THE LITERARY INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES
N the evening of the Tuesday following the first Monday next November, after the citizens of the several States shall have cast their ballots for the candidates of their choice, the boys of New York, in accord with their immemorial custom on election night, will illuminate the streets of the city with countless bonfires, not knowing, any of them, that they are thus commemorating Guy Faux and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. And yet such is the fact, as Doctor Eggleston has ascertained beyond all question. What British boys are pleased to remember on the 5th of November, American boys have forgotten, although they keep alive the memorial fires on the evening of the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, be that the 5th or not, as the almanac may declare. In like manner the "dressing up as a Guy" still survives also in New York, in the parades of the "fantasticals" on Thanksgiving Day—the last Thursday in November. So hard is it for old customs to die out. Perhaps the British 5th of November was in its turn a survival of some pagan rite ignorantly lingering as late as the Gunpowder Plot, and thereafter identified with the fate of Guy Faux.
We cannot help being the descendants of our ancestors; and no tariff, however high and however complicated by ad valorem duties, can keep out of these United States the traditions, the beliefs, the habits, the feelings of the immigrants whose children we are. That those who have left a great country, England or France or Germany, should look back to that country as the centre of light, is natural—perhaps it is inevitable. But that their children should continue to do so, natural enough for a while, is not inevitable. Even though the colonist succeeds in breaking the political tie which binds him to the country whence his fathers came, there is no real independence unless he lays aside also the habit of intellectual deference; and that is as arduous, as difficult, and as long a task as any one ever undertook. None the less is it absolutely necessary if a people is to speak with its own voice and not with borrowed tongues—if its independence is to be complete and final.
In Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge's interesting and stimulant volume called Studies in History there is no essay more interesting or more stimulating than that on "Colonialism in the United States." In two-score pages Mr. Lodge distinguishes colonialism from provincialism, with which it is sometimes confounded, and then shows how the thirteen United States, having once been colonies, still breathed the colonial spirit long after their political independence was fully established. He recalls the fact that one half of the people disliked Washington's proclamation of neutrality as between France and Great Britain, because it seemed "hostile to France," while the other approved of it for the same reason. We Americans at the beginning of this century were still engaged in fighting over again all the battles of Europe. But Washington was an American, not a European, and so was Hamilton; and they kept us true to the line of our national development.
Even before the Revolution, when "the travelled American, the petit-maître of the colonies," so Hawthorne reminds us, was "the ape of London foppery, as the newspaper was the semblance of the London journals"—even then there were Americans, like Franklin, for example, who had nothing of the colonist about them, who were at once cosmopolitan and American. Mr. Lodge is right in calling Franklin's Autobiography "the corner-stone, the first great work of American literature."
After the War of 1812 the politics of the United States ceased to depend in any way on the politics of Europe; and our elections began to turn solely on questions of domestic policy. So our commerce and our manufactures freed themselves from reliance on England or France. An unending succession of inventions showed the ingenuity of the American. In law, the autonomy of the separate States permitted a variety of juristic experiment, the best results of which have been copied now in the legislature of Great Britain. "But the colonial spirit"—to quote Mr. Lodge again—"cast out from our politics and fast disappearing from business and the professions, still clung closely to literature, which must always be the best and last expression of a national mode of thought."
The colonial attitude in literature was unwittingly encouraged by Congress, which, by refusing to pass an international copyright bill, and thus secure to the British author the control of his own works, permitted the foreigner to be plundered, and forced the native author to sell his wares in competition with stolen goods. Sir Henry Sumner Maine declared—in his work on Popular Government (p. 247)—that the neglect to give copyright to foreign "writers has condemned the whole American community to a literary servitude unparalleled in the history of thought." This, of course, is the violent over-statement of an enemy; but there was a percentage of truth in it once. To show just what the American literary attitude was in the early years of this century, Mr. Lodge instances Cooper's first novel, Precaution, now wholly forgotten, and fortunately, for its characters, its scenery, "its conventional phrases were all English; worst and most extraordinary of all, it professed to be by an English author, and was received on that theory without suspicion." And Mr. Lodge tersely sums up the situation by saying that "the first step of an American entering upon a literary career was to pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen."
Cooper was too good an American to be content with the cast-off garments of British novelists; and in 1821, a year after the appearance of Precaution, he published The Spy, and never thereafter was there any need for an American novelist to masquerade as an Englishman. Yet his fellow-countrymen thought to compliment Cooper by calling him "the American Scott." And more than a quarter of a century later, when Lowell put forth his Fable for Critics there was abundant colonialism in our literature, if we may accept the satirist's picture of the mass-meeting of
| "The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts. |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
| By the way, 'tis a fact that displays what profusions |
| Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions, |
| That while the Old World has produced barely eight |
| Of such poets as all men agree to call great, |
| And of other great characters nearly a score— |
| One might safely say less than that rather than more— |
| With you every year a whole crop is begotten, |
| They're as much of a staple as corn is or cotton; |
| Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties |
| That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes; |
| I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys, |
| Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles, |
| Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, |
| One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, |
| A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons— |
| In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, |
| He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain |
| Will be some very great person over again." |
After Cooper came Hawthorne and Poe, intensely American, both of them, although in different fashion. In due season Mrs. Stowe brought out one book which set forth fearlessly a situation undeniably (and most unfortunately) American. Then came the war, which stiffened our national consciousness, and by giving us something to be proud of, killed the earlier habit of brag. Among later story-tellers who study American life as it is, and without any taint of Briticism, are the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the author of The Rise of Silas Lapham, the author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and the author of Old Creole Days, all aggressively American, all devoid of the slightest suggestion of colonialism, all possessing a wholesome mistrust of British traditions, British standards, and British methods. Some of his fellow-countrymen and contemporaries complained that Cooper was not proud of being called "the American Scott;" and if we want to see how far we have travelled away from colonialism of this sort we have only to imagine the laughter with which Mark Twain would greet any critic who thought to compliment him by calling him the American Burnand!
That this is an enormous gain is obvious enough. American authors are now writing for their fellow-countrymen and about their fellow-countrymen. If, as Matthew Arnold declared, "the end and aim of all literature is, if one considers it attentively, nothing but that—a criticism of life," then the literature likely to be most useful, most invigorating, and most satisfactory to Americans should be a criticism of life in America. Whether or not the spirit of colonialism still survives in these United States sufficiently to make the majority of readers here prefer books of British authorship is a question hardly worth asking, it seems to me, although there are some, both in London and in New York, who would answer it in the affirmative. To those of us who happened to be in London during the closing days of our long struggle for the Copyright act of 1891 it was obvious that many British authors believed that unbounded affluence was about to burst upon them. They accepted Sir Henry Maine's view as to the literary poverty of America, and apparently did not know that there were American authors standing ready to supply the American demand as soon as they should be relieved from an enforced competition with stolen goods.
