124
AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
A writer in a late number of the Courier arrived at the conclusion that America has never had and has not to-day a national literature of her own. Another writer, in a succeeding number, maintains that for us a national literature must forever remain an impossibility. Unhappy were we if there were indeed need that we adopt these views. I wish to record my utter dissent from them both, and to contest particularly the latter.
Why can America never have a national literature? Because, the answer practically says, America did not have the misfortune to be born a thousand years or more before the steam engine and the telegraph. Because, forsooth, the American people had not to spend a solitary, isolated childhood, and to work its way out of barbarism unaided and alone, through painful centuries of war, therefore it can have no national literature. To the Chinese, with their wall against the world, or to the Greenlanders, with their "certain mental seclusion from surrounding nations," or to the tribes of Central Africa, a national literature may be possible, but to America, never. Well, then, let us thank Heaven that it is not: for, however glorious a possession a national literature has been thought to be, if it is to be had only under such conditions and at such a sacrifice, we will none of it. Really, would it not seem as if any interpretation of the expression "National Literature" that must confine its meaning to the rude war songs, myths, and heroic traditions of a semi-civilized or barbarous people, were to be looked upon with suspicion as one-sided and incomplete? Are we to be content with an understanding of those words that will allow to the literature of the Scandinavian north a nationality which it denies to that of Elizabethan England? Has a people no longer
a distinct nationality when it has engrafted onto its native, original stock some foreign branch? Were the Germans less Germans, or the English less English, when they had given up Thor for Jehova and Baldur for Christ? Must we understand under nationality merely the sum of those characteristics which a people has accumulated up to the time when it emerges from its lonesome isolation and begins to grow, in contact with the ideas of other peoples? No; that seems to me absurd. Rather every people has a nationality so long as it has a great stock of ideas and modes of thought and feeling which are common to the great majority of its individuals. This nationality it does not lose on coming in contact with, nor even on appropriating, new ideas, but rather it tests and proves its nationality by the manner in which it sifts them and transforms them. No country develops in absolute isolation. Greece, singularly self-sufficient as she was, did not grow wholly from within, and could we know more of her early history we would find her, perhaps, borrowing in more ways than we now suspect from her neighbors; but that would in no wise affect the Greek character, the habitual attitude of the people toward the world and toward ideas. And as it is with the people, so it is with their literature and art. Even if we could prove that the Greeks borrowed their first notions of architecture from the Egyptians, Greek art would be none the less royally Greek. So England's literature, which borrowed here and there that of which it had need—more than that of Greece, for there was more to borrow—is none the less royally English.
"Yet Chaucer and Shakespeare are not English in the sense that Homer and Aischylos are Greek," says our writer. Well, I may perhaps be pardoned for not seeing why. Certainly it seems to me that