CHAPTER XXII

TWO UNACCREDITED AMBASSADORS

They were both from Boston. In the days when they first became known in England and began their work of conciliation as between England and the United States, Boston was still Boston, and New York had only begun to be New York. The latter statement may be challenged, but the very men who take most pride in the New York of to-day ought to be the first to accept it. For Manhattan was not then the magnet, as London has always been, which drew to itself whatever was best from other parts of the land. Boston was still the Athens of America. There were excellent names elsewhere and at least one man of genius who owed neither birth nor culture to Boston; but the capital of Massachusetts was none the less the literary capital of the United States. Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, Agassiz, R. H. Dana, Jr., were all living and all in the fulness of their powers. Theodore Parker, the greatest force in the American pulpit, was just dead. Chief Justice Shaw had been for thirty years the head of the judiciary of his own state and a revered authority throughout the Union. {213} Wendell Phillips had no rival as an orator. Harvard was the first of American colleges. The ideas of New England, which were the ideas of Boston, had spread and taken root, and new commonwealths in the West were nourished on them; nay, these ideas and these conceptions of law and social order were the foundation stones on which new States were built. No theologian had arisen to dim the fame--a great yet sombre fame--of Jonathan Edwards. Daniel Webster, "disappointed, defeated, slept by the solemn waves of the Atlantic," but you cannot think of Boston or of Massachusetts without him; nor did the disasters of his last years much lessen the homage paid him at death or his immense influence on the political thought of the whole country.

If the intellectual pre-eminence of Boston in those days was somewhat grudgingly admitted by New York, it was incontestable. New York presently redressed the balance, not so much by her own creative efforts as by drawing much of what there was best in Boston to the banks of the Hudson. I believe Mr. Howells's migration at a later period was thought to be the decisive sign; one of many. Commercial influences prevailed over the purer influences of literature. The publisher took command. But I apprehend that Mr. Howells did not forsake the Charles for the Hudson without many regrets. The atmosphere was not the same. Old Abernethy used to say: "If you live in the best air in the world, leave it and go to the second best." Unconsciously, {214} perhaps, Mr. Howells obeyed that medical prescription. He went to the second best.

Did he find a Tavern Club in New York? Over the _noctes coenæque_ of that pleasant company in Boston Mr. Howells used to preside, with a genial charm all his own. It was so long ago that I may be forgiven if I remember in print one of those evenings which owed so much to his presiding genius. He spoke and was the cause of speaking in others. He had the tact which drew from others more than they supposed they had to give. He gently compelled the most reluctant of guests from their chairs. There was a brief eulogy on the victim. It was Mr. Howells's art to paint a portrait so vivid, albeit flattering, it needed no name to be recognized. "If," said he, "you were in any doubt of his identity, you will recognize him by the look of determined unconsciousness on his face."

I reckon it among the highest of Mr. Howells's many services that he has been at times an interpreter between England and America, and in more senses than one. There is a sense in which every American writer who reaches an English audience is an interpreter, or, better still, an Ambassador, the business of an Ambassador being to keep the peace. For when Lord Dufferin was complimented on his diplomatic fame he answered: "Ah, that is all a mistake. So long as we succeed you never hear of us. It is when we have failed that the world begins to know of our existence."

That, however, is a _malàpropos_ anecdote, and {215} tells the other way; but in such papers as these there must be anecdotes. Mr. Howells was not a silent Ambassador, and he would not have been an Ambassador had he been silent. His books spoke for him. The English thought, and still think, that his writings had some qualities which it does not suit the parent stock to consider distinctively American. They liked the reserve, the simplicity, the continual though implicit reference to English literature. It was partly because of the homage he paid to the great masters that they presently came to accept him also as a master. They were quite aware that his homage was sometimes reluctant. When it went further and, as in his unlucky criticism of the greatest of English masters in fiction, became a caricature, they resented it but they bore no malice. How can you bear malice against a writer with so much sweetness of nature as Mr. Howells?

Besides, what he has written about England is sympathetic; and is thought sympathetic by the English. If it be also at times critical, the English accept the criticism as it is meant. Nothing is truer about them than their indifference to criticism. They regard Mr. Howells's essays as so many studies, and these studies as interpretative. What he has lately been writing of provincial towns is almost a revelation to the Londoner, who himself is sometimes called provincial, and does not mind.