These British authors thought that the passage of the act opened a boundless field for them to enter in and take possession of; and no doubt some of the American opponents of the bill were of the same opinion. Of course we all see now, what some of us who had studied the conditions of the book-trade foresaw, that the instant result of the Copyright act must needs be a decrease in the number of books of British authorship sold in the United States. As soon as there was only one authorized publisher engaged in pushing a British book in America, in the place of a dozen unauthorized publishers forced to a frantic and cut-throat competition, the British book had to sell on its merits alone, without the aid of any premium of cheapness. As soon as all books had to be paid for by the publisher, the book of native authorship had its natural preference; and now the inferior and doubtful books of foreign authorship are ceasing to be reprinted here. This is a tendency which will increase with time, and very properly, since every nation ought to be able to supply its own second-rate books, and to borrow from abroad only the best that the foreigner has to offer it. And it cannot be said too often or too emphatically that the British are foreigners, and that their ideals in life, in literature, in politics, in taste, in art, are not our ideals.
The decrease in the proportion of British books published in America, sharply accelerated, no doubt, by the Copyright act of 1891, has been going on ever since Cooper published The Spy, now more than threescore years and ten ago. It occurred to me that it would be useful to show exactly the rate at which the American book had been gaining upon the British book, and to discover whether the native author had overtaken the foreigner or was likely to do so. To this end I have considered the books issued during the past thirty years by two of the leading publishing houses of America: Messrs. Harper & Brothers, and Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company. Messrs. Harper & Brothers have always maintained very close relations with the leading authors of Great Britain; and to them, far more than to any one other American publishing house, have the most popular writers of England intrusted the American editions of their works. Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, on the other hand, succeeding to the firms of Ticknor & Fields, and of Fields, Osgood & Company, have always devoted themselves more especially to books of American authorship. These two great houses represent different traditions, and it seemed to me therefore that a comparison of their present catalogues with their catalogues of thirty years ago would not be without profit. I have to thank both these firms for their kindly assistance, without which it would have been impossible for me to prepare the present paper.
I have been furnished with a list of the books published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers in the years 1861, 1871, 1881, and 1891; and I propose to show how the book of American authorship has gained on the book of British authorship in three decades. From all the lists I begin by discarding the classic authors of our language. There was scarcely any American literature before Cooper's Spy, and of course all the glorious roll of English authors who wrote before 1776 are as much a part of our having as the common law itself. For kindred reasons I throw out all new editions and all text-books and all school-books.
Making these deductions (and they naturally decrease very much the apparent number of books published during any one year), we find that in the year 1861 Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued twenty-four books, of which fourteen were of British authorship (including George Eliot's Silas Marner) and seven of American authorship (including Motley's United Netherlands and Mr. Curtis's Trumps); three books sent forth by them were translated from foreign languages.
In 1871 Messrs. Harper & Brothers published fifty-seven books, and of these thirty-six were of British authorship, twenty were by American writers, and one was a translation.
In 1881 they sent forth ninety-eight books, of which sixty-six were by British authors (including some forty-seven numbers of the Franklin Square Library) and twenty-six were by American authors, while six were translations from foreign languages. It is to be noted that in 1881 we were in the very thick of piracy, and that Messrs. Harper & Brothers were engaged in pushing vigorously the Franklin Square Library, which they had devised as a weapon to fight the reprinters with.
In 1891 the Copyright act became operative on the 1st of July. During that year Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued seventy-six books, of which twenty-seven were of British authorship and forty-one of American, while eight were translations. It is to be noted here that the translations of 1891 were nearly all made in America, while those of 1861 and of 1881 were the work of British writers. In the books of British authorship are included all those issued only in paper covers in the new Franklin Square Library. Of course, Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued every year many more books than I have counted; but I have, as I said, omitted all new editions, all school-books, and all reprints of the classics of our own or any other language, as not falling within the scope of this inquiry. To decide exactly what to include or to exclude was not always easy, but I have tried to be consistent, and I believe that the figures here given are fairly accurate. They show that a house which published in 1861 twice as many books of British authorship as of American, published in 1891 one-third more books of American authorship than of British. They show also that the actual number of American books issued by this firm increased with every decade, and was in 1891 almost six times as large as it was thirty years before.
The present house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company is descended on one side from the firm of Hurd & Houghton, and on the other from the firm which was successively William D. Ticknor & Company, Ticknor & Fields, Fields, Osgood & Company, and James R. Osgood & Company. I am sorry to say that I have not been able to get a complete catalogue of the books published by Ticknor & Fields in 1861, but I have found certain lists of books published by them about that time: one of these lists contains four American books, three British, and one translation from a foreign tongue; in another there are ten books of British authorship and ten of American; and in a third there are six British authors represented and eight American.
In 1871 the firm was James R. Osgood & Company, and the proportion of books of American authorship was steadily increasing. I have not been able to find a full and complete list, but I know that the house published that year at least twenty-eight books by American authors, ten by British writers, and three translated from a modern language.
In 1881 the firm had become Houghton, Mifflin & Company, and it has kindly provided me with an accurate list of its publications during these twelve months. Omitting, as before, all new editions, we find that the house issued that year thirty-eight books by Americans, seven by British authors, and eleven volumes of translations.
In 1891 the proportion of native works still further increased. The American books published in that year by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company were sixty-nine, while the firm issued only seven volumes by British authors and two translations. A comparison of these figures with those of thirty years before show that the predecessors of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company published in 1861 about as many books of British authorship as of American; while in 1891 the firm sent forth ten times as many American books as it did British.
In going over the lists of Messrs. Harper & Brothers and of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, I have resolutely cast out of account all school-books, because a consideration of these might have given a false impression, since the school-books of all Americans who were boys in 1861 were already of American authorship. I was a boy myself in 1861, and I never saw a school-book of British origin until after I had been in college for a year or two, and then it was only a single manual of political economy. When Noah Webster issued, in 1783, the first part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language, afterwards known as Webster's Spelling Book, and as such sold for half a century to the extent of a million copies a year, an example was set which other American educators were prompt to follow.
For nearly a hundred years now the American school-boy has been supplied with American books suited to American conditions and inculcating American ideas. Nor is there any likelihood that this fortunate condition will ever change. The American Book Company, a publishing firm formed by the consolidation of four or five of the leading school-book houses of this country, supplies probably four-fifths of the books used in American schools. I have recently made a careful examination of its complete classified price-list of school and college text-books, with the eminently satisfactory result of finding in the first 500 titles only one book of foreign authorship.
Perhaps it was in consequence of the wholesome Americanism imparted in the school-room that American boys and girls demanded other books of American authorship. Certain it was that the department of the publishing trade which handles "juveniles," as they are called, gave an early preference to books describing life in America or from an American point of view. Peter Parley was a pioneer, and Jacob Abbott followed after; and I confess I am sorry for the boys and girls of Great Britain who did not know the joy of travelling through Europe with Rollo and Uncle George, the omniscient. From my own childhood I can recall only one volume of British origin, although of American manufacture; it was a sturdy tome called The Boy's Own Book, and it had strange wood-cuts of strangely chubby youths in strange Eton jackets.
