Text: T. S. Eliot, “[Review of the Cambridge History of English Literature],” The Athenaeum (London, UK), whole no. 4643, April 25, 1919, pp. 236-237

[page 236, column 2:]

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Vol. II. Edited by William P. Trent, Professor of English Literature in Columbia University ; John Erskine, Professor of English in Columbia University ; Stuart P. Sherman, Professor of English in the University of Illinois; Carl van Doren, Head Master of the Brearley School. (Cambridge, University Press. 17s. 6d. net.)

THIS is Volume II of the American Supplement to the “Cambridge History of English Literature.” We look forward with gnawing curiosity to Volume II] wondering what it may contain besides the article on Brander Matthews which is apparently promised: for Volume II brings us up through a chapter on “Books for Children.” Did Professor Tassin of Columbia University, to whom this topic was allocated, warm to enthusiasm when he received his commission? He has done his work well, and so have most of his colleagues. But the book has the effect, not of a history, but of a collection of scattered essays on the various fragments of American letters, done by men who did not collaborate, but worked apart, and each with his own aim and method.

It is inevitable that any work on American literature should contain a good deal of stuffing. The fault is not in the lack of material so much as in its lack of cohesion. There could be written a very instructive account of American Puritanism, with its interesting transition to Transcendentalism ; but this would be a history not of American but of Boston literature, and it would turn out to be not so much a history of the brahminical canon of Boston literature as of Boston Society. The great figures of American literature are peculiarly isolated, and their isolation is an element, if not of their greatness, certainly of their originality. When we glance over the contents of most of the chapters we acquire some perception of how isolated the great figures are. Some of the subjects are too forbidding for any eye but that of the professional anthropologist — “Magazines, Annuals and Gift Books,” “Familiar Verse,” “Dialect Writers.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, on Daniel Webster, tries hard to make something literary out of it. He quotes from the “Bunker Hill Oration”: —

Senator Lodge's comments follow : —

The comment needs no comment. Miss Putnam, on Prescott, remarks enthusiastically that the historian's wife “was a splendid comrade for her husband in the sheltered life that had to be his lot.’‘ She fails to draw any comparison between Prescott and Motley and European historians which might enable us to value the two Americans at their proper rate. Professor MacMechan's essay on Thoreau is good, but not written from any very fresh or surprising point of view.

The three important men in the book are Poe, Whitman and Hawthorne. Professor Campbell, writing on Poe, makes his article turn on Poe's genuine and unappreciated merits as a critic. It is not a point of vast importance, as most of the writers whom Poe criticized are embalmed only in their coffins and in Poe's abuse; but Poe's intellectual abilities should not be overlooked; he was the directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either America or England. It is a pity that Professor Campbell fails to analyse Poe's peculiar originality as a poet. He perceives the relation of Poe to Byron, Moore and the Romantic movement in [page 237:] general, but misses observing that Poe is both the reductio ad absurdum and the artistic perfection of this movement. Professor Holloway's article on Whitman tells of everything (including several interesting things) except his poetry. Professor Erskine's “Hawthorne” is surely the most serious and intelligent essay in the volume.

We must regret that this article is not supplemented elsewhere in the book by any coherent study of the society of which Hawthorne did not quite form a part. For this, Barrett Wendell's “Literary History of America” remains the best reference. Such a supplement would be as useful to most Americans as to foreigners, inasmuch as in this context “foreigners” includes all Americans who are not New Englanders. Hawthorne was very much a New Englander, but he was not really a member of the Transcendentalist group which clustered round Emerson. He was somewhat affected by it, but never engrossed in it. The reasons for his independence Mr. Erskine elicits with commendable skill. It is quite right to say of Hawthorne :

Mr. Erskine also makes the point that

Neither Emerson nor any of the others was a real observer of the moral life. Hawthorne was, and was a realist. He had, also, what no one else in Boston had — the firmness, the true coldness, the hard coldness of the genuine artist. In consequence, the observation of moral life in the “Scarlet Letter,” in the “House of the Seven Gables,” and even in some of the tales and sketches, has solidity, has permanence, the permanence of art. It will always be of use; the essays of Emerson are already an encumbrance. The work of Hawthorne is truly a criticism — true because a fidelity of the artist and not a mere conviction of the man — of the Puritan morality, of the Transcendentalist morality, and of the world which Hawthorne knew. It is a criticism as Henry James's work is a criticism of the America of his times, and as the work of Turgenev and Flaubert is a criticism of the Russia and the France of theirs. Hawthorne had even the minor token of literary genius, the genius for titles, as “Endicott and the Red Cross,” “The Wives of the Dead.”

Hawthorne is the only elder American who reached this critical greatness, and Hawthorne might have been greater — that is, more important — had he had a more important subject. Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman are all pathetic creatures; they are none of them so great as they might have been. But the lack of intelligent literary society is not responsible for their shortcomings ; it is much more certainly responsible for some of their merits. The originality, if not the full mental capability, of these men was brought out, forced out, by the starved environment. This originality gives them a distinction which some heavier-weight authors do not obtain. Compare “Ulalume” with “The Witch of Atlas” (or whatever poem of Shelley's seems more apposite), and Poe appears the more creative, the more distinguished. Compare “Leaves of Grass” with “Dramatic Monologues,” and you see that Whitman is more creative, more original, more “ shocking,” in single lines, than Browning. Compare the “Scarlet Letter” with “Adam Bede,” and the distinction, again, is on the side of Hawthorne. What the Americans, in point of fact, did suffer from was the defect of society in the larger sense, not from exiguity of intelligentsia — [column 2:] intelligentsia would have spoiled their distinction. Their world was thin; it was not corrupt enough. Worst of all it was secondhand ; it was not original and self-dependent — it was a shadow. Poe and Whitman, like bulbs in a glass bottle, could only exhaust what was in them. Hawthorne, more tentacular and inquisitive, sucked every actual germ of nourishment out of his granite soil ; but the soil was mostly granite.

These reflections are probably alien to the point of view of the able university critics who have confected the present book, which is provided with an important and encyclopedic bibliography.

T. S. E.