All human activity is, in a certain sense, a mode of self-expression. The works of man in the organization of the State, in the development of industry, in voluntary effort for the improvement of the common order, are an utterance of his inner life.

But it is natural for him to seek a fuller, clearer, more conscious mode of self-expression, to speak more directly of his ideals, thoughts, and feelings. It is this direct utterance of the Spirit of America, as it is found in literature, which I propose now, and in the following lectures,[1] to discuss.

Around the political and ecclesiastical and social structures which men build for themselves there are always flowing great tides and currents of human speech; like the discussions in the studio of the architect, the confused murmur of talk among the workmen, the curious and wondering comments of the passing crowd, when some vast cathedral or palace or hall of industry is rising from the silent earth. Man is a talking animal. The daily debates of the forum and the market-place, the orations and lectures of a thousand platforms, the sermons and exhortations of the thousand pulpits, the ceaseless conversation of the street and the fireside, all confess that one of the deepest of human appetites and passions is for self-expression and intercourse, to reveal and to communicate the hidden motions of the spirit that is in man.

Language, said a cynic, is chiefly useful to conceal thought. But that is only a late-discovered, minor, and decadent use of speech. If concealment had been the first and chief need that man felt, he never would have made a language. He would have remained silent. He would have lived among the trees, contented with that inarticulate chatter which still keeps the thoughts of monkeys (if they have any) so well concealed.

But vastly the greater part of human effort toward self-expression serves only the need of the transient individual, the passing hour. It sounds incessantly beneath the silent stars,—this murmur, this roar, this susurrus of mingled voices,—and melts continually into the vague inane. The idle talk of the multitude, the eloquence of golden tongues, the shouts of brazen throats, go by and are forgotten, like the wind that passes through the rustling leaves of the forest.

In the fine arts man has invented not only a more perfect and sensitive, but also a more enduring, form for the expression of that which fills his spirit with the joy and wonder of living. His sense of beauty and order; the response of something within him to certain aspects of nature, certain events of life; his interpretation of the vague and mysterious things about him which seem to suggest a secret meaning; his delight in the intensity and clearness of single impressions, in the symmetry and proportion of related objects; his double desire to surpass nature, on the one side by the simplicity and unity of his work, or on the other side by the freedom of its range and the richness of its imagery; his sudden glimpses of truth; his persistent visions of virtue; his perception of human misery and his hopes of human excellence; his deep thoughts and solemn dreams of the Divine,—all these he strives to embody, clearly or vaguely, by symbol, or allusion, or imitation, in painting and sculpture, music and architecture.

The medium of these arts is physical; they speak to the eye and the ear. But their ultimate appeal is spiritual, and the pleasure which they give goes far deeper than the outward senses.

In literature we have another art whose very medium is more than half spiritual. For words are not like lines, or colours, or sounds. They are living creatures begotten in the soul of man. They come to us saturated with human meaning and association. They are vitally related to the emotions and thoughts out of which they have sprung. They have a wider range, a more delicate precision, a more direct and penetrating power than any other medium of expression.

The art of literature which weaves these living threads into its fabric lies closer to the common life and rises higher into the ideal life than any other art. In the lyric, the drama, the epic, the romance, the fable, the conte, the essay, the history, the biography, it not only speaks to the present hour, but also leaves its record for the future.

Literature consists of those writings which interpret the meanings of nature and life, in words of charm and power, touched with the personality of the author, in artistic forms of permanent interest.

Out of the common utterances of men, the daily flood of language spoken and written, by which they express their thoughts and feelings,—out of that current of journalism and oratory, preaching and debate, literature comes. But with that current it does not pass away. Art has endowed it with the magic which confers a distinct life, a longer endurance, a so-called immortality. It is the ark on the flood. It is the light on the candlestick. It is the flower among the leaves, the consummation of the plant’s vitality, the crown of its beauty, the treasure-house of its seeds.

Races and nations have existed without a literature. But their life has been dumb. With their death their power has departed.

What does the world know of the thoughts and feelings of those unlettered tribes of white and black and yellow and red, flitting in ghost-like pantomime across the background of the stage? Whatever message they may have had for us, of warning, of encouragement, of hope, of guidance, remains undelivered. They are but phantoms, mysterious and ineffective.

But with literature life arrives at utterance and lasting power. The Scythians, the Etruscans, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, have vanished into thin air. We grope among their ruined cities. We collect their figured pottery, their rusted coins and weapons. And we wonder what manner of men they were. But the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Romans, still live. We know their thoughts and feelings, their loves and hates, their motives and ideals. They touch us and move us to-day through a vital literature. Nor should we fully understand their other arts, nor grasp the meaning of their political and social institutions without the light which is kindled within them by the ever-burning torch of letters.