In Doctor Holmes's paper on "The Seasons" (to be found in Pages from an Old Volume of Life), it is made evident that the American children of the second decade of this century were less fortunate than those of the seventh decade. Doctor Holmes tells us that he was educated on Miss Edgeworth and Evenings at Home. "There we found ourselves in a strange world, where James was called Jem, not Jim, as we always heard it; where one found cowslips in the fields, while what we saw were buttercups; where naughty school-boys got through a gap in the hedge to steal Farmer Giles's red-streaks, instead of shinning over the fence to hook old Daddy Jones's Baldwins; where there were larks and nightingales instead of yellow-birds and bobolinks; where the robin was a little domestic bird that fed at the table, instead of a great, fidgety, jerky, whooping thrush; where poor people lived in thatched cottages, instead of shingled ten-footers; where the tables were made of deal; where every village had its parson and clerk and beadle, its green-grocer, its apothecary who visited the sick, and its bar-maid who served out ale" (pp. 172-3).
And with the witty wisdom which is the secret of the Autocrat's power over us, he continues: "What a mess—there is no other word for it—what a mess was made of it in our young minds in the attempt to reconcile what we read about with what we saw! It was like putting a picture of Regent's Park in one side of a stereoscope and a picture of Boston Common on the other, and trying to make one of them. The end was that we all grew up with a mental squint which we could never get rid of. We saw the lark and the cowslip and the rest on the printed page with one eye, the bobolink and the buttercup, and so on, with the other in nature. This world is always a riddle to us at best; but those English children's books seemed so perfectly simple and natural, and yet were so alien to our youthful experiences that the Houyhnhnm primer could not have muddled our intellects more hopelessly."
The colonial habit of dependence on England for literature and of deference to British opinion is to be seen in the history of the American drama quite as distinctly as in the other departments of literature, and it is not yet wholly extinct. At first, of course, all our actors were of British birth. When the first American comedy, Royall Tyler's "Contrast," was played at the John Street Theatre in New York in 1787, the character of Jonathan the Yankee was undertaken by Thomas Wignell, a native of England. Thomas Abthorpe Cooper was criticised in London as an American, but he had been born in Great Britain. Edwin Forrest was the first distinguished tragedian who was a native of our continent. Since he set the example many an American actor has appeared in England, and Mr. Augustin Daly has taken his whole company of comedians to Europe repeatedly. Nowadays there are always performers of American birth and training in half a dozen of the leading London theatres.
Indeed, it might fairly be said that acting was the first of the arts to develop here in America; beyond all question it was the first that we began to export. But the art of the native American dramatist long lagged behind that of the native American actor. Perhaps even now there is still a lingering survival of the prejudice in favor of foreign plays, or, at least, against plays of American authorship. At present the foreign play most likely to be in favor is the French, but when the theatre was young in this country our sole reliance was on the British stage. Now we get light from Berlin and from Paris; then we saw no ray of hope except from London.
So complete was the dependence of the Park Theatre on Drury Lane and on Covent Garden in the early part of this century, that when our first native dramatist, William Dunlap, made adaptations of Kotzebue's plays he took good care not to avow his share in the work, allowing it to be supposed that his versions of the German originals were those which had been made for the London stage. Even as late as 1812, when Mr. J. N. Barker dramatized Marmion "the prejudice then existing against American authors"—to quote the words of Mr. Ireland, the historian of the New York stage—"was so great that the play was announced as the production of an English dramatist, and thus, with its fine cast, commanded an extraordinary success." Perhaps this is even more pitiful than Cooper's pretending to be an Englishman in his first novel.
To show the changes which have taken place in the composition of our play-bills during the past thirty years, I have had lists made of the plays which were advertised for performance in the first full week of January in 1861, 1871, 1881, and 1891. The result of the consideration of these lists is not as convincing as one could wish, for the performances of a single week are scarcely enough to furnish matter for the adequate comparison of one year with another. Yet the comparison is not without interest, and it seems to me indisputably instructive. All grand operas, all circuses, all menageries, all dime museums, all negro minstrel entertainments, and all those strange performances known, for some inscrutable reason, as "variety shows," are here left out of court, as having little or no connection with literature.
Making these deductions, we find that there were open in New York in the first week of January, 1861, seven places of amusement devoted to the drama, at only two of which were the plays wholly of American authorship; although at a third, where Edwin Forrest was acting, the American tragedy of "The Gladiator" shared the bill with the British tragedy of "Damon and Pythias." At the rest of the theatres the plays were of British authorship, that at Wallack's being "Pauline," a British dramatization of a French novel.
In the corresponding week of 1871 after making the same omissions, and after deducting also the performances in foreign languages, always very frequent in a city with a population as cosmopolitan as ours—making these allowances, we find seven theatres, at which three British plays are being performed and three American plays, and one play, if it can so be called, "The Black Crook," which was an American adaptation from the German. There was at this time a temporary prevalence of negro minstrelsy and the variety show.
In 1881 the New Yorker who went to the theatre during the first week in January had his choice of fifteen performances, and he could see nine plays of American authorship, two American adaptations from the German, two British adaptations from the French, and two plays of British authorship. The proportion of American plays seems overwhelming, and it was probably not maintained throughout the year, although the preceding decade had seen an extraordinary development of the American drama. Among those to be seen at this time in New York were "The Danites," "Hazel Kirke," and "The Banker's Daughter."
When we come to 1891 we see that the list of theatres offering a dramatic entertainment in the English language has swollen to twenty-one, and we note that the variety shows and the negro minstrel performances are now infrequent. At these twenty-one theatres we could see thirteen plays of American authorship, besides two American adaptations from the German, while at the same time there were also visible five plays by British authors and one British adaptation from the French. I may add also, and of my own knowledge, that the plays which were most popular, and therefore most profitable at this time, were all to be found among the thirteen of American authorship. It is a fact also that for fully forty years now the great pecuniary successes of the American theatre have been gained by plays of American life, and more especially of American character. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Rip Van Winkle," "Colonel Sellers," "My Partner," "The Danites," "The Banker's Daughter," "Held by the Enemy," and "Shenandoah" have had no foreign rivals in popularity except "The Two Orphans." Possibly exception should also be made of "The Shaughraun" and "Hazel Kirke," both written in America, although dealing with life in Europe.
It is to be noted that the Copyright act of 1891 has had, and will have, but little effect upon the foreign dramatist, because, for twenty years and more, judicial decisions in the United States courts had accorded him a full protection for his stage-right under the common law. Thus the American dramatist had been freed from the necessity of vending his wares in competition with stolen goods long before a like privilege had been vouchsafed to the American novelist.
