Americana Norvegica, Volume 2: Norwegian Contributions to American Studies [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512818727

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AMERICANA

NORVEGICA II

PUBLICATIONS

THE A M E R I C A N

OF

INSTITUTE

U N I V E R S I T Y OF O S L O

IN C O - O P E R A T I O N W I T H

D E P A R T M E N T OF A M E R I C A N

THE

CIVILIZATION

G R A D U A T E S C H O O L OF A R T S AND S C I E N C E S U N I V E R S I T Y OF P E N N S Y L V A N I A

AMERICANA NORVEGICA Norwegian

Contributions

to American Studies Vol. II

EDITOR :

SIGMUND

SKARD

OSLO

EDITORIAL

COMMITTEE:

INGVALD R A K N E M

GEORG

TRONDHEIM

INGRID

ROPPEN

BERGEN

SEMMINGSEN OSLO

U N I V E R S I T Y OF P E N N S Y L V A N I A PHILADELPHIA,

PENNSYLVANIA

1968

PRESS

Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi O S L O : GYLDENDAL NORSK

FORLAG

Manufactured in Norway Language Collaborator: Ida Lange

This publication was in part subsidized by Norges Almenvitenskapelige Forskningsräd and Mr. Erling D. Naess, New York

A.s John Griegs Boktrykkeri, Bergen, Norway

This volume is dedicated to the memory HALVDAN

oj

KOHT

1873-1965 Founder of American in Norway

Studies

TABLE CURTIS

OF

CONTENTS

DAHL

Missing: A Great Novel of Aztecs or Incas OTTO

9

REINERT

The Perplexed Promise: The Image of the United States in Two Popular Norwegian Magazines, 1835-1865 0IVIND

GjERTSEN

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Norway: A Factual Account BERIT

SPILHAUG

74

JOHNS

William Dean Howells and Bjornstjerne Bjornson: A Literary Relationship JAN

W.

118

OVERLAND

Americans Debate Ibsen, 1889-1910 PAUL

E.

135

STORING

United States' Recognition of Norway in 1905 JOHANNES

HELGE

NORMANN

191

NILSEN

The Quest for Reality: A Study in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens TORBJORN

219

SIREVAAG

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Use of History MARVIN

160

KJORVEN

Two Studies in Robert Frost

299

FISHER

More Snow on Kilimanjaro THE

94

DIETRICHSON

Henry J a m e s and fimile Zola ORM

34

343

CONTRIBUTORS

PUBLICATIONS

OF

THE

354 AMERICAN

INSTITUTE

356

M I S S I N G : A G R E A T N O V E L O F A Z T E C S O R INCAS B Y CURTIS D A H L

No American subject would seem to offer more brilliant possibilities to the Romantic historical novelist than the conquest of the great Indian empires of Mexico and Peru by heroic little groups of Spaniards. Against a gorgeous background of tropical jungles, many-islanded lakes, and towering Andes, incredible adventures take place. Despite treachery among his own followers and constant jealous interference from Spain and Cuba, Cortes with a few hundred soldiers defeats the countless warriors of Montezuma and holds that sad monarch captive in his own splendid capital. Pizarro, leading a motley band of undependable adventurers, topples the magnificent realm of the Incas, one of the most intricately organized and warlike civilizations of the age. By power of the sword, the Cross is raised on pagan pyramids bloody with human sacrifice. Avarice, lust, savage cunning, and civilized treachery abound; yet resourcefulness, successful intrigue, miraculous luck, and courage — the unbelievable courage of handfuls of men defying and defeating massed armies — make the history of those days echo with just the melodramatic and heroic notes most successfully sounded in historical fiction. Why is it, then, that no great historical romance based on this rich material ever emerged? What were the difficulties that stood in the way of successfully turning Spanish Conquest into fiction ? I A fictional masterpiece on the grand struggle of the Spaniards for dominance in Middle and South America did not fail to appear because of default of interest or effort. 1 Long before excitement over far-away realms and savages — noble or ignoble — was strengthened by the growth of Romantic feeling at the end of the eighteenth century, Peruvian and Mexican heroes strode grandly through literature in

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English. J o h n Dryden uses both, for instance, in The Indian Queen (1664) and The Indian Emperor (1665). Translations of Thomas-Simon Gueullette's pseudo-oriental Mille et une heures, contes Peruviens (1733) and Madame de Graffigny's sentimental yet satirical Lettres d'une Piruvienne (1747) were popular in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. Jean-Fransois Marmontel's popular poetic novel Les Incas (1777) was frequently translated; it appeared on the English stage as Thomas Morton's Columbus, or a World Discovered (1792). At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century both the British and American theatres were crowded with adaptations by Sheridan, William Dunlop, and others of August von Kotzebue's dramas Die Sonnenjungfrau (1791) and Die Spanier in Peru oder Rollas Tod (1796). But none of these works intended or achieved any real reconstruction of American Indian civilization nor was seriously founded on authentic Spanish American history. Rather they employed Aztecs and Incas, as earlier works had Chinese, Egyptians, East Indians, Persians, and Greeks, as convenient mouthpieces for social comment or as figures in sentimental drama. Even Southey's "epic" Madoc (1805), though written by a poet who was later one of the best early historians of Brazil, is merely a colorful legend imagining a Welsh origin for Aztec culture and has no real relation to the Aztecs as they actually were when the Spaniards discovered them. Serious historical fiction on Aztec and Peruvian subjects began to be written extensively only after the development of the historical romance by Scott, Bulwer, and Cooper and the publication of a growing body of pioneer archaeology and Romantic history in the work of Robertson (1777), Clavijero (1780), Del Rio (1822), Sahagun (1829), Kingsborough (1830, 1848), Veytia (1836), and Waldeck (1838). 2 Especially important in arousing interest were the popular books (1828 and after) on Spanish-American history by Washington Irving. A few years later renewed impetus was given to Mexican subjects by the tremendous vogue of J o h n Lloyd Stephens' Incidents of Travel in Central America (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). Tremendously influential, too, were Prescott's Conquest of Mexico (1843) and Conquest of Peru (1847). The outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 also turned attention toward Spanish America. Much of the earliest fiction on the Conquest was in poetic form, as in the case of Madoc, Hugh J o h n Balfour's Montezuma, A Tragedy (1822), William Gilmore Simms' " T h e Vision of Cortes" (1829),

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G. P. R . J a m e s ' Adra, or the Peruvians (1829), and R o b e r t C. Sands' " T h e Dream of Princess Papantzin" (1829). 3 But soon emphasis shifted to the novel, with the result that the period 1834 through 1853 saw the first efflorescence of the novel on Aztec and Peruvian subjects. During these twenty years there appeared in America and England more than eleven novels on the Conquest and two on the closely related subject of the abortive Scottish settlement in Darien. Four novels were published between 1854 and 1880. T h e n a second flowering came at the very end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In little over a decade more than twelve such novels appeared. Thereafter the tradition trailed off into a trickle of juvenile books and was not to be strongly revived until well into the twentieth century — a period with which this study does not attempt to deal in detail. Though they form a distinct literary trend, the novels on Aztec and Incan subjects differ widely from each other. T h e y have, for instance, markedly different purposes, ranging from mere stimulation of melodramatic terror or narration of romantic adventure to political comment, historical instruction, and the inculcation of religious truth. Some (especially the juveniles) are pure sugar-coating of history; others center in the moral dilemmas of the European conquest of America or the relation of the white race to the red; still others emphasize the struggles of differing religions and political philosophies within the Indian empires themselves. Quite different are the group of novels set in time long after the Conquest which deal with the search for Indian treasure or the discovery of a lost city that still retains into modern times its pure Aztec, Mayan, or Incan culture. Several nineteenth-century literary traditions show amazing vitality in these novels, lasting even into the twentieth century. O n e is that of the Gothic novel with its dark deadly underground passages, its terror and torture, and its evil pagan priests lusting after imprisoned virgins. Especially influential is the adaptation of the Gothic popularized by Bulwer-Lytton. Indeed, the theme of Christians persecuted in a rich, cruel, corrupt society and brought for sacrifice to infidel altars is again and again borrowed for the New World from the long series of Classical novels that came to its apex in Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). 4 It is amusing how cavalierly the ancient R o m a n gladiatorial combats between pagan and Christian warriors are transferred bodily to the prisoner-baiting ceremonies of the Aztec amphitheatres and how gleefully the novelists chance upon

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the volcano hanging over Mexico City and summon its eruptions to raze the impious altars of the fated city just as their predecessors had used Vesuvius to destroy dissolute Pompeii. Also used or overused is the Gothic or Bulwerian trick of the mysterious prophecy of doom eventually realized in a strange manner. T h e tradition of the magical Eastern romance, particularly as adapted by Irving in his tales of Moorish Spain, lends color to several of these novels. In one, for instance, appear a magician, a knight of the Holy Sepulchre, a mysterious Moor, and a fair boy in armor who is really a lovely maiden; Moorish ballads are sung; and there is much comparison of the Conquest to the exploits of the Cid. Another novel transfers to the New World the characteristically Eastern vision of a beautiful underground world in which a fair girl is imprisoned and watched over by evil genies (here Aztec priests). In addition, the influence of Cooper is strong. The plots of a number of the novels are based on Cooper's formula of battle, capture, escape, pursuit, recapture, renewed flight, and climactic final battle. Others treat the Cooperian theme of the tragic difficulties of love between members of different races. But though the Indian girls beloved by Caucasians are generally whitewashed as much as possible (Tiata in Munroe's The White Conquerors, for instance, is described as "fair almost to whiteness"), these novelists show much less color prejudice than Cooper, possibly because the white men in the stories are usually Spaniards rather than Englishmen or Americans. Sometimes the Indian Pocahontases are even allowed to marry, at least temporarily, their white lovers. II But why is it — one returns to that question — that with all this effort no author really succeeds in creating from this vivid and dramatic material a truly outstanding novel such as, for instance, Cooper created in The Last of the Mohicans from the myth of the North American frontier, Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter drew out of the traditions of colonial Boston, or Melville in Moby-Dick "tried out" of the unlikely stuff of the American whaling industry ? Is it just chance that no great author happened to turn to the events in Mexico or Peru, or were there difficulties inherent in the material itself ? If so, what were they ? Paradoxically, one of the main problems doubtless was the very richness of the material itself. The story of the Conquest is, as Prescott

