AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
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Here, then, are two whose work should seem to deserve to be called national.
Without seeking now other names to add to these, let us think for a moment whether the writings of these two give evidence, beyond their plain relation to the America of a hundred years ago, of any national way of looking at things and feeling the world. I think they do. It would, perhaps, be hard to define clearly what that way of looking at things is; but that it is, the quality of American humor seems to prove. Neither Hawthorne, who shows his sense of it rarely, nor yet Mrs. Stowe, who indulges in it freely, are the best exponents of our humor; a score of names occur to one at once of those whose pages brim with it, but no American seems wholly without it. And this matter of humor, though it may seem otherwise at the first sight, is really a valuable test of a people's way of looking at things. Humor is a very intangible, elusive thing, but this much can be said of it: It does not depend upon any particular condition of society, or upon any particular ideas or institutions, but upon nothing less broad than just this whole way of looking at the world. That the American laughs while the German preserves a sober silence, is for no other reason than that they have different modes of feeling, a different mental constitution. Just in what this difference consists would he hard to say; the important thing is that it is there; and of this there can be no doubt to one who has read American humorists to a foreign audience and been annoyed at the persistence which it laughs in the wrong place, if it laughs at all.
Another feature of the American view of things I mention with some reluctance. It is likely to wound our national pride, and I should be very glad to have it disproved if that be possible-I refer to our worship of the commonplace, our exaltation of the
general average of things. This is, perhaps, one of the bad results on our character of our boasted turn for the practical—as if a good painter of fences and barns were more practical than a painter of good pictures. There is much that is praiseworthy in the mind that finds no work mean or unworthy of itself, so long as it be honestly and seriously performed, but the danger of exaggerating the common and ordinary lies close at hand, and the American mind has not escaped it. Foreign critics have ever laid that fault at our door. It stands in a certain relation, too, to our deep-seated belief in the sacredness of a majority; and it seems to have given rise in our own day to our new American school of fiction—the school of which Howells and James are the masters. No one can have a greater admiration for Howells and James as literary artists than I; at the same time it is useless to deny the common-place character of their material and motives. Indeed, their watchword is common-placeness, triviality; a regard for these is the secret of their realism. To make one's self sure of this, and that the school has the doubtful distinction of being American and not English, one can not do better than follow the running fire of discussion that the English and American magazines have been keeping up this twelvemonth, ever since Howells and James brought the English critics about their cars by some words they unluckily let fall on the tendency of modern fiction.
Thus, if we mistake not, we have a literature springing naturally out of a history, a society, and a set of ideas that belong to us alone, and revealing a way of looking at things which no other people shares with us. Shall we not call it national? Is it not fairly a beginning.
A. C.