A careful study of the figures here presented will convince the disinterested critic that the American dramatist has passed his foreign rival in the race for popularity, just as a careful study of the successive lists of Messrs. Harper & Brothers and Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company will prove that the American author has also overtaken the foreigner. If there was truth once in Sir Henry Sumner Maine's assertion that we Americans offered the example of a literary servitude without parallel, that assertion is true no longer. The American author is now conscious of a demand from the American public for plays and for books which reflect American life and embody American character. Before another decade has closed the century, the proportion of works of foreign authorship to be seen in our book-stores and in our theatres is certain to be smaller still. Sooner or later the time will come when it will be profitable to reproduce in America only the best of books of foreign authors and only the best plays of foreign dramatists.
At the same time that the American author has been taking possession of his own country he has also been conquering abroad. I have not had time for the needful and laborious calculation, but I believe that an examination of the files of the London Athenæum and Saturday Review of 1861 would show that very few books of American authorship were deemed worthy of reprint and review in England, while an examination of their files for 1891 would reveal a surprisingly large proportion of books of American origin now considered as entitled to criticism. And I believe that this proportion is steadily increasing, and that more and more books published in the United States are every year reprinted in Great Britain, or exported for sale in London in editions of satisfactory size.
Of course the reputation of American authors has been spread abroad in England largely by the agency of the great American illustrated magazines, which have now an enormous circulation on the other side of the Atlantic. There are at least two American magazines which far outsell in England itself any British magazine of corresponding pretensions. A few British magazines and reviews continue to be imported into the United States, but they are very few indeed; I think that the total number of copies imported is less than the number exported of either of the two great American illustrated monthlies.
It is pleasant to be able to assert that this wide-spread popularity of the American magazines in England has not been due to any attempt to cater to the English market. On the contrary, the more obviously and frankly American these magazines are, the more marked is their success in England. No doubt a large part of this popularity is due to American superiority in wood-engraving, in process work, in printing, and to the liberality of the American publisher in paying for these embellishments; but a share as large is due to the skill with which the American magazines are edited, to their freshness, their brightness, their vivacity, to their national flavor, and especially to their larger scope and to their stronger understanding of the capabilities and the opportunities of the modern periodical.
1892
THE CENTENARY OF FENIMORE COOPER
OST appropriate is it that the first literary centenary which we were called upon to commemorate one hundred years after the adoption of the Constitution that knit these States into a nation should be the birthday of the author who has done the most to make us known to the nations of Europe. In the first year of Washington's first term as President, on the fifteenth day of September, 1789, was born James Fenimore Cooper, the first of American novelists, and the first American author to carry our flag outside the limits of our language. Franklin was the earliest American who had fame among foreigners; but his wide popularity was due rather to his achievements as a philosopher, as a physicist, as a statesman, than to his labors as an author. Irving was six years older than Cooper, and his reputation was as high in England as at home; yet to this day he is little more than a name to those who do not speak our mother-tongue. But after Cooper had published The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Pilot his popularity was cosmopolitan; he was almost as widely read in France, in Germany, and in Italy as in Great Britain and the United States. Only one American book has ever since attained the international success of these of Cooper's—Uncle Tom's Cabin, and only one American author has since gained a name at all commensurate with Cooper's abroad—Poe. Here in these United States we know what Emerson was to us and what he did for us and what our debt is to him; but the French and the Germans and the Italians do not know Emerson. When Professor Boyesen visited Hugo some ten years ago he found that the great French lyrist had never heard of Emerson. I have a copy of Evangeline annotated in French for the use of French children learning English at school; but whatever Longfellow's popularity in England or in Germany, he is really but little known in France or Italy or Spain. With Goethe and Schiller, with Scott and Byron, Cooper was one of the foreign forces which brought about the Romanticist revolt in France, profoundly affecting the literature of all Latin countries. Dumas owed almost as much to Cooper as he did to Scott; and Balzac said that if Cooper had only drawn character as well as he painted "the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art."
In his admirable life of Cooper, one of the best of modern biographies, Professor Lounsbury shows clearly the extraordinary state of affairs with which Cooper had to contend. Foremost among the disadvantages against which he had to labor was the dull, deadening provincialism of American criticism at the time when The Spy was written; and as we read Professor Lounsbury's pages we see how bravely Cooper fought for our intellectual emancipation from the shackles of the British criticism of that time, more ignorant then and even more insular than it is now. Abroad Cooper received the attention nearly always given in literature to those who bring a new thing; and the new thing which Cooper annexed to literature was America. At home he had to struggle against a belief that our soil was barren of romance—as though the author who used his eyes could not find ample material wherever there was humanity. Cooper was the first who proved the fitness of American life and American history for the uses of fiction. The Spy is really the first of American novels, and it remains one of the best. Cooper was the prospector of that little army of industrious miners now engaged in working every vein of local color and character, and in sifting out the golden dust from the sands of local history. The authors of Oldtown Folks, of the Tales of the Argonauts, of Old Creole Days, and of In the Tennessee Mountains were but following in Cooper's footsteps—though they carried more modern tools. And when the desire of the day is for detail and for finish, it is not without profit to turn again to stories of a bolder sweep. When the tendency of the times is perhaps towards an undue elaboration of miniature portraits, there is gain in going back to the masterpieces of a literary artist who succeeded best in heroic statues. And not a few of us, whatever our code of literary esthetics, may find delight, fleeting though it be, in the free outline drawing of Cooper, after our eyes are tired by the niggling and cross-hatching of many among our contemporary realists. When our pleasant duty is done, when our examination is at an end, and when we seek to sum up our impressions and to set them down plainly, we find that chief among Cooper's characteristics were, first, a sturdy, hearty, robust, out-door and open-air wholesomeness, devoid of any trace of offence and free from all morbid taint; and, secondly, an intense Americanism—ingrained, abiding, and dominant. Professor Lounsbury quotes from a British magazine of 1831 the statement that, to an Englishman, Cooper appeared to be prouder of his birth as an American than of his genius as an author—an attitude which may seem to some a little old-fashioned, but which on Cooper's part was both natural and becoming.
The Spy was the earliest of Cooper's American novels (and its predecessor, Precaution, a mere stencil imitation of the minor British novel of that day, need not be held in remembrance against him). The Spy, published in 1821, was followed in 1823 by The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to appear, and by far the poorest; indeed it is the only one of the five for which any apology need be made. The narrative drags under the burden of overabundant detail; and the story may deserve to be called dull at times. Leatherstocking even is but a faint outline of himself, as the author afterwards with loving care elaborated the character. The Last of the Mohicans came out in 1826, and its success was instantaneous and enduring. In 1827 appeared The Prairie, the third tale in which Leatherstocking is the chief character. It is rare that an author is ever able to write a successful sequel to a successful story, yet Cooper did more; The Prairie is a sequel to The Pioneers, and The Last of the Mohicans is a prologue to it. Eighteen years after the first of the Leatherstocking Tales had been published, Cooper issued the last of them, amplifying his single sketch into a drama in five acts by the addition of The Pathfinder, printed in 1840, and of The Deerslayer, printed in 1841. In the sequence of events The Deerslayer, the latest written, is the earliest to be read; then comes The Last of the Mohicans, followed by The Pathfinder and The Pioneers; while in The Prairie the series ends. Of the incomparable variety of scene in these five related tales, or of the extraordinary fertility of invention which they reveal, it would not be easy to say too much. In their kind they have never been surpassed. The earliest to appear, The Pioneers, is the least meritorious—as though Cooper had not yet seen the value of his material, and had not yet acquired the art of handling it to advantage. The Pathfinder, dignified as it is and pathetic in its portrayal of Leatherstocking's lovemaking, lacks the absorbing interest of The Last of the Mohicans; it is perhaps inferior in art to The Deerslayer, which was written the year after, and it has not the noble simplicity of The Prairie, in which we see the end of the old hunter.