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says, almost "too extravagant, altogether too improbable, for the pages of romance." 5 There is so much drama, even impossible melodrama, in the actual history of the conquistadors' true but unbelievable adventures that fiction has little scope, and the historian turns out to be a better romancer than the novelist. Indeed, oddly, in this instance historical accuracy leads almost inevitably to melodrama. It was hard for the novelist to imagine a fictional plot that could even distantly compete in excitement and colorfulness with the thrilling pageant of history. A more piquant problem was whither the sympathy of the reader should be directed. Seen in one perspective, the story of the Conquest is one of brave, patriotic, "noble savages" fighting for their wives and children, freedom and faith, against cruelly rapacious Spanish invaders in many ways inferior to themselves in civilization. From this point of view the sympathetic characters are the Indians, and the Spaniards are the villains. But, on the other hand, the Spaniards are white men, the Aztecs and Peruvians red; and the nineteenth-century novelist, consulting the prejudices of his readers, is hesitant to sympathize with a non-white race in conflict with the white. This problem becomes particularly troublesome when Cortes' mistress Marina (or Malinche, as she is often called) or any other Indian girl beloved of a white cavalier enters the story. (It is fascinating how much ingenuity a number of the authors spend in trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the "fallen" Marina or getting rid of her without besmirching the character of the heroic Cortes.) Indeed, in these novels the role of the Indian beloved is fraught with extreme danger; the dusky young lady, no matter how fictionally whitened her skin, almost always has to be in one way or another killed off so that in the conclusion the hero may marry a white girl. A further problem is posed by the actual historical fact that the Spaniards eventually triumphed. Tragedy can be shaped from a tale of moral triumph amid physical defeat, but romance usually demands that the hero be on the winning side. If this reasoning is accepted, the hero must be a Spaniard — even though the Spaniards are cruel invaders bent on destroying an Eden-like Paradise and Cortes can even be compared by one novelist to Milton's Satan peering over the wall of the Garden. Religion complicates the dilemma of sympathy even more. Not only are the Indians non-white; they are also pagan and, in Mexico at least, pagans guilty of wholesale human sacrifice. Thus, despite

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their savage nobility and the goodness of their cause in defending their homeland, it is almost impossible for the novelist to let them have his full sympathy. He cannot, in the nineteenth century, have paganism triumph over Christianity. Yet on the other hand the largely Protestant readers of the novels cannot be expected to sympathize with the superstitious fanaticism of the conquistadors' sixteenth-century Catholicism. Somehow, bringing Christianity to America must be commended while at the same time the bringers must be stigmatized as bloody sons of the Inquisition. As the Indian patriot must be dissociated from the vile idolator, so the noble Christian must be separated from the fanatic papist. The basic problem, however, is that the writer while still retaining as much historical truth as possible must bridge the gulf between the moral and religious standards of sixteenth-century Indians and conquistadors and those of his nineteenth-century readers. Prescott understands and faces the difficulty far more directly than any of the novelists. He sees that one must judge the conduct of the Spaniards not by modern standards or in the context of our own time but by their standards. They believed, for instance, that conquest of infidels was not only a right but even a duty given them by their religion. Any act necessary to effect it was therefore morally justifiable, and expediency became synonymous with right. Seen in this light and against the background of the cruelties Europeans of that age were wont to inflict on each other, Prescott argues, the massacres and tortures of the Indians by the Spaniards cannot be utterly condemned. 6 Such historical objectivity, however, is far easier for the historian than for the novelist, and most of the novelists become impaled on the horns of a dilemma: if they depict the conquistadors and Indians as the cruel, semi-barbarous men they historically were, they cannot gain for them the sympathy of the reader; but if, to the contrary, they pretty up the characters and actions to suit nineteenth-century standards, the novels become unconvincing historically. Too many of the romancers weakly try to steer a compromise course between historical fact and modern morality, with a resultant lessening of intellectual and dramatic unity and power in their books. But what else can they do ? Consistency would lose them their readers. T h e best path they can take is to follow Prescott's lead and contend that despite the nobility and magnanimity of individuals such as Montezuma and his gallant successor Guatemozin the Aztec empire deserved to fall because of its abominable human sacrifice, its suppression of older

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and better religions, its paganism, its tyranny over its subject peoples, and the treachery of its more evil leaders. 7 Implicit also in many of the novels is the Cooperian thesis that even the best culture of the red aborigine must yield before the "superior civilization" of the whites. Ill Many of the novels come to grief on the rocks of these difficulties and, despite various excellences such as gorgeous description, exciting plots, and heroic characters, fail for lack of convincing dramatic and intellectual unity. Two exciting Gothic novels that pioneered use of Mexican material, Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest (Philadelphia, 1834) and The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico (Philadelphia, 1835), must be relegated to this category. Both are by the well known American dramatist Robert Montgomery Bird. Calavar, for instance, is supposedly told from the Indian point of view, and in it much is made of the humanity and beneficence of Montezuma and the high civilization of the Aztecs, while the cruel and unjust Spaniards, with an impious mockery of religion, like devils are destroying an Edenic paradise marred only by the one horrible fault of human sacrifice. Abdalla the Moor is used to point out explicitly the injustice of the Spanish conquest, and the hero Amador, understanding that the Aztecs are struggling merely to liberate their king, thinks that the Spaniards are worse barbarians than the Indians and refuses to fight in so unjust a cause. But later in the novel this same Amador rails against the Moor (who has saved his life) for joining "the bloodthirsty barbarians" and even though convinced that heaven is on the other side fights with his Spanish compatriots. Unconvincingly, especially in a story supposedly told by a descendant of the Aztecs, when the chips are down and he must choose between white and red, he turns into a bigotted Spaniard eager to return to slaughtering Mexicans, whom he now regards as horrible savages. Equally confused in its sympathies is The Infidel, the title figure of which is the heroic Guatemozin, last and bravest emperor of Tenochtitlan, who unselfishly fights for his country's liberty. T h e Spaniards are here shown as less civilized and less religious than the Aztecs. They are rent by quarrels and riddled with treachery. But even so Juan Lerma, the romantic hero, will not join the Indians, will not become a "renegade" or "apostate" even though he falls in

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love with the beautiful (and nearly white) Zelahualla, daughter of Montezuma. Indeed, rescued by the Mexicans just as his compatriots are about to hang him, treated royally in Tenochtitlan, offered his beloved in marriage, admiring as he does Guatemozin, he still yearns to return to be hanged by the perfidious and bloodthirsty Spaniards who hate him. In the end the noble and patriotic Indian emperor is executed, with only slight regret from the author, as an "infidel." Two much later novels also show this kind of confusion. Albert Lee's The Inca's Ransom, A Story of the Conquest of Peru (London, 1898) breaks down in a conflict between sixteenth-century thought and modern moral judgment. On the one hand, the narrator, a Spaniard who joins Pizarro's expedition, sees the conquest through nineteenthcentury eyes: the Spaniards are cruel and rapacious, the Inquisition is oppressive, many of the Indians are noble and patriotic, but the destruction of the Peruvian civilization, lamentable though it may be, is partially justified by Incan tyranny. He sees the treacherous seizure of the Inca and the massacre of his nobles as infamous, yet, on the other hand, he partly justifies Pizarro's perfidy on the grounds that the Inca too plotted treachery (thereby implicitly accepting a right of conquest for the Spaniards), frequently exalts the dauntless courage of his countrymen, and is not ashamed to carry off to Spain a large hoard of Incan gold. George Chetwynd Griffith, in The Virgin of the Sun, A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (London, 1898), tries to avoid such difficulties by representing the fall of Peru as a fated tragedy resulting from the oppressiveness and too proud exaltation of the Inca empire and by distinguishing between noble and ignoble Spaniards. By their crimes the evil Peruvians bring the catastrophe upon themselves: Pizarro could not have been victorious had it not been for their faults. Yet the Spaniards are in general stigmatized as cruel, rapacious, and treacherous, less true Christians than the pagan Indians, who often give good for evil. But whenever the invaders really have their backs to the wall, whenever as in the siege of Cuzco they are faced with annihilation, they become " a little band of desperate heroes" with whom the reader is implicitly asked to sympathize. A number of them, indeed, are noble chivalrous knights who deplore the destruction of Peruvian civilization and Pizarro's brutality and perfidy and even help the last Inca, Manco Capac, to escape. But, though Griffith does not realize it, there is a logical catch here, since even these benign, religiously tolerant Spaniards (Griffith sees Catholic priests as perfidious, Peru-

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vian priests as good) show absolutely no intention of leaving Peru entirely alone and relieving the Peruvians of the Spanish "presence." T h e moral problem of an unjustified invasion cannot be solved so simply as by dividing both the invaded and the invaders into good and bad factions. How a religious motif can lead to another kind of lack of sound logic is illustrated by V . V . Vide's Sketches of Aboriginal Life (New York, 1846). Threaded on the story of Tecuichpo, daughter of Montezuma and wife of Guatemozin, this is a history of the Aztecs from the time of the early prophecies of Cortes' coming to the final defeat of Guatemozin. Here the excruciating tortures inflicted on the heroine are almost excused on the grounds that they eventually lead to her acceptance of Christianity. But one wonders whether the conversion of one woman, however exalted, is sufficient justification for the devastation of the lives of countless thousands of other Indians. IV What is most fascinating in the Aztcc and Incan novels, however, is not their confusion or failure but the several ingenious yet alas not wholly successful expedients by which their authors try to evade the inherent difficulties of the subject. Unfortunately no one of these devices is quite effective enough — at least in the hands of these particular writers — to permit this potentially rich material to be used with real success. One method is to evade the whole question of divided sympathies by writing only of the Indians before the appearance of the white man. This course is followed by R . C. Sands in the poem " D r e a m of Princess Papantzin," in which the only hint of the Conquest is in a prophetic dream that comes to young Montezuma. It is also pursued by Joseph Holt Ingraham in Montezuma the Serf; or, The Revolt of the Mexitili (Boston, 1845). And though in its latter parts Anson Uriel Hancock's Coitlan, A Tale of the Inca World (Chicago, 1893) does briefly treat of Pizarro and DeSoto and the Spanish friars who treacherously intervene in the dynastic struggle between the Incas Huascar and Atahualpa, the main emphasis of this evidently much condensed novel is on Peruvian life and history before the coming of the white man. Despite Hancock's stilted style, frequent dullness, and anachronistic depiction of ancient Incan life as lived according to nineteenth-century European standards, he succeeds fairly well in keeping to the point of

