, and made us think more of character and less of reputation.
The first is the absolute success, as success is measured by the world’s finger, of this American experiment. The hope of the founders to establish a stable and prosperous republican government where life, property, conscience, and opinion were safe has been realized.
The second and more sensational change came from the Great War, which gave us that quiet confidence in our national strength that comes when recognition from without confirms the fact and makes self-assertion unnecessary.
The third, and probably the most important, has been the rise to intellectual influence and cultural and social power of aliens—Irish, German, most of all Jews—who, unlike the earlier immigrants, do not cherish as their chief wish the desire to become in every sense American. Such phenomena as an Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Paine, becoming almost from the day of their landing more native than the natives, are becoming rarer and rarer. More and more we must count upon cosmopolitans of brains and ability among us who know not Israel, though they may love the traditions of their home lands even less. It is this new America, heterogeneous, brilliant, useful, but disturbing, that has more than anything else sharpened the self-consciousness of America, turned us toward introspection, made us sensible of our homogeneity, and the new alignments inevitable for the future.
And just as at the turn of the eighteenth century enthusiasts were clamoring for a new literature from America, in which freedom and liberty should have their apotheosis, so now the awakened consciousness of Americans of the older stock is clamoring for the expression of what they vaguely denominate, and still more vaguely describe, as Americanism. Like all such terms called forth by a crisis and displayed like a flag or a button, the term is at the same time indefinite and full of significance. Ten men and women will in ten different ways define it. And yet none can doubt that vast feeling lies behind the word, and would crystallize, if power were given it, into an expression of our national experience and aspirations and ideals as we have lived with them and seen them develop for a century.
And opposed to this clamor for a literature of Americanism is another call, not loud yet, but rising—a demand for a different literature, mordant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, which will cut at the sentimentalities in which our idealism has involved us, strike at the moribund liberalism which we still regard as our basis of action, take issue with the moral standards that have been received as irrevocable because they were American. Keenly aware of the need for a more honest and more vigorous expression of what America means to-day, and sensitive to these caustic attacks upon all that we have called American, the thoughtful mind finds little to console it in the clever, sentimental writing which, with sewing machines, dental pastes, ready-made clothes, and cheap motor-cars, has become one of the standardized products of America.
There has been one response already to the awakening national consciousness, and this, curiously enough, has been almost identical with the reaction of the new republic a century and more ago to its responsibilities. Then the first writing which commanded attention here and abroad was to be found in so-called state papers, declarations of Congress and legislatures, pamphlets by Adams and Hamilton and Jefferson. And the first response to our modern clamor for Americanism has also been in state papers, beginning perhaps with Roosevelt’s administration and continuing through Wilson’s messages and the many documents on the war. The worth and significance of many of these public utterances have commanded world-wide respect, and possible permanence in literature.
Yet it is rarely that state papers can satisfy a national need for literature. They are too restricted in their interests and too occasional in their provenance. It is only once in a century that a Gettysburg Address sums up the political and moral philosophy of millions or a discourse on the needs and obligations of democracy unites public opinion in America and Europe. The emotions of the race seek outlet and interpretation in pure literature, and here the American response is more doubtful.
None of the more popular brands of contemporary writing seems to satisfy the craving for national self-expression. It is true that we are going in for universals. Our books reach the hundred thousands, and our magazines the millions. The successful writer of plays, stories, or special articles trades in the thoughts that circulate through a vast community of common education, experience, and environment. The result is to spread and perpetuate the ideals and the liberal hopes that we call American, but also to stereotype and thus weaken their influence. They become counters in a game, or, better still, standardized foods for the imagination, whose popularity is certain until the fashion wears out. The writer of adventurous fiction to-day uses the same formulas as did Cooper, because he writes for a people still true to the mold of that America which they have inherited directly in family life, or indirectly in the schools. But his idealism is faint beside Cooper’s; his “strong, simple Americans” too often mere fabrications when compared with Deerslayer, or crude, vulgarized approximations, like sculptures of the decadent fourth century. Vulgarization is the menace of democratic literature—vulgarization by smart and cheap short stories, by plays where the wit is raw, the sentiment mushy, the characters, like their language, cheap and mean. Slang can be racy; colloquialism belongs to a literature of the people; to be homely is often to be lovable and true: but a literature, no matter how moral, which in its lack of clarity and sweetness is like a glass of dirty water, is a heavy price to pay for mere circulation. The appeal to universals is essential in a democracy, but unless clarified by love and hope and conviction, it leads toward universal vulgarity.
