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VII
On literary tonics
some minor English critic wrote lately of
Dr. Holmes's ‘Life of
Emerson:’ ‘The Boston of his day does not seem to have been a very strong place; we lack performance.’
This is doubtless to be attributed rather to ignorance than to that want of seriousness which
Mr. Stedman so justly points out among the younger
Englishmen.
The Boston of which he speaks was the
Boston of
Garrison and
Phillips, of
Whittier and
Theodore Parker; it was the headquarters of those old-time abolitionists of whom the
English Earl of
Carlisle wrote that they were ‘fighting a battle without a parallel in the history of ancient or modern heroism.’
It was also the place which nurtured those young
Harvard students who are chronicled in the ‘Harvard Memorial Biographies’—those who fell in the war of the
Rebellion; those of whom Lord Houghton once wrote tersely to me: ‘They are men whom
Europe has learned to
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honor and would do well to imitate.’
The service of all these men, and its results, give a measure of the tonic afforded in the
Boston of that day. Nay,
Emerson himself was directly responsible for much of their strength.
‘To him more than to all other causes together,’ says
Lowell, ‘did the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining strength of moral heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives.’
And when the force thus developed in
Boston and elsewhere came to do its perfect work, that work turned out to be the fighting of a gigantic war and the freeing of four millions of slaves; and this in the teeth of every sympathy and desire of all that appeared influential in
England.
This is what is meant, in American history at least, by ‘performance.’
Indeed, as the
War of 1812 has been called, following a suggestion of
Franklin's, ‘the second War for Independence,’ so the
Civil War might be called in the same sense the third war of the same kind; and the evolution of the
American as a type wholly new and distinct from the Englishman, dates largely from that event.
We are sometimes misled by a few
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imitations in respect to visiting cards and servants' liveries, to be solicitous about a revival of Anglomania, forgetting that the very word Anglomania implies separation and weaning.
I can recall when there was no more room for Anglomania in New York than in Piccadilly, for the simple reason that all was still
English; when the one cultivated newspaper in the country was the New York Albion, conducted for British residents; when the scene of every child's story was laid abroad and not at home; when
Irving was read in
America because he wrote of
England, and
Cooper's novels were regarded as a sort of daring eccentricity of the frontier.
Fifty years ago Anglomania could scarcely be said to exist in this country; for the nation was still, for all purposes of art and literature, a mere province of
England.
Now all is changed; the literary tone of the
United States is more serious, more original, and, in its regard for external forms, more cultivated than that now prevailing on the other side.
Untravelled
Americans still feel a sense of awe before the
English press, which vanishes when they visit
London and talk with the young fellows who write for its journals;
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and when these youths visit us, what lightweights they are apt to seem!
Emerson said of our former literary allegiance to
England that it was the tax we paid for the priceless gift of English literature; but this tax should surely not be now a heavy one; a few ballades and villanelles seem the chief recent importations.
The current American criticism on the latest English literature is that it is brutal or trivial.
The
London correspondent of the Critic quoted some Englishmen the other day as saying that the principal results of our Civil War had been ‘the development of
Henry James, and the adoption of
Mr. Robert Stevenson.’
Mr. Stevenson, if adopted, can hardly be brought into the discussion.
Mr. James has no doubt placed himself as far as possible beyond reach of the
Civil War by keeping the
Atlantic Ocean between him and the scene where it occurred; but when I recall that I myself saw his youngest brother, still almost a boy, lying near to death, as it then seemed, in a hospital at
Beaufort, S. C., after the charge on
Fort Wagner, I can easily imagine that the
Civil War may really leave done something
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for
Mr. James's development, after all.
Mr. Howells has scarcely yet given up taking the heroes of his books from among those who had gone through a similar ordeal, and it will be many years before the force of that great impulse is spent.
For one thing, the results of the war have liberated the
Southern literary genius, and that part of the nation, so strangely unprolific till within twenty-five years, is now arresting its full share of attention, and perhaps even more than its share.
It is difficult to say just how far the influence of a literary tonic extends, and
Goethe might doubtless be cited as an instance where art was its own sufficient stimulus.
In the cases of a writer like
Poe, we trace no tonic element.
The great anti-slavery agitation and the general reformatory mood of half a century ago undoubtedly gave us
Channing,
Emerson,
Whittier,
Longfellow, and
Lowell; not that they would not have been conspicuous in any case, but that the moral attribute in their natures might have been far less marked.
The great temporary fame of
Mrs. Stowe was identified with the same influence.
Hawthorne and
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Holmes were utterly untouched by the antislavery agitation, yet both yielded to the excitement of the war, and felt in some degree its glow.
It elicited from
Aldrich his noble
Fredericksburg sonnet.
Stedman,
Stoddard, and
Bayard Taylor wrote war songs, as did
Julia Ward Howe conspicuously.
Whitman's poem on the death of
Lincoln is, in my judgment, one of the few among his compositions which will live.
Wallace, who must be regarded as on the whole our most popular novelist—whatever may be thought of the quality of his work—won his first distinction in the
Civil War. Cable,
Lanier,
Thompson, and other strong writers were also engaged in it, on the
Confederate side.
It is absolutely impossible to disentangle from the work of any but the very youngest of our living American authors that fibre of iron which came from our great Civil War and the stormy agitation that led up to it.
What is to succeed that great tonic?—for we can hardly suppose that the human race is to be kept forever at war for the sake of supplying a series of heroic crises.
It is evident that no particular source of moral stimulus is
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essential; the
Woman Suffrage movement has made a dozen and more women into orators and authors; and
Helen Jackson was as thoroughly thrilled and inspired by the wrongs of the
American Indians, as was
Mrs. Stowe by those of the Negroes.
The American writers who signed the petition for the pardon of the
Chicago Anarchists, had at least the wholesome experience of standing firmly, whether they were right or wrong, against the current opinion of those around them.
The contributions toward the discussion of social questions which have of late flowed so freely from clergymen and other nonexperts, must undoubtedly do good to those from whom they proceed, if to no others.
The essential thing is that the literary man should be interested in something which he feels to be of incomparably more importance to the universe than the development of his own pretty talent.
We see the same thing across the ocean, when
Swinburne writes his ‘Song in Time of Order,’ and
Morris marches in a Socialist procession.
Here lies the power of the
Russian writers, of
Victor Hugo.
Probably no man who ever lived had an egotism more colossal than
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that of
Hugo, yet he was large enough to subordinate even that egotism to the aims that absorbed him—to abhorrence of
Napoleon the
Little—to enthusiasm for the golden age of man. I like to think of him as I saw him at the
Voltaire Centenary in 1876, pleading for Universal Peace amid the alternate hush and roar of thousands of excitable Parisians—his lion-like head erect, his strong hand uplifted, his voice still powerful at nearly eighty years. So vast was the crowd, so deserted the neighboring streets, that it all recalled the words put by
Landor into the lips of
Demosthenes: ‘I have seen the day when the most august of cities had but one voice within her walls; and when the stranger on entering them stopped at the silence of the gateway, and said, “
Demosthenes is speaking in the assembly of the people.”
’