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view of his narrator, a royal I n c a n noble now resident in Spain, and recounting events as Q u o h u i t l would have seen t h e m . His sympathies in this accurately historical and vividly instructive depiction of the organization of I n c a n society are almost wholly with the Indians, whom he repeatedly compares to the ancient Greeks. Yet Coitlan fails not only because its plot is too intricate and its supposedly historical I n c a n characters, in order to make them appeal to modern readers, are given unhistorically modern ideas on h u m a n sacrifice or marriage b u t also because, speaking through a sixteenth-century I n c a n narrator, Hancock tries to make a modern historical analysis of the reasons for t h e fall of the I n c a n empire and to attack modern governmental paternalism. Hancock cannot have his cake and eat it too: the result of his a t t e m p t is superficiality of both characterization a n d history. Less of an evasion t h a n this concentration solely on the Indians is involved in the plan of the highly Gothic and Bulweresque romance of terror Montezuma ; or, The Last of the Aztecs (New York, 1845), by E d w a r d M a t u r i n , which places its emphasis on the theme of catastrophe and destruction itself. M a t u r i n uses all the Gothic paraphernalia — wicked priests, lovely virgins abducted for sacrifice, a mysterious dwarf, a volcanic eruption exactly timed to save the helpless m a i d e n f r o m the bloody priest. His real subject, however, is the terrible overthrow of a flourishing empire by the just a n d terrible w r a t h of an avenging God. Here neither Aztecs nor Spaniards are really admirable, though the latter act as God's agents. Sufficient t h o u g h this scheme is for a novel of horror, terror, and pathos, it really leaves the reader no one (aside from the very weak romantic hero a n d heroine) with w h o m to sympathize b u t God — and symp a t h y with H i m seems slightly presumptuous. A far better trick was seized upon by a n u m b e r of authors who escaped from the essential dilemma of the situation by t u r n i n g their readers' sympathy toward noble, truly religious non-Aztec Indians u n t a i n t e d by either the bestial rites of pagan Aztecs or the harsh rapacity of papistical Spaniards. In W. W. Fosdick's Malmiztic the Toltec; and the Cavaliers of the Cross (Cincinnati, 1851), for instance, the hero is a survivor of a mysterious pre-Aztec race whose high civilization was blotted out (compare Pompeii and H e r c u l a n e u m ) by volcanic destruction before the rise of the Aztec empire. Malmiztic is a " t r u e " Christian — that is, a Protestant Christian (he even has a mysterious Bible h a n d e d down to him from his forefathers) — as opposed to t h e Spaniards like Cortes who begin as "cavaliers of the

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Cross" but are soon debauched by avarice into lustful, perfidious devils. Malmiztic, indeed, is forced into the uncomfortable position of h a v i n g to fight out of patriotism for the Aztecs, whose cannibalism a n d h u m a n sacrifice he despises, b u t his discomfort is lessened w h e n he converts the last emperor Guatemozin to his own belief in the O n e Beneficient Invisible God. Despite its defence by these two noble warriors, the city falls because heaven d e m a n d s justice on it for its sins of bloody idolatry. But Malmiztic, having generously spared the life of t h e infamous Cortes, can escape to live on happily with his beloved Tecalco. T h e legend of the good Toltecs is also used in The White Conquerors of Mexico: A Tale of Toltec and Aztec (New York, 1893), by Kirk M u n r o e . H e r e it is blended with the historical fact that the Indians of Tlasca, a subjugate nation near Tenochtitlan, joined with the Spaniards to c o n q u e r their Aztec oppressors. Not only are the Tlascans led by the Toltec warriors Tlahuical and Huetzin, whose religion of love a n d piety has for its symbol a cross, b u t the Tlascans themselves are noble m o u n t a i n e e r s fighting to regain their freedom from the a r r o g a n t Aztecs. Yet, surprisingly, Cortes and the Spaniards are even so pict u r e d as noble warriors of Christianity, and their worst deeds such as the massacre at Cholula, the treacherous seizure of M o n t e z u m a , a n d Alvarado's slaughter of Mexicans in the capital are all excused as being d o n e in a good cause. M u n r o e even has stomach to a p p l a u d Sandoval for b u r n i n g alive the evil priest Topil. T h e function of the Spaniards, indeed, in the book is the God-given one of putting back t h e Cross — which is both Toltec and Christian — on the temples of Tlasca and Mexico, and nothing they do can really be wrong. T h e book is unconvincing in its building such a structure on the c h a n c e similarity of Christian and Toltec religious symbols, in its attribution of m o d e r n ideals to the Tlascans, and in its moral approbation of the worst Spanish excesses (even though some sympathy is shown to the e m p e r o r Guatemozin, who is misguided by evil priests). It ends with an unrealistic h a p p y r e t u r n of the Toltec Huetzin as a K n i g h t of Castile, happily married to Cortes' former mistress M a r i n a (pure, brave, and beautiful in this version!), to rule over a free republic of Tlasca. If Toltecs and Tlascans could be used as sympathetic characters in opposition to the Aztecs, so too could a M a y a n . Such is the plan adopted by William Dudley Foulke in his Maya, A Story of Yucatan (New York a n d London, 1900). H e r e the Mayans, hating h u m a n sacrifice, oppose t h e Aztecs and are truer Christians t h a n the Christian Spani-

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ards themselves. Though based closely on archaeological evidence and backed up by references to numerous historical authorities, the tale is a fantastic one of a Spaniard, Sandoval, a relative of the famous Sandoval the companion of Cortes, who is shipwrecked and captured by harsh Indians but escapes. Then, naked, he by chance meets the Vestal Virgin and great humanitarian Princess Maya, and with her help pretends to be a returned god. He marries the princess, converts her to Christianity during their wedding night (!), rules her tribe well, and when finally unmasked and brought to the stone of sacrifice is saved by Maya and exiled to the ancient Mayan city of Uxmal. There the two of them live in the Temple of the Sun and mingle the good ancient Mayan beliefs (to which Aztec human sacrifice is abhorrent) with Spanish Catholicism to form a Christianity based on love and forgiveness and better than the Church's belief in hell and purgatory. Both are, after further adventures, somewhat ridiculously finally turned into orioles. Lew Wallace, author of the famous novel of Roman times Ben-Hur, in The Fair God; or, The Last of the ' Tzins (Boston, 1873) tells a colorful story of dancing girls, gladiators fighting in the arena, villainous priests, and prophecies of destruction enunciated in the amphitheatre — all straight out of the conventions of the Classical novel. Yet, as one would expect, he too primarily emphasizes the religious question. His sympathy is with the believers in the old religion of the loving and merciful One God, Quetzal, whose kindly worship has recently been replaced by that of the fierce war god, lover of human sacrifice. Because of their desertion, the Aztecs are doomed to utter destruction by Quetzal. Wallace handles well the paradox (really a comment on orthodox, Last Judgment-preaching Christianity) that it is the merciful God rather than the war god whose vengefulness inflicts wholesale massacre on His erstwhile worshippers. But even Wallace's very considerable skill cannot wholly reconcile the contradictory themes of the novel. The Aztecs are really more civilized than the Spaniards, and some of them though pagans (really, of course, representing Protestants) are more Christian than the nominal Christians. Yet the ravaging, enslaving Cortes is depicted favorably — as an able and handsome soldier who sincerely believes he has been led to conquer this heathen land for God and the Virgin. The pattern becomes too complicated, for instance, when a Catholic priest is considered a force for good when he destroys Aztec idols but the rest of the time because of his Catholicism is himself regarded as an idolator.

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A Great Novel of Aztecs or Incas

21

Similarly unsatisfactory in its focus of sympathy a n d ideological structure is Gold and Glory; or, Wild Ways of Other Days (London, 1882), by Grace Stebbing. T h e hero is y o u n g M o n t o r o D i e g o , w h o after a voyage with Columbus and thrilling adventures in the Spanish West Indies, where like the priest Las Casa he deplores the barbaric treatment of the Indians, finds himself in Cortes' army m a r c h i n g on M e x i c o . But the author carefully dissociates him from the other Spaniards, for he is half Jewish, and both his father and grandfather have been tortured by the Inquisition. Furthermore, he has not only learned the sacred H e b r e w books secreted by his mother R a c h e l but has also been able to read, despite the priests' objections, the great Bible that Columbus carries with him. Thus w h e n he reaches Mexico, though repelled by the h u m a n sacrifices practised by the A z t e c priests, he can see little real difference between them and the Catholic autos-da-fe of Catholic Spain: there is devil's mixture in both. H e has, w e are told, a "more tender conscience and enlightened m i n d " than the other Spaniards. Yet while he deplores the cruel and treacherous treatment by Cortes of Indians w h o are only fighting justly for their lands and liberty, he cannot harshly blame Cortes, since Cortes sincerely believes himself to be acting to spread Christianity, even if by oppression, trickery, and the sword. What mortal dares judge, M o n t o r o asks himself, the "mysterious workings" of G o d or of those w h o believe themselves to be spreading His Gospel? Is not all that happens, even slaughter and conquest, permitted by God ? This argument, of course, if followed logically would also excuse the horrors of the Inquisition and the massacres on the islands — something that the author has no intention of doing. All Miss Stebbing can d o is to praise those a m o n g the Spaniards w h o are true (or nearly Protestant) Christians — O l m e d o , Columbus, Las Casa, and Montoro — a n d send the last h o m e m o u t h i n g the words of Christ — "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" — but still reaping "gold and glory" from his adventures. Francis N e w t o n Thorpe's The Spoils of Empire (Boston, 1903) carries to an extreme the device of differentiating I n d i a n from Indian and Spaniard from Spaniard. Here both hero and heroine are separated from their respective countrymen. T h e heroine Dorothea, one of that multitude of beautiful fictive daughters evidently produced by M o n t e z u m a specially for the delectation of romantic novelists and the amorous delight of their passionate heroes, hates the bloody Aztec religion and is really a Christian at heart. T h e hero, J u a n Fonseca, is the son of a man w h o has been executed for heresy in

