Lancaster daily intelligencer. [volume] (Lancaster, Pa.) 1864-1928, 1881-03-25
American Literature and Boston Lftera.
tures

American Literature and Boston Litera
St. James Gazette.
The German professor in Mr.. Henr,
James last batch of novelettes nasses q
criticism upon literary Boston which ad-
mlraOIy sums up its present curious final
phase Of complete decadence. He pro.
nounces upon it in the particular embodi.
ment of Mr.. Louis Leverett as having
reached "the period OF culture in which
the faculty Of appreciation preponderates
over tho faculty of creation" In This
judgment, which its brilliant author care
fully places in the mouth of specially
unpleasant characteI-in order doubtless
to blunt the edge Of its sting for his fellow
citizens in tho hub of the universe-Mr,
James has put his finger with his usuai
analytic subtlely OF the exact weak point
ston dilettantism. Quite recentlv
kf n <t's brother. DR.. William
the novel,. laws as. metaphysi.
James-who disp.. I'll the acuteness,
clan and psychologist g.. -hich are
originality, and vigor "" With
in his fathers family, :.
all the under current of mysticism as we'll
has pointed out in the Atlantic Aonthly
that the intellect of Boston is now fast
ripening to decay. There are. he says,
Just as many able and intelligent men in
the city as ever there is just as much
culture, Just as much literary ferment,
Just as much philosophical learning but
there is no pro 1uctivcness. Nothing
comes of it all. The elder men are passed
away or aged the young men stand at
the mere dead level of cultivated apprecia-
ton and receptivity, without ever rising
to the higher pitch of active creativeness.
Hawthorne and his fellows are gone
Emerson and Longfellow are al
most silent and the new genera
ton is generation Of readers and
thinkers only, not of producers and Origi-
natOrs. DIR. James does not account for
the falling of, or, rather, he accounts for
it, more suo, by saying that it is due to the
inscrutable action of individuality which
amounts to much the same thing in the
end. Yet the question is an interesting
one and it bears q good deal upon a very
common English misconception as to the
position Of Boston in the American
world.
In England, people generally imagine
that American literature and Boston litera-
ture are one and the same thing. Not
that many people would consciously as
sert anything Of the sort, because when
they hear of an American writer they
never think of inquiring whether he is
Bostonian or not but if they were asked
to mention the chief American authors,
they would at once mention such names
as Longfellow, Hawthorne, Prescott.
Motley and Lowell-New EDglanders all
of them-with perhaps Washington Irv
ing, who was BostOnesque New Yorker.
To the average English mind the Boston
litterateurs form the acknowlsed specimens
Of the American author, just as the culti-
waited New Englander of the old Puritan
families is universally figured in England
as "the best typo of American gentle
man." Both are in tact very much what
We are accustomed to at home and both
are equally alien to the general tone Of
thought and feeling in America as a
whole.
The truth is, Boston culture has always
been an exotic on American SOIL 1t went
over to New England with such theologi-
cal thinkers as the Mathers aud WinthrOps
whose whole feelings and interests were
what pedantic style OF learning. 1t lived
on and lived down the natural impulses of
a new country only by the aid Of that
stern theOcracy which the imported Puri-
tan spirit kept alive in the government Of
Massachusetts for hundred and fifty
years. As Presbytcrianism passed into
Unitarianisn, it woke up,at the beginning
of the present century. into first flush ct
literary activity. But Boston had all along
been in such close connection with Eng
lish thought and English culture that
this activity was wholly the initiative
sort. All that was written there was
just an outlaying part of English litera-
ture. LongfellOw and Prescott are as
English as TennysOn and FrOude-a great
deal more English than Swinburne Or Car
lyle. Hawthorne has a strong and subtle
originality but it is an originality purely
personal, further removed in many points
from the ordinary feelings of England.
Most of these men find their themes in the
Old World, or in that historical and colo
NAL New England which was only q sim
gle element OF the Old World transplant
ed, with all its beliefs and prciudices, into
the midst of the new. Miles Standish in
Puritan Massachusetts,, Evangeline in old
French Acadia, the Cinque ports, the
Rhine castles, the Flemish towns-these
are sLongfellOw's pct themes. "The
Scarlet Letter." shows the same turning
to the essentially English past in Haw-
thorne. Many of the English-American
writers were European in all their tastes
and habits Washington Irving lived
in Spain, and was most at home
among the Moorish legends Of the
Alhambra. Motley took his subject from
the Holland where he spent the best years
of his life. Hawthorne was American
consul at Liverpool. The whole Boston
school is from first to last essentially Eu-
ropean. Such litecatures, based upon
the best models" and without any ma.
tiOnal root Of sentimental of feeling, al
ways die down at last into an era of Clau-
dians. So the Boston movement had died
down in its turn into mere universal dif-
fusion of literary and philOsOphic Taste,
mixed with general disposition to criti-
else everything intelligently and to rest sat
isiied for the most part with negative re-
suits. The crude but pregnant suggest
iveness of Emerson has na:ul ally given
place to habit of reading Hartman and
Schopenhaur, Renan and Herbert Spencer,
and deciding that there is a great deal to
be said against every point of view. OF
the purely objective, critical and analytic
standpoint thus produced, Mr.. Henry
James is himself singularly favorable
outcome.
But behind and beyond this wholly Eng
lish Bostonian literature there has ALWAYS
been a little surface-seething here and
there of native literature, racy of the
Soil, which is purely tentative as yet, and
mostly very fOrmless, but which truly
represents some tendencies at least of the
American mind. OF course this underly-
ing and nascent American literature is