AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 265, 1 August 1908, Page 12

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Apart i from recent achievements in natural science and experimental psychology, America for her size has ''contributed remarkably little to the permanent wealth of humanity. Sho is even poorer in musical composers than Great Britain. Her architecture,. whero it is not absolutely hideous, hovers between tasteless flamboyance and coldness without dignity. Her art js the emasculated slave of contemporary Parisian schools: her subjectpainters worship living French painters as devoutly and as blindly as the Opies, Wests, and Ettys of our dark ages worshipped the Cinquecento Italians; and. her , landscapists have only recently discovered that thero aro forests in Maine as well as at Fontainebleau, and that America has a sea coast as well as Brittany. Her greatest literary period was only an offshoot and prolongation of the earlier phases of the Romantic period in England. Had her writers attempted to keep abreast of contemporary English movements, her literature would have been only parasitical. That it was not parasitical, and that it lias becohio at last tho starting point of a great national literature, was owing to tho unconscious unanimity with which her earlier writers obeyed tho maxim, "Reculez pour micux sautcr." Tho theologians of the colonial

period harked baok to Jacobean and Cromwellian ideals. The post-Revolution orators prolonged and swelled tho accents of Burko and Chatham. And in what as yet remains the great ago. of American literature —in the period that, both geographically and intellectually, may bo roughly described as tho Now England period—the essayists modelled thomselves upon Addison and Goldsmith; the historians combined the grandiloquence of Gibbon with tho simplicity of Hume; tho only novelist, in the strict sense of the term, was an American Scott; and the poets, with the exception of Poe and Whitman —of whom tho one remains an unappreciated, the othor an inoffectivq forco in American letters —painfully, attained a cosmopolitan colourlessness which at least leaves tlio canvas clean'-for an American Shakespeare. Thus, by going well down the parent stem, the American .branch, in prose at least, secured tho possible maximum of the strong and clearrunning sap of thought, and remained uncontaininated by tho fungus-growths of slang and shop-jargon which had choked and obscured the language of the street and tho jffice. And at last, when it became no longer possible to live in America and think in Europe, the American stem suddenly divided, one branch trailing off over Europe in a rich but infertile efflorescence, the other sinking quietly into American, soil. Naturally, tho European branch, fed by intensive culture, and blossoming amid coteries of connoisseurs, attracted by far the greater share of attontion. Mr.-Howells's sentimental: pessimism and Continental Wanderlust were accepted as tho final American attitude to life. Mr. Marion Crawford's rococo Italianism seomed the-expression of tho despairing abandonment by his compatriots of ;any . attempt /to Voxtraet the essence of romance .-.from; the history and social life of their own This abandonment bocame almost passionately explicit in the novels of' Mr. Henry James, whose personagos, too superiorly French or Italian to become good Americans and- too superiorly American to become good _ 'Frenchmen or Italians and have done with it soothe thoir secret Hoimweh with joyless luxury and dilletante culturo, and, timorous of the straight- hot roads of elomental passion, turn .aside' into cool psychological labyrinths,' "and find on end, in wandering mazes lost."

11l the.oddly, fantastic pages of Mr. Henry James's-novels it is not difficult to perceive the final flowering:of the European branch, of American ;literature. . The pathetic ineffectiveness of,the tourist stories, or European costume romances, of soma of the most genuinely talented of' contemporary American writers gives imperative emphasis to the trunmpet cry, "To your tents, 0 Israd!" -whoso first .faint notes wore heard and mailked, many years ago now, by Edward 'Eggleston of Indiana. His stories are almost forgotten already, but! the future historian of American literature will give him a post of. honour as. one of the earliest' to recognise that'to be truly national literature must first becomo provincial. The first signs of national, as of human consciousness,, proceed, from the body, not from the head, But the I body cannot act without tho head.'" America; up to Eggleston's r day, had gone about, like St.' Denis, carrying its head .under its. arm—or in a Saratoga trunk, ornate with the labels of fashionable European hotels. Eggleston at least succeeded in-fixing the-head on the body. The result was almost instantly apparent. The lungs breathed deep breaths of native air, the eyes:,opened; wide upon, nativo scones, and the mouth, at last,, gavo forth nativo thoughts in native accents. Mark Twain made articulate the life and : moods of the dwellors by tho Mississippi; ■ Bret Harte voiced the romance of the Wild West; George W. Cable oaught and expressed the evasive and exotic charm of' Creole life in Louisiana;' found." a Hardy' in Thomas Nelson- Page, ■ Kentucky in James Lane Allen; .and New. England,- in Hawthorne's, day merely; a museum 1 of preRevolution memories, and sirico then only a stepping-ofF 'placo' for authors Europe-bound, .supplied ' this: rich "materials of many a tale in which the genuine salt of Yankeeism was unmixed with ,the! spurious condiments of caricature or brag. Even tho cities did not remain . inarticulate. New York swarmed with,"delineators of.Metropolitan life'; books like Mr; • Booth Tarkington's "Conquest of ! Canaan" gave moral and intellectual unity 'and .'meaning', to'tho societies of the State capitals; and the efficacy of the new spirit was strikinglydisplayed when Miss Wyatt bestowed life and form upon the apparently Ihopdess' clay 'ofVChicago,commercialism. 'There have been set-backs, naturally; .'the course of ' true ■ literature never did run smooth. Publishing , trusts have attempted :to coefce : authors into deliberate pandering •.to degraded "tastes ;■ this, however, .is an evil which : we have seen elsewhere upon the earth, even in Great Britain. .The tractarian >nalism of Mr. Upton Sinclair, also as "The 'Metropolis"proves, is a ' clumsy and -inartistic weapon even in the skilful hands of Mr. Sinclair himself;, but inartistic .realism •can always be trusted to die a natural death. .Meanwhile/,tho long-looked-for sijjn of total as distinguished from local, consciousness, is distinctly apparent in tho later novels of Mr. ■Winston; Churchill.. His latest book is. indeed, a national'prose-epic, with a prophetic close. His male characters are supreme both as types and as individuals, they are both themselvos . and America.. . ; His • very ; defects ! are-those, of the'.nation,he represents;' ho would be unnatural and unconvincing without them. ;He lacks atmosphere and repose, but so' docs America;.,!iis love, episodes aro unsatisfactory, as they aro bound to be. in tho portrayal of a society in which man either looks fatuously up to woman as a goddess or cynically down upon her-as a'prey. Those''defects in Arnmcan .society, it is true, militate somewhat against . tho absolute greatness of the American novel, but. they 'do not detract,from, they rather heighten, the achievements of American's greatest living novelist,, since what is called genius consists mainly ;in the overcoming of apparently insuperable difficulties.—" Glasgow Herald." °