There are, no doubt, irregularities in the Leatherstocking Tales, and the incongruities and lesser errors inevitable in a mode of composition at once desultory and protracted; but there they stand, a solid monument of American literature, and not the least enduring. "If anything from the pen of the writer of these romances is at all to outlive himself, it is, unquestionably, the series of the Leatherstocking Tales"—so wrote the author when he sent forth the first collected and revised edition of the narrative of Natty Bumppo's adventures. That Cooper was right seems to-day indisputable. An author may fairly claim to be judged by his best, to be measured by his highest; and the Leatherstocking Tales are Cooper's highest and best in more ways than one, but chiefly because of the lofty figure of Leatherstocking. Lowell, when fabling for critics, said that Cooper had drawn but one new character, explaining afterwards that
| The men who have given to one character life |
| And objective existence, are not very rife; |
| You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers, |
| Without overruning the bounds of your fingers; |
| And Natty won't go to oblivion quicker |
| Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. |
And Thackeray—perhaps recalling the final scene in The Prairie, where the dying Leatherstocking drew himself up and said "Here!" and that other scene in The Newcomes, where the dying Colonel drew himself up and said "Adsum!"—was frequent in praise of Cooper; and in one of the Roundabout Papers, after expressing his fondness for Scott's modest and honorable heroes, he adds: "Much as I like these most unassuming, manly, unpretentious gentlemen, I have to own that I think the heroes of another writer—viz., Leatherstocking, Uncas, Hardheart, Tom Coffin—are quite the equals of Scott's men; perhaps Leatherstocking is better than any one in 'Scott's lot.' La Longue Carabine is one of the great prize-men of fiction. He ranks with your Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff—heroic figures all, American or British, and the artist has deserved well of his country who devised them."
It is to be noticed that Thackeray singled out for praise two of Cooper's Indians to pair with the hunter and the sailor; and it seems to me that Thackeray is fairer towards him who conceived Uncas and Hardheart than are the authors of A Fable for Critics and of Condensed Novels. Muck-a-Muck I should set aside among the parodies which are unfair—so far as the red man is concerned, at least; for I hold as quite fair Mr. Harte's raillery of the wooden maidens and polysyllabic old men who stalk through Cooper's pages. Cooper's Indian has been disputed and he has been laughed at, but he still lives. Cooper's Indian is very like Mr. Parkman's Indian—and who knows the red man better than the author of The Oregon Trail? Uncas and Chingachgook and Hardheart are all good men and true, and June, the wife of Arrowhead, the Tuscarora, is a good wife and a true woman. They are Indians, all of them; heroic figures, no doubt, and yet taken from life, with no more idealization than may serve the maker of romance. They remind us that when West first saw the Apollo Belvedere he thought at once of a Mohawk brave. They were the result of knowledge and of much patient investigation under conditions forever passed away. We see Cooper's Indians nowadays through mists of prejudice due to those who have imitated them from the outside. The Last of the Mohicans has suffered the degradation of a trail of dime novels, written by those apparently more familiar with the Five Points than with the Five Nations; Cooper begat Mayne Reid, and Mayne Reid begat Ned Buntline and Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer and similar abominations. But none the less are Uncas and Hardheart noble figures, worthily drawn, and never to be mentioned without praise.
In 1821 Cooper published The Spy, the first American historical novel; in 1823 he published The Pioneers, in which the backwoodsman and the red man were first introduced into literature; and in 1824 he published The Pilot, and for the first time the scene of a story was laid on the sea rather than on the land, and the interest turned wholly on marine adventure. In four years Cooper had put forth three novels, each in its way road-breaking and epoch-making: only the great men of letters have a record like this. With the recollection before us of some of Smollett's highly colored naval characters, we cannot say that Cooper sketched the first real sailor in fiction, but he invented the sea tale just as Poe invented the detective story—and in neither case has any disciple surpassed the master. The supremacy of the The Pilot and The Red Rover is quite as evident as the supremacy of the The Gold Bug and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. We have been used to the novel of the ocean, and it is hard for us now to understand why Cooper's friends thought his attempt to write one perilous and why they sought to dissuade him. It was believed that readers could not be interested in the contingencies and emergencies of life on the ocean wave. Nowadays it seems to us that if any part of The Pilot lags and stumbles it is that which passes ashore: Cooper's landscapes, or at least his views of a ruined abbey, may be affected at times, but his marines are always true and always captivating.
Cooper, like Thackeray, forbade his family to authorize or aid any biographer—although the American novelist had as little to conceal as the English. No doubt Cooper had his faults, both as a man and as an author. He was thin-skinned and hot-headed. He let himself become involved in a great many foolish quarrels. He had a plentiful lack of tact. But the man was straightforward and high-minded, and so was the author. We can readily pardon his petty pedantries and the little vices of expression he persisted in. We can confess that his "females," as he would term them, are indubitably wooden. We may acknowledge that even among his men there is no wide range of character; Richard Jones (in The Pioneers) is first cousin to Cap (in The Pathfinder), just as Long Tom Coffin is a half-brother of Natty Bumppo. We must admit that Cooper's lighter characters are not touched with the humor that Scott could command at will; the Naturalist (in The Prairie), for example, is not alive and delightful like the Antiquary of Scott.
In the main, indeed, Cooper's humor is not of the purest. When he attempted it of malice prepense it was often laboriously unfunny. But sometimes, as it fell accidentally from the lips of Leatherstocking, it was unforced and delicious (see, for instance, at the end of chapter xxvii. of The Pathfinder, the account of Natty's sparing the sleeping Mingos and of the fate which thereafter befell them at the hands of Chingachgook). On the other hand, Cooper's best work abounds in fine romantic touches—Long Tom pinning the British captain to the mast with the harpoon, the wretched Abiram (in The Prairie) tied hand and foot and left on a ledge with a rope around his neck so that he can move only to hang himself, the death-grip of the brave (in The Last of the Mohicans) hanging wounded and without hope over the watery abyss—these are pictures fixed in the memory and now unforgettable.
Time is unerring in its selection. Cooper has now been dead nearly two-score years. What survives of his work are the Sea Tales and the Leatherstocking Tales. From these I have found myself forced to cite characters and episodes. These are the stories which hold their own in the libraries. Public and critics are at one here. The wind of the lakes and the prairies has not lost its balsam, and the salt of the sea keeps its savor. For the free movement of his figures and for the proper expansion of his story Cooper needed a broad region and a widening vista. He excelled in conveying the suggestion of vastness and limitless space, and of depicting the human beings proper to these great reaches of land and water—the two elements he ruled; and he was equally at home on the rolling waves of the prairie and on the green and irregular hillocks of the ocean.
