Part 18

“This quite ignored Mr. Bryant’s poetic side, which Sherman possibly may not have quite enjoyed. Far more interesting than this, I thought, was a naval reception where Farragut was given profuse honors, yet held them all as a trivial pleasure compared to an interview with his early teacher, Mr. Charles Folsom, the superintendent of the University Printing-Office at Cambridge. To him the great admiral returned again and again, and we saw them sitting with hands clasped, and serving well enough, as some one suggested, for a group of ‘War and Peace,’ such as the sculptors were just then portraying.”

Most interesting, too, I found on one occasion, at Charles Perkins’s, the companionship of two young Englishmen, James Bryce and Albert Dicey, both since eminent, but then just beginning their knowledge of this country. I vividly remember how Dicey came in rubbing his hands with delight, saying that Bryce had just heard a boarder at the hotel where he was staying say _Eurōpean_ twice, and had stopped to make a note of it in his diary. But I cannot allow further space to them, nor even to Mr. George Bancroft, about whom the reader will find a more ample sketch in this volume (page 95). I will, however, venture to repeat one little scene illustrating with what parental care he used to accompany young ladies on horseback in his old age, galloping over the Newport beaches. On one of these occasions, after he had dismounted to adjust his fair companion’s stirrup, he was heard to say to her caressingly, “Don’t call me Mr. Bancroft, call me George!”

In regard to my friend, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and her Newport life, I have written so fully of her in the article on page 287 of this volume that I shall hardly venture it again. Nor have I space in which to dwell on the further value to our little Newport circle of such women as Katharine P. Wormeley, the well-known translator of Balzac and Molière and the author of “Hospital Transports” during the war; or of the three accomplished Woolsey sisters, of whom the eldest, under the name of “Susan Coolidge,” became a very influential writer for young people. She came first to Newport as the intimate friend of Mrs. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt, who was more generally known for many years as “H. H.” The latter came among us as the widow of one of the most distinguished officers whom the West Point service had reared. She was destined in all to spend five winters at Newport, and entered upon her literary life practically at that time. She lived there as happily, perhaps, as she could have dwelt in any town which she could christen “Sleepy Hollow,” as she did Newport; and where she could look from her window upon the fashionable avenue and see, she said, such “Headless Horsemen” as Irving described as having haunted the valley of that name.

After her second marriage she lived far away at the middle and then at the extreme western part of the continent, and we met but few times. She wrote to me freely, however, and I cannot do better than close by quoting from this brilliant woman’s very words her description of the manner in which she wrote the tale “Ramona,” now apparently destined to be her source of permanent fame. I do not know in literary history so vivid a picture of what may well be called spiritual inspiration in an impetuous woman’s soul.

THE BERKELEY, February 5, 1884.

I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story. But about the not hurrying it—I want to tell you something— You know I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it, knew I had no background—no local color for it.

Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel that I had—that the scene laid there—& the old Mexican life mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had happened to them—would be the very perfection of coloring. You know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.

Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot flashed into my mind—not a vague one—the whole story just as it stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke it. I sprang up, went to my husband’s room, and told him: I was half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me, becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it. I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I _cannot_ help it. It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot help being superstitious about it. I have never done _half_ the amount of work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I have broken down utterly for a while—with a cold ostensibly, but with great nervous prostration added. What I have to endure in holding myself away from it, afternoons, on the days I am compelled to be in the house, no words can tell. It is like keeping away from a lover, whose hand I can reach!

Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote! I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual woman I know—Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong, clear—“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week—she has been spending a few days with me ... but she says, “Far better than anything you ever have done.”

The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down. There is but one Indian in the story.

Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story or a bit of verse: I can’t bear the strain: but the instant I open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now—as fast as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon? Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?

I have the feeling that if I could only read it to you, you would know. If it is as good as Mrs. Trimble, Mr. Jackson & Miss Woolsey think, I shall be indeed rewarded, for it will “tell.” But I can’t believe it is. I am uneasy about it—but try as I may, all I can, I cannot write slowly for more than a few moments. I sit down at 9.30 or 10, & it is one before I know it. In good weather I then go out, after lunching, and keep out, religiously till five: but there have not been more than three out of eight good days all winter:—and the days when I am shut up, in my room from two till five, alone—with my Ramona and Alessandro, and cannot go along with them on their journey, are maddening.

Fifty-two last October and I’m not a bit steadier-headed, you see, than ever! I don’t know whether to send this or burn it up. Don’t laugh at me whatever you do.

