[M7] “American Literature,” The Citizen Soldier, June 21, 1843

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Mediocrity is the order of the day.  We have mediocre novels, mediocre tales, mediocre poetry, mediocre essays, and mediocre wit.  Large crowds linger round the half-way house of Literature—none dwell in the temple at the summit.

There is nothing striking in the Literature of the times.  Nothing new, nothing good, nothing sublime.  Old ideas are sent forth in new clothing, and that none of the best.  Charlatans infest the walks of Poetry, and the solitudes of Science are broken by the din of loud-tongued pretenders.

The glory of American Literature is past.—Brockden Brown wrote, starved, and is forgotten.  Brockden Brown, the grand anatomist of the human heart, the analyst, the romancer of the good, the beautiful and the true; inferior in tremendous power of intellect to Godwin alone.  Brockden Brown, the author of Edgar Huntly and Arthur Mervyn, is dead and forgotten.

Cooper was more successful; he has not starved.  He managed matters somewhat better.  He wrote in the days of his early prime, and by the might of his original genius, commanded an unknown sway over the hearts of his countrymen.  But Cooper suited not the whims of the herd—he knew not “the infallibility of the press.”  The hounds attacked the stag—he turned on them.—He engaged in a hand to hand fight with the press—its outcasts and its bravoes.

How has he been rewarded?  By public condemnation.  The public know no reason why the lion shouldn’t be polluted with the filth of a vile animal of the forest.  But they think it undignified for the King of the Woods to turn and fight the noxious reptile.

And the public are right.  A scavenger may pelt a gentleman with mud—is there no means of redress, but by descending in the ditch and flinging back to the scavenger his own filth?

Brockden Brown has passed away; the glory of Cooper is rather of the by-gone than the present; Irving has walked “Spanish;” Dana has fallen into comparative obscurity, and the literary platform is left for the occupancy of new aspirants.

In the present literary world there is no striking scenery—no elevations.  All plain, level, pretty and dull.  Here a mud-puddle, there a canal; here a bog, and yonder a swamp.  Plenty of mosquitoes hover over this marsh, frogs croak in this fen, vile crawling things, lizards and mud-turtles, wriggle about in this filth.

But the eagle has sought the mountain top; the lion has fled to the wood—all that is noble or great has departed from the Literary World of the present, and insects fill the air, and reptiles swarm in the flood.

This may be rather figurative.  Is it desirable to be more minute?  Shall we particularize?  Individualize?  Shall we give life to the abstraction?

Shall we step forth boldly, and call this Magazine Charlatan by name—this Weekly Newspaper humbug by his proper designation?  Shall we unravel the secrets of their traffic?  Do they wish it?  Shall we tell them what they are?  How they crawled into their present elevation?  When did plain truth become wholesome?

We will avoid personalities.  A Yankee preacher may edit one of our Magazines, and be the “author” of our “poets,” but we will not whisper a word of his former Bedouin career.  A cast-off lawyer, may issue his Blue Book, tinctured with mingled imbecility, pseudo-morality, and pregnant with positive trash, but we will not “pillory” him for the “general eye.”

Let them pass, the herd of pretenders.  But in the name of common sense, as men filled with a just appreciation of what our literature should be; as members of a thinking community, having an indisputable right to rebuke charlatanism, literary pretensions, and little-minded arrogance,

W E   D O   P R O T E S T

Against the humbug of imbecile periodicals, with Guide Book plates, fashion plate outlines a year old, with Bedouin editors, lacking brains, but fine fellows for shameless theft, low abuse and small trickery.

We do protest against the glaring absurdity of calling these periodicals American Literature.

We do protest against the array of names, without corresponding talent, monthly blazoned forth on their covers, yellow and blue, being denominated “American authors.”

We do protest against the emasculated productions with the names of men attached to them, which monthly fill these magazines.  We do protest against the prevalence of the petticoat in every magazine of the day.  We do protest against the small criticism of these magazines, their littleness of mind, their narrow views, their small malice to all who will not clique with them.  We protest against these hermaphroditical pamphlets in every light, in every point of view, and we do protest against the underlings of the self-complacent proprietors, being yclept “the Philadelphia Literati.”

One word as to personalities.  A personal remark blunts the shaft and destroys the sting of a well aimed arrow.  We shall not deal in personalities.  But the mirror shall be held up before the very eyes of our friends, and if their literary proportions are diminutive, deformed, or monstrous, we cannot help it.  They shall see for themselves.