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Spain; hence he hates the Inquisition and in the latter part of the story is himself burnt, though not fatally, in a Spanish auto-da-fe which is specifically likened to an Aztec human sacrifice. In the end he and Dorothea escape from Spain to become Protestants in Holland. But even this radical effort at straightening out sympathies does not wholly work, since in order to drag in the inevitable (Roman) amphitheatre scene Thorpe must picture the Spaniards as deliverers. Furthermore, Dorothea's preaching of love and mercy to her father Montezuma actually only weakens him and causes even more carnage and blood. In Montezuma's situation greater Christian meekness is the last thing he needs! V Another technique used by the novelists to solve the tricky problem of sympathy is to set their stories after the Conquest, when the intrusion of modern standards is natural. Some of those stories set in post-Conquest times, such as The Virgin of the Sun: A Historical Romance of the Last Revolution in Peru (Boston, 1847), by Edward Z. C. Judson ("Ned Buntline"), have only slight connection with the ancient Aztecs and Incas; but others, by various clever devices, skillfully and colorfully introduce the pageantry of pre-Conquest Peru or Mexico into nineteenth-century romances. One frequent motif is the search for Aztec or Incan treasure. G. A. Henty's The Treasure of the Incas (London, 1903), for instance, tells (perhaps too instructively) how two English brothers find ancient Incan treasure in an old castle-like ruin. In The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (London, 1884), by G. Manville Fenn, the British boy Henry, a soapmaker's son in search of adventure, helped by his lower-class friend Tom, finds in a cave an immense Incan treasure, melodramatically pays off his uncle's mortgage just in time to save his beautiful cousin Lilla from marriage to the villainous halfbreed Garcia, and manages to escape from pursuing Indians, incidentally pushing Garcia into the river, where he is eaten alive by voracious piranha. Henry returns in triumph and wealth to England to marry Lilla. A little more subtle is the moral distinction of " T h e Golden Sands of Mexico: A Moral and Religious T a l e " published in Philadelphia in 1850 at the time of the California Gold Rush. 8 This tale tells how the lust for gold from long-concealed Aztec mines so corrupts the pious old priest of an idyllic Mexican village that

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23

he brings t o r t u r e , d e a t h , a n d utter destruction on his loving I n d i a n parishioners w h o refuse to reveal their secret. A n o t h e r m e t h o d of bringing the ancient into the m o d e r n world is to write of a ninet e e n t h - c e n t u r y I n d i a n revolt against Spanish rule. William H . G . Kingston, for instance, in Manco the Peruvian Chief; or, An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas (London, 1853), tells a thrillingly a d v e n t u r o u s story of how in the nineteenth c e n t u r y the oppressed I n d i a n s of Peru, led by the noble M a n c o , descendant of t h e last I n d i a n e m p e r o r a n d secret p r e t e n d e r to his t h r o n e , d o n their a n c i e n t p a g a n finery a n d take u p their long disused a r m s to face t h e S p a n i s h troops in o n e last vain battle. T h o u g h Kingston has the a d v a n t a g e of h a v i n g set his novel in m o d e r n times w h e n m o d e r n j u d g m e n t s arc realistic a n d t h o u g h he also m a k e s use of t h e oft-used device of telling his tale f r o m the point of view of a n English boy, w h o should be able to be objective a b o u t both I n d i a n s a n d S p a n i a r d s , even so his sympathies in this very r e a d a b l e novel a r e not wholly consistent. I n d e e d , the focus of s y m p a t h y seems to shift f r o m being at t h e start wholly with the I n d i a n s (who are now Christians) a n d against t h e crucl oppressive Spaniards, the heirs of "bloodstained P i z a r r o , " t h r o u g h a t t e m p t e d impartiality, to a n admission t h a t the P e r u v i a n " s a v a g e s " are " f a r lower in the scale of h u m a n beings t h a n t h e Spaniards." A n even m o r e successful fictional s t r a t a g e m t h a n the I n d i a n rebellion (though it is often joined with that) is the device of i m a g i n i n g a secret h i d d e n I n c a n or Aztec city t h a t in a r e m o t e m o u n t a i n fastness has r e m a i n e d w i t h all its original splendor undiscovered by t h e white m a n . If one c a n believe t h e novelists, a n a m a z i n g n u m b e r of such h i d d e n cities flourished far into the n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . T h e lost city motif was pioneered by Aztec Revelations; or, Leaves from the Life of the Fate-Doomed, a c r u d e moralistic novel of G o t h i c terror by a n a n o n y mous a u t h o r published in 1849 in the unlikely literary center of O q u a w k a , Illinois. It differs, however, f r o m most of its successors in t h a t it is set n o t in m o d e r n times b u t shortly after the C o n q u e s t . I n it B e r n a r d o , w h o in Spain in a fit of jealous passion has h u r l e d his beloved off a precipice, in the N e w World is c a p t u r e d by t h e I n d i a n s a n d , saved by a friendly cacique f r o m t h e stone of sacrifice, is c a r r i e d to a m a g n i f i c e n t I n d i a n city h i d d e n in a m o u n t a i n valley accessible only b y a l o n g w i n d i n g tunnel t h r o u g h a m o u n t a i n . H e r e h e learns t h e secret of t h e Aztecs' arts a n d even h o w to r e a d their hieroglyphics before h e foolishly (for n o good reason b u t the a u t h o r ' s conve-

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nience) insists on leaving this idyllic retreat. In the outside world again, after having survived being left to die in the crater of a volcano, he finally expires a raving maniac, murdered by the vengeful brother of his dead beloved, who walls him up living in a dungeon tomb. This retribution enforces the novel's capitalized moral: Indulgence of Passion leads to an Evil Fate! Less morally beneficial but almost equally melodramatic is the much later novel on a similar theme: The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (New York, 1886) by William Westall. Here, using the up-todate technical conveniences available to dime novelists in the 1860's, an English surgeon named Carlyon at the behest of a lapsed Irish priest after numerous subsidiary adventures involving lost treasures and hairbreadth escapes manages to land by balloon in the hidden Toltec city Ixtil, the land of light. The foolish and wholly conventional story ends when, in order to save his light-skinned Indian bride and himself from being sacrificed by malevolent priests to a volcano (volcanoes being very popular in these romances), the hero manages to escape with her through a secret passage under the mountains. Two other novels of lost Indian cities have considerably more literary value. Though it is sometimes ridiculous and though its moral structure is based on a curious anomaly (that fraud in a pagan ceremony brings down divine justice on the perpetrators even though they commit it to save their lives), H. Rider Haggard's The Heart of the World (London, 1896) tells a ringing story, creates living characters, and concludes in a wonderfully vivid catastrophe. It is the tale of how Ignatio, descendant of the last Aztec emperor Guatemozin and head of the mystic secret Order of the Heart, and his English friend J a m e s Strickland, led by an old cacique and the lovely Maya, Priestess of the Heart, penetrate to the still gorgeous but decadent City of the Heart in order to obtain Aztec treasure with which Ignatio can conquer the Spanish oppressors and regain the ancient Aztec heritage. All fails, as one might guess it would, because Strickland and M a y a fall in love, thereby causing the malicious enmity of her erstwhile fianc£, an evil priest who favours human sacrifice (as opposed to the mysterious religion of the Heart, whose beliefs and rites are nearly Christian). The catastrophe comes in a tumult of waters that rise over the ancient city's palaces and temples and blot it out forever as M a y a , in a last despairing attempt to save her beloved Strickland, pulls the secret mechanism that lets the waters of the lake overflood the doomed city. Strickland and Ignatio escape, though the Aztec cause is doomed.

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25

If Haggard's colorful novel has plenty of deep water but no intellectual or moral profundity, the historian Thomas A. Janvier's The Aztec

Treasure-House:

A Romance of Contemporaneous Antiquity

(New

York, 1890) combines a good story with archaeological accuracy in what is probably the best of the novels set in post-Conquest times. Like so many of the others, it too tells of a search for Indian treasure and it too involves Anglo-Saxon heroes. By means of ancient documents, a secret token, and a strange blazed trail the searchers — an archaeologist seeking knowledge, a priest seeking martyrdom, and two Americans seeking gold — after numberless thrilling adventures find a secret city ruled by a mysterious priest-king. Here the ancient Aztec civilization still flourishes. Their entrance into this hidden city causes a revolt of the oppressed Indians against their priestly rulers, in the course of which Janvier can introduce the seemingly inescapable Roman-amphitheatre scene (complete with thunder, lightning, and earthquake called down upon the wicked city by Antonio the Spanish priest) and provide for the destruction of the city after the Americans have found fantastic wealth and the archaeologist rediscovered "contemporaneous antiquity." The scheme is a clever one since through it Janvier can describe life as it was at the Conquest, make modern social and religious comments about it (here at last is a truly good Catholic priest), and yet at the same time avoid violating historical probability because the story is told through the words of a trained archaeologist of our own day. Yet despite the merits of this and the other post-Conquest novels, it must be emphasized that all of them, though in clever and entertaining ways, essentially evade the real problem of dealing fictionally with the Conquest itself.