Yours always,

H. J.

XXIV

A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

(1857-1907)

I

The brilliant French author, Stendhal, used to describe his ideal of a happy life as dwelling in a Paris garret and writing endless plays and novels. This might seem to any Anglo-American a fantastic wish; and no doubt the early colonists on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, after fighting through the Revolution by the aid of Rochambeau and his Frenchmen, might have felt quite out of place had they followed their triumphant allies back to Europe, in 1781, and inspected their way of living. We can hardly wonder, on the other hand, that the accomplished French traveler, Philarète Chasles, on visiting this country in 1851, looked through the land in despair at not finding a humorist, although the very boy of sixteen who stood near him at the rudder of a Mississippi steam-boat may have been he who was destined to amuse the civilized world under the name of Mark Twain.[23]

That which was, however, to astonish most seriously all European observers who were watching the dawn of the young American republic, was its presuming to develop itself in its own original way, and not conventionally. It was destined, as Cicero said of ancient Rome, to produce its statesmen and orators first, and its poets later. Literature was not inclined to show itself with much promptness, during and after long years of conflict, first with the Indians, then with the mother country. There were individual instances of good writing: Judge Sewall’s private diaries, sometimes simple and noble, sometimes unconsciously eloquent, often infinitely amusing; William Byrd’s and Sarah Knight’s piquant glimpses of early Virginia travel; Cotton Mather’s quaint and sometimes eloquent passages; Freneau’s poetry, from which Scott and Campbell borrowed phrases. Behind all, there was the stately figure of Jonathan Edwards standing gravely in the background, like a monk at the cloister door, with his treatise on the “Freedom of the Will.”

Thus much for the scanty literary product; but when we turn to look for a new-born statesmanship in a nation equally new-born, the fact suddenly strikes us that the intellectual strength of the colonists lay there. The same discovery astonished England through the pamphlet works of Jay, Lee, and Dickinson; destined to be soon followed up with a long series of equally strong productions, to which Lord Chatham paid that fine tribute in his speech before the House of Lords on January 20, 1775. “I must declare and avow,” he said, “that in all my reading and observation—and it has been my favorite study—I have read Thucydides and have studied and admired the master-states of the world—for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia.” Yet it is to be noticed further that here, as in other instances, the literary foresight in British criticism had already gone in advance of even the statesman’s judgment, for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant of the literary men of his time, had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in Boston and a Xenophon in New York.

It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of looking over whole boxes of Washington’s yet unprinted letters in the hands of our kind neighbor, Jared Sparks (1834-37); manuscripts whose curved and varied signatures we had the inexhaustible boyish pleasure of studying and comparing; as we had also that of enjoying the pithy wisdom of Franklin in his own handwriting a few years later (1840), in the hands of the same kind and neighborly editor. But it was not always recognized by those who grew up in the new-born nation that in the mother country itself a period of literary ebb tide was then prevailing. When Fisher Ames, being laid on the shelf as a Federalist statesman, wrote the first really important essay on American Literature,—an essay published in 1809, after his death,—he frankly treated literature itself as merely one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, “The time seems to be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least poetry of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If America had not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no longer, it will not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius.” Believing as he did, that human freedom could never last long in a democracy, Ames thought that perhaps, when liberty had given place to an emperor, this monarch might desire to see splendor in his court, and to occupy his subjects with the cultivation of the arts and sciences. At any rate, he maintained, “After some ages we shall have many poor and a few rich, many grossly ignorant, a considerable number learned, and a few eminently learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men of genius, who will be admired and imitated.” The first part of this prophecy failed, but the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite unexpected.

II

The point unconsciously ignored by Fisher Ames, and by the whole Federalist party of his day, was that there was already being created on this side of the ocean, not merely a new nation, but a new temperament. How far this temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how far from a new political organization, no one could then foresee, nor is its origin yet fully analyzed; but the fact itself is now coming to be more and more recognized. It may be that Nature said, at about that time, “‘Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another turning of the globe, and a further novelty. We need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman: let us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.’ With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born.” This remark, which appeared first in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold, who missed the point entirely in calling it “tall talk” or a species of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children in school. In reality, it was a point of the greatest importance. If Americans are to be merely duplicate Englishmen, Nature might have said, the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one finally did more toward recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold himself, when he afterwards wrote, in 1887, “Our countrymen [namely, the English], with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility”; and again in the same essay, “The whole American nation may be called ‘intelligent,’ that is to say, ‘quick.’”[24] This would seem to yield the whole point between himself and the American writer whom he had criticised, and who happened to be the author of this present volume.

