The American Mind: The E. T. Earl LecturesPerry, Bliss
History
The American Mind: The E. T. Earl Lectures
Perry, Bliss
American literature -- History and criticism; National characteristics, American
What went on in California between 1849 and 1852 is precisely typical
of what is going on everywhere to-day. American men and women are
learning, as we say, "to get together." It is the distinctly
twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of getting
together, not merely to conserve the interests of literature and art
and society, but to preserve the individual himself in his just rights.
Any one who misunderstands the depth and the scope of the present
political restlessness which is manifested in every section of the
country, misunderstands the American instinct for fellowship. It is a
law of that fellowship that what is right and legitimate for me is
right and legitimate for the other fellow also. The American mind and
the American conscience are becoming socialized before our very eyes.
American art and literature must keep pace with this socialization of
the intelligence and the conscience, or they will be no longer
representative of the true America.
Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism lie close at
hand. They are to be found here and there even in the rebellious,
well-nigh anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. They are to be
found throughout the prose and verse of Whittier. No one has preached a
truer or more effective gospel of fellowship than Longfellow, whose
poetry has been one of the pervasive influences in American democracy,
although Longfellow had but little to say about politics and never
posed in a slouch hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots.
Fellowship is taught in the _Biglow Papers_ of Lowell and the stories
of Mrs. Stowe. It is wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, and
it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately written pages of
Hawthorne. But in the books written for the great common audience of
American men and women, like the novels of Winston Churchill; and in
the plays which have scored the greatest popular successes, like those
of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the
doctrine of fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in the poems
of James Whitcomb Riley and of Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds
of lesser known writers of verse and prose who have echoed Foss's
sentiment about living in a "house by the side of the road" and being a
"friend of man."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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