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ties which inspire that literature, and pass judgment upon the present, and prophesy for the future, according to the results of that examination.

The hopes of a literature hide in the measure of individual life which its makers possess. Those ages are rich in which a great many men appear, writing books because they are men and have something to say, not because books are to be written. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, English literature was barren of individuality to a degree which seems now almost incredible, and, therefore, although it was enormously prolific of books, it occupies less space in the history of letters than ten years of the Regency or of the reign of Victoria.

You can swear

to the age of almost any English book that was produced between 1750 and 1800, from glancing over three sentences; for everybody wrote like every body else, and an author no more dreamed of individuality in the style of his sentences, than of individuality in the cut of his coat. To pass, on the contrary, from Lamb to Coleridge, from Byron to Scott, from Wordsworth to Keats; or to go from an essay of Macaulay's to a review of Sydney Smith's, from a dramatic lyric of Browning to an idyl of Tennyson, is like traveling from the moorlands to the meadows, from the hills to the downs, or from the smiling uplands to the sad sea-shore. Every writer of all these has his own charm, because every man of them had his own value. Not less remarkable is the contrast between the literature of France under the empire, and under the restoration and the monarchy of July. In the one case you have writers writing; in the other, men thinking, creating, protesting: in the one case you have dilettantism and virtuosism, uniformity of style, and triviality of substance; in the other, an infinite diversity of development, ardor, reality, and the thousand-fold beauty of reality.

How does our own literature bear the test of such criticism?

Writers we have always had, because we have been always in some degree, at least, an educated people, and education, if it cannot guarantee inspiration, at least continues the traditions of literary ambition, and the phantoms of an interest in literature. But of authors-of men who communicated themselves to manVOL. IX.-25

kind, because there was something in themselves to communicate-our nation has not been so abundantly prolific. From the settlement of the colonies, down to the epoch of our independence. only two men detach themselves from the multitude of cisatlantic scribes, as emphatic individualities, expressing themselves through the written word. Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin are, as it seems to us, the two permanent realities contributed by colonial America to the literary history of the English race.

The colonial position of our ancestors does not suffice to account for this fact; for the colonial Greeks enriched the literature of their language, in the course of a single century, with larger and more splendid contributions than have been made to the wealth of English letters by Anglo-American authorship in twice that period of time. A plausible explanation of the comparative poverty of American literature, through so many years, is to be found, we think, in the fact, that literature is an art, and can only flourish where it is cultivated as an art. The idea of beauty in form is coincident, in the mind of a genuine author, with the idea of truth in substance. He must not only have a purpose worth fulfilling, but he must take pleasure in the fulfillment of that purpose, and he must so fulfill it that the manner of its achievement shall give pleasure to others. Now, our forefathers in English America were extremely hostile to all the arts. Their ideas of education were analogous with those of the Spartans, who held, as Plato tells us, that a "knowledge of letters for practical purposes should be common to all; but that no specific encouragement should be given to the cultivation of elegant or speculative literature." Even Jonathan Edwards, who was a great metaphysical author, was not of purpose an author, but simply by the necessity of his genius, which dictated, even to him, a Puritan, an artistic perfection of logical forms with which no Greek or Frenchman could have quarreled.

Franklin was more deliberately an artist. He had not made himself familiar with the French literature of this age without imbibing something of the literary temper, and he is fairly entitled, we think, to be considered the first of American authors.

His autobiography is as charming in

form as it is entertaining and suggestive in matter, and it shines out, among the commonplace compositions of the time on both sides of the Atlantic, with the lustre of a positive and individual value. With the establishment of our national independence came the desire for a national literature. We were beginning to emancipate ourselves from the spirits of Puritanism and Quakerism. With the increase of wealth, the cultivation of the arts of refinement and beauty had commenced among us, and the first thrills of artistic inspiration were felt in the national genius. Then, every nation has its literature, and we, having become a nation, necessarily must have ours! The sentiment of amour propre was enlisted in the question; and, as that sentiment is not apt to bear very rich and racy fruit, it was not surprising that the first deliberately literary productions of the new republic should not have been of a nature either to appall or to enchant mankind. Moreover, the first epoch of our national life was contemporaneous with a period singularly prolific of great works and of gifted authors in the mother country, and the cisatlantic muse was abashed, in her first timid essays, by the sudden and splendid sallies of her elder sister beyond the seas.