VI Many of the novels set after the Conquest introduce, as we have seen, English or American heroes who can be more objective than either Indians or Spaniards can be. Very early in Calavar Robert Montgomery Bird had hinted at the advantages of using an observer foreign to both warring factions. But this observer was a Moor, Abdalla, and Bird was so much entangled in the Gothic traditions of his time, according to which a Moor had to be either a devilish villain or a lonely Byronic hero, that he failed to follow up his excellent intuition. A Moslem Moor, also, is not a character with whom English and American readers can be expected readily to identify

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Cialis Dahl

themselves in the face of noble Indians and Christian Spaniards. A Protestant, anti-Catholic Englishman, however, fits the bill exactly. T h r e e of the very best novels of the Conquest itself — F. S. Brereton's Roger the Bold: A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico (London, 1907), G . A. H e n t y ' s By Right of Conquest; or, With Cortez in Mexico (London, 1891), and H . R i d e r H a g g a r d ' s Montezuma's Daughter (London, 1893) — use this device. All solve the p r o b l e m of s y m p a t h y effectively by finding their heroes in Protestant Englishmen w h o can call down a pox on t h e houses of b o t h Spaniards a n d Indians. Brereton's rousing b u t i m p r o b a b l e tale is of a young English giant crossbowman n a m e d R o g e r w h o in the days of K i n g H e n r y V I I I procures f r o m a sailor a golden disk whose hieroglyphics are a m a p t h a t shows where a n enormous Aztec treasure is concealed in Mexico City. W i t h a g r o u p of heroic English adventurers he sets out for the Spanish M a i n to steal the treasure. After exciting sea battles, Roger, left w o u n d e d with his faithful I n d i a n c o m p a n i o n T a m b a (page Cooper or the Lone R a n g e r ! ) , is c a p t u r e d by the Aztecs and brought to Mexico City to be sacrificed. But by his gigantic strength he holds off the whole Mexican nation until he is finally recognized as a God — or at least as an E n g l i s h m a n ! T h e r e u p o n he becomes the ally (and, incredibly, even probable successor) of the E m p e r o r G u a t e m o z i n and organizes the defense of the city against Cortes, who is a b o u t to return after his defeat on the Noche Triste. H e teaches the I n d i a n s how to use crossbows a n d pikes a n d enlists all his English comrades, who have now reached Mexico, in the Aztec cause, after he and they have been c a p t u r e d by the Spaniards b u t rescued by their I n d i a n friends. T h u s it is a b a n d of Englishmen who almost save Mexico for the Mexicans (though they despise h u m a n sacrifice a n d intend to make its emperor a vassal to their K i n g H e n r y ! ) . But after initial victory the Indians are starved into submission. Roger a n d his companions, after having been explicitly released by both the chief priest and emperor f r o m a n y d u t y to stay a n d be c a p t u r e d , escape f r o m the doomed city, b u t n o t until the Spanish villain Alvarez by the help of the golden disk has led t h e m to the treasure. Alvarez goes m a d with greed and is slain. R o g e r a n d his valiant friends regain their brigantine f r o m the Spaniards a n d return to E n g l a n d with a huge bag of jewels and, of course, t h e faithful T a m b a . All of the story is preposterous, b u t it is c r a m m e d with excitement a n d is lots of f u n . I t is all action, a n d has really no t h o u g h t in it. Based firmly on Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Henty's novel has a

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A Great Novel of Aztecs or Incas

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large share of the excitement and color and verve of that wonderful book. T h e hero is Roger Hawkshaw, an English boy of Wycliffite persuasion. From the time of his shipwreck on the coast of Tabasco to his return to England laden with jewels and married to an Indian princess, he goes through a multitude of daring adventures with great eclat. Though Henty feels it necessary also to play the trick of differentiating between good and bad Indians — between the bloodthirsty Aztecs of the capital and the gentle Texcucans, who abhor human sacrifice and believe in a Great Unknown God, Lord of All Gods — Roger as a disinterested observer also provides a fairly successful focus for the readers' sympathy. But even in this device there is an inherent difficulty. The hero of a blood-and-thunder melodrama must act vigorously and heroically; he cannot merely withdraw and observe. However, when he does act, he loses his objectivity and tends to become identified with the party which he is at the moment supporting. As a result his own basic principles and sympathies (and consequently those of the author) become unclear. In this instance, for example, Roger's best friend is Cacama, the noble king of Texcuco. Roger admires the Texcucan culture and religion. Yet when forced to choose between fighting for Spaniards or his admired Indian friends, he chooses to fight on the side of the men of his own color and even to act as Cortes' spy against the friendly Indian king. This race-motivated choice is particularly ironic here since Roger is in love with Cacama's beautiful sister and eventually marries her. Elsewhere, when he is with the Indians, Roger expresses his thorough dislike of the cruel, bigotted, papist Spaniards; yet at other times he admires their courage and excuses even their worst excesses as results of a noble and conscientious desire to propagate their religion. At one moment Alvarado's treacherous massacre of the Indian nobles seems to him (and Henty) "utterly indefensible"; at another he defends it by saying it is less horrible than the Aztecs' custom of sacrificing to their idols twenty-five thousand victims a year. Basically, of course, the illogicality is Henty's rather than Roger's: Roger merely reflects his creator's inability to decide whether he should judge events by modern or by sixteenth-century standards. A prime example occurs in the incident in which Cortes offers a negotiated peace to Guatemozin. Implicitly accepting the sixteenth-century doctrine of the right of conquest (else the offer is presumptuous) and paradoxically at the same time thinking in nineteenth-century terms

28

Curtis Dahl

of possible peaceful capitulation and an honorable agreement that can be trusted, Henty praises Cortes for his magnanimity and blames Guatemozin for a stubborn refusal to trust the Spaniards. But Henty himself has previously said that no Spaniard in the sixteenth century felt bound to keep faith with a mere infidel; hence historically and dramatically Guatemozin is wholly right not to trust any Spaniard and especially Cortes — the man who has already perpetrated the treacherous massacre at Cholula. He would be a fool to do so. But then Henty twists himself into another paradox. After having accused Guatemozin of having caused the utter destruction of his city through blameworthy recalcitrance, he reverses himself and supports the Indian emperor's position by lauding the Aztecs' "heroic constancy" in defending themselves against, one assumes, unjust aggression. Perhaps, indeed, the real cause of the confusion in Henty — as in many of the other novelists — is that he tries to be both novelist and historian. From Prescott he introduces subtleties of moral evaluation that are necessary parts of a history book and might even be fitted into a deep Melvillian or Hawthornian novel of a soul searching for truth among the ironically contradictory values of two moral worlds. He forgets that the kind of romance he is writing must tell an exciting tale of bold action against an immediately clear and acceptable moral background. Unless the center of interest is definitely and irrevocably shifted from the action to the hero's moral dilemma, exploration of moral ambiguities, even in simple terms, merely impedes the movement of the tale. Here the resultant lack of definite focus weakens a potentially excellent novel. Of all these many novels Haggard's Montezuma's Daughter is the most clearly thought out. The hero and narrator of this exceptionally exciting and swift-moving story is Wingfield, son of an English father who has been tortured by the Inquisition in Spain and a beautiful girl forced into a nunnery because of her refusal to marry a wicked Spaniard, Garcia, who vengefully murders her in England after her escape from confinement. Coming to America to take vengeance on Garcia, Wingfield is captured by the Aztecs, regarded by them as the son of the god Quetzal, chosen for sacrifice to an idol, wedded to Montezuma's daughter Otomie, saved from the stone knife at the very last moment by (ironically) the sword of Garcia, baptized in blood as an Aztec warrior, captured by the Spaniards and tortured by Garcia to make him reveal the hidden Aztec treasures, rescued by Marina, and chosen king of the city of the Otomies, a nation of good Indians

Missing: A Great Novel of Aztecs or Incas

29

allied with the Aztecs. In a wonderfully melodramatic scene he pursues Garcia to the top of a snow-covered volcano where Garcia goes mad and slips into the burning lava. After Otomie's death Wingfield eventually returns to England and the girl he had left behind twenty years earlier. Much of the merit of the novel lies in the skillful way in which Haggard excitingly mingles deep Gothic horror with brilliant historical pictures and event after event of swift adventurous action. All possible elements of the Gothic adventure story from dark dungeons full of golden treasure through pagan temples reeking with human sacrifice to the climactic struggle on the bare mountain peak are used here to the best advantage. T h e characters are consistent and understandable — the villainous but inwardly terrified Garcia, Wingfield's loving but savage wife Otomie, the noble Guatemozin, and Wingfield himself. But what gives the novel its real superiority is its coherence of thought. I t is true that Haggard (like so many of the other novelists) cheats a little by picturing Guatemozin and Otomie and the Otomie tribe in general as good Indians who hate human sacrifices and therefore as sympathetic characters, and he does spend an inordinate amount of verbiage on trying to convince the reader that Wingfield at heart remains true to his pale English Lily despite his passionate fourteen-year marriage with the lovely dark Otomie. Y e t Haggard adeptly uses the device of the narrator. Wingfield's violently antiSpanish and anti-papistical prejudices are convincingly realistic in a sixteenth-century Englishman. So too is his abhorrence of Aztec human sacrifice, though his careful balancing of Aztec religious butchery against Spanish torture is perhaps a little too subtle for historicity. He is especially over-subtle when he argues that, though Aztec sacrifice to idols is worse than papistry's persecutions and walling up girls in nunnery dungeons, the Spaniards' torture of Indians and himself in order to make them reveal the hiding places of treasure is in turn far more evil than the brutality of Aztec religious ritual. T h e irony is effective when Haggard has an Indian ask scornfully after the massacre of six hundred Indian nobles: " I f our gods are devils, as you say, what are those who worship y o u r s ? " On top of this historical realism, moreover, Haggard has built a general moral structure that without noticeably violating the historicity of the narrator's pattern of thought appeals strongly to the modern reader. In the long run, the novel urges, evil is always punished. But man should not take upon himself the role of avenger, for " V e n g e a n c e

30

Curtis Dahl

is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay." Though many of them are kind and gentle folic, the Aztecs fall before the Spaniards because of their cruel rites. However, their punishers the Spaniards, because of their cruelties, gain only pain and trouble from their conquest. Cortes dies a broken man. Marina, who has betrayed her country, is discarded by Cortes and wedded to an inferior man. Wingfield himself, though he does not actually kill Garcia (the Lord takes care of that by maddening the villain and toppling him over the side of the volcano!), spends twenty years of his life in seeking vengeance, loses all his four children by Otomie, has the grief of seeing her poison herself, and knows that he can never have children by his English wife Lily. God does act, and sternly, in history: "every wrong revenges itself at last upon the man or the people that wrought it." This doctrine, consistently presented through all the fascinatingly colorful scenes and breathtaking adventures of the novel, gives the book a consistency and appeal lacking in the novels that rest their appeal wholly on colorful description, melodramatic emotion, and violent action. Also, it is close enough to sixteenth-century patterns of thought to strengthen rather than weaken the historical illusion. Haggard is the only author skillful enough to use the device of the outside observer to its full potential. But even he has written a novel valuable principally for its dramatic and colorful action and not for any true depth of meaning or subtlety of tragic or psychological perception. 9 VII So the nineteenth and very early twentieth century tried to deal in fiction with the extraordinarily rich material of the Spanish Conquest. So they failed. Perhaps the reason was the very wealth of the material itself. Perhaps it was the confusion of sympathies. Perhaps it was the chance that no really great novelist happened to turn to the subject. But, clearly, no really outstanding novel sprang out of this apparently fertile soil. Nor has yet the later twentieth century produced remarkably better. Archibald MacLeish's poetic narrative Conquistador (1932), though it won a Pulitzer prize and excels most of the novels by consistently sticking to the point of view of the narrator Bernal Diaz, lacks real grandeur and epic power. 10 A recent play on the Conquest of Peru, The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer, though it has had

