OUR SERVILITY IN LITERATURE.

CONSIDERING that our national institutions are based upon a high humanitarian ideal, seemingly calculated to inspire an almost religious enthusiasm, and that they are the creation and property of the whole people, we are prepared to find them the objects of the tenderest reverence and solicitude. That, in countries where all power is in the hands of an individual or a class, and the body of the people are owned rather than own, there should be little or none of this reverence, is most natural; but that there should be any lack of it among our people, any tendency to treat the laws with disrespect, is almost astonishing. And yet such disrespect is very general, if not in words at least in practice. Though, from temperament and for material reasons, strongly averse to revolutions, we are, as a people, singularly lacking in patriotism of the genuine sort, in that enthusiastic loyalty which our country deserves, and which is often felt for her institutions by intelligent foreigners.

The lack of patriotism among Americans displays itself, not merely in disrespect for the laws, and in a willingness to break them when they happen to be inconvenient, but also, and to a far greater extent, in matters with which the laws do not presume to deal; in the sphere of morals, as distinguished from that of legality. Very many persons having sufficient patriotism not to violate a positive law, do not hesitate to be thoroughly and systematically unpatriotic in matters beyond the reach of such law. True patriotism imposes this as a duty upon every citizen: that he shall make the fundamental principles of his country's institutions determining factors in all the actions of his life; that he shall neither say nor do anything contrary to these principles, anything calculated to lessen their effectiveness on the life of the nation. How rarely is this duty felt, even among that minority of our citizens who by education are fitted to understand our institutions and their high purpose! It is a pitiful

fact that the free spirit of our Declaration of Independence has not yet, in any great measure, entered, as an informing principle, into the life of our people. While professedly representing a new epoch in the history of human freedom and civilization, we are still content to follow, in thought and life, the servile and semi-barbarous ideals of past epochs. In no one department of our activity-politics, business, education, religion, art, thought, or literature--has the spirit of American freedom been able to assert itself. Though we boast that we have freed ourselves from the tyrannies of Europe, we are still their bond slaves in all save name. "Captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror," said Horace. So vanquished Europe still rules her vanquisher, America. Ay, and Europe, with good reason, despises us for submitting to her rule.

In no direction, perhaps, is our unworthy and unpatriotic dependence upon Europe more marked, and in none, certainly, is it more pervasively hurtful, than in that of literature. With the works of Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Cable, and others before us, it would, of course, be unjust to say that we have no such thing as a national literature. At the same time, no one who understands that a national literature must be an embodiment of the national ideal, will affirm that ours is extensive. Although hardly any other country produces more of what is called literature than the United States, yet very little of what we produce is, in any distinctive sense, American. And worse than this, our home literature is almost overwhelmed in a flood of foreign, un-American productions, which inundate our book markets. The obvious result of this is, that the literature thrown broadcast over our land, and read by the great body of our citizens, young and old, educated and uneducated, is unAmerican in tone, temper, and ideal, and has a distinct tendency to undermine and destroy all true patriotism among our people.

For this condition of things four distinct classes of persons are to blame: First, the reading public, which has so little love. for the national ideal as to crave unpatriotic literature; second, our literary men and women, who so far forget themselves as to pander to this servile craving; third, our publishers, who, for mere love of gain, have been willing to corrupt their countrymen

with unmanly literature; and, fourth, our literary critics, who hold themselves and their function as educators so cheap as to allow all this to go on without raising their voices against it.

As to the reading public, it may be said, by way of excuse, that its members, for the most part, do not realize either the extent to which they are influenced by what they read, or the hurtful nature of much of the literature supplied to them. They are very largely in the hands of authors, publishers, and critics, who set the fashion in literature, pretty much as tailors and modistes do in dress. The one changes almost as frequently as the other, and as capriciously. All the more ought these three classes, the dispensers of literature, to recognize the importance of the part they are called upon to play in the education of their countrymen, and to perform that part conscientiously.