1889
IGNORANCE AND INSULARITY
N the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" asked Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review, in 1820; and for years the American people writhed under the query as though they had been put to the question themselves. In those days the American cuticle was extraordinarily sensitive, and the gentlest stroke of satire caused exquisite pain. But although Sydney Smith was unkind, he was not unjust; in the four quarters of the globe nobody to-day reads any American book published before 1820—except Irving's Knickerbocker. In the very year that Sydney Smith wrote there was published in England a book which might have arrested the dean's sarcastic inquiry had it appeared a few months earlier. This was Irving's Sketch Book. The Americans of seventy years ago did not know it; but none the less is it a fact that American literature made a very poor showing then, and that there was in existence in those days scarcely a single book with vitality enough to survive threescore years and ten. The men who were to make our literature what it is were then alive—Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Poe, Hawthorne, Bancroft, Prescott, and Motley; but Irving's Knickerbocker was the only book then in print which to-day is read or readable. It was only in 1821 that Cooper published the Spy, the first American historical novel, and the first of the Leatherstocking Tales did not appear until 1823. Reverberations of the angry roar which answered Sydney Smith's question must have reached his ears, for, in 1824, again in the Edinburgh Review, he wondered at our touchiness: "That Americans ... should be flung into such convulsions by English Reviewers and Magazines is really a sad specimen of Columbian juvenility."
Now we have changed all that. In less than three-quarters of a century (a very short time in the history of a nation) our cuticle has toughened—perhaps the process was hastened by the strokes of a long war fought for conscience' sake. It is not so easy now to wring our withers, and more often than not it is on the other side of the Atlantic that the galled jade winces. John Bull is not as pachydermatous as once he was, and a chance word of Brother Jonathan's penetrates and rankles. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner once let fall an innocent remark about the British strawberry; and more than one British journal flushed with rage till it rivalled the redness of that worthy but hollow-hearted fruit. Mr. W. D. Howells suggested a criticism of two British novelists; and the editor of the Saturday Review made ready to accept the command of the Channel Fleet. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt rebuked a British general for insulting Robert E. Lee with blundering laudation; and Mr. Andrew Lang promptly wrote a paper on "International Girlishness," in which he very courteously offered himself as an example of the failing he described. In a little essay on the centenary of Fenimore Cooper, I remarked that the reader of Professor Lounsbury's admirable biography could "see how bravely Cooper fought for our intellectual emancipation from the shackles of the British criticism of that time, more ignorant then and even more insular than it is now;" and against this casual accusation that British criticism is or was ignorant and insular, Mr. Andrew Lang again protested, with his wonted suavity, of course, but with energy nevertheless and with emphasis.
Turn about is fair enough. When Time plays the fiddle, the dancers must needs change places; and we Americans have no call for weeping that the British attitude to-day resembles ours in the early part of the century more than our own does. The change is pleasant, and Mr. Andrew Lang ought not to object to our enjoyment of it. As regards the special charge that British criticism was more ignorant and more insular fifty odd years ago than it is now—well, I do not think that Mr. Andrew Lang ought to object to that either. If I understand my own statement, it means that there has been an improvement in British criticism in the past half-century; and I do not think that this assertion affords a fair ground for a quarrel. Still, when Mr. Andrew Lang throws down the gauntlet, I cannot refuse to put on the gloves; and I decline to avail myself of the small side door he kindly left ajar for my escape.
First, it is to be noted that when Mr. Andrew Lang writes about "critics," and when I wrote, we were discussing different things. There are two kinds of critics, and the word criticism may mean either of two things. The writer of an anonymous book-review printed in a daily or weekly paper considers himself a critic, and the product of his pen is accepted as a criticism. But there is no other word than criticism to describe the finest work (in prose) of James Russell Lowell and of Matthew Arnold. Mr. Andrew Lang chooses to consider chiefly what might be called the higher criticism, and he sets aside the lower critics as "reviewers," declaring that "reviewers are rarely critics, and they are often very tired, very casual, very flippant." Now, it was this sort of British critic, the very casual and very flippant reviewer, that I meant when I spoke of the ignorance and insularity of British criticism; and it was the attitude of British critics of this type towards America that I had in mind. It was to their ignorance of America and Americans that I referred, and to the insularity of their position towards us. This ignorance is now less than it was in Cooper's time, and of late the insularity has been modified for the better. But that they were "very tired, very casual, and very flippant" is not an excuse for their constant attitude towards most American authors; it is not even an adequate reason. No doubt Mr. Andrew Lang knows the anecdote—is there any Merry Jest that he has not heard?—of the Judge who chafed under the insulting demeanor of a certain barrister until at last he was forced to protest: "Brother Blank," he said, "I know my great inferiority to you; but, after all, I am a vertebrate animal, and your manner towards me would be unbecoming from God Almighty to a black beetle!"
It is in relation to America and to American workers that we find British criticism ignorant and insular. The ordinary British critic assumes a very different tone towards us from that he assumes towards the French or the Germans. He may dislike these, but he accepts them as equals. Us he regards as inferiors—as degenerate Englishmen unfortunately cut off from communion with the father-land and the mother-tongue, and to be chided because we do not humbly acknowledge our deficiencies. He does not know that we are now no more English than the English themselves are now Germans. He does not guess that we are proud that we are not English—prouder, perhaps, of nothing else. He does not think that we do not like being treated as though we were younger sons in exile—wandering prodigals, deserving no better fare than the husks of patronizing criticism. No American likes to be patronized, and even some Englishmen seem to object to it; apparently Mr. Andrew Lang did not approve of the critical nepotism of a certain Teutonic reviewer. But the lordliness of the eminent German who reviewed Mr. Andrew Lang's book without reading it was tempered by the good faith with which he confessed his ignorance; and his offence was less heinous than that of the critic in the Saturday Review, who dismissed Mr. Aldrich's "Queen of Sheba" with a curt assertion that it was like the author's other poems.
As the Greek felt towards the Barbarian and as the Jew towards the Gentile, so does the ordinary British critic feel towards America. The feeling of the Greek and of the Jew was perhaps based on a serious reason; but what justifies the lofty superiority of the British critic? Is not its cause the self-satisfaction of ignorant insularity?—using neither word in any offensive sense. And does it not result in a willingness to condemn without knowledge and without any effort to acquire knowledge? Any one who recalls Brougham's review of Byron's first book, or Jeffrey's attack on Keats, or Wilson's dissection of Tennyson, knows that there are British criticisms which are not models of sweetness and light; never are sweetness and light more frequently absent than in British criticism of America and of Americans. "Light," I take it, means knowledge; and "sweetness" is incompatible with that form of morgue britannique which one may call insularity.