The Americans do not belong among the dumb races. Their spiritual descent is not from Etruria and Phoenicia and Carthage, nor from the silent red man of the western forests. Intellectually, like all the leading races of Europe, they inherit from Greece and Rome and Palestine.

Their instinct of self-expression in the arts has been slower to assert itself than those other traits which we have been considering,—self-reliance, fair-play, common order, the desire of personal development. But they have taken part, and they still take part (not altogether inaudibly), in the general conversation and current debate of the world. Moreover, they have begun to create a native literature which utters, to some extent at least, the thoughts and feelings of the soul of the people.

This literature, considered in its ensemble as an expression of our country, raises some interesting questions which I should like to answer. Why has it been so slow to begin? Why is it not more recognizably American? What are the qualities in which it really expresses the Spirit of America?

I. If you ask me why a native literature has been so slow to begin in America, I answer, first, that it has not been slow at all. Compared with other races, the Americans have been rather less slow than the average in seeking self-expression in literary form and in producing books which have survived the generation which produced them.

How long was it, for example, before the Hebrews began to create a literature? A definite answer to that question would bring us into trouble with the theologians. But at least we may say that from the beginning of the Hebrew Commonwealth to the time of the prophet Samuel there were three centuries and a half without literature.

How long did Rome exist before its literary activities began? Of course we do not know what books may have perished. But the first Romans whose names have kept a place in literature were NÆvius and Ennius, who began to write more than five hundred years after the city was founded.

Compared with these long periods of silence, the two hundred years between the settlement of America and the appearance of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper seems but a short time.

Even earlier than these writers I should be inclined to claim a place in literature for two Americans,—Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Indeed it is possible that the clean-cut philosophical essays of the iron-clad Edwards, and the intensely human autobiography of the shrewd and genial Franklin may continue to find critical admirers and real readers long after many writers, at present more praised, have been forgotten.

But if you will allow me this preliminary protest against the superficial notion that the Americans have been remarkably backward in producing a national literature, I will make a concession to current and commonplace criticism by admitting that they were not as quick in turning to literary self-expression as might have been expected. They were not a mentally sluggish people. They were a race of idealists. They were fairly well educated. Why did they not go to work at once, with their intense energy, to produce a national literature on demand?

One reason, perhaps, was that they had the good sense to perceive that a national literature never has been, and never can be, produced in this way. It is not made to order. It grows.

Another reason, no doubt, was the fact that they already had more books than they had time to read. They were the inheritors of the literature of Europe. They had the classics and the old masters. Milton and Dryden and Locke wrote for them. Pope and Johnson, Defoe and Goldsmith, wrote for them. Cervantes and Le Sage wrote for them. Montesquieu and Rousseau wrote for them. Richardson and Smollett and Fielding gave them a plenty of long-measure novels. Above all, they found an overflowing supply of books of edification in the religious writings of Thomas Fuller, Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Philip Doddridge, Matthew Henry, and other copious Puritans. There was no pressing need of mental food for the Americans. The supply was equal to the demand.

Another reason, possibly, was the fact that they did not have a new language, with all its words fresh and vivid from their origin in life, to develop and exploit. This was at once an advantage and a disadvantage.

English was not the mother-tongue of all the colonists. For two or three generations there was a confusion of speech in the middle settlements. It is recorded of a certain young Dutchwoman from New Amsterdam, travelling to the English province of Connecticut, that she was in danger of being tried for witchcraft because she spoke a diabolical tongue, evidently marking her as “a child of Satan.”

But this polyglot period passed away, and the people in general spoke

“the tongue that Shakespeare spoke,”—

spoke it indeed rather more literally than the English did, retaining old locutions like “I guess,” and sprinkling their talk with “Sirs,” and “Ma’ams,”—which have since come to be considered as Americanisms, whereas they are really Elizabethanisms.

The possession of a language that is already consolidated, organized, enriched with a vast vocabulary, and dignified by literary use, has two effects. It makes the joyful and unconscious literature of adolescence, the period of popular ballads and rhymed chronicles, quaint animal-epics and miracle-plays, impossible. It offers to the literature of maturity an instrument of expression equal to its needs.

But such a language carries with it discouragements as well as invitations. It sets a high standard of excellence. It demands courage and strength to use it in any but an imitative way.

Do not misunderstand me here. The Americans, since that blending of experience which made them one people, have never felt that the English language was strange or foreign to them. They did not adopt or borrow it. It was their own native tongue. They grew up in it. They contributed to it. It belonged to them. But perhaps they hesitated a little to use it freely and fearlessly and originally while they were still in a position of tutelage and dependence. Perhaps they waited for the consciousness that they were indeed grown up,—a consciousness which did not fully come until after the War of 1812. Perhaps they needed to feel the richness of their own experience, the vigour of their own inward life, before they could enter upon the literary use of that most rich and vigorous of modern languages.