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Not a few of those courageous Americans, nevertheless, who adventured into print during the earlier part of the present century, amply vindicated their conduct, by the evidence they gave sonal value and of personal force. Bryant had certainly as good reason for singing as Beattie, and the stories, which Cooper had to tell, were better worth the telling than those which fermented in the mind of Mr. James; and if it was worth while that Addison and Steele should come back to console an England thirsting for their pure, pellucid prose, Mr. Irving's right to rob the gray goose of his quill shall never be ques

tioned.

Sparks of true fire flashed for a moment from the words of other men who yet drew back from the path of glory, because uncheered by cordial criticism, and unwelcomed by a public which had not yet accommodated itself to all the necessities, nor accustomed itself to all the privileges, of its new national position. As time went on, and the American nationality gathered vigor and consistency, the literature of America

began to assume more respectable proportions; and, within the last ten or twelve years, it has developed with a rapidity and a reality which certainly afforded us no reasons for despondent views of the future. A generation of writers is giving way to a generation of authors, and though it is, of course, a very distressing thing that we have not yet produced an authentic and unquestionable Shakespeare, nor even an admitted Pope, we may yet take some small comfort, surely, from the fact, that we have given birth to a certain number of artists in words, whose touch the world has recognized as betraying the individuality of genius, and the reality of manhood.

The perfume of a page of Hawthorne is as positive and as peculiar as the aroma of a line of Tennyson or a chapter of Dickens. The man, who could confound the sheen of one of Emerson's glittering phrases with the clouded glow of a sentence of Carlyle, would be capable of buying a sapphire for an amethyst. The subtle analysis and morbid intensity of Poe define his creations as sharply as if each were a living human face of wrath, or woe, or crime; and if you do not recognize the music of a special soul in every chime that Longfellow chooses to ring, it must be a purely unselfish benevolence and public spirit which induce you to pay your subscription to the Philharmonic Society! When you take your Diogenes' lantern and go through the libraries in search of a man, where can you be more sure of finding one than within the covers of the "Biglow Papers," or the "Fable for Critics;" or, if you are looking for a woman, is there no womanhood-warm, at least, and earnest, if not perfectly wise, and queenly, and gracious-in the sorrows of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the wrath of "Dred?"

We have authors, indeed, among us— men who mean something, hope something, fear something, love something, and who can work, with all their hearts, to set their meaning plainly before their fellow-men-to communicate their hopes and fears, and love to the world, for the world's delight and use, and not merely to discharge their own overcharged minds, or to fill their own unfilled pock

ets.

This being so, it is time, we think, that we should have serious critics as well as authors' judges to deal with these

men manwise, to try these artists by the laws of art, and to take upon themselves the troublesome office of suiting praise to judgment.

We are notoriously an appreciative people. Nowhere will you hear the merit of good books more genially discussed, or more warmly recognized, than in the most cultivated circles of American society. The delicious criticism of sympathy is exquisitely dealt out, in many an American home, to the most passionate, profound, and earnest artists of the world of letters; and if the number of editions and of copies put into circulation be a fair criterion of the estimation in which an author is held by the public, our British cousins must own that they lag behind ourselves in their appreciation of, and admiration for, not a few of the greatest among those whom the voice of their own best criticism has pronounced the great of English literature.

But it must be confessed that our public criticism is not wholly worthy of our actual rank in the world of letters. Its defects are not sure to be of a mean or malicious kind. We are, happily, not cursed with much of that petty spirit of clique and starveling ill-will, which degrade and make worthless the minor criticism of the London press. But our criticism too commonly wants dignity and sincerity. We deal our praise out very lightly, with a kind of good-natured nonchalance, as if it didn't matter much after all, and it was better for all parties, on the whole, to "laugh than look sad." If life were only one long alternation of dinings and digestions, the philosophy of this jovial old adage would be as sound as it is cheery; but we must not be vexed if a man, who has a serious and intense interest in his art, grows rather sad than merry when all his efforts are rewarded with an undiscriminating salvo of applause, or a patronizing nod of encouragement. Welcome to the true author's soul is the strong, cordial voice which recognizes his honesty and his manliness, and mingles, with sincere praise of that which is beautiful in his work, sturdy reprobation of that which is not beautiful, and a distinct intimation of that which is less than beautiful.