The higher criticism in England, which Mr. Andrew Lang praises perhaps not more than it deserves, has developed greatly within the last twenty years. It is not ignorant like the very tired, very casual, and very flippant reviewing, nor in the same fashion; but it has an ignorance of its own, compounded of many simples. Its attitude towards us is not as offensive, but it is not without its touch of superiority now and again. Mr. Andrew Lang himself, for example, is ignorant of our best critics, and confesses his ignorance as frankly as did his Teutonic reviewer; and then he reveals what is not wholly unlike insularity in his readiness, despite this ignorance, to make comparisons between American critics and British.
On Mr. Andrew Lang's list of British critics are the names of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. J. A. Symonds, Mr. R. L. Stevenson, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Walter Pater, Mr. George Saintsbury, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor Robertson Smith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Theodore Watts—and every reader must instinctively add Mr. Andrew Lang's own name to a list on which it will find no superior. The list seems oddly chosen; an American misses the name of Mr. John Morley, perhaps the foremost of British critics of our day, and those of Mr. Austin Dobson, and of Mr. William Archer. Of American critics Mr. Andrew Lang can recall of his own accord, apparently, only the name of Lowell, and he remarks that "Mr. Howells, in an essay on this subject, mentions Mr. Stedman and Mr. T. S. Perry, doubtless with justice." If there were any advantage in making out a list of American critics to place beside the list of British critics, I should put down the names of Mr. Curtis, Col. Higginson, Mr. Warner, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Professor Lounsbury, Professor T. F. Crane, Mr. W. C. Brownell, Mr. John Burroughs, Mr. George E. Woodberry, and Mr. Henry James—adding, of course, the names of Mr. Stedman and of Professor Child, mentioned by Mr. Andrew Lang in another part of his paper. But I fear me greatly that this is idle; it is but the setting up of one personal equation over against another. Orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy. Counting of noses is not the best way to settle a dispute about literature.
Indeed there is no way to settle such a dispute, and there is no hope of coming to an agreement. "It is a very pretty quarrel as it stands;" and if "we quarrel in print, by the book," let us stop at the first degree, the Retort Courteous, not going on even to the third, the Reply Churlish. Also is there much virtue in an If. "If you said so, then I said so." Let us then, while there is yet time, shake hands across the Atlantic and swear brothers.
1890
THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS
OUBTLESS criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather than its defects. The passions of man have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture." So wrote Longfellow a many years ago, thinking, it may be, on English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, or on the Jedburgh justice of Jeffrey. But we may question whether the poet did not unduly idealize the past, as is the custom of poets, and whether he did not unfairly asperse the present. With the general softening of manners, no doubt those of the critic have improved also. Surely, since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, "to criticise," in the ears of many, if not of most, has been synonymous with "to find fault." In Farquhar's "Inconstant," now nearly two hundred years old, Petit says of a certain lady: "She's a critic, sir; she hates a jest, for fear it should please her."
The critics themselves are to blame for this misapprehension of their attitude. When Mr. Arthur Pendennis wrote reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette, he settled the poet's claims as though he "were my lord on the bench and the author a miserable little suitor trembling before him." The critic of this sort acts not only as judge and jury, first finding the author guilty and then putting on the black cap to sentence him to the gallows, but he often volunteers as executioner also, laying on a round dozen lashes with his own hand, and with a hearty good-will. We are told, for example, that Captain Shandon knew the crack of Warrington's whip and the cut his thong left. Bludyer went to work like a butcher and mangled his subject, but Warrington finished a man, laying "his cuts neat and regular, straight down the back, and drawing blood every time."
Whenever I recall this picture I understand the protest of one of the most acute and subtle of American critics, who told me that he did not much mind what was said about his articles so long as they were not called "trenchant." Perhaps trenchant is the adjective which best defines what true criticism is not. True criticism, so Joubert tells us, is un exercice méthodique de discernement. It is an effort to understand and to explain. The true critic is no more an executioner than he is an assassin; he is rather a seer, sent forward to spy out the land, and most useful when he comes back bringing a good report and bearing a full cluster of grapes.
La critique sans bonté trouble le gout et empoisonne les saveurs, said Joubert again; unkindly criticism disturbs the taste and poisons the savor. No one of the great critics was unkindly. That Macaulay mercilessly flayed Montgomery is evidence, were any needed, that Macaulay was not one of the great critics. The tomahawk and the scalping-knife are not the critical apparatus, and they are not to be found in the armory of Lessing and of Sainte-Beuve, of Matthew Arnold and of James Russell Lowell. It is only incidentally that these devout students of letters find fault. Though they may ban now and again, they came to bless. They chose their subjects, for the most part, because they loved these, and were eager to praise them and to make plain to the world the reasons for their ardent affection. Whenever they might chance to see incompetence and pretension pushing to the front, they shrugged their shoulders more often than not, and passed by on the other side silently:—and so best. Very rarely did they cross over to expose an impostor.
Lessing waged war upon theories of art, but he kept up no fight with individual authors. Sainte-Beuve sought to paint the portrait of the man as he was, warts and all; but he did not care for a sitter who was not worth the most loving art. Matthew Arnold was swift to find the joints in his opponent's armor; but there is hardly one of his essays in criticism which had not its exciting cause in his admiration for its subject. Mr. Lowell has not always hidden his scorn of a sham, and sometimes he has scourged it with a single sharp phrase. Generally, however, even the humbugs get off scot-free, for the true critic knows that time will attend to these fellows, and there is rarely any need to lend a hand. It was Bentley who said that no man was ever written down save by himself.
The late Edouard Scherer once handled M. Emile Zola without gloves; and M. Jules Lemaître has made M. Georges Ohnet the target of his flashing wit. But each of these attacks attained notoriety from its unexpectedness. And what has been gained in either case? Since Scherer fell foul of him, M. Zola has written his strongest novel, Germinal (one of the most powerful tales of this century), and his rankest story, La Terre (one of the most offensive fictions in all the history of literature). M. Lemaître's brilliant assault on M. Ohnet may well have excited pity for the wretched victim; and, damaging as it was, I doubt if its effect is as fatal as the gentler and more humorous criticism of M. Anatole France, in which the reader sees contempt slowly gaining the mastery over the honest critic's kindliness.
For all that he was a little prim in taste and a little arid in manner, Scherer had the gift of appreciation—the most precious possession of any critic. M. Lemaître, despite his frank enjoyment of his own skill in fence, has a faculty of hearty admiration. There are thirteen studies in the first series of his Contemporains, and the dissection of the unfortunate M. Ohnet is the only one in which the critic does not handle his scalpel with loving care. To run amuck through the throng of one's fellow-craftsmen is not a sign of sanity—on the contrary. Depreciation is cheaper than appreciation; and criticism which is merely destructive is essentially inferior to criticism which is constructive. That he saw so little to praise is greatly against Poe's claim to be taken seriously as a critic; so is his violence of speech; and so also is the fact that those whom he lauded might be as little deserving of his eulogy as those whom he assailed were worthy of his condemnation. The habit of intemperate attack which grew on Poe is foreign to the serene calm of the higher criticism. F. D. Maurice made the shrewd remark that the critics who take pleasure in cutting up mean books soon deteriorate themselves—subdued to that they work in. It may be needful, once in a way, to nail vermin to the barn door as a warning, and thus we may seek a reason for Macaulay's cruel treatment of Montgomery, and M. Lemaître's pitiless castigation of M. Ohnet. But in nine cases out of ten, or rather in ninety-nine out of a hundred, the attitude of the critic towards contemporary trash had best be one of absolute indifference, sure that Time will sift out what is good, and that Time winnows with unerring taste.
