Sweet Flower! for by that name at last I call thee, and to that cleave fast, Sweet silent Creature! That breath'st with me in sun and air, 45 Do thou, as thou art wont, repair My heart with gladness, and a share NOTES ON LONGFELLOW. LITERATURE IN AMERICA. One turns from English to American literature with a painful sense of loss. Cultivated literary men America has no doubt produced, elegant essayists and smooth versifiers, but scarcely one profound thinker or inspired poet. Her men of letters have chosen their profession from the same motives of profit or ambition as actuate their countrymen in general. As Longfellow, for example, frankly stated, they have seen in literature an opportunity of rising in the world. They more frequently possess talent and industry than imagination or genius, and their work accordingly, though often voluminous, scarcely ever rises above mediocrity, hardly even to the level of what would be considered mediocre work in more happily inspired men or times. Faithful translations, descriptive work like Irving's or Borroughs' overloaded with commonplace ruminations rather than reflections, literary criticism like Stedman's wasting itself in unprofitable discussions of form, or figurative and pretentious without real illumination, like Hudson's, second hand philosophies, moralizings in prose and verse and some middling novels are, if we except Emerson's truly inspired work, America's contribution to 19th century thought and art. Frankly admitted by intelligent Americans, the comparative inferiority of American literature is accounted for and balanced by the greatness of their achievements along other lines. "The Literature of America," says Whipple, "is but an insufficient measure of the realized capacities of the American mind. Imagination in the popular mind is obstinately connected with poetry and romance, and when the attempt is made to extend the application of the creative energy of imagination to business and politics, the sentimental outcry becomes almost deafening. In fact it is the direction given to the creative faculty that discriminates between Fulton and Bryant, Whitney and Longfellow. It would be easy to show that in the conduct of the every-day transactions of life, more quickness of imagination, subtlety and breadth of understanding and energy of will have been displayed by our business men than by our authors. The nation out-values all its authors even in respect to those powers which authors are supposed especially to represent. No one can write intelligently of the progress of American literature during the past hundred years without looking at American literature as generally subsidiary to the grand movement of the American mind." Whipple's explanation has all the insinuating plausibility of a halftruth. It is true that ability and energy of the highest kind are required to organize and manage a great business or to carry on a government successfully. And yet we should be shy of laying the flattering unction to our souls that material success is a sufficient compensation for mediocrity in art and letters. It is not a question of ability but of spirit. Business is selfish. Politics at best is tinctured with charlatanism. Art and letters are disinterested, and just because disinterested, the highest measure of a people's civilization. Matthew Arnold lays down five conditions of civilization-expansion, conduct, science, beauty, manners. By expansion he means mainly material prosperity and political liberty. These are the basis on which civilization rests. A high civilization is of course impossible while the people are either living in squalid poverty or overtutored, overgoverned, sat upon. Material prosperity and political liberty are good, nay indispensable, but in themselves do not make civilization. A people can be truly called civilized only when its business and politics are regarded not as ends in themselves but as providing the conditions favorable to intellectual, moral and æsthetic development. It is in poetry especially that the sentiment of man's ideal life is to be found. In it are enshrined our noblest intimations. It keeps alive our sense of beauty and begets a divine dissatisfaction with the actual, which is the only true incentive to progress, and the nation, however splendid its material growth, that has not blossomed into first rate poetry has not attained to the highest plane of culture. American life has been from the first almost entirely practical, material and utilitarian. In the severe struggle for existence against the sterner forces of nature, the noble puritanism of the early settlers degenerated into bigotry and grotesqueness. Preoccupation with material things became more and more marked, and the range of thought and spiritual experience narrowed, while a superstitious and mechanical routine misnamed religion prevailed. The revolutionary struggle and the war of 1812 should have quickened the spiritual life of the nation, but, unfortunately, an imported fatalism and moral indifference incidental to the disappointed revolutionary hopes in France crossing the Atlan tic and reinforcing a native growth of like origin, threatened to swamp all nobler feeling. The opportunities for wealth afforded by the opening up of a continent and the development of machinery enabled the people to throw off this morbid influence, but their whole energies seemed absorbed in the race for fortune. Against this, many philanthropic, social and literary influences contended, and with some apparent success. The democratic constitution of the state was firmly established. Slavery was abolished. The treatment of criminals became more rational and humane, and the questions of temperance, public health, education and woman's rights were forced upon the attention of legislators. Old customs and prejudices lost their hold. The American temper became more cheerful, more good-natured, saner, less conventional, more emancipated from the trammels of tradition than that of any other people. But so completely had the ideal of the average sensual man—the ideal of comfort and amusement-become the ideal of the whole, that Emerson's phrase for his own dearly loved country is "great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious America." It is to "the hardness and materialism of America, her want of soul and delicacy, her exaggeration and boastfulness and the absence of the discipline of respect," that her literary mediocrity is due. Matthew Arnold has told us that the flowering time for literature and art is when there is a national glow of thought and feeling. Without this only two or three courses are open to the man of letters. He may be a voice crying in the wilderness, entering his scornful protest against the practical tendencies of the time. Like Whitman he may look into the future and see the nobler civilization, for which the great materialistic movement of the present prepares the way. He may develop his technique and, like Eugene Field and a score of others, become the conventionalized vehicle of platitudes. He may seek refuge from the unspiritual present in the past or the remote. Longfellow chose the latter. In the actual movements of his time he had little interest. The spiritual problems which were beginning to perplex men he never faced, falling back upon a sort of fading and attenuated puritanism. Tired of the broad glare of American business and industrial activity, he sought relief in mediæval legend and old-world sentiment, or, as in Evangeline, in the contemplation of a fancy picture of idyllic happiness under simple primitive conditions, rudely broken in upon by our aggressive AngloSaxon civilization, yet exhibiting in its eclipse the power of the simple, primary instincts and affections, as Wordsworth says, "to make a thing endurable which else would overset the brain or break the heart." |