Who can tell how much good Alfred Tennyson gained from that stout, straightforward, large-hearted paper in which old Christopher North took him

so smartly to task for his early follies, and commended, with such a fond and generous warmth, his immortal gifts— his works of real beauty already achieved? Heaven send you such a critic of that first book which you now profoundly meditate, dear and aspiring young friend! You will bless his memory when your laurels are greenest.

If there ever was an author who deserved such a critic, and needed such an one, alike for praise and blame, it is our old acquaintance and esteemed prosepoet, Herman Melville.

It is long, now, since we first sailed with Melville to Typee, but we shall never forget the new sensations of that delectable voyage. Over silent stretches of the sleeping sea it led us, and left us on a miraculous shore, to live there a miraculous life.

The tropic island, into whose delicious glades we wandered, was not, indeed, wholly new to us; for we had been there before, partly in the way of business, and partly on a pleasure trip, with Bougainville and La Perouse, with Foster and Cook. But the manner of our being there was intensely new. It was the dream of the passionate and despairing lover of "Locksley Hall," fulfilled in the spirit of Robinson Crusoe, and with all the "modern improvements." We had, indeed, burst all links of habit, and had wandered to a happy world of most unconventional bliss-to islets favored of heaven.

"Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

Breadths of tropic shade, and palms in cluster, knots of paradise;

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,

Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy fruited tree, Summer isles of Eden, lying in dark purple spheres of sea."

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its ugly mouth at our own precious persons, we should never have wished to leave so enchanting a place.

How Mr. Melville contrived to get us thither, we never stopped to think. We accepted his maoris, his palm-trees, his amazing gymnastics, his irresistible Fayaway, and his faithful Toby, as we had accepted the graundees of Peter Wilkins, or the Uncases of Cooper.

The book fascinated us with the fascination of genius. We recognized in this new writer a man's large nature, and quick sympathy with all things beautiful and strong-an eye to see, nerves to feel, muscle to achieve, and a heart to dare. Was the charming romance, after all, intended to be a satire upon the world in which we habitually live? Were these strange and beautiful pictures painted to strike us into thought, and develop in us that vague universal conviction of needed and impending change, which now pervades all Christendom, and mingles with the fancies and colors the speech of all who think and feel?

This might or might not have been 80. We felt that the writer had purpose enough in him, at all events, and that whatever the origin of this first book might have been, it was but the prelude of a career which could not fail to be, at least, remarkable.

In the matters of style and form, Mr. Melville's first book exhibited a rare degree of ripeness and perfection. It was deformed with ungraceful locutions, it is true, and the simple flow of the narrative was not unbroken in all its course. But what was not to be hoped from a young author who displayed so much native intensity and vigor of speechsuch a command of vivid coloring, and such a felicitous touch in his designs.

The promise of "Typee" has been kept, but rather to the ear than to the secret spirit. Mr. Melville has done a great deal since; but he has not yet done the precise things we hoped of him. He has pursued a distinct path with unfaltering steps; he has shown capital qualities, and, above all, the indispensable first qualities of pluck and perseverance. But he has been going wrong, we fear, rather than right, and we wish with all our heart that we could bring him over to our way of thinking.

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Typee" was published, if our memory deceive us not (how can one recall the date of a book, which has numbered, at least, twice as many editions as it

99.66

has years ?) in or about the year 1847; that is just ten years ago, and Mr. Melville has suffered hardly one of these ten years to pass without reminding us agreeably of his existence. Mardi,' "Omoo," " Redburn, "Moby Dick," "Israel Potter," the "Piazza Tales," and the " Confidence Man," make up a catalogue which would prove, if it proved nothing more, our author's sincere devotion to his art, and would entitle him, therefore, to the interest and the respect of all who love American literature, and hope noble things for it.

Has that devotion been as wise as it has been fervent? is a question which, however, continually recurs to us, in perusing Mr. Melville's books, and we closed the " O Confidence Man" with the conviction that it was time this question should be resolutely and clearly answered.

Everybody who read "Typee" thoughtfully (and, it was Mr. Melville's fault that so few people could read thoughtfully a book so full of fascination), was struck with a tendency to vague and whimsical speculation which constantly betrays itself in the turn of the hero's reflections, and in the character of his Yankee Sancho Panza, and seafaring man Friday-Toby."

