LAWS OF GROWTH. environ ment; 3 very cause and foundation of these essays, and if I did not perceive this fact I should have no excuse for their general endeavor. It is true that a nation's literature will not appear out of season. Poetry, its most spontaneous form, is a growth rather than an artifice, or it does not come to strengthen and to stay. Let me acknowledge, as heretofore, the bear- Law of ing of the conditions under which it is produced, and that a poet must be viewed in the light and shadow of his environment; furthermore, that when a time is ripe there are found both idealists and men of action to represent it, springing up as when, in the physical world, the pines and fir-trees of a virgin forest have been cleared away, and a novel flora suddenly appears, whose germs have been hidden in the undermould, awaiting their own season of room and light and air. But let me also, and at present no less than in our foreign excursions, include a factor which and the the new criticism often overlooks. Too little allow-factors ance is made for the surprises of genius. We forget modify its effect. that now and then some personage comes without a summons, like a stray leader from the skies; that works appear under adverse circumstances, so new, so strong, so revolutionary, as to seem inspired creations, men and works that overleap the stages of development, that demand the spiritual factor, the personal equation, the allowance for exception, in the problem of national growth. In the absence of a sunlit atmosphere, they shine by inward light, and communicate heat and lustre to their surroundings. When a link in the chain of evolution is missing, such are the forces that make up for it. But there are other forces, and certain modes of intellectual effort, which assist growth and somewhat forestall the ordinary process. Even criticism may do a share, and which Matters first to be considered. often by penetrative study of the leaders that reflect or stimulate the various tendencies of a people's ideality. Of course a poet must represent his age and habitat; a Grecian temple beside an Alleghanian trout-brook might be lovely, but surely would be out of place and date. It is now my province to discover what special aids the poets of America have experienced, and what hindrances. In no modern country has ideality been more retarded than in our own; and I think that certain restrictions have peculiarly limited production in the field of Poetry, the chief of imaginative arts. Yet I see that, in spite of these, the ultimate rise of an American school of poetry was swift and strong, and that its chiefs have had their aids no less than their obstacles, and have bravely confronted the latter. And thus we are brought directly to the preliminary issue. Question of a Home School and II. MUCH has been written of late upon the topic of our native literature. Is there a distinctly American its charac- school? If not, when and where shall we look for one? What are, or should be, its special characteristics? These and similar questions are frequently and somewhat vaguely discussed. teristics. Essential quality. Now, it is first to be observed that the radical quality of any national school, in any country or period, does not wholly depend upon the types, personages, localities, and other materials utilized by its artists and men of letters; and this is especially true with regard to the work of a poet, in distinction from that of a painter. The specific tone of the former artist is not derived from the images which his genius informs with life, and from the plots that serve NATIONAL QUALITY. his expression of the thought, passion, imagination, of his people and time. Mere reliance upon these will not suffice. Even a painter might devote his life to copying the groups he finds in his own streets, the streets themselves, and the fields and woods beyond them, yet not produce an original art, nor execute it in a fresh and native way. The mere dialect and legends of a province or section are powerless to convey their essential quality to the song of a poet who calls them to his aid. Mr. Grant White, therefore, was perfectly right when he suggested, for these and other reasons, that it is the spirit, not the letter, which giveth life; that we must pay regard to the flavor, rather than to the form and color, of the fruit, to the distinctive character, not the speech and aspect, of the personage. Unless the feeling of our home-poet be novel, his vision a fresh and distinctive vision, unless these are radically different from the French, or German, or even the English feeling and vision, they are not American, and our time has not yet come. 5 R. G. White, in the N. Y. Times, Feb. 1, 1880. tion. But I am not with this distinguished writer in his A reservafurther claim that we still are essentially English, and shall be so for a long series of years to come; that our literature, like the language we inherit, is wholly English, and must remain so for centuries, until "Anglo-Saxon and Hollander and German and Irishman. and negro and Chinese shall have so blended their blood . . . that from the fusion a new race shall have sprung." What I first call to mind is that there are few Americans, even those of but one remove, who are not instantly recognized abroad as being very different from Englishmen, not only with respect to feature, mould, and speech, which vary according to the sections from which they come, - but in their senti "The Scarlet Letter." ment, modes of thought and feeling, and way of looking at things. In both outward and inward traits they are pronounced distinctively un-English and "American," however divided among themselves. Again, by so much as the style is the man, I believe that the literary product of this new people differs from the literary product of the English, or any other people of the Old World, and I hope to make that difference clear in the course of these chapters. And I will remark, in passing, that "The Scarlet Letter," a romance which Mr. White cited in illustration, to me appears thoroughly un-English in its mystical temper, and its undertone and atmosphere; if not broadly American, it is locally so, the fruit and outgiving of the New England sentiment that brooded in its author's spirit, and of which it is a soul-wrought witness and dramatic chronicle. - In fine, recognizing the error of those who, by a forced effort, would anticipate creations that will come only of themselves, or through the natural impulse of foreordained artists, I also perceive that already, in various walks of art, and in none more than in that A distinc- to which our present study is devoted, we have exhibited the new and broad results, both of acclimacharacter. tion and of a blending process, to which the ruling tive na tional divisions of our population thus far have been subjected. Equally obvious are the minor distinctive phases, which, on the other hand, arise from the differentiation of the American people by influences that, in widely separated districts, have acted upon their inhabitants from the early settlements to the present time. The first-named phenomena are national, while those of the latter class may be termed sectional; but all are American, whether they appertain to the whole, or to the subdivisions, of our intellectual yield. THE AMERICAN TYPE. must be 7 The type first suggested, that of a broadly national Its incomcharacter, is plainly incomplete, and has wide room for pleteness maturer development. Let us measure it only at its acknowledged. worth. A restless and ill-adjusted spirit still pervades the heterogeneous elements of our nationality. Here is a country as large as all Europe, embracing zones as far apart, in physical attributes, as those of Norway and Sicily. Here are the emigrants or descendants of every people in Europe, -to go no farther, — and all their languages, and customs, and traditions, and modes of feeling, at one time or another, have come with them. Hence our unconscious habitude of variety, the disinclination to cling to one way of life or thought until its perfect conclusion. There is a ferment in new blood. The American travels, and at first is delighted with the color and flavor of the region to which he has come, but soon wearies of them, and pushes on to some new place where novel characteristics can be enjoyed. This is observable of all Anglo-Saxons, capricious yet steadfast as they are, but more so among ourselves than with respect to our British kinsmen. America has absorbed the traits The naof many lands and people; the currents still set this way; our modern intercourse with the world at large is close and unintermitting, so that the raw ingredients of our national admixture are supplied quite as rapidly as the whirl and stir of the popular system can triturate and commingle them. It is too much, then, to expect that our art or song, from whatever section either may come, will exhibit a quality specifically American in the sense that the product of Italy is Italian, or that of France is French. At this distance, we who watch others as we are watched ourselves can readily see that the same causes which make our civilization assume the composite type are blend tional ele ments: |