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CAN AMERICA HAVE A LITERATURE?
CAN AMERICA HAVE A LITERATURE?
In the first Courier of this year a certain writer has discussed quite fully the question, "Has America a Literature?" He takes considerable pains to prove, what we knew before, that a book does not necessarily belong to the literature of a country merely because it is written in that country. He shows how English literature has been written in all countries, and charges that American literature, thus far, has been no more than English literature. All this I grant, and will hereafter endeavor to show that it couldnot well be otherwise.
He says: "Before a nation can produce a literature essentially its own, it must have a kind of feeling and a system of thought peculiarly its own." Very true; what I conceive him to mean is, that a writer's verse or prose must have that peculiar flavor of national life, very easy to perceive but very hard to define, which some one has called the "taste of the soil." This is only to be found in early and what may be called spontaneous literatures; and by spontaneous I mean those works in which there is the least possible trace of conscious literary art, that spring direct from the people, coming so entirely from all the race that we cannot know their author.
The best examples of this are the many folk-tales to be found in all nations. Many of these, it is true, are common property of all Aryan peoples, and the ethnologist draws his conclusions therefrom, but each race has moulded and colored them according to its own genius, and has added inventions of its own.
How these tales arose is a minor question. The sun-myth explanation fits some; with others it is simply ridiculous; to treat them as actual history is to strain human credulity. But telling stories has always been and will always continue to be the great
source of amusement for mankind. In the childhood of the race these tales, many of them subjects of religious belief, were told and retold, combined and recast by countless generations of story-tellers until they became interwoven with the life of the people only less than that greatest effort of unconscious production, its language.
That these stories are the basis of most imaginative literature is easy to show. Whence did Chaucer and Shakspere get much of their material? From the Novelle of Boccaccio and Bandello. And whence these latter? From the Italian and Sicilian stories and from the French Fabliaux.
The best critics seem now to agree that Homer only shaped into an artistic whole the floating legends of the god-like heroes who went forth to recover the stolen Helen, or of the long and weary wanderings of the stedfast, goodly Odysseus, the most cunning of men. But these legends sprang from the people—were not borrowed from without.
Like to Homer ear the Saga-men of the North, differing only as the outward aspects of nature gave different turns to their imaginations. Thus the Northern tales are filled with bulky giants and tricksy dwarfs, which the finer artistic sense of the Greek intellect rejected.
Now it is literatures like these that are truly national. Homer and Aischyeos and Plato are Greek, and have no mixture of foreign cultures.
This is explanable by two reasons. One, that their literature sprang from the very soil. They had behind them no literary forms or traditions. Even if they took much from the surrounding nations, it is so worked over as to be wholly unrecognizable.
The reason for this last is to be found in