Missing:

31

A Great Novel of Aztecs or Incas

long and successful runs in several countries, has received only mediocre reviews. There have been several translations from the Spanish, as for instance Robert Graves' The Cross and the Sword (1954) from M a n u e l de Jesus Galvan's Enriquillo. In fiction the only major work has been Samuel Shellabarger's exciting, well constructed, and highly popular Captain from Castile (1945), but even that pretends to only slight literary value. T h e confusingly written, sex-ridden trilogy of novels by Dexter Allen (Jaguar and the Golden Stag, 1954; Coil of the Serpent, 1956; Valley of the Eagles, 1957) on the career of Nazahual, King of Tezcuco, just before the Conquest, has practically none. One wonders, indeed, whether there will ever be a great novel of the Conquest. Where Romanticism failed can we reasonably hope that our naturalism or post-naturalism can succeed ? Has the opportunity, if it ever existed, gone forever? But genius can overcome all difficulties, and perhaps new ideas and new literary techniques will someday bring to fruition the Great Aztec or Great Incan novel still so sadly missing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O F N O V E L S ON A Z T E C S AND 1834-1903

INCAS

Aztec Revelations ; or, Leaves from the Life of the Fate-Doomed. Oquawka, Illinois, 1849. Bird, Robert Montgomery. Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest. Philadelphia, 1834. — The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico. Philadelphia, 1835. Bowen, E. J . ("J. Evelyn"). An Inca Queen, or Lost in Peru. London, 1891. Brereton, F. S. Roger the Bold: A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico. London, 1907. Dalton, William. Cortes and Pizarro: The Stories of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru . . . Retold for Youth. London, 1862. Fenn, G. Manville. The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas. London, 1884. Fosdick, W. W. Malmiztic the Toltec; and the Cavaliers of the Cross. Cincinnati, 1851. Foulke, William Dudley. Maya, A Story of Yucatan. New York and London, 1900. The Golden Sands of Mexico. A Moral and Religious Tale: To Which Is Added True Riches ; or, The Reward of Self-Sacrifice. Illus. William Croome. Philadelphia, 1850. Griffith, George Chetwynd. The Virgin of the Sun, A Tale of the Conquest of Peru. London, 1898. Haggard, H. Rider. The Heart of the World. London, 1896. — Montezuma's Daughter. London, 1893. Hancock, Anson Uriel. Coitlan, A Tale of the Inca World. Chicago, 1893. Henty, G. A. By Right of Conquest; or, With Cortez in Mexico. London, 1891. — The Treasure of the Incas. London, 1903. Ingraham, Joseph Holt. Montezuma the Serf; or, The Revolt of the Mexitili. A Tale of the Last Days of the Aztec Dynasty. Boston, 1845.

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Janvier, Thomas A. The Aztec Treasure-House: A Romance of Contemporaneous Antiquity. New York, 1890. Judson, Edward Z. C. ("Ned Buntline"). The Virgin of the Sun: A Historical Romance of the Last Revolution in Peru. Boston, 1847. Kingston, William H . G. Manco the Peruvian Chief; or, An Englishman's Adientures in the Country of the Incas. London, 1853. Lee, Albert. The Inca's Ransom, A Story of the Conquest of Peru. London, 1898. Maturin, Edward. Montezuma ; or, The Last of the Aztecs. New York, 1845. Munroe, Kirk. The White Conquerors of Mexico: A Tale of Toltec and Aztec. New York, 1893. Stebbing, Grace. Gold and Glory; or, Wild Ways of Other Days. London, 1882; also printed under the title A Real Hero, or Gold and Glory: A Story of the Conquest of Mexico. Thorpe, Francis Newton. The Spoils of Empire. Boston, 1903. Victor, Metta Victoria Fuller ("Seeley Regester"). The Last Days of Tul: A Romance of the Lost Cities of Yucatan. 1847. Vide, V. V. Sketches of Aboriginal Life. New York, 1846. Wallace, Lew. The Fair God; or, The Last of the ' Tzins. A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston, 1873. Westall, William. The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance. New York, 1886.

NOTES 1

I a m indebted for bibliographic help to Norman Holmes Pearson. Useful was also J o h n T . Flanagan and Raym o n d L. Grismer, "Mexico in American Fiction Prior to 1850," Hispania, X X I I I (December, 1940), 3 0 7 - 3 1 8 , but that study emphasizes novels of Spanish Mexico. ' Further evidence of the interest in ancient Mexico in the 1820's was William Bullock's p a n o r a m a (painted by Robert Burford) and archaeological exhibit (1824-1825) at the Egyptian Hall, London. Bullock tried to portray Mexico at the time of the Conquest. 3 Even as late as 1886 M a r y Β. M . Toland published a verse narrative entitled The Inca Princess, An Historical Romance, but it has no real relationship to the historical Incas. Far earlier, Joel Barlow's historical epic The Columbiad (1807) h a d included a

whole book on the Inca Capac and his people who, according to Barlow, were destroyed to make way for a higher good. * For this Pompeian or "catastrophic" tradition see my articles "Recreators of Pompeii," Archaeology, I X (September, 1956), 182-191; "BulwerLytton and the School of Catastrophe," Philological Quarterly, X X X I I (October, 1953), 4 2 8 ^ 4 2 ; a n d " T h e American School of Catastrophe," American Quarterly, X I (Fall, 1959), 380-390. s

History of the Conquest of Mexico, Book IV, C h a p . iii.

β

Ibid., Book I I I , Chap, vii; I V , iii; V I , vii.

' Ibid., Book V I , Chap. vii. 8

T h e connection to the gold fever of the time is specifically m a d e in the second story in the volume, " T r u e

Missing: A Great Novel of Aztecs or Incas Riches; or, T h e Reward of SelfSacrifice," pp. 107-108. • Two other novels I have been unable to consult: Metta Victoria (Fuller) Victor or "Seeley Regester," The Last Days of Tul: A Romance of the Lost Cities of Yucatan (1847), and E. J . Bowen ( " J . Evelyn"), An Inca Queen, or Lost in Peru (London, 1891). Though sometimes listed as fiction, Edward Eggleston and Lillie Eggleston Seelye, Montezuma and the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1880; London, 1881, with the title The Mexican Prince) is really biography. William Dalton's Cortes and Pizarro: The Stories of the

3

33

Conquest of Mexico (London, 1862) is fictionalized history — a series of stories which show the Spaniards not as glorious heroes who fight in a just cause but as brigands or filibusters. Yet Dalton also rejoices that the cannibalistic, human-sacrificing Aztecs have been erased from the earth. 10

It is interesting to note that an earlier apprentice work by a greater poet, Robert Frost, was a narrative poem on the subject " L a Noche Triste." See Louis Marshall Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking (Norman, Oklahoma, 1965), pp. 427-431.

THE PERPLEXED PROMISE The Image of the United States in Two Popular Norwegian Magazines, 1835-1865 BY OTTO REINERT

I The hold which the United States had on European imaginations in the nineteenth century has in recent years been the subject of extensive research on both sides of the Atlantic. 1 It is a vast, intricate, and slippery subject, and it is not surprising that most studies so far have confined themselves to America's impact on a single nation. But even this more limited task requires a certain intrepidity of purpose and delicacy of touch. To reconstruct and trace the changes in one nation's past image of another means to reduce a vast miscellany of impressions and opinions to some kind of interpreted order without violating the integrity of individual items or obscuring their larger patterns. In any absolute sense what is sought is obviously beyond the recovery of even the most diligent and resourceful historian. And since the available data are virtually inexhaustible, their interrelationships myriad and complex, their specifics recalcitrant in their diversity, and the interpreter's possible approaches and emphases infinite, scholarly prudence suggests caution and diffidence even within the limits of what can be accomplished. Almost by definition the truth we seek eludes precise and complete documentation. A methodology for coping with the difficulties is sketched in the Introduction to the most ambitious study of this kind yet to appear, Rend Rdmond's two-volume Les Etats-Unis devant Γ opinion franfaise, 1815-1852 (Paris, 1962). Three of its points are particularly relevant here. First, Rdrnond distinguishes between his enterprise seen as an essay in "the history of public opinion" and more conventional histories of international relationships. T h e latter can legitimately limit themselves to such sources as diplomatic and military records,

The Image of the United States

35

political utterances, legislative acts, official statistics and propaganda, and statements of economic policy, but in the former no area of the image-making nation's cultural life can safely be ignored as a priori irrelevant. Second, in this ill-defined assortment of sources it is necessary to distinguish between those that exercised influence and those that reflected opinion. The former is of primary concern to the historian of political events, the latter to the historian of inter-cultural sociology. For him, a casual reference in a newspaper, a trite allusion in a popular bestseller, or the size of the edition of an American book may say more about what he is after, and say it with more authority, than a scholar's learned tome, a social scientist's acute perceptions, or a travelling novelist's lively polemic. The literary value of a source is no criterion of its value as source, and since the historian of public opinion seeks not individual views but their total composite he cannot afford to discriminate among testimonies on the basis of the wit or the personality or the public importance of the witnesses. Third, there is a subtle, two-way relationship between information and opinion. Λ11 public opinion is based on information, true or false, but the selection of information for public consumption and the manner of its presentation and dissemination are themselves determined by public opinion. Government agencies, businessmen, and publishers of newspapers, periodicals, and books give the public what they think it wants and needs, but the wants and needs of the public are largely defined in response to its expression, direct and indirect, of its interests, tastes, expectations, and prejudices. My purpose here is not to survey or evaluate existing works of modern Amerikakunde or to correlate their findings with my own but to supplement the sources for such studies with a representative sample of the material on the United States in two popular Norwegian weeklies from 1835 till the end of the Civil War, both published in Christiania (Oslo): Skillingsmagazinet (SM in subsequent reference) a n d Illustreret

Nyhedsblad

(Illustrated

News Magazine)

(INB).