One of the best indications of this very difference of temperament, even to this day, is the way in which American journalists and magazinists are received in England, and their English compeers among ourselves. An American author connected with the “St. Nicholas Magazine” was told by a London publisher, within my recollection, that the plan of the periodical was essentially wrong. “The pages of riddles at the end, for instance,” he said, “no child would ever guess them”; and although the American assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in twenty thousand families or more, the publisher still shook his head. As to the element of humor itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant New York talker that he had dined through three English counties on the strength of the jokes which he had found in the corners of an old American “Farmer’s Almanac” which he had happened to put into his trunk when packing for his European trip.

From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crèvecœur, down to Ampère and De Tocqueville, there was a French appreciation, denied to the English, of this lighter quality; and this certainly seems to indicate that the change in the Anglo-American temperament had already begun to show itself. Ampère especially notices what he calls “une veine européenne” among the educated classes. Many years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble, writing in reference to the dramatic stage, pointed out that the theatrical instinct of Americans created in them an affinity for the French which the English, hating exhibitions of emotion and self-display, did not share, she recognized in our nation this tinge of the French temperament, while perhaps giving to it an inadequate explanation.

III

The local literary prominence given, first to Philadelphia by Franklin and Brockden Brown, and then to New York by Cooper and Irving, was in each case too detached and fragmentary to create more than these individual fames, however marked or lasting these may be. It required time and a concentrated influence to constitute a literary group in America. Bryant and Channing, with all their marked powers, served only as a transition to it. Yet the group was surely coming, and its creation has perhaps never been put in so compact a summary as that made by that clear-minded ex-editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the late Horace Scudder. He said, “It is too early to make a full survey of the immense importance to American letters of the work done by half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of the country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come.”

The geographical headquarters of this particular group was Boston, of which Cambridge and Concord may be regarded for this purpose as suburbs. Such a circle of authors as Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Alcott, Thoreau, Parkman, and others had never before met in America; and now that they have passed away, no such local group anywhere remains: nor has the most marked individual genius elsewhere—such, for instance, as that of Poe or Whitman—been the centre of so conspicuous a combination. The best literary representative of this group of men in bulk was undoubtedly the “Atlantic Monthly,” to which almost every one of them contributed, and of which they made up the substantial opening strength.

With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed at that period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself rapidly over the country, and in which most of the above authors took some part and several took leading parts, these lectures having much formative power over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous among the lecturers also were such men as Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and lesser men who are now collectively beginning to fade into oblivion. With these may be added the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to their audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These lectures were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source of popular education; they were subject, however, to the limitation of being rather suggestive than instructive, because they always came in a detached way and so did not favor coherent thinking. The much larger influence now exerted by courses of lectures in the leading cities does more to strengthen the habit of consecutive thought than did the earlier system; and such courses, joined with the great improvement in public schools, are assisting vastly in the progress of public education. The leader who most distinguished himself in this last direction was, doubtless, Horace Mann, who died in 1859. The influence of American colleges, while steadily maturing into universities all over the country, has made itself felt more and more obviously, especially as these colleges have with startling suddenness and comprehensiveness extended their privileges to women also, whether in the form of coeducation or of institutions for women only.

For many years, the higher intellectual training of Americans was obtained almost entirely through periods of study in Europe, especially in Germany. Men, of whom Everett, Ticknor, Cogswell, and Bancroft were the pioneers, beginning in 1818 or thereabouts, discovered that Germany and not England must be made our national model in this higher education; and this discovery was strengthened by the number of German refugees, often highly trained men, who sought this country for political safety. The influence of German literature on the American mind was undoubtedly at its highest point half a century ago, and the passing away of the great group of German authors then visible was even more striking than have been the corresponding changes in England and America; but the leadership of Germany in purely scientific thought and invention has kept on increasing, so that the mental tie between that nation and our own was perhaps never stronger than now.

In respect to literature, the increased tendency to fiction, everywhere visible, has nowhere been more marked than in America. Since the days of Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the recognized leader in this department has been Mr. Howells; that is, if we base leadership on higher standards than that of mere comparison of sales. The actual sale of copies in this department of literature has been greater in certain cases than the world has before seen; but it has rarely occurred that books thus copiously multiplied have taken very high rank under more deliberate criticism. In some cases, as in that of Bret Harte, an author has won fame in early life by the creation of a few striking characters, and has then gone on reproducing them without visible progress; and this result has been most apt to occur wherever British praise has come in strongly, that being often more easily won by a few interesting novelties than by anything deeper in the way of local coloring or permanent delineation.

IV