Another reason why American literature did not develop sooner was the absorption of the energy of the people in other tasks than writing. They had to chop down trees, to build houses, to plough prairies. It is one thing to explore the wilderness, as Chateaubriand did, an elegant visitor looking for the materials of romance. It is another thing to live in the wilderness and fight with it for a living. Real pioneers are sometimes poets at heart. But they seldom write their poetry.

After the Americans had won their security and their daily bread in the wild country, they had still to make a State, to develop a social order, to provide themselves with schools and churches, to do all kinds of things which demand time, and toil, and the sweat of the brow. It was a busy world. There was more work to be done than there were workmen to do it. Industry claimed every talent almost as soon as it got into breeches.

A Franklin, who might have written essays or philosophical treatises in the manner of Diderot, must run a printing-press, invent stoves, pave streets, conduct a postal service, raise money for the War of Independence. A Freneau, who might have written lyrics in the manner of AndrÉ ChÉnier, must become a soldier, a sea-captain, an editor, a farmer.

Even those talents which were drawn to the intellectual side of life were absorbed in the efforts which belong to the current discussions of affairs, the daily debate of the world, rather than to literature. They disputed, they argued, they exhorted, with a direct aim at practical results in morals and conduct. They became preachers, orators, politicians, pamphleteers. They wrote a good deal; but their writing has the effect of reported speech addressed to an audience. The mass of sermons, and political papers, and long letters on timely topics, which America produced in her first two hundred years is considerable. It contains much more vitality than the imitative essays, poems, and romances of the same period.

John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer,” the sermons of President Witherspoon of Princeton, the papers of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in the Federalist, are not bad reading, even to-day. They are virile and significant. They show that the Americans knew how to use the English language in its eighteenth-century form. But they were produced to serve a practical purpose. Therefore they lack the final touch of that art whose primary aim is the pleasure of self-expression in forms as permanent and as perfect as may be found.

II. The second question which I shall try to answer is this: Why is not the literature of America, not only in the beginning but also in its later development, more distinctly American?

The answer is simple: It is distinctly American. But unfortunately the critics who are calling so persistently and looking so eagerly for “Americanism” in literature, do not recognize it when they see it.

They are looking for something strange, eccentric, radical, and rude. When a real American like Franklin, or Irving, or Emerson, or Longfellow, or Lanier, or Howells appears, these critics will not believe that he is the genuine article. They expect something in the style of “Buffalo Bill.” They imagine the Spirit of America always in a red shirt, striped trousers, and rawhide boots.

They recognize the Americanism of Washington when he crosses the forest to Fort Duquesne in his leather blouse and leggings. But when he appears at Mount Vernon in black velvet and lace ruffles, they say, “This is no American after all, but a transplanted English squire.” They acknowledge that Francis Parkman is an American when he follows the Oregon trail on horseback in hunter’s dress. But when he sits in the tranquil library of his West Roxbury home surrounded by its rose gardens, they say, “This is no American, but a gentleman of Europe in exile.”

How often must our critics be reminded that the makers of America were not redskins nor amiable ruffians, but rather decent folk, with perhaps an extravagant admiration for order and respectability? When will they learn that the descendants of these people, when they come to write books, cannot be expected to show the qualities of barbarians and iconoclasts? How shall we persuade them to look at American literature not for the by-product of eccentricity, but for the self-expression of a sane and civilized people? I doubt whether it will ever be possible to effect this conversion and enlightenment; for nothing is so strictly closed against criticism as the average critic’s adherence to the point of view imposed by his own limitations. But it is a pity, in this case, that the point of view is not within sight of the facts.

There is a story that the English poet Tennyson once said that he was glad that he had never met Longfellow, because he would not have liked to see the American poet put his feet upon the table. If the story is true, it is most laughable. For nothing could be more unlike the super-refined Longfellow than to put his feet in the wrong place, either on the table, or in his verse. Yet he was an American of the Americans, the literary idol of his country.

It seems to me that the literature of America would be more recognizable if those who consider it from the outside knew more of the real spirit of the country. If they were not always looking for volcanoes and earthquakes, they might learn to identify the actual features of the landscape.

But when I have said this, honesty compels me to go a little further and admit that the full, complete life of America still lacks an adequate expression in literature. Perhaps it is too large and variegated in its outward forms, too simple in its individual types, and too complex in their combination, ever to find this perfect expression. Certainly we are still waiting for “the great American Novel.”

It may be that we shall have to wait a long time for this comprehensive and significant book which will compress into a single cup of fiction all the different qualities of the Spirit of America, all the fermenting elements that mingle in the vintage of the New World. But in this hope deferred,—if indeed it be a hope that can be reasonably entertained at all,—we are in no worse estate than the other complex modern nations. What English novel gives a perfect picture of all England in the nineteenth century? Which of the French romances of the last twenty years expresses the whole spirit of France?