As a literary review and as the voice of a rather sceptical-conservative element in the younger Norwegian intelligentsia, INB was intellectually the weightier and more sophisticated of the two. For S M the popularization of knowledge about the contemporary world in a great variety of fields appears to have been the sole editorial aim; for INB it was important but hardly primary. In their American coverage, however, this qualitative distinction is not regularly apparent. Both

36

Otto Reinert

depended quite heavily on foreign sources for their material on the United States, though it is difficult to say just how heavily: a number of articles printed without credit suggest an origin far from Christiania. Both reflect the European ambivalence of response, then as now, to the United States as the home of freedom, equality, opportunity, and viable democratic institutions but also of frenetic materialism, political, judicial, social, and religious corruption, and of freedom betrayed by anarchy and popular tyranny. There is hardly a single feature of American life or a single nuance of opinion about it in S M and I N B that will not already be familiar to students of similar publications in other European countries. It is all there: the vast awesomeness of the American landscape, the vicissitudes and rewards of immigrant life, the restless ruthlessness of Yankee enterprise, the curse of slavery, the pathos of the vanishing Indian, the quaint or pernicious or attractive ways of public manners and institutions. T h e image is not simple, but neither are its components subtle or indistinct. M y study necessarily shares the limitations of its sources, and these are, then, considerable — in scope, in depth, and in originality. But it does not follow that the value of its material is therefore negligible. If Rdmond's remarks on aims and methodology have any merit — and the achievement of the book itself certainly lends them weight — then it is precisely the middlebrow unpretentiousness of the two weeklies that gives their banalities about the United States significance as expressions of mid-nineteenth-century public opinion in N o r w a y . T o the extent that S M and I N B were efforts at mass education they would have missed their mark if they had not been popular — that is, not just entertaining, miscellaneous in content, and making only modest demands on the reader's learning and intelligence, but also deliberately trying to appeal to his interest in the United States and to re-affirm rather than to upset his preconceived stereotypes. Obviously, this argument should not be pushed too far. S M and I N B addressed themselves to a large but not an inclusive audience, middle-class but not homogeneous, lay but not uneducated. A n d though they no doubt tell us something about what the average Norwegian reader knew and thought and felt about the United States as fact and as concept, they probably tell us at least as much about the attitudes of the editors. Generally, the history of the European image of the United States in the nineteenth century reflects a shift from the idealizing notions of a romantic and revolutionary age to the growing disillusionment of a generation that saw the approach and eruption of the Civil W a r as a

The Image of the United Stetes

37

radical ordeal, of doubtful outcome, of the whole American experiment. From emigrants and visitors Europe was learning that the realities of life in America did not always conform to expectations. To the extent that SM and INB offer evidence, however, this shift appears less decisive in Norway than in inter-empire France according to Rdmond and in Germany according to Hildegard Meyer's NordAmerika im Urteil des deutschen Schrifttums bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts

(Hamburg, 1929).2 The difference remains significant even after allowance is made for the facts that there is only partial overlap between the period covered by Rimond and Meyer and the years of SM's and INB's publication and that by the time SM, the older qf the two Norwegian weeklies, began publication in 1835 the romantic phase in the development of French and German views of the United States was already over. Thus, in France, according to R^mond, 1832-1835 were the pivotal years of change. The importance of this chronological discrepancy is less than it may seem at first because romanticism in Norway was almost a generation behind the corresponding movements in the great national cultures in Europe. There is a sense in which the early half of the period that R6nond deals with, i.e., 1815-1835, can be said to coincide with the 1840s and '50s in Norway, a small and poor country on the cultural periphery. At any rate, SM and INB suggest that in Norway it was less a matter of enthusiasm for things American being superseded by scepticism than of the continuing co-appearance of both reactions even during the '50s and the years of the Civil War. The impression of a distinct change in attitude from the early to the later part of the period is muted by the persistence of ambivalence of response or of tension between contrasting views throughout these years. The difference, less than striking though it is, may seem puzzling, since many of the conditions that determined public opinion about the United States in the rest of Europe were operative in Norway too. There, as in other countries, American democratic institutions and the egalitarianism of American social life appealed to those large sections of the population for whom democracy throughout most of the century remained more nominal than real. Norwegian society was still rigidly stratified, with an almost unbridgable gap between the educated, largely urban- and Danooriented class of appointed magistrates in the church, in education, and in civil and military administration, on the one hand, and on the other, the small landholders and dependent tenant farmers who made

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Otto Reinert

u p the majority of the people and who for some time yet were kept from participating decisively in political life by lack of opportunity and education. Restive radicals looked with longing to American freedom of political action and expression. Typically, Marcus Thrane, the first organizer of Norwegian labor, went to America after serving a prison sentence for subversive agitation in the early 1850s. Norwegian agriculture was periodically depressed and even in good years offered only a meager livelihood for most of the farm population. The abundance of good and cheap land in the United States remained the single most potent attraction for Norwegian as for other European emigrants until well after the Civil War, and among the emigrants were not just rural proletarians but freeholders as well. The American free enterprise system offered visions of unlimited economic opportunity for artisans and small tradesmen who felt frustrated by European conditions. There was no official policy of religious intolerance, let alone persecution, in Norway, but to practicing dissenters and other independent spirits the separation of church and state in the United States re-enforced the general image of a land in which individual freedom could be exercised without harassment and prejudice in all areas of life. And it was precisely to the issues raised by such real or alleged attractions as these that the voice of the establishment addressed itself in the popular press when it sought to oppose patriotic sentiments to the prospective emigrant's visions of a haven of affluence and liberty across the sea. In general, the qualified or negative views of the United States in SM and INB represent the conservatism of the ruling order. 3 But if so many Norwegians shared the common European attitudes to the United States, how do we explain the relative indistinctness of the change from largely favorable to largely unfavorable views in S M and INB, as compared to the more decisive and sudden shift reflected in popular periodicals elsewhere in Europe during the years from Jackson's presidency till the Civil War? Certain unique features in Norwegian history and society suggest an answer. Given these, what, in fact, is a little surprising is not that the attitudes to the United States expressed in the two Norwegian weeklies deviate at all from those found in other popular European periodicals but that they deviate as little as they do. T o account for this by reference to the number of translated articles in S M and INB begs the question: why did the Norwegian editors feel that their purposes were being served by reprinting so many foreign views of the United States? For if social,

The Image of the United States

39

political, a n d economic conditions in \ o r w a v in m a n y respects were like those in the rest of Europe, there were also important respects in which they differed. History might be expected to have predisposed Norwegians to a more unequivocally favorable attitude to the United States t h a n t h a t which prevailed in countries of older and unbroken national traditions, like England, France, and Sweden. Like the United States, nineteenthcentury Norway was politically a young nation. I n 1814, after some four h u n d r e d years of Danish rule, she had given herself a constitution modeled on t h a t of the U n i t e d States. At the time it was the freest constitution in all of E u r o p e . I n the same year Norway had also gained a substantial measure of political self-determination within a union with Sweden u n d e r one king. Zealous guardianship of the new constitution against its a t t e m p t e d erosion by the Swedish king occupied much of the Norwegians' political energy during the first decades of the union. T h e r e are parallels here to American political experience during the period f r o m the last years of British colonial rule t h r o u g h the war of 1812, America's "second war of i n d e p e n d e n c e " — not in political and military events b u t in the growth of a peculiar national self-consciousness. Norwegians were anxious to vindicate their regained national independence by indigenous productions in art, literature, scholarship, a n d science that could strengthen the sense of national identity and purpose a n d c o m m a n d respect a b r o a d . T h a t aspect of Norwegian national romanticism that took the form of a declaration of cultural i n d e p e n d e n c e from Denmark is in some ways analogous to the growing d e m a n d a m o n g patriotic Americans for a national culture, particularly a literary culture, distinct from that of England — not despite b u t because of their linguistic c o m m u n i t y . Industrialization began to be an important factor in Norway's economic life only d u r i n g the 1850s. T h e Jacksonian ideal of America as a democracy of free farmers was still a major ideological reason for Norwegian emigration to the U n i t e d States and a liberal a r g u m e n t in Norwegian political d e b a t e at a time when it was receding into nostalgia in the increasingly industrialized and socially and ethnically complex United States and when it had ceased to influence even liberal opinion in the economically more advanced countries of Europe. Finally, Norwegian emigration to the United States did not become regular till the late 1830s, did not assume significant proportions till well into the 1840s, and remained moderate till after the Civil W a r . 4 As a result, anti-emigration p r o p a g a n d a in the Norwegian press in

40

Otto Reinert

the form of negative reports on American conditions never became either very steady or very strong and did not vary greatly in content or intensity during the period with which we are concerned. It is foolish to presume to be positive in matters of this kind, but these seem to be the main reasons why the idealistic and romantic view of the United States lingered on in Norway even after the brightness of the American image had begun to pale elsewhere in Europe and why, when it began to pale in Norway too, it paled less steadily and certainly. S M (1835-1891) was modelled on the British Penny Magazine, only three years its senior. From 1835 to 1856 the editor was C. A. Guldberg, a minister in the state church, and from 1857 to 1891 Hartvig Lassen, a literary historian who did pioneer work as editor and critic of Henrik Wergeland's poetry. After the 1860s the periodical kept losing its battle for readership to another popular journal. The years of highest incidence of American items in SM were its first two or three years of publication, the early 1850s, and the Civil War years. My coverage stops with the death of Lincoln. If INB (1851-1866) survived for a much shorter time than SM, the reason seems to have been that it addressed itself to a more select audience. It was edited throughout its life by Paul Botten-Hansen, one of the more important secondary literary figures in Norway at the time. The son of a poor peasant, he ended his career as state archivist, director of the University Library, and the owner of one of the largest private book collections in the country. In his youth he had poetic ambitions, and his play, Huldrebrylluppet (The Troll Wedding), published in 1851, is a clever if not very poetic blend of native folklore, Heinean wit, and the metaphysics of the self, that was one of Ibsen's inspirations for Peer Gynt. Botten-Hansen, in fact, was one of Ibsen's closest friends prior to the poet's departure from Norway in 1864. Ibsen belonged to "the Dutchman's Circle" (Botten-Hansen himself was "the Dutchman", in allusion to a character in one of Holberg's plays, whom Botten-Hansen's friends said he resembled in his talent for picking up literary rarities), a group of struggling young writers and intellectuals who got together in Botten-Hansen's rooms for drink and radical talk in the late '50s and early '60s. Three of Ibsen's plays, Lady Inger, The Vikings, and Love's Comedy, first appeared as supplements to INB ("New Year's Gifts" to the subscribers), and a number of his poems were first published there. Botten-Hansen was a man of learning and wide humanistic interests, a cool intellectual whose scepticism and disinterestedness inclined him