Another Bostonian, Mr. Henry James, took a longer flight still; all the way from Boston to {216} London and so to Paris and Italy, in all of which he is equally at home. It was, I think, Colonel Higginson who, in his patriotic impatience of the expatriated American, winged a shaft at Mr. James, and at those who called him cosmopolitan. "In order to be truly cosmopolitan," said this eminent colonel, "a man ought to know something of his own country." To which Mr. James has lately made the best possible reply by a book on his own country which is an appreciation like no other of recent days. And I will say this, that if Colonel Higginson supposes an American or a Russian or a Japanese can win favour with the English by trying to be English he is profoundly mistaken. The English like an American to be an American. If he is a writer, they like his writings to be American.

Who are the American authors most popular in England? I will take the dead only. They are Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Dana, and Walt Whitman; others, perhaps, but if there are others they are all like these I have named, American to the finger-tips, American in thought, in language, in method; nay, if you like, in accent. That is why they are relished in England. I do not include Poe. He is better understood in France than in England; his genius is perhaps more Gallic than Saxon. So much so that when the American Ambassador delivered a discourse at the celebration in London of Poe's centennial, it was as if he had spoken on a topic remote from the minds of this English people. They read {217} him because he was American Ambassador, or because he was Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and for his graceful mastery of the topic and of the English language. But to them he seemed to be announcing a discovery.

When Mr. Henry James adopted his new manner--the manner in which all his books since _The Awkward Age_ have been produced--his English readers turned away from him, or many of them did. The change coincided, or nearly so, with his change from pen and ink to dictation; a perilous experiment. But, whatever else may be said of it, Mr. James has gradually won back his English public. To them the matter is more than the manner, as in Mr. Meredith's case also. The American is now thought a more distinguished writer than before. I use the word distinguished as he uses it, meaning that he has more distinction as a writer and turns out more distinguished work. They are no longer repelled by his colloquialisms, by his Gallicisms, by his obscurities, by his involutions of structure, or by the labyrinthine length of his sentences. Through all these, they now perceive, pierces the true genius of the man. Therefore is he another Ambassador, another of those Americans who, from having become known abroad, have added lustre to the fame of their own country where, in European estimation, it most needs lustre, namely, in the domain of letters.

By the time the New Yorker of to-day has read thus far, if he has read, it may have become clear {218} to him how great a part of all the renown in literature we have abroad comes to us from Boston. All the American writers best known here and most read, Whitman excepted, are of Boston, or of the State of which Boston is, or was, the final expression. If another exception were to be made it would be Lincoln, whose greatest pieces of prose, and most of all the Gettysburg address, are well known to Englishmen who know anything of America. If what Dr. Jonson said in the preface to his dictionary, "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors," be true, then what do we Americans not owe to Boston? Supposing, that is, we care for the judgment of a foreign nation, which Browning declared to be like the judgment of posterity.

For some of these Bostonians London has a personal affection. Emerson is beloved. Lowell was an immense favourite; a favourite notwithstanding his combativeness in a society which prefers toleration to excursions on the warpath. Holmes during his visits here was idolized, and as the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table he is idolized, and quoted day in and day out. Of Longfellow's Poems in the pre-copyright days more copies were sold than of Tennyson, and when he was here the English thought him almost one of themselves. Dana's _Two Years Before the Mast_ is the one story of the sea which, among many rivals, seems likely to be immortal in England, and is, meantime, the one which in circulation year after year far exceeds all others. And Dana was one of those {219} Americans on whom the English found an English birthmark.

There was a time when Mr. James and Mr. Howells used to be bracketed, as if they hunted in couples; which was not a discriminating view, though a popular view. It expressed itself in the jingle about "Howells and James Young Men," of which the music-hall was the proper home; and there it related to a firm in Regent Street, now extinct. But it was sung by the daughters of a house where Mr. James was a guest, and almost in his hearing, to the horror of its mistress. To all popularity there are penalties. But the popularity of Mr. James is perennial.

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