Meantime it is not difficult to find certain partial and local reflections of the inner and outer life of the real America in the literature, limited in amount though it be, which has already been produced in that country. In some of it the local quality of thought or language is so predominant as to act almost as a barrier to exportation. But there is a smaller quantity which may fairly be called “good anywhere”; and to us it is, and ought to be, doubly good because of its Americanism.

Thus, for example, any reader who understands the tone and character of life in the Middle States, around New York and Philadelphia, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, feels that the ideas and feelings of the more intelligent people, those who were capable of using or of appreciating literary forms, are well enough represented in the writings of the so-called “Knickerbocker School.”

Washington Irving, the genial humorist, the delicate and sympathetic essayist and story-teller of The Sketch-Book, was the first veritable “man of letters” in America. Cooper, the inexhaustible teller-of-tales in the open air, the lover of brave adventure in the forest and on the sea, the Homer of the backwoodsman, and the idealist of the noble savage, was the discoverer of real romance in the New World.

Including other writers of slighter and less spontaneous talent, like Halleck, Drake, and Paulding, this school was marked by a cheerful and optimistic view of life, a tone of feeling more sentimental than impassioned, a friendly interest in humanity rather than an intense moral enthusiasm, and a flowing, easy style,—the manner of a company of people living in comfort and good order, people of social habits, good digestion, and settled opinions, who sought in literature more of entertainment and relaxation than of inspiration or what the strenuous reformers call “uplift.”

After the days when its fashionable idol was Willis, and its honoured though slightly cold poet was Bryant, and its neglected and embittered genius was Edgar Allan Poe, this school, lacking the elements of inward coherence, passed into a period of decline. It revived again in such writers as George William Curtis, Donald Mitchell, Bayard Taylor, Charles Dudley Warner, Frank R. Stockton; and it continues some of its qualities in the present-day writers whose centre is undoubtedly New York.

Is it imaginary, or can I really feel some traces, here and there, of the same influences which affected the “Knickerbocker School” in such different writers as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, in spite of their western origin? Certainly it can be felt in essayists like Hamilton Mabie and Edward S. Martin and Brander Matthews, in novelists like Dr. Weir Mitchell and Hopkinson Smith, in poets like Aldrich and Stedman, and even in the later work of a native lyrist like Richard Watson Gilder. There is something,—I know not what,—a kind of urbanum genus dicendi, which speaks of the great city in the background and of a tradition continued. Even in the work of such a cosmopolitan and relentless novelist as Mrs. Wharton, or of such an independent and searching critic as Mr. Brownell, my mental palate catches a flavour of America and a reminiscence of New York; though now indeed there is little or nothing left of the Knickerbocker optimism and cheerful sentimentality.

The American school of historians, including such writers as Ticknor, Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, and Parkman, represents the growing interest of the people of the New World for the history of the Old, as well as their desire to know more about their own origin and development. Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, Parkman’s volumes on the French settlements in Canada, Sloane’s Life of Napoleon, and Henry C. Lea’s History of the Inquisition are not only distinguished works of scholarship, but also eminently readable and interesting expressions of the mind of a great republic considering important events and institutions in other countries to which its own history was closely related. The serious and laborious efforts of Bancroft to produce a clear and complete History of the United States resulted in a work of great dignity and value. But much was left for others to do in the way of exploring the sources of the nation, and in closer study of its critical epochs. This task has been well continued by such historians as John Fiske, Henry Adams, James Bach McMaster, John Codman Ropes, James Ford Rhodes, Justin Winsor, and Sydney G. Fisher.

These are only some of the principal names which may be cited to show that few countries have better reason than the United States to be proud of a school of historians whose works are not only well documented, but also well written, and so entitled to be counted as literature.

The Southern States, before the Civil War and for a little time after, were not largely represented in American letters. In prose they had a fluent romancer, Simms, who wrote somewhat in the manner of Cooper, but with less skill and force; an exquisite artist of the short-story and the lyric, Poe, who, although he was born in Boston and did most of his work in Philadelphia and New York, may perhaps be counted sympathetically with the South; two agreeable story-tellers, John Esten Cooke and John P. Kennedy; two delicate and charming lyrists, Paul Hayne and Henry Timrod; and one greatly gifted poet, Sidney Lanier, whose career was cut short by a premature death.

But the distinctive spirit of the South did not really find an adequate utterance in early American literature, and it is only of late years that it is beginning to do so. The fine and memorable stories of George W. Cable reflect the poesy and romance of the creole life in Louisiana. James Lane Allen and Thomas Nelson Page express in their prose the Southern atmosphere and temperament. The poems of Madison Cawein are full of the bloom and fragrance of Kentucky. Among the women who write, Alice Hegan Rice, “Charles Egbert Craddock,” Ruth McEnery Stuart, “George Madden Martin,” and Mary Johnston may be named as charming story-tellers of the South. Joel Chandler Harris has made the old negro folk-tales classic, in his Uncle Remus,—a work which belongs, if I mistake not, to one of the most enduring types of literature.