Nor does the prospect cheer if one looks to the contemporary Brahmins, who seek not the universal, but the particular; who write for the best, not the broadest, emotions of democracy. Lowells and Emersons have not yet reappeared in our society. No Emerson has philosophized the reactions of America to international obligation; no Lowell assailed militarist and pacifist alike in the war; no Whitman even has sung commonplace America become momentarily heroic in the cause of a half-understood democracy. We have had an abundance of writing directed to fine minds and fine souls, but it has lacked the authentic note of national inspiration.
Perhaps the coldness of our intellectual literature has been due to the specialization of the age. A Lowell, an Emerson, even a Longfellow, has been difficult for the last three decades. Learned men, like these, have been driven by the public opinion of their world toward investigation and scientific research. They have been weighted with a frightful responsibility for facts; they have been better scholars than their predecessors, but less effective citizens. The tool-cutter nowadays knows only his own operation. The scholar and philosopher have a lifetime of labor assigned them, with no time to become acquainted with their United States. In nineteenth-century America there was little place for the scholar. He was driven into the world, and if scholarship lost, we profited. Now his corner is built for him, and he has gone into it.
As a result of all this we face a very real danger. American literature, with its burden of ideals and experience, being cheapened by writers for the mob and deserted by the academician, may lose its virility and pale before a new literature of cosmopolitanism, which could find no better breeding-place than Chicago or New York.
Artistically, this might be no calamity. Such a society as a great American city presents has never before been seen in the world, not even in Rome, and the international democracy which it forecasts is worthy already of a great literature, has, indeed, already begun one. But we old Americans, even though our age is of only two generations, are not yet ready for international democracy. Our own racial character has not received its final stamp, come to full self-expression, established itself as the permanent influence upon the world’s development which our career and our opportunities should make it. To rush into literary internationalism before the long American experience has ripened into a national democracy would be to skip a step. It is to commit again the error of our forefathers, who proposed an epic of liberty before we had freed ourselves from the burden of economic development.
And what we need is precisely such a cross-fertilization between the mind that reaches for the best and the imagination which feels for the many, as one finds in varying measures in Mark Twain and Holmes, in Cooper and Whitman and Emerson. It must be a different and perhaps a more mature product, but nothing else can make American ideals worth saving in literature, for nothing else can grasp the shrewd native quality of this people, which is still pervasive through all our alien swarms.
For three centuries now we have been at our experiment in democracy. We have been sordid and we have been magnificent. We have been timorous and we have set examples for hardihood in man. We have stumbled blindly on our road, and we have had great moments of illumination. We have not made a perfect democracy, but perhaps more men, women, and children have been happy in America than elsewhere in world history. And on the whole our course has been consistently onward. No purpose of the founders has failed to continue; no valuable element of character has yet been lost by the way. We are no worse men, by and large, than our forefathers. And either this great experiment is worth something or it is not.
If it is worth something, it must pass into literature, and find men to make it pass. And these men and women must be lovers of what we have done here and what we are, as the young poets of England at war were above all lovers of their blessed England. They cannot be scoffers at our loose-held ideals and our nervous commercialism, who scold, which is easy, a great, though uneven, nation, but do not search out the cause of its greatness and proclaim its hope. Nor can they be recluses contemptuous of that public in whose progressive refinement lies the only chance for democracy. Nor mere buyers and sellers of emotion who have learned the speech of the great beast, as Hamilton called the common people, only to make profit by it.
But you cannot summon a literature from the vasty deep by calling for it in oratorical vein. Perhaps, even now as I write, some wise youth, who takes his task more seriously than himself, has begun in humor a poem that is meant for some newspaper column, but will become a better description than an essay can give of the American who has been doing so much, but thinking also, who still knows how to grin at misfortune, and is not yet ready to declare himself bankrupt in ideas, deficient in character, or pallid in imaginative faith. As a nation we did our boasting early and got it out of our system; but the confidence and the strength and the hope that inspired that boasting remain, and approach fruition.