In the midst of the dreamiest, the most suggestively naïve and unconscious passages of picturesque description, you stumble over quaint phrases of a vagrant philosophy, and find the most modern metaphysics mingled with the most primitive love-making, after a perfectly amazing fashion. It is as if that philosophic polygamist, John Buncle, gentleman, suddenly came upon you, while you were lazily happy under a palm-tree, in the company of Bernardin de St. Pierre and Daniel Defoe. This was annoying, certainly; but then we had only to remember that "Typeo” was a first book, and that as no man suddenly becomes a thorough villain, so no man suddenly becomes a complete author.

An ardent and ingenious young writer sits down to his first book, as if it were to be his last also. There are a thousand thoughts busy in his brain-a thousand experiences fermenting in his heart. How does he know whether he shall ever have another opportunity of uttering them? So, fitly, or unfitly, germanely or extravagantly they come into speech, hints of them crop out every

where, in unexpected places; in short, the general idiosyncrasy of a writer is, at least, quite as apt to be betrayed in his first book as his special intention is.

Mr. Melville was not only a young man, but a young American, and a young American educated according to the standard of our day and country. He bad all the metaphysical tendencies which belong so eminently to the American mind-the love of antic and extravagant speculation, the fearlessness of intellectual consequences, and the passion for intellectual legislation, which distinguish the cleverest of our people. It was inevitable that he should have stamped himself pretty clearly on his book, and his book was all the more interesting that he had so stamped himself upon it. Still we waited anxiously for number two. It came, and with it came more than we had anticipated of the metaphysics of "Typee," and less than we had hoped of its poetry. Had not Mr. Melville been impelled to a good deal of sharp, sensible writing in "Omoo," by his wrath against the missionaries, it is clear, we think, that he would have plunged headlong into the vasty void of the obscure, the oracular, and the incomprehensible. But a little wholesome indignation is a capital stimulus to good writing, and the beneficial effects of it were never more clearly apparent than in this very book. We trembled for its successor, and we trembled with reason; for, when "Mardi" came, or rather when we came to "Mardi," our voyage thither" affected us much as it would to be literally knocked into the middle of next week.

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We frankly own here, and now, and once for all, that we have not, and never expect to have, the faintest notion of why we took a voyage to "Mardi," nor of what we found when we reached "Mardi," if we ever did reach it, nor of how we got away from "Mardi" again, if we ever did get away from that enchanted, mysterious place. We would just as soon undertake to give anybody a connected and coherent account of the Mardi gras of Paris, on coming out of the Bal de l'Opéra at three in the morning, as criticise, or describe, or analyze the Mardi" of our friend Mr. Melville. Do we believe, then, that Mr. Melville meant nothing by taking us to "Mardi"-that he had no purpose at all in his mind, but was carnivalizing

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when he wrote the book? Not a bit of it; for, dull of perception, and still more dull of instinct must the critic be who does not recognize in every page of Mr. Melville's writings, however vague, and obscure, and fantastic, the breathing spirit of a man of genius, and of a passionate and earnest man of genius. It is precisely because we are always sure that Mr. Melville does mean something, and something intrinsically manly and noble, too, that we quarrel with him for hiding his light under such an impervious bushel.

Mr. Melville is not a dilettante in metaphysics. If he is fantastically philosophical in his language, it is because he wants to say something subtle and penetrating which he has discerned, or thinks he has discerned, and take this to be the most effective way of saying it. And this is just the issue we have to make with him. We made it when we read "Mardi ;" we have been obliged to make it, again and again, in reading his subsequent books. What, for instance, did Mr. Melville mean when he wrote " Moby Dick?" We have a right to know; for he carried us floundering on with him after his great white whale, through all manner of scenes, and all kinds of company-now perfectly exhausted with fatigue and deafened with many words whereof we understood no syllable, and then suddenly refreshed with a brisk sea breeze and a touch of nature kindling as the dawn. There was so much truth in the book that we knew the author must have meant to give us more, and we were excessively vexed with him for darkening his counsel by words which we could not but esteem to be words without knowledge. Is it not a hard case, O sympathizing reader? Here is a man of distinct and unquestionable, genius; a man who means righteously and thinks sensibly; a man whose aims do honor to himself and to his country; a man who wishes to understand life himself, and to help other people to understand it; a man, too, who has proved not once only but fifty, yea, a hundred times, that he can write good English-good, strong, sweet, clear English-a man who has music in his soul, and can ring fair chimes upon the silver bells of styleand this man will persist in distorting the images of his mind, and in deodorizing the flowers of his fancy; a man born to create, who resolves to anatomize; a

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