But beyond a doubt the richest and finest flowering of belles lettres in the United States during the nineteenth century was that which has been called “the Renaissance of New England.” The quickening of moral and intellectual life which followed the Unitarian movement in theology, the antislavery agitation in society, and the transcendental fermentation in philosophy may not have caused, but it certainly influenced, the development of a group of writers, just before the middle of the century, who brought a deeper and fuller note into American poetry and prose.

Hawthorne, profound and lonely genius, dramatist of the inner life, master of the symbolic story, endowed with the double gift of deep insight and exquisite art; Emerson, herald of self-reliance and poet of the intuitions, whose prose and verse flash with gem-like thoughts and fancies, and whose calm, vigorous accents were potent to awaken and sustain the intellectual independence of America; Longfellow, the sweetest and the richest voice of American song, the household poet of the New World; Whittier, the Quaker bard, whose ballads and lyrics reflect so perfectly the scenery and the sentiment of New England; Holmes, genial and pungent wit, native humorist, with a deep spring of sympathy and a clear vein of poetry in his many-sided personality; Lowell, generous poet of high and noble emotions, inimitable writer of dialect verse, penetrating critic and essayist,—these six authors form a group not yet equalled in the literary history of America.

The factors of strength, and the hidden elements of beauty, in the Puritan character came to flower and fruit in these men. They were liberated, enlarged, quickened by the strange flood of poetry, philosophy, and romantic sentiment which flowed into the somewhat narrow and sombre enceinte of Yankee thought and life. They found around them a circle of eager and admiring readers who had felt the same influences. The circle grew wider and wider as the charm and power of these writers made itself felt, and as their ideas were diffused. Their work, always keeping a distinct New England colour, had in it a substance of thought and feeling, an excellence of form and texture, which gave it a much broader appeal. Their fame passed from the sectional to the national stage. In their day Boston was the literary centre of the United States. And in after days, though the sceptre has passed, the influence of these men may be traced in almost all American writers, of the East, the West, or the South, in every field of literature, except perhaps the region of realistic or romantic fiction.

Here it seems as if the West had taken the lead. Bret Harte, with his frontier stories, always vivid but not always accurate, was the founder of a new school, or at least the discoverer of a new mine of material, in which Frank Norris followed with some powerful work, too soon cut short by death, and where a number of living men like Owen Wister, Stewart Edward White, and O. Henry are finding graphic stories to tell. Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, William Allen White, and Robert Herrick are vigorous romancers of the Middle West. Winston Churchill studies politics and people in various regions, while Robert Chambers explores the social complications of New York; and both write novels which are full of interest for Americans and count their readers by the hundred thousand.

In the short-story Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, and Mrs. Deland have developed characteristic and charming forms of a difficult art. In poetry George E. Woodberry and William Vaughn Moody have continued the tradition of Emerson and Lowell in lofty and pregnant verse. Joaquin Miller has sung the songs of the Sierras, and Edwin Markham the chant of labour. James Whitcomb Riley has put the very heart of the Middle West into his familiar poems, humorous and pathetic.

And Walt Whitman, the “democratic bard,” the poet who broke all the poetic traditions? Is it too soon to determine whether his revolution in literature was a success, whether he was a great initiator or only a great exception? Perhaps so. But it is not too soon to recognize the beauty of feeling and form, and the strong Americanism, of his poems on the death of Lincoln, and the power of some of his descriptive lines, whether they are verse or rhapsodic prose.

It is evident that such a list of names as I have been trying to give must necessarily be very imperfect. Many names of substantial value are omitted. The field is not completely covered. But at least it may serve to indicate some of the different schools and sources, and to give some idea of the large literary activity in which various elements and aspects of the Spirit of America have found and are finding expression.

III. The real value of literature is to be sought in its power to express and to impress. What relation does it bear to the interpretation of nature and life in a certain country at a certain time? That is the question in its historical form. How clearly, how beautifully, how perfectly, does it give that interpretation in concrete works of art? That is the question in its purely Æsthetic form. What personal qualities, what traits of human temperament and disposition does it reveal most characteristically in the spirit of the land? That is the question in the form which belongs to the study of human nature.

It is in this last form that I wish to put the question, just now, in order to follow logically the line marked by the general title of these lectures. The Spirit of America is to be understood not only by the five elements of character which I have tried to sketch in outline,—the instinct of self-reliance, the love of fair-play, the energetic will, the desire of order, the ambition of self-development. It has also certain temperamental traits; less easy to define, perhaps; certainly less clearly shown in national and social institutions, but not less important to an intimate acquaintance with the people.

