# Points of View (Sherman)/For the Higher Study of American Literature

Though the table of contents in Mr. Brownell's American Prose Masters indicates that the book contains but six masters, a reflective reader soon perceives that it contains a seventh, to whom the rest are indebted for no small part of the interest which they seem to possess in their own right. It is the fate of most celebrities, soon after their vogue is over, to be ushered respectfully into an honorable but dusky chamber which has more the air of a museum than of a living room. The warm appreciation of a living classic cools swiftly, in the presence of his marble effigy, to cold commemoration. Teachers and young pupils stroll listlessly through the dusky hall of fame, and, pausing for a moment before some "pallid bust," remark with perfunctory reverence, "This is Cooper," or "That is Emerson." Then they pass on—without stirring the accumulating dust of oblivion. But now and then a master, visiting the "museum," pauses before the same figures and begins to speak understandingly, with special knowledge, with acute discrimination of innumerable neglected values. It is as ​if the place were suddenly flooded with light. The shadowy shapes regain their sharpness of contour and recover their jutting boldness of feature and their animated expression. They seem once more to have something to say to us; and we gather responsively around, rejoicing to feel the power of great writers, and rejoicing, too, perhaps, in an illusory sense of our own perceptiveness.
"Oh, yes," we exclaim, "Cooper is clearly one of our distinguished assets—we mustn't forget Cooper. Prolix, to be sure; but then diffuseness is an element in his illusion. He hadn't Scott's rich background, but the alliance of romance with reality in his tales, his general and personal interest in the life he depicted, make his account of it solider art, give his romance even more substance and meaning than Scott's historiography. And then consider his actual 'contributions.' His Indians were unprecedented, and they remain unsurpassed for vigor and fidelity. Balzac praised his painting of woods and sea to the skies. Thackeray picked half a dozen of his characters as the equals of Scott's men, and he called La Longue Carabine 'one of the great prize men of fiction.' Add to all this his solid merits as publicist and patriotic critic. Between 1825 and 1850, you remember, New England, always the apex, had become also the incubus of our civilization, and called loudly for the note-taking of a chiel from beyond its borders. Cooper performed that service. To him we owe it that not only American authorship but American literature ​has been from his day of national rather than sectional character."
As is obvious, I have just reread Mr. Brownell's "Cooper," with a note-book in hand; and I am astonished to discover how many points he has given me to reflect upon, how many paths he has suggested for excursions. I am grateful to him now for revealing the relation between prolixity and illusion; in a world where prolixity is a predominant quality, that revelation alone is worth an essay. I am tormented with a desire to reread not merely the Leatherstocking Tales, but also the Waverley Novels, and to compare my middle-aged with my juvenile impressions of Scott's men and Cooper's men. I should like to go thoroughly into that interesting matter of Cooper's early and long vogue in France and his influence upon Balzac. I wish a complete account of the Indian in American fiction and a similar survey of American tales of the sea. I have a lively desire to investigate the origin and development of the anti-New England conscience before 1850. But—to make a conclusion rather than an end to the desires wakened by Mr. Brownell's method of dealing with American classics, I have never read in this book without saying to myself rather sternly: "It is high time that young Americans should begin the serious study of their own literature; and here is a guide who shows us how the task should be undertaken."
Since the English language became for the ma​jority of English-speaking people the main avenue to the culture of the world, the literature of England has received the attention that it deserves. From childhood to old age we read English books. Furthermore, from the primary grades through the graduate school students examine English texts grammatically, historically, and critically—with some part of the seriousness which the ancient classics once commanded. American "classical" literature, however, remains for most of us a mere recreation when it does not become a fading recollection of our youth. In childhood we memorize bits of Longfellow and Lowell; we read Cooper and Poe and Hawthorne at the age when we are playing Indians. Perhaps in early adolescence we are helped by some aspiring high-school teacher through an essay of Emerson. But when we go to college, we put away our American classics as we put away our algebra and our Cæsar. Whatever taste and judgment in literary matters we attain are formed by English rather than American masters. We may carry into later life a certain affection for the native books that pleased our nonage; but we seldom subject them to critical scrutiny or test them with our disciplined powers of appreciation.
There was, of course, a period within the memory of our grandfathers when it was possible to exhaust the resources of an American library; and there are among our countrymen to-day persons of considerable cultivation who fancy that all the native books which are worthy of their atten​tion could still be put on a five-foot shelf. This notion is becoming a little archaic. In the course, of the last hundred years our literature has outgrown its youth and poverty. It is abundant, and it is becoming mature to the verge of sophistication. It has acquired a history, it has developed critical tendencies, it has participated in successive movements, it has produced schools and has evolved styles, it has discovered wide ranges of new material, it has made significant innovations in form, it has even put forth dialectal branches from a sturdily rooted vernacular stock. It has been subject to many influences, but it has also been widely influential. It exhibits all the resources and powers of a national literature. At no very distant period in the future its bulk and diversity will be so immense that Americans will either be obliged to give it the central place in their programme of reading or they will be obliged to remain ignorant of their own national culture and its chief instrument. At the present time it is a conservative estimate to say that nine-tenths of our university teachers are more competent to discuss the literature of England than the literature of America; and the actual quantity—not to speak of the quality—of instruction provided in the higher study of our own literature is relatively insignificant.
