66

GENERAL SURVEY-CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS.

WHO are your Poets?" demanded, with some touch of scorn, an English critic of an American lady. "Among others," she replied, "we have Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton." The retort is open to a charge not often. preferred against her countrymen, it is over modest. "Vixere fortes post Agamemnona": there are poets now1 living in America whose claim to respect it is a mere, though a common, affectation to deny. But, by way of apology for the prejudice that provoked the question, let me quote from a Chicago newspaper the following advertisement:" Mr. Elias F. Mathers offers to write a thousand magazine articles in a thousand weeks. Length is immaterial." "So, probably," subjoins the London Examiner, "is quality." Unhappily, Mr. Mathers is no rare phenomenon, for perhaps a thousand of his Transatlantic compatriots are ready and, in a sense, able to perform the same feat. Far too many books and magazines are yearly published in Great Britain-books that fail from the obviousness of their platitudes, the slovenliness of their

1 1880, when some sentences were added to this Chapter, first delivered as a Lecture in 1866.

B

style, the innate incapacity of their writers; or, worse, owe a short success, and opportunity to cumber the ground, to their more or less skilful setting of commonplaces, their appeals to complacent ignorance or perverted taste. In the United States the same evil is magnified, and it requires some hardihood, from a distance, to arraign it.

The critics of one nation must, to a certain extent, regard the works of another from an outside point of view. Few are able to divest themselves wholly of the influence of local standards. This is pre-eminently the case when the efforts of a comparatively young country are submitted to the judgments of an older country, strong in its prescriptive rights, and intolerant of changes, the drift of which it is unable or unwilling to appreciate. Our censors are apt to bear down on the writers of the New World with a sort of aristocratic hauteur. Englishmen are perpetually reminding Americans of their immaturity, scolding their innovations in one breath, their imitations in another, and twitting them with disregard of the "golden mean." Such sentences as the following, where half-truths are clad in discourtesy, cannot fail to excite an unpleasant feeling. "Over American1 society there is diffused an incurable vulgarity of speech, sentiment, and language, hard to define, but perceptible in every word and gesture." "Persons of refinement in the States are over-refined: they talk like books, and everywhere obtrude their superior education." Americans, on the other hand, are, for the most part, impossible to please. Ordinary men among them are as sensitive to foreign, and above all to British, censure as the "irritabile genus" of other lands. Their second and third rate authors, reared in the atmosphere of "Mutual Admiration Societies," of which we have, nearer home, equally obnoxious equivalents, resent the application of a higher standard with more than the vehemence due to a 1 National Review, October 1861, p. 371.

INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM.

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personal affront. Mr. Emerson is allowed to impress home truths on his countrymen, as, "Your American eagle is very well, but beware of the American peacock." Such remarks are not permitted to Englishmen. If they point to any flaws in Transatlantic manners or ways of thinking with an effort after politeness, it is "the good-natured cynicism of well-todo age:" if they commend Transatlantic institutions or achievements, it is, according to Mr. Lowell, "with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in condescending to be pleased by American merit which we find so conciliating." This incisive writer and often genial humorist is, as Defensor Patriæ,1 apt to criticise our leading thinkers and poets in a spirit of retaliation. Mr. Carlyle is a "cynic" given to "canting," who, "since Sartor Resartus has done little but repeat himself with increasing emphasis and heightened shrillness," who "goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing to seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey." In a depreciative review of Atalanta in Calydon, the same critic has "well-grounded doubts whether England is precisely the country from which we have a right to expect that most precious of gifts (poetry) just now." Elsewhere, after a bitter reminder that Alabamas are not mere bad wishes, he addresses us in mass with a halftruth, though with some characteristic confusion of metaphor, "Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, you have been a stepmother to us. Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us darken your doors if you could help it; we know that perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as men, don't shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any longer." Now that the United States have

1 In a later Chapter I have endeavoured to do justice to Mr. Lowell (now indubitably the foremost living American author) in this and other capacities.

attained their majority, it is indeed time that England should cease to assume the attitude of their guardian; but it is also time that they should cease to be on the alert to resent the assumption. Meanwhile, "qui s'excuse s'accuse" continues to have its application across the sea, where in matters of Art, if no longer in Politics, a nervous self-assertion remains to indicate a lingering self-distrust. He who attempts to give, as the result of long and careful study, a sympathetic sketch of American Literature, must be prepared to suffer rebuke for patronising the writers he has praised, and the reproach of ignorance for omitting to mention those he has inwardly condemned.

"There are ten thousand

Geese, villain?

Authors, sir,"

is Byron's appropriate adaptation of "Macbeth." We must "prick our face and over-red our fear." I, however, disclaim in these chapters attempting a catalogue or playing the part of an auctioneer. I am content to illustrate, mainly from the works of a few representative artists in prose and verse, the general impressions derived from some direct knowledge of a great people, and some familiarity with the recorded. thoughts and fancies that seem most conspicuously to display the leading features of their character.

It has become a platitude to say that the developments of History and of Literature run in parallel lines; but much of our education consists in the unfolding of universally acknowledged principles which, when applied to various times and places, often lead to previously unexpected results. Only he who has realised the stagnant solemnity of the East can read the Vedas: the impulse of the Athenian Drama was due to Marathon and Salamis as much as to the elder Myths half the soul of Plato's political philosophy was in the laws of Sparta, the other half in the oratory of Pericles.