CHAPTER I THE CHARACTER OF AMERICAN 1. AMERICAN HISTORY AND AMERICAN THE contrast between word and deed, between experience and representation, is borne in upon us with striking force in comparing the history of the United States with its literature. No people on earth cherished higher aspirations than the band of seekers for freedom who, in the early part of the seventeenth century, embarking in a tiny vessel, bade a tearful adieu to their English home; and what has been accomplished, even though it bear no comparison with what was hoped for, is that marvelous achievement, the American Republic, with its gigantic power and an industrial development unexampled in history. The Mayflower, which put to sea in the fall of 1620, counted a hundred souls; forty-one men landed in December on the rocky coast of 3 Plymouth. After the first pitiless winter on the inhospitable soil of the New World, the little company was almost swept away by disease; of the forty-one Argonauts only seven were able to continue the struggle against the elements; and the descendants of this little band have in the space of 250 years exterminated the natives, assimilated the French and Dutch, driven back the Spaniards, and-most difficult of all their Herculean tasks-thrown off the yoke of the mother country. When has human will accomplished anything so great in so brief a space? Do not all heroic acts of ancient and medieval history shrink into insignificance by the side of this miracle? We seek in vain, however, for an epic that glorifies those great deeds; for a historical production that does justice to those conquerors and pathfinders of heroic proportions. The first settlers, who subjugated the land with musket and plow, were fully conscious of the greatness of their work, and efforts were not lacking to commemorate the extraordinary happenings in written recitals. William Bradford, one of the patriarchs of the Mayflower and member of the first Puritan settlement, wrote a "History of the Plymouth Plantation";* the enterprising Captain John Smith, to whom Virginia and all the other Southern States owe their origin, depicted, in a sustained style appropriate to the circumstances, his own adventures,† nor did the astonishment aroused by the unprecedented happenings on the soil of the new Colchis fail to be voiced in verse. But the forefathers did not go beyond dry, faltering reports, and their descendants have even to this day found no literary expression for the heroic. Neither the verse of Longfellow nor the prose of Hawthorne rises to the height of the subject. And the Americans were destined to have yet another heroic age: the more peaceful conquest of the territory beyond the Ohio, toward the middle of the nineteenth century; then the conflict for the emancipation of the blacks, of 1861-1865. All Americans who took part in the great migration to the West or participated in the Civil War were deeply stirred by their experiences and feel that they belong to a heroic *William Bradford, "Journal, The History of Plymouth Plantation, 1630-1649," in facsimile, with introduction by J. A. Doyle, London, 1896. tJohn Smith, "New England's Trials," London, 1622. Rochester, N. Y., and London (American and Colonial Tracts), age. But how tame does their language sound when they attempt to give their feelings poetic expression! Joaquin Miller, really Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (born in 1841), who created a great sensation with his "Songs of the Sierras," depicts in more than one poem, with temperament and poetic swing, the progress of the tens of thousands to the West; but how petty, how inadequate, are these productions, measured by the immensity of the phenomenon! And just as little have the hundreds of ballads of Northern and Southern poets succeeded in worthily perpetuating the Civil War in the memory of their countrymen. It is evident that American literature lags infinitely far behind American history. Various causes may be assigned for this disparity; it has not as yet been quite adequately explained. The generations The generations that preceded Cooper and Irving, it is often said, had their hands too full, were too overburdened with their daily tasks, to turn their thoughts to the luxury of literary presentation or creation. But that is far from the truth. In periods of the greatest stress, under the most adverse circumstances, pools of ink were wasted upon theological hairsplitting; the poorest farmers |