Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/772

Rh 728 AMERICAN LITERATURE itself as a novelty. * Similarly, when the latter writer, among his anecdotes of the conscription, tells us that &quot; one young man who was drawn claimed to be exempt because he was the only son of a widowed mother who supported him,&quot; the amusement is all in the unexpected turn of the last three words. In contradistinction to this, the humour of Don Quixote, of Falstaff, of Uncle Toby, of Major Bath, of the Vicar of Wakefield and Sir Roger de Coverley, of Major Pendennis and Bishop Blougram, consists in its truth. What these people do or say never surprises us. It is absurd as a great part of human life is absurd, and, laughing at them, we feel we are laughing at something in ourselves. The best recent instances of this higher kind of humour which American literature affords are to be found in Washington Irving, in Mr Lowell s Biglow Papers (to which, as a considerable national poem, we shall have to revert), in passages of Mr Longfellow s Kavanagh, in Mr Hawthorne s Seven Galles and Seven Vagabonds, and in the prose and verse of Dr Holmes. In his three pleasant volumes, The Autocrat, The Professor, and The Poet at the Breakfast Table, there is much that might have been omitted, more that should have been compressed. They contain too many jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and are tainted here and there with what we must be excused for regarding as New England slang. But they are pervaded by a genial glow of kindly sym pathy, and they exhibit, with a quaint mannerism not without its attractions personages, and situations, and sentiments which we recognise as at once odd and real. Dr Holmes s works have frequent reflections of Montaigne and Burton, and the Nodes Ambrosiance ; he mixes pathos and whimsicality after the manner of Lamb and Sterne. His humorous verses, the best known of which, &quot; Daily Trials,&quot; &quot; Evening, by a Tailor,&quot; and the &quot; Music-grinders,&quot; inevi tably recall the drolleries of Hood. His genius has, nevertheless, an original vein, less mellow, but at its best as genuine as that of his older masters. Several of the miscellaneous papers, essays, and periodicals belonging to the earlier years of the century, as Salmagundi, The Talisman of Bryant and Verplanck, The Olipodiana of W. G. Clarke, and the Sparrow Grass Papers, are fre quently enlivened by sparkles of wit and evidences of keen discrimination. In others we trace the germs of a vicious style which threatens to degrade the lighter litera ture of the States. The Charcoal Sketches of Joseph Neal which might be entitled Comicalities of the Mississippi are among the earliest examples of the habit of playing with slang terms characteristic of his successors. An author who relies for effect on giving his imaginary personages such nicknames as &quot; Dawson Dawdle,&quot; &quot; Peter Ploddy,&quot; &quot; Tippleton Tipps,&quot; and &quot; Shiverton Shanks,&quot; is more likely to be the cause of wit in others than the source of humour himself. During the last generation in America the anxiety to be national has led many of her minor authors to make themselves ridiculous. To avoid walking like Englishmen, they have gone on all-fours ; to escape the imputation of Anglo-Saxon features, they have painted their faces with ochre and put ear-rings through their nostrils; forsaking the speech of Addison and Steele, they have expressed themselves in an unseemly jargon of strange tongues. Of this mocking-bird humour the most legitimate form is that of the Biglow Papers, where the New England dialect is employed with effect to give voice to the sentiments of that district of the country diiring the national struggle, on one side of which it took the lead. A similar justification may be put forward in behalf of the Californian peculiarities, which are perhaps not too promi nent in the often really humorous pieces of Bret Harte. The mixture of two dialects in the Breitmann Ballads is a bolder licence, though for the best of these Mr Leland may plead the wide-spread use of the .nongrel speech, and the original success of a drollery which has only become tiresome from his not knowing when his readers have had more than enough of it. The parodies of Mr Browne (Artemus Ward) are open to the same criticism. The writer was a man of wit and talent, and therefore his writings are amusing. They are good specimens of the worst style of satire : for the wit that relies on bad spelling is almost as false as that which consists in bad language. In vindication of the &quot; Showman,&quot; it must, however, be observed that his sarcasm is generally directed against mean or ridiculous things. But his example has paved, for those who have caught the trick of his phrase and who are unrestrained by his good feeling and good sense ; an easy descent to the lowest form of light literature that which panders to the vice of moral scepticism and thrives on the buffoonery of making great and noble things appear mean or ridiculous. The names of those who habitually feed on mental garbage should be left to sink into the oblivion from which they have unfortu nately emerged. It is painful but necessary to observe that some of the more considerable writers and thinkers of the New World are apt to condescend on occasion to this burlesque way of writing. American light literature bristles in puns which are at best the &quot; a-b abs &quot; of wit. Of these, Mr Lowell (a severe critic of everything English) has made the worst &quot; Milton is the only man who has got much poetry out of a cataract and that was a cataract in his eye.&quot; Mr Leland, the next worst, in his book of travels &quot; If a thing of beauty be a jaw for ever, as the American said of his handsome, scolding wife, then the donkey boys of Cairo are the most jaw-ous and beautiful creatures ; for the sound of their voices drieth not up.&quot; Eccentricities of this sort, with the graver irreverences which intrude themselves even into the pulpits of the West, should be universally discredited as blasphemies against the first principles of taste. They are as &quot; flat, stale, and unprofitable &quot; as the contortions of a wearied clown. True humour as ever in our classics must go hand-in-hand with seriousness ; it must never forget that behind the comic there is a tragic element in human life. The mere &quot;farce &quot;is contemptible, because it is as unnatural as the expression of a countenance dis torted by a continual grin. In forgetfulness of this lies the greatest danger of the recent literature of America, and we can only trust to the higher intellectual instincts and tendencies of the age to detect and resist it. 5. NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM. Religion, the Theolog first motive power of thought in America, has continued to flow, both in its old channel that of the orthodox Puritanism which came down from Eliot and Edwards through Dwight to Hodge and the Princeton Essays and in another, that of the new forms of faith advocated by W. E. Channing, and with gravely heterodox modifica- Chanuin tions by Theodore Parker. Criticism of Channing s theological position is apart from our purpose here. He claims notice in a review of literature by the vigour of his conceptions and his graceful and correct expression of them. His earliest considerable essay, the Moral Argu ment against Calvinism, one of the best known of his numerous controversial works, indicates by its title his prevailing attitude. He relied through life on a priori moral arguments, and employed them as his engines of attack against all persons, institutions, or practices that offended his rigid sense of justice or his enthusiastic benevolence e.g., Napoleon I., War, and Slavery. A generous indignation against wrong, and keen practical sense of the duties of life, are more conspicuous in hi* writings than speculative power ; but his insight into the political position of parties and the probability of future