These temperamental traits are the very things which are most distinctive in literature. They give it colour and flavour. They are the things which touch it with personality. In American literature, if you look at it broadly, I think you will find four of these traits most clearly revealed,—a strong religious feeling, a sincere love of nature, a vivid sense of humour, and a deep sentiment of humanity.

(1) It may seem strange to say that a country which does not even name the Supreme Being in its national constitution, which has no established form of worship or belief, and whose public schools and universities are expressly disconnected from any kind of church control, is at the same time strongly religious, in its temperament. Yet strange as this seems, it is true of America.

The entire independence of Church and State was the result of a deliberate conviction, in which the interest of religion was probably the chief consideration. In the life of the people the Church has been not less, but more, potent than in most other countries. Professor Wendell was perfectly right in the lectures which he delivered in Paris four years ago, when he laid so much emphasis upon the influence of religion in determining the course of thought and the character of literature in America. Professor MÜnsterberg is thoroughly correct when he says in his excellent book The Americans, “The entire American people are in fact profoundly religious, and have been, from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers landed, down to the present moment.”

The proof of this is not to be seen merely in outward observance, though I suppose there is hardly any other country, except Scotland, in which there is so much church-going, Sabbath-keeping, and Bible-reading. It is estimated that less than fifteen of the eighty millions of total population are entirely out of touch with any church. But all this might be rather superficial, formal, conventional. It might be only a hypocritical cover for practical infidelity. And sometimes when one reads the “yellow journals” with their flaming exposures of social immorality, industrial dishonesty, and political corruption, one is tempted to think that it may be so.

Yet a broader, deeper, saner view,—a steady look into the real life of the typical American home, the normal American community,—reveals the fact that the black spots are on the surface and not in the heart of the country.

The heart of the people at large is still old-fashioned in its adherence to the idea that every man is responsible to a higher moral and spiritual power,—that duty is more than pleasure,—that life cannot be translated in terms of the five senses, and that the attempt to do so lowers and degrades the man who makes it,—that religion alone can give an adequate interpretation of life, and that morality alone can make it worthy of respect and admiration. This is the characteristic American way of looking at the complicated and interesting business of living which we men and women have upon our hands.

It is rather a sober and intense view. It is not always free from prejudice, from bigotry, from fanaticism, from superstition. It is open to invasion by strange and uncouth forms of religiosity. America has offered a fertile soil for the culture of new and queer religions. But on the whole,—yes, in immensely the larger proportion,—the old religion prevails, and a rather simple and primitive type of Christianity keeps its hold upon the hearts and minds of the majority. The consequence of this is (to quote again from Professor MÜnsterberg, lest you should think me a prejudiced reporter), that “however many sins there are, the life of the people is intrinsically pure, moral, and devout.” “The number of those who live above the general level of moral requirement is astonishingly large.”

Now this habit of soul, this tone of life, is reflected in American literature. Whatever defects it may have, a lack of serious feeling and purpose is not among them. It is pervaded, generally, by the spiritual preconception. It approaches life from the point of view of responsibility. It gives full value to those instincts, desires, and hopes in man which have to do with the unseen world.

Even in those writers who are moved by a sense of revolt against the darkness and severity of certain theological creeds, the attempt is not to escape from religion, but to find a clearer, nobler, and more loving expression of religion. Even in those works which deal with subjects which are non-religious in their specific quality,—stories of adventure, like Cooper’s novels; poems of romance, like the ballads of Longfellow and Whittier,—one feels the implication of a spiritual background, a moral law, a Divine providence,—

“Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”

This, hitherto, has been the characteristic note of the literature of America. It has taken for granted that there is a God, that men must answer to Him for their actions, and that one of the most interesting things about people, even in books, is their moral quality.

(2) Another trait which seems to me strongly marked in the American temperament and clearly reflected in American literature is the love of nature. The attractions of the big out-of-doors have taken hold upon the people. They feel a strong affection for their great, free, untended forests, their swift-rushing rivers, their bright, friendly brooks, their wooded mountain ranges of the East, their snowy peaks and vast plains and many-coloured canyons of the West.

I suppose there is no other country in the world where so many people break away from the fatigues of civilization every year, and go out to live in the open for a vacation with nature. The business of making tents and camp outfits for these voluntary gypsies has grown to be enormous. In California they do not even ask for a tent. They sleep À la belle Étoile.

The Audubon societies have spread to every State. You will not find anywhere in Europe, except perhaps in Switzerland, such companies of boys and girls studying the wild flowers and the birds. The interest is not altogether, nor mainly, scientific. It is vital and temperamental. It is the expression of an inborn sympathy with nature and a real delight in her works.

This has found an utterance in the large and growing “nature-literature” of America. John James Audubon, Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, Clarence King, John Muir, Ernest Seton, Frank Chapman, Ernest Ingersoll,—these are some of the men who have not only carefully described, but also lovingly interpreted, “nature in her visible forms,” and so have given to their books, beyond the value of accurate records of observation, the charm of sympathetic and illuminative writing.