The Image of the United States

41

to conservative views b u t also to toleration of the radicalism of m o r e fiery friends. His weekly enjoyed considerable prestige, particularly because of the editor's own reviews of c o n t e m p o r a r y Norwegian literature, and it is still considered an i m p o r t a n t index to nineteenthcentury cultural life in N o r w a y . At its most successful (c. 1860) it h a d a circulation of 1,400, a respectable figure. T h e largest n u m b e r of items on the United States in either of the two weeklies in a single year was 92 in I N B in 1853. T h e n u m b e r decreased sharply after t h a t year b u t remained fairly steady t h r o u g h the rest of t h e 1850s. I N B printed more material on A m e r i c a t h a n S M until the Civil W a r , when it failed to m a t c h S M ' s sudden increase in coverage. I deal with all the years of the INB's publication. Aside f r o m S M ' s fuller coverage of Civil W a r news there was no significant difference in the kind of A m e r i c a n subject m a t t e r in the two weeklies (though INB, for some reason, mentions the A m e r i c a n I n d i a n only once), nor in their editorial attitudes, explicit or implicit, to the United States. T h e r a n d o m inclusiveness of the material suggests t h a t newsworthiness a n d p o p u l a r reading appeal r a t h e r t h a n ideology or polemics d e t e r m i n e d editorial policy, a n d the anonymity of most of the selections expressing strong opinions, either pro or con, a b o u t America makes inferences a b o u t the editors' own views b o t h difficult and doubtful. T h e r e is no consistent editorial line to be t r a c e d ; articles a p p e a r , sometimes within a few weeks of one another, t h a t take flatly opposite positions on a given issue, a n d the editors make no a t t e m p t to reconcile t h e m or even to recognize the clashes. T h e y fail, t h a t is, to assume intellectual responsibility for the controversial material, original or second-hand, which they print a b o u t the U n i t e d States. O r , in kinder terms: they d o not seem to have an axe to g r i n d . T h e acknowledged foreign sources (more of t h e m in S M t h a n in INB) included such journals as Das Ausland (almost consistently antiAmerican, to judge f r o m the pieces reprinted in S M ) , Über Land und Meer, Illustrierte deutsche Monatshefte, Revue des deux mondes, Magazin pittoresque, Dickens's Household Words a n d All the Year Round, Penny Magazine, Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, a n d Harper's Weekly. Some acknowledgements were simply in the form of " T r a n s l a t e d f r o m English" ( F r e n c h / G e r m a n ) . T h e i r coverage of current A m e r i c a n news events was at best sporadic. T h u s , some b u t by no means all the m a j o r battles of the Civil W a r were reported on, a n d even in S M there was a noticeable decline in Civil W a r news d u r i n g t h e Prusso-Danish conflict in 1863-64. T h e staple of b o t h weeklies were popularly

42

Otto Reinert

informative articles on a wide range of subjects within the general area of "culture": history and technology, nature and daily life, economics and biography, politics and law. Most of these were longer than similar articles in a modern news magazine, but few exceeded a couple of thousand words. The occasional longer piece was usually serialized. Most articles appeared anonymously. Among the named foreign authors were Dickens, Trollope, Washington Irving, the American traveller Bayard Taylor, the social reformer Charles L. Brace, and the London Times' famous war correspondent William Russell. The Norwegian novelist Jonas Lie contributed a number of surveys of international politics to INB, including frequent references to American affairs. On the whole, both SM and INB were quite reliable sources of information about the United States, even if there were important areas they pretty much ignored — like art, literature, science, and education. The most notable exception to this general rule is SM's failure to distinguish among Indian tribes; the reader gets the impression that there was a single, homogeneous Indian culture throughout North America. The translation of "county" as "Grevskab" is mildly incongruous in its literalness but hardly proof of ignorance of American social structure or administrative system. Nor should probably much be made of the fact that Brook Farm is not mentioned in an article in S M on Fourier and experiments in socialist community living. Given the audience and the editorial aim of the two periodicals, their image of America was inevitably made up of miscellanea: anecdotes illustrating "typical" American attitudes and ways of life, poems by homesick emigrants, travelogues weary or enthusiastic, diatribes against proselytizing Mormons, accounts of the Monitor battling the Merrimac, of Negro revival meetings, buffalo hunts, gold digger brawls, lynchings, elections, trials, droughts, floods, fires, ship disasters, epidemics, Indian attacks, and a sea monster sighted off the Massachusetts coast. From thoughtful and informed comparisons of the North's and the South's military and economic resources and of the Auburn and Philadelphia penal systems we move through reviews of Uncle Tom's Cabin a n d biographies of politicians a n d generals to a

recipe for keeping beer from spoiling in the summer heat and to stories about the Great Eastern's first Atlantic crossing, Jenny Lind being nearly mobbed by an over-enthusiastic audience, and one William Todd who in 1844 built himself a contraption of "wings and mechanical weights" in which he set out to fly from Philadelphia to

The Image of the United States

43

New York "but was by an unfortunate accident shot down before he reached his destination and took the secret of his invention with him to the grave." But trivia too are evidence of the editors' assumptions about reader taste and interest. What it implies about popular journalism and middle class reading habits in mid-nineteenth-century Norway is part of the image we are seeking. II Introductions to articles in S M and INB that deal at some length with American events and institutions repeatedly remind the reader that there are two main reasons why the great republic across the ocean has a claim on his interest. One is the growing number of Norwegians who emigrate, and the other is the growing importance of the United States in world affairs. According to an article in INB in the spring of 1866, a total of 15,000 Norwegians are expected to emigrate to America that year. This is said to be a new high; the previous high was in 1861, when 8,850 Norwegians left for the United States. INB estimates a total of 80,000 Norwegian emigrants to the United States for the period 1849-66 (INB 5/27 66). 5 Such a drain of people who more than likely represented youthful economic initiative and a healthy ambition for self-improvement was obviously a grave problem for a small nation. Reflective Norwegians' concern with the accelerating rate of emigration as little less than a national disaster is evident in the way the problem is treated in the two weeklies. It is admitted that high taxes, backward communications impeding marketing of farm products, scarcity of arable land, lowyield soil, and a succession of bad harvests have left large numbers of people virtually destitute and with no choice but to seek better fortunes in a country where good land is plentiful and cheap. Norway can ill afford to lose so many of her best people this way (SM 7/27 61), but one can hardly blame the emigrants for leaving (INB 12/4 59). Neither S M nor INB suggests a program of domestic reform for slowing the drain, and neither attempts to deny that in many cases emigration turns out to have been the right step for the emigrant and his family to take. SM reports in 1848 that most Norwegian emigrants to America do not regret their decision: the more fertile climate and soil yield bigger and better crops for the same or less amount of work (SM 1/15 48). Some Norwegian immigrants in a small prairie town reminisce and reflect one evening: "Looks to me, though, like

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America ain't all she's supposed to be. Sure, it's a great country. But I don't see that people ain't gotta work and sweat for a living here too just like home." — "Aw, come on! This is a much better country. Profits are bigger, people are easier to get along with, and you got real freedom. You can buy the best land for a song, and you can vote"· ( S M 5/11 61). Certainly the immigrant must make sacrifices, and he works long and hard, but he works for himself (INB 1/16 60), and in the end he will have "his own nice little home," perhaps even prosperity ( S M 11/9 50). S M notes that with the improved facilities on the emigrant ships and the transition from sail to steam there should not longer be much physical discomfort involved in crossing the Atlantic ( S M 7/27 61). When English was proposed by a Christiania newspaper as a subject for the Examen Artium (the qualifying examination for the University) the proposal no doubt reflected both awareness of the value of a knowledge of English in a world increasingly dominated by the two great English-speaking nations and recognition of emigration to America as an increasingly important fact of Norwegian life (INB 5/1 52, 11/13 52). T h e proposal must have received tragic support in the news that two hundred Norwegian immigrants had perished in a shipwreck on Lake Erie because they did not understand the commands shouted at them by the English-speaking crew (INB 9/11 52). But most items on emigration in both weeklies reflect a negative attitude. There are plenty of warnings that emigration is not a step to be taken lightly. T h e crossing is long and rough: as late as one year before S M ' s reassuring note above about the new ease and comfort of the transatlantic passage, the same magazine hits two favorite American targets: " T h e sufferings which those wretches [i.e., the Irish who were taken into slavery by the vikings] had to endure in the passage from Ireland to Iceland can hardly have been less than those of the Negro slaves during the voyage from Guinea to Cuba or those of the modern emigrants on their way to the land of liberty and equality" ( S M 11/17 60). The juxtaposition of the two comparisons and the sarcasm of the final phrase are clearly meant to suggest that the emigrant may just be exchanging one form of slavery for another. T h e journey inland is made dangerous by dishonest travel agents, train wrecks and fires, boiler explosions on the river boats, and shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. Above all, the immigrant must expect to experience privation, homesickness, and hard toil in his new home, at least for several years after his arrival ( S M 11/9 50). Only simpletons

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any longer believe that wealth comes easy in the United States (SM 12/7 49). In New York alone there are 195,000 unemployed (INB 4/7 55). The lure of Californian gold is deceptive. Some few are lucky — a tanner's apprentice from Fredrikstad has returned a wealthy man (INB 3 19 53) and a man from Trondheim is said to be the richest gold digger in all of California (INB 11/11 54) — but most are not. Besides, to strike it rich usually means becoming morally corrupted; vice and violence are rampant in the gold fields (SM 9/20 51). Success, even, sometimes, mere survival, depends on the possession of some capital, good health, strong and willing arms, tough perseverance - and luck (SM 7/13 39, 12/8 49, 11/9 50). Even the few who make good often find that happiness in the new homeland is elusive. Materially they may be better off than in Norway, but "gold is not happiness" (SM 9/20 51). They have lost something: " T h e carefree, joyous outlook is g o n e . . . . The early struggles, homesickness and want are severe trials'' (INB2/1761). T h e notion that carefree joy characterized the mood of a Norwegian tenant farmer contemplating escape from filth and drunkenness and a lifetime of futile toil is a piece of sentimental-patriotic cant, but perhaps for that very