A History of the American People

time to time, it has become second only to the Oxford English Dictionary as the prime authority
on English words.
In the hieratic, as opposed to the demotic, the Americans were slower to become creative. In a
notorious article in the Edinburgh Review of 1819, the great English wit and reformer the Rev.
Sydney Smith hailed some American political innovations but argued that Americans during the thirty or forty years of their existence' had doneabsolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the
Arts, for Literature or even for the statesman-like studies of Politics and Political Economy.' This
was nonsense as regards the sciences, as we have seen, and Smith had obviously never read the
Federalist or any of the great debates on the Constitution, which rivaled Burke in their
penetrating analysis of basic political issues. He was wrong about literature, too, if one considers
the works of Jonathan Edwards and Franklin. But it was odd, as he suggested, that independence
had not brought about a corresponding pleiade of American literary stars.
Many Americans agreed with him. In 1818 the Philadelphia Portfolio published an essay by
George Tucker, On American Literature, drawing attention to the contrast between the literary
output of America, with 6 million people, and the performance of tiny countries like Ireland and
Scotland-where were the American equivalents of Burke, Sheridan, Swift, Goldsmith, Berkeley,
and Thomas Moore from Ireland, and Thomson, Burns, Hume, Adam Smith, Smollett, and
James Boswell from Scotland? He pointed out that the two most distinguished novelists were
Scott and Maria Edgeworth, both from little Scotland. He calculated that America produced on
average only twenty new books a year, Britain (with admittedly a population of i8 million)
between 500 and 1,000. In 1823, Charles Jared Ingersoll in an address to the American
Philosophical Society, A Discourse Concerning the Influence of America on the Mind,' noted that 200,000 copies of Scott's Waverley novels had been printed and sold in the United States, while the American novel was almost nonexistent. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly were now printed in America and sold 4,000 copies each issue there, whereas the American equivalent, the North American Review, was unknown and unobtainable in London. Even when the first real American literary personality emerged, in the shape of Washington Irving (1783-1859), he seemed to be guilty of theCultural Cringe,' and based himself on
English models, chiefly Scott and Moore, to a stultifying degree. When he traveled to Europe
from 1815 onwards, he made himself heavily dependent on German literary sources too. His
most famous character, Rip Van Winkle, and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published in The
Sketch Book (1820), were taken straight from Christophe Martin Wieland and Riesbeck's Travels
Through Germany-he merely expanded the Winkle tale and gave it an American setting. Irving
was an enormous success in England, precisely because of his cringing and his deference to
British cultural idol, such as Scott, and also because of his sensible attempts to stop American
publishers pirating English copyrights. Irving sold well on both sides of the Atlantic, and seems
to have earned from his writings the immense sum of $200,000. Many towns, hotels, squares,
steamboats, and even cigars were named after him. He was the first American to achieve
celebrity in literature and when he died New York, his home city, closed down: there were 15o
carriages in his funeral procession and 1,000 mourners crowded outside the packed church.
President Jackson, who objected to his being made minister in Madrid, snarled: `He is only fit to
write a book, and scarcely that.' Behind the philistinism, one detects a note of all-American truth.
By contrast, the first great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), was
undoubtedly indigenous in his work and spirit. He grew up in a 40,000-acre tract of land in upper
New York State, his father being a land investor and agent who at one time owned 750,000 acres
and controlled much more. Cooper Sr wandered at will in what was then largely unexplored