But it is not only in these special books that I would look for evidence of the love of nature in the American temperament. It is found all through the poetry and the prose of the best writers. The most perfect bit of writing in the works of that stern Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, is the description of an early morning walk through a field of wild flowers. Some of the best pages of Irving and Cooper are sketches of landscape along the Hudson River. The scenery of New England is drawn with infinite delicacy and skill in the poetry of Bryant, Whittier, and Emerson. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller make as see the painted desert and the ragged Sierras. James Lane Allen shows us the hemp fields of Kentucky, George Cable the bayous of Louisiana. But the list of illustrations is endless. The whole literature of America is filled with pictures of nature. There is hardly a familiar bird or flower for which some poet has not tried to find a distinct, personal, significant expression in his verse.

(3) A third trait of the American temperament is the sense of humour. This is famous, not to say notorious. The Americans are supposed to be a nation of jokers, whose daily jests, like their ready-made shoes, have a peculiar oblique form which makes it slightly difficult for people of other nationalities to get into them.

There may be some truth in the latter part of this supposition, for I have frequently observed that a remark which seemed to me very amusing only puzzled a foreigner. For example, a few years ago, when Mark Twain was in Europe, a despatch appeared in some of the American newspapers giving an account of his sudden death. Knowing that this would trouble his friends, and being quite well, he sent a cablegram in these words, “Report of my death grossly exaggerated, Mark Twain.” When I repeated this to an Englishman, he looked at me pityingly and said: “But how could you exaggerate a thing like that, my dear fellow? Either he was dead, or he was alive, don’t you know.” This was perfectly incontestable, and the statement of it represented the English point of view.

But to the American incontestable things often have a double aspect: first that of the solemn fact; and then that of the curious, unreal, pretentious shape in which it is dressed by fashion, or vanity, or stupid respectability. In this region of incongruities created by the contrast between things as they really are and the way in which dull or self-important people usually talk about them, American humour plays.

It is not irreverent toward the realities. But for the conventionalities, the absurdities, the pomposities of life, it has a habit of friendly satire and good-tempered raillery. It is not like the French wit, brilliant and pointed. It is not like the English fun, in which practical joking plays so large a part. It is not like the German joke, which announces its arrival with the sound of a trumpet. It usually wears rather a sober face and speaks with a quiet voice. It delights in exposing pretensions by gravely carrying them to the point of wild extravagance. It finds its material in subjects which are laughable, but not odious; and in people who are ridiculous, but not hateful.

Its favourite method is to exaggerate the foibles of persons who are excessive in certain directions, or to make a statement absurd simply by taking it literally. Thus a Yankee humorist said of a certain old lady that she was so inquisitive that she put her head out of all the front windows of the house at the same time. A Westerner claimed the prize of inventiveness for his town on the ground that one of its citizens had taught his ducks to swim on hot water in order that they might lay boiled eggs. Mr. Dooley described the book in which President Roosevelt gave his personal reminiscences of the Spanish-American War under the title “Alone in Cubea.”

Once, when I was hunting in the Bad Lands of North Dakota, and had lost my way, I met a solitary horseman in the desert and said to him, “I want to go to the Cannonball River.” “Well, stranger,” he answered, looking at me with a solemn air of friendly interest, “I guess ye can go if ye want to; there ain’t no string on ye.” But when I laughed and said what I really wanted was that he should show me the way, he replied, “Why didn’t ye say so?” and rode with me until we struck the trail to camp.

All this is typical of native American humour, quaint, good-natured, sober-faced, and extravagant. At bottom it is based upon the democratic assumption that the artificial distinctions and conventional phrases of life are in themselves amusing. It flavours the talk of the street and the dinner-table. It makes the Americans inclined to prefer farce to melodrama, comedietta to grand opera. In its extreme and degenerate form it drifts into habitual buffoonery, like the crude, continuous jests of the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers. In its better shape it relieves the strenuousness and the monotony of life by a free and kindly touch upon its incongruities, just as a traveller on a serious errand makes the time pass by laughing at his own mishaps and at the queer people whom he meets by the way.

You will find it in literature in all forms: in books of the professional humorists from Artemus Ward to Mr. Dooley: in books of genre painting, like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson, or like David Harum, which owed its immense popularity to the lifelike portrait of an old horse trader in a rural town of central New York: in books of sober purpose, like the essays of Lowell or Emerson, where a sudden smile flashes out at you from the gravest page. Oliver Wendell Holmes shows it to you, in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, dressed in the proper garb of Boston; you may recognize it on horseback among the cowboys, in the stories of Owen Wister and O. Henry; it talks the Mississippi River dialect in the admirable pages of Charles D. Stewart’s Partners with Providence, and speaks with the local accent of Louisville, Kentucky, in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Almost everywhere you will find the same general tone, a compound of mock gravity, exaggeration, good nature, and inward laughter.

