i6 
Land & Water 
May 9, igi^ 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Squwe 
American Literature 
THE Cambridge History of American Literature, of 
which vol. I (15s. net) has just been pubhshed, 
should not, to all appearances, be* taken as a 
work for which either Cambridge University or 
its Press has more than a godparental responsi- 
bility. Its editors are four American scholars ; its con- 
tributors are all Americans ; and the English edition has 
been printed in America. Cambridge seems to have supphed 
merely a model, an imprint, and a name. This generous 
delegation, on the part of the Press, of the care of its reputa- 
tion for producing works of sound scholarsliip, has, however, 
done no harm. The history — thus far, at all events — is a 
creditable and even impressive work of reference ; and at 
this moment it is peculiarly felicitous that Americans and 
EngUsh should co-operate in producing it. 
It is on a larger scale than any previous history ; and it 
cannot fail to supplant its predecessors, though Professor 
Barrett Wendell's short book will still hold the field for 
those who want merely an outhne. The preface leads one 
at once to expect a sensible work. The editors very naturally 
discuss the old and much-vexed question as to how far 
American Hterature ought, or can be expected, to differ 
from English literature. All sorts of fanatical Americans 
and misguided Englishmen have clamoured for something 
unmistakably American : often, it must be admitted, in 
reaction against dilettante Americans who have kept their 
eyes too exclusive!}- upon Europe and undervalued anything 
which did not come from England. But a desire to be 
"different," whether nationally or otherwise, never in itself 
produced good work. The sort of advice which may assist 
such production is not of local appUcation only ; it is em- 
bodied in phrases like "the eye on the object," "look in thy 
heart and write," and others none the less sound for being 
hackneyed. America cannot escape, nor is there any reason 
to escape, her origins, and the great community of traditions 
she hjis with us in language, in literature, in morals. Ameri- 
cans must write in English ; must be influehced by the htera- 
ture that exists in the language ; and, in so far as they think 
and feel like us, must write as we do. There is no risk of a 
lack of local colour where a man writes sincerely and local 
peculiarities exist. An American who looks directly at 
the scenery around him, and not merely at the scenery in 
books, will get something that an Enghshman could not get ; 
even were the speech and intellectual outlook of Americans 
exactly the same of ours down to the last detail their affec- 
tions are necessarily in part centred on other objects than 
those which hold ours. The less American writers bother 
about being either like us or unlike us, the better for them. 
Against the extreme doctrinaires, the editors of the history 
very pertinently quote Griswold, who said, in 1847 : "Some 
critics in England expect us who write the same language, 
profess the same religion, and have in our intellectual firma- 
ment the same Bacon, Sidney, and Locke, the same Spenser, 
Shakespeare, and Milton, to differ more from themselves 
than they differ from the Greeks and Romans, or from any 
of the moderns." Nevertheless, Griswold was "a proud 
nationalist," and left valuable collections of American prose 
and poetry. Mere imitation of Enghsh writers is bad and 
sterile ; but it is as bad in England as in America. 
the confession of his critic, only wrote two good lines in all 
his life), which might well have been devoted to a fuller 
treatment of major (though undeniably later) writers. There 
is, as a rule, very little tendency to exaggerate the merits 
of these small fry; Anne Bradstreet herself "The^Tentb 
Muse," is quite properly dismissed as merely an attractive 
personahty whose product of "meritorious lines" was only 
twice as great as that of the reverend gentleman previously 
mentioned. The critical standards of the volume as a whole 
are sound ; the judgments, so far as one's limited knowledge 
enables one to test them, sensible. But this passion for 
completeness and this desire to prove that American literature 
did not begin until the nineteenth century has sacrificed 
valuable pages which might well have been added, say, to- 
Mr. Paul Elmer More's powerful little essay on Emerson. 
One could have even spared the account of Wigglesworth in 
exchange for a few quotations from Thanatofsis, the end 
of which is admittedly the finest thing that Bryant ever 
wrote. Bryant otherwise certainly gets his due from Pro- 
fessor Leonard ; perhaps rather more than his due. 
Almost all the most interesting American writers — what- 
ever may be urged on the other side — are left over for the 
other volumes. Research may do what it likes in the way of 
rehabihtating the neglected and exhuming the forgotten. 
The fact remains that almost all the lasting work that America 
has done was done in the nineteenth century, and the great 
mass of it in the second and third quarters of that century. 
There is nothing odd about the slowness of the beginning ; 
what is tantalising is the great void after the death of 
Whitman. You have a period wliich produced a crowd of 
men, varying, no doubt, in stature, Hke Poe, Emerson, 
Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Motley, Thoreau, and 
Hawthorne. There follows it a period of immense literary 
production, of tremendous activity in every other department 
of life, in which the conspicuous names are those of popular 
humorists and small poets, and in which Henry and William ' 
James stand on a lonely eminence. 
The principal figures in this volume, beyond those 
already referred to, are Willis, Halleck, Brockden Brown, 
Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, 
Parker, and Channing. It is impossible to attempt here a 
survey of so much ground. There are few weak chapters 
in the book. The principal fault which is at all general is 
an excessive passion for dragging in names, especially of 
foreign authors, allusively. When Professor Leonard paren- 
thetically calls Samuel Rogers "that old Maecenas and 
Petronius Arbiter," he is indulging the same foible that 
leads other critics to rush about after needless literary 
parallels. Had the proofs been better read, misprints would 
have been fewer, and sentences such as "in quite different 
ways, Bryant is with Poe, American's finest artist in verse" 
would not have been passed. That sentence is meaningless. 
The latter portion of it, taken alone, might reasonably, in 
the absence of other knowledge, have been supposed to mean 
that Bryant and Poe were Siamese twins who collaborated 
in art; but the quahfication "in quite different ways" in 
itself precludes such an interpretation. 
This is an attempt at a .standard and comprehensive 
history. In their desire not to be mere anthologists, or 
commit an error in proportion by concentrating too exclu- 
sively upon the nineteenth century, the editors-have perhaps 
gone a little too far in the opposite direction. It is quite 
true that the seventeenth century divines ought not to be 
treated as though they had never existed ; that Jonathan 
Edwards was a great man who, in England at least, has 
recently not received his due ; and that Frankhn and Wash- 
ington Irving flourished before Poe and Longfellow were 
thought of. But the determination to do justice to the 
earlier centuries has given the greater part of this volume 
the appearance not of a history of literature (in the usual 
sense), but of an undiscriminating record of the products of 
the American printing press. The result is that space is 
wasted upon scores of forgotten authors like the Revs. Uriah 
Oakes, Mather Byles, and Michael Wigglesworth (who, by 
Over two hundred pages of the volume are, quite properly,, 
filled with bibliographies. It would be sheer humbug on 
my part to pretend that I have studied them or that I am 
competent to judge them. I can never have heard of nine- 
tenths of the works mentioned in them ; and thus far (though 
I shall certainly use them for reference) 1 have not even 
looked at them. This lapse into candour, so unusual amongst 
reviewers, may look rather like a piece of poor swank. I 
prefer to think myself that, during perusal of this book, 
I have been influenced by the ghostly presence of George 
Washington. All I can honestly say is that bibhographies 
so voluminous cannot fail to contain a great deal of informa- 
tion, and that if the compilers of them are as conscientious 
and sensible as their colleagues who have written the rest of 
the book, they cannot fail to be found both accurate and 
exhaustive. In format the work is uniform with the 
Cambridge History of English Literature. That is to say, it 
is pleasant in every way save that the bindings are coloured 
with a red dye that fades and fades. 