As to American authors, it is but fair to say that few, if any, of them manifest any intention of discouraging patriotism by their writings; while some, and these by far the greatest, are most nobly patriotic. When our authors err, it is mostly from ignorance or from the imitation of foreign models. It ought to be frankly admitted that the majority of our literary men and women, as well as of our artists, are persons of very ordinary intelligence and education, whom a desire for social success, or the inability to pursue any productive calling, has turned to story-telling or verse-forging. That such persons should have any higher purpose than to pander to the taste of the thoughtless multitude, or any power to produce anything valuable or enduring, is not to be expected. Since the long-needed copyright law has been enacted, although it is premature to guess even how far it will contribute to exclude the more undesirable kinds of foreign popular literature from our markets, it certainly ought, by securing to American authors their lawful rights in their works in England and the English colonies, to induce a superior class of men and women to enter the paths of literature in this country. But even authors who deserve to be called literary people are often lamentably ignorant of the character of that literature which our country demands, and which a genuine patriotism would hasten to supply-a literature exhibiting the results of the American spirit in all the departments of thought and life. Very

many of them not only prefer foreign subjects (which are entirely allowable, if treated in the American spirit,) but also treat all their subjects from a foreign point of view, presenting as valid and binding many notions and conventions which our nation, by the very fact of its existence, utterly repudiates, and which can only tend to obliterate the American ideal in the hearts and minds of our people. In saying this, I must not be understood to advocate any Know-nothingism in literature, any narrow, supercilious insularity, such as so frequently pervades English literary works. Our literature ought to be broad, cosmopolitan, sympathetic; but just for that reason it ought to be American in spirit, and not Chinese, Hindoo, German, French, or English. There is no reason why it should not deal with any form of human thought or life, provided it always deal with it from the American point of view, which alone is truly cosmopolitan. At the same time, it argues a certain blindness to the poetic possibilities of American life, and a certain want of true patriotism, when an American author, instead of taking the subjects for his art from the life of his own people or the scenery of his own country, goes to look for them among the people and scenery of other lands. It ought to be one of his chief endeavors to idealize American life, to bring out its latent poetry; in a word, to throw around it that ennobling charm which Burns and Scott threw around the life of the Scottish people. No more patriotic service can any American perform for his country today than this. And this life of ours, in spite of all its outward frivolity, selfishness, and materialism, contains numerous elements of genuine poetry, which it needs but a true literary artist to bring out and make glorious forever. If truth and reality be the basis of all noble art, literary and other, then no life ever offered greater possibilities for art than our life offers to-day. For, however conventional we may, in our obliviousness, allow ourselves to become in actual practice, the underlying ideals of our lives are still simplicity, genuineness, intrinsic, incommunicable worth. What more can a serious artist desire? How much grander and more poetical is the spectacle of a human being quietly and persistently striving to be simply noble in his own person and right, than that of one struggling to obtain lands,

honors, titles, or even conjugal happiness! And yet how blind are most of our literary men and women to this fact! How few literary works in our country have subjects turning upon what is, after all, the pivot of all true human life at any time!

But, if much of the literature produced by native Americans is foreign and unpatriotic in spirit, that mass of really foreign literature which, in cheap reprints, has threatened to drive our native products from the market, is still more so. A great deal has been spoken and written against these reprints on the score of the dishonesty involved in them, and with good reason; but they deserve far more and far stronger reprobation on other grounds. Even if the authors' copyright had been, in all cases, duly regarded, they ought still, in the majority of cases, to be protested against, as tending to corrupt our people and to draw them away from that simple ideal of life and freedom which is the very soul of our nation. I am here referring not solely or chiefly to reproductions of those unclean works with which France favors us, or of that vapid, sentimental Damen-literatur in which Germany abounds, but rather, and especially, to those innumerable reprints of English works of unexceptionable conventional morality with which the whole country is deluged. Against French immorality we are, in some degree, protected by our native puritanism, and where that fails, by conventional hypocrisy; while German sentimentality, lacking, as it usually does, the salt of humor, strikes us as insipid, and therefore lays but slight hold upon us. In English works, on the other hand, there is something far more germane to our character, a subtle atavistic poison, which puts to sleep the new man, the free American, in us, and wakes the slumbering servile or overbearing EnglishStill more frequently it wakes the slumbering Englishwoman. However useful such literature may be in England, which is dominated by the spirit of caste, rendering necessary the cultivation of servility in one class to match the arrogance of another, it is distinctly hurtful in America, where there is no recognized caste, and where nothing is more essential to public and private well-being than the spirit of manly and womanly self-respect, and of contempt for all factitious worth conferred by birth, position, title, or wealth.

man.