This is obviously not a happy state of affairs for native letters; yet this condition is the natural consequence of careless acquiescence in the contention that American must always be a part of English ​literature. It is perhaps wiser to accept this contention than to listen to those revolutionaries who wish to cut themselves off without a shilling of their inheritance, and who sternly bid our English ancestors never darken our doors again. But our national literature will never hold its due place nor perform its proper work in our consciousness till we reverse the orthodox contention and declare instead that the older English literature must forever be a part of American literature. It will always be too soon to substitute our own authors for Chaucer or Spenser or Shakespeare or Milton. They belong to the common past of all the great branches of the English-speaking peoples. They are an essential and glorious part of our common literary history, just as ante-Reformation theologians are a part of both Roman and Anglican ecclesiastical history.
Shakespeare and Milton are as important to us as they are to Englishmen. Yet as between Jeremy Taylor and Cotton Mather, for example, it begins to be clear that one is of high importance to the English and of relatively little importance to us. As we advance into the eighteenth century, the shifting of values becomes even more noticeable. We need not discriminate between Gulliver's Travels and Franklin's Autobiography, for both are classics of the world's literature, and we cannot afford to neglect either of them. But it is not too soon to declare that the collected writings of Franklin belong to the culture of an educated American, while the collected writings of Swift have pretty certainly ​a less valid claim on his attention than the collected writings of Voltaire. It is not too soon to declare that, if a choice must be made, the American student should choose to be familiar with the Federalist rather than the Letters of Junius, with Irving rather than Leigh Hunt, with Emerson rather than Carlyle, with Thoreau rather than Richard Jefferies, with Whitman rather than William Morris, with Mark Twain rather than Oscar Wilde, with Henry James rather than George Moore, and with. Theodore Roosevelt rather than Queen Victoria.
In every case that I have mentioned the preference of a native writer would also, I believe, be the preference of a greater personality; and, in such cases, the arguments in favor of an American choice are conclusive. It is only by using our native literature, by keeping it current, by making it saturate the national consciousness—it is only so that we can make our lengthening history serve and enrich and inform us, and give to our culture the momentum of a vital tradition. But suppose the choice to be between an English author of the first rank in his kind and an American author of the second or third rank in the same kind. Is it not an unsound "cultural" policy to select for study the inferior author? Most eminent American teachers appear to think so. Believers in intellectual free trade, they have long ridiculed the notion of "protected industries" in the field of letters, and have united with English critics in deriding "Cooper, the American Scott," ​"Bryant, the American Wordsworth," "Miller, the American Byron." Insensibly they have slipped into the assumption that for every American author there must necessarily be a superior English counterpart. In their determination to show no soft indulgence to native writers, to avoid all chauvinistic infatuations, they have "leaned over backwards"—till at the present time our own authors are complaining, not without grounds, that, in the educational field at least, the English has become the "protected" branch of authorship among us.
But to return to our question:—Is it not an unsound policy to select for study an inferior author, merely because he is American? A Yankee answer to this question would be: Is it not an unsound policy to assume that an author, merely because he is American, must be inferior? And now for an answer which I have tried to make straightforward. I cannot make it entirely simple and at the same time adequate, for it requires careful qualification. It is generally an unsound policy to select for uncritical assimilation an American author who is the inferior of an available and equivalent author, whether he be English, Italian, or Greek, or beside whatever national banner he may stand beneath the flag of the republic of letters. If the best authors were always available, and if they always supplied our needs, there would be small reason for reading any other than the best. But as a matter of fact, the best Greek and Italian authors, say, are, to most American students, only imperfectly available; and foreign ​authors, even the best modern authors of England—accessible though these are and closely related—are imperfect equivalents for the native authors that we need, to express for us the individual adventures and the social sense of men and women who live under our own national conditions. "Best," after all, even in the field of art, is a term which cannot be defined without some reference to what art is so fond of denying to itself—its purpose. When an American reader wishes an intimate picture of American society there can be no best book but an American book. There is always this strong special reason for knowing the literary expression of our national life, even though it be immature, unsatisfactory, and inferior of that of other nations.
The danger involved in assigning to American literature a much larger place in our culture than it now holds is obviously that in seeking to know ourselves and our own place in the world we may grotesquely overvalue our own things. This is a danger which is to be encountered, I believe, not carelessly yet unhesitatingly. It may be safely encountered only if it is met with an adequately equipped open-eyed criticism. Hence the grave importance of criticism at the present juncture in America. To embrace our native literature for better or for worse implies knowing it and valuing it for its virtues, whatever they are; but it need not in the least require us to shut our eyes to its shortcomings. On the contrary, we shall find, as our addiction to American letters increases, that we ​shall grow more and more exacting; we shall "discover," as Mr. Brownell says, "new requirements in the ideal"—to which I would add: if we have an ideal. There are, indeed, at the present time many indications that our proverbial American hypersensitiveness to adverse comment on our institutions, our society, and our literature is at length beginning to yield ground before a new spirit of somewhat drastic self-examination and self-censure. In its popular manifestations this new spirit is as yet mainly iconoclastic, uncertain of its standards, and chiefly admirable, perhaps, in its readiness to give and receive hard knocks in the contest for solid footing. It is not in any sense an ancestor-worshiping spirit. Its temper is so depreciatory and its general attitude toward the past so contemptuously irreverent that all danger of overvaluing our hereditary possessions seems for the time being quite to have disappeared. It is a spirit of potentiality which may under wise guidance become a spirit of power.