The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837Various
History
The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837
Various
Periodicals
POLITICS AND LITERATURE.--We regret to perceive that our
contemporary, the 'American Monthly,' has pushed out upon the stormy
sea of politics. We believe with DANIEL WEBSTER, that our literary
periodicals ought rather to constitute a happy restraint upon the
asperities which political controversies engender, than to aid in
creating them. Let us keep literature and politics distinct. We
need a kind of neutral ground, on which men of all creeds and all
politics may meet, and forget the bitterness of party feeling.
Literature should be this ground; and the only prominent objection
to this position, that we have yet seen, is that the _English_
periodicals are some of them political, and that therefore _ours_
should be so too! To say nothing of the independent, republican
spirit evinced in imitating foreign works, as if we were incapable of
originality in any thing, let us look at the different circumstances
of the case. In America, politics are in every body's hands, in the
newspapers of the day, large and small, for the merest trifle of
cost. In Great Britain, on the contrary, it is the very reverse.
The metropolitan daily journals cost so much, that thousands are
wholly unable to procure them; and national politics are conveyed
to a large proportion of the public through the less frequently
published magazines, one number of which frequently passes into fifty
or an hundred hands. How small the necessity or demand, on the other
hand, in this country, for an admixture of politics in our literary
periodicals, when the partizan may take his daily political dish
for a single penny, or at most, three! Beside, premeditately long
political disquisitions are universally considered as sad bores,
at the best. They are rarely read by more than one side, and make
no converts. Let no sinister motive be ascribed to these remarks;
for, in our own case, this Magazine possesses the good will of all
parties, and has neither the indifference nor the opposition of any.
We speak but for the common cause of American literature.
* * * * *
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