You may catch the spirit of it all in a letter that Benjamin Franklin sent to a London newspaper in 1765. He was having a little fun with English editors who had been printing wild articles about America. “All this,” wrote he, “is as certainly true as the account, said to be from Quebec, in all the papers of last week, that the inhabitants of Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery this summer in the upper Lakes. Ignorant people may object that the upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt-water fish; but let them know, Sir, that cod, like other fish, when attacked by their enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest; that whales, when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed, by those who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in Nature.”

(4) The last trait of the American temperament on which I wish touch briefly is the sentiment of humanity.

It is not an unkind country, this big republic, where the manners are so “free and easy,” the tempo of life so quick, the pressure of business so heavy and continuous. The feeling of philanthropy in its broader sense,—the impulse which makes men inclined to help one another, to sympathize with the unfortunate, to lift a neighbour or a stranger out of a tight place,—good will, in short,—is in the blood of the people.

When their blood is heated, they are hard hitters, fierce fighters. But give them time to cool down, and they are generous peacemakers. Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” strikes the key-note. In the “mild concerns of ordinary life” they like to cultivate friendly relations, to show neighbourliness, to do the useful thing.

There is a curious word of approbation in the rural dialect of Pennsylvania. When the country folk wish to express their liking for a man, they say, “He is a very common person,”—meaning not that he is low or vulgar, but approachable, sympathetic, kind to all.

Underneath the surface of American life, often rough and careless, there lies this widespread feeling: that human nature everywhere is made of the same stuff; that life’s joys and sorrows are felt in the same way whether they are hidden under homespun and calico or under silk and broadcloth; that it is every man’s duty to do good and not evil to those who live in the world with him.

In literature this feeling has shown itself in many ways. It has given a general tone of sympathy with “the under dog in a fight.” It has led writers to look for subjects among the plain people. It has made the novel of American “high life” incline generally to satire or direct rebuke. In the typical American romance the hero is seldom rich, the villain seldom poor.

In the weaker writers the humane sentiment dwindles into sentimentality. In the stronger writers it gives, sometimes, a very noble and manly note. In general you may say that it has impressed upon American literature the mark of a moral purpose,—the wish to elevate, to purify, to fortify the mind, and so the life, of those who read.

Is this a merit or a fault in literature? Judge for yourselves.

No doubt a supremely ethical intention is an insufficient outfit for an author. His work may be

“Chaste as the icicle
That’s curded by the frost from purest snow
And hangs on Dian’s temple,”

and yet it may be without savour or permanence. Often the desire to teach a good lesson bends a book from the straight line of truth-to-the-facts, and makes a so-called virtuous ending at the price of sincerity and thoroughgoing honesty.

It is not profitable to real virtue to dwell in a world of fiction where miracles are worked to crown the good and proper folk with unvarying felicity and to send all the rascals to prison or a miserable grave. Nor is it a wise and useful thing for literature to ignore the lower side of life for the sake of commending the higher; to speak a false and timid language for fear of shocking the sensitive; to evade the actual problems and conflicts which men and women of flesh and blood have to meet, for the sake of creating a perfectly respectable atmosphere for the imagination to live in.

This mistaking of prudery for decency, this unwillingness to deal quite frankly with life as it is, has perhaps acted with a narrowing and weakening effect upon the course of American literature in the past. But just now there seems to be a reaction toward the other extreme. Among certain English and American writers, especially of the female sex, there is a new fashion of indiscriminate candour which would make Balzac blush. But I suppose that this will pass, since every extreme carries within itself the seed of disintegration.

The morale of literature, after all, does not lie outside of the great circle of ethics. It is a simple application of the laws which embrace the whole of human life to the specific business of a writer.

To speak the truth; to respect himself and his readers; to do justly and to love mercy; to deal with language as a living thing of secret and incalculable power; not to call good, evil, or evil, good; to honour the noble and to condemn the base; to face the facts of life with courage, the humours of life with sympathy, and the mysteries of life with reverence; and to perform his task of writing as carefully, as lovingly, as well as he can,—this, it seems to me, is the whole duty of an author.

This, if I mistake not, has been the effort of the chief writers of America. They have spoken surely to the heart of a great people. They have kept the fine ideals of the past alive in the conflicts of the present. They have lightened the labours of a weary day. They have left their readers a little happier, perhaps a little wiser, certainly a little stronger and braver, for the battle and the work of life.

The measure of their contribution to the small group of world-books, the literature that is universal in meaning and enduring in form, must be left for the future to determine. But it is sure already that American literature has done much to express and to perpetuate the Spirit of America.

HERBERT CROLY’S
The Promise of American Life

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By ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE, Ph.D.
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The United States as a World Power

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