Life — December 3, 1896 — page 5: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GOLD STANDARD IN LITERA- on ‘ Burns” TURE. CARLYLE (which been recently put in a in his essay has volume for students [Longmans], with a capable and sympathetic introduction by Wilson Farrand), explaining one of the re- sults of the strong national feeling in Burns and Scott, says: ‘Our chief literary men « «no longer live among us like a French colony. . . Our literature no longer grows in water but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate.” If Carlyle were to utter similar sentiments in America to-day he would be called a pro- vincial, That is the final taunt of the kind of criticism that considers itself “large,” “detached,” and all the other adjectives that ko with an admiration for what is foreign and contempt for what is native. Color has been given to this criticism by the kind of braggadocio that asserts that American books must be esteemed because they are American, An American book can no more be declared good because it is GRAVY, AND THE POINTER CAD ADVANTAGES OF A CANINE CADDY. Recife : SOAK THE GOLF BALLS IN QUAIL VER LOSE THE SCENT. American, than a depreciated dollar can be made whole by national fiat, ‘ without the consent of any other nation on earth.” The gold of good literature passes current the world over, not because it is national, but because it 1s good literature. The American eagle stamped on its back cannot make a bad book good, either here or “ abroad.” HAT Carlyle was praising in Burns was ‘his sixcerity, his indisputable airoftruth. . . A Scottish peasants life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man’s life, and therefore significant tomen, +. . He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience.” The best book of a man must grow out of what he really is—and the best book of an American writer ought to be an American book—not an imitation of an English or French model. That is all that tne ‘eagle's scream" can ever accomplish in our literature. And there is a side of this sensible Americanism that touches readers, as well as writers, Itis very effectively put by Brander Matthews in one of the essays in his recent volume, ‘‘Aspects of Fiction’ (Harper's). He says: “If we accept the statement that, after all, literature is only a criticism of life, it is of value in proportion as its criticism of life is truthful. Surely it needs no argument to show that the life it is most needful for us Americans to have criticised truthfully is our own life. /¢ #s only in our own Literature that we can hope to learn the truth about ourselves.” No doubt Professor Matthews would liber- ally interpret the “only” in the above sen- tence—for all his writing shows that he is a believer in the illumination that comes to any man froma comparative study of other litera- tures than his own, He has written very charmingly, himself, of French dramatists and Scotch novelists, But what he objects to is American writers who think the only path to fame lies in writing after some foreign model. He has no admiration for American “Lorna Doones” or American Dickenses and Kiplings. ‘The gold standard is as good for American letters as for American finance. We ought not to tolerate any fifty-three-cent writers posing as real dollars, Neither ought we to give any preference to gold sovereigns over American five-dollar gold pieces. Droch, comicbooks.com