The duty of the critic, therefore, is to help the reader to "get the best"—in the old phrase of the dictionary venders—to choose it, to understand it, to enjoy it. To choose it, first of all; so must the critic dwell with delighted insistence upon the best books, drawing attention afresh to the old and discovering the new with alert vision. Neglect is the proper portion of the worthless books of the hour, whatever may be their vogue for the week or the month. It cannot be declared too frequently that temporary popularity is no sure test of real merit; else were Proverbial Philosophy, the Light of Asia, and the Epic of Hades the foremost British poems since the decline of Robert Montgomery; else were the Lamplighter (does any one read the Lamplighter nowadays, I wonder?), Looking Backward, and Mr. Barnes of New York the typical American novels. No one can insist too often on the distinction between what is "good enough" for current consumption by a careless public and what is really good, permanent, and secure. No one can declare with too much emphasis the difference between what is literature and what is not literature, nor the width of the gulf which separates them. A critic who has not an eye single to this distinction fails of his duty. Perhaps the best way to make the distinction plain to the reader is to persist in discussing what is vital and enduring, pointedly passing over what may happen to be accidentally popular.
Yet the critic mischooses who should shut himself up with the classics of all languages and in rapt contemplation of their beauties be blind to the best work of his own time. If criticism itself is to be seen of men, it must enter the arena and bear a hand in the combat. The books which have come down to us from our fathers and from our grandfathers are a blessed heritage, no doubt; but there are a few books of like value to be picked out of those which we of to-day shall pass along to our children and to our grandchildren. It may be even that some of our children are beginning already to set down in black and white their impressions of life, with a skill and with a truth which shall in due season make them classics also. Sainte-Beuve asserted that the real triumph of the critic was when the poets whose praises he had sounded and for whom he had fought grew in stature and surpassed themselves, keeping, and more than keeping, the magnificent promises which the critic, as their sponsor in baptism, had made for them. Besides the criticism of the classics, grave, learned, definitive, there is another more alert, said Sainte-Beuve, more in touch with the spirit of the hour, more lightly equipped, it may be, and yet more willing to find answers for the questions of the day. This more vivacious criticism chooses its heroes and encompasses them about with its affection, using boldly the words "genius" and "glory," however much this may scandalize the lookers-on:
| "Nous tiendrons, pour lutter dans l'arène lyrique, |
| Toi la lance, moi les coursiers." |
To few critics is it given to prophesy the lyric supremacy of a Victor Hugo—it was in a review of Les Feuilles d'Automne that Sainte-Beuve made this declaration of principles. A critic lacking the insight and the equipment of Sainte-Beuve may unduly despise an Ugly Duckling, or he may mistake a Goose for a Swan, only to wait in vain for its song. Indeed, to set out of malice prepense to discover a genius is but a wild-goose chase at best; and though the sport is pleasant for those who follow, it may be fatal to the chance fowl who is expected to lay a golden egg. Longfellow's assertion that "critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews to challenge every new author," may not be altogether acceptable, but it is at least the duty of the soldier to make sure of the papers of those who seek to enlist in the garrison.
"British criticism has always been more or less parochial," said Lowell, many years ago, before he had been American Minister at St. James's. "It cannot quite persuade itself that truth is of immortal essence, totally independent of all assistance from quarterly journals or the British army and navy." No doubt there has been a decided improvement in the temper of British criticism since this was written; it is less parochial than it was, and it is perhaps now one of its faults that it affects a cosmopolitanism to which it does not attain. But even now an American of literary taste is simply staggered—there is no other word for it—whenever he reads the weekly reviews of contemporary fiction in the Athenæum, the Academy, the Spectator, and the Saturday Review, and when he sees high praise bestowed on novels so poor that no American pirate imperils his salvation to reprint them. The encomiums bestowed, for example, upon such tales as those which are written by the ladies who call themselves "Rita" and "The Duchess" and "The Authoress of The House on the Marsh," seem hopelessly uncritical. The writers of most of these reviews are sadly lacking in literary perception and in literary perspective. The readers of these reviews—if they had no other sources of information—would never suspect that the novel of England is no longer what it was once, and that it is now inferior in art to the novel of France, of Spain, and of America. If the petty minnows are magnified thus, what lens will serve fitly to reproduce the lordly salmon or the stalwart tarpon? Those who praise the second-rate or the tenth-rate in terms appropriate only to the first-rate are derelict to the first duty of the critic—which is to help the reader to choose the best.
And the second duty of the critic is like unto the first. It is to help the reader to understand the best. There is many a book which needs to be made plain to him who runs as he reads, and it is the running reader of these hurried years that the critic must needs address. There are not a few works of high merit (although none, perhaps, of the very highest) which gain by being explained, even as Philip expounded Esaias to the eunuch of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, getting up into his chariot and guiding him. Perhaps it is paradoxical to suggest that a book of the very highest class is perforce clear beyond all need of commentary or exposition; but it is indisputable that familiarity may blur the outline and use may wear away the sharp edges, until we no longer see the masterpiece as distinctly as we might, nor do we regard it with the same interest. Here again the critic finds his opportunity; he may show the perennial freshness of that which seemed for a while withered; and he may interpret again the meaning of the message an old book may bring to a new generation. Sometimes this message is valuable and yet invisible from the outside, like the political pamphlets which were smuggled into the France of the Second Empire concealed in the hollow plaster busts of Napoleon III., but ready to the hand that knew how to extract them adroitly at the proper time.
The third duty of the critic, after aiding the reader to choose the best and to understand it, is to help him to enjoy it. This is possible only when the critic's own enjoyment is acute enough to be contagious. However well informed a critic may be, and however keen he may be, if he be not capable of the cordial admiration which warms the heart, his criticism is wanting. A critic whose enthusiasm is not catching lacks the power of disseminating his opinions. His judgment may be excellent, but his influence remains negative. One torch may light many a fire; and how far a little candle throws its beams! Perhaps the ability to take an intense delight in another man's work, and the willingness to express this delight frankly and fully, are two of the characteristics of the true critic; of a certainty they are the characteristics most frequently absent in the criticaster. Consider how Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold and Lowell have sung the praises of those whose poems delighted them. Note how Mr. Henry James and M. Jules Lemaître are affected by the talents of M. Alphonse Daudet and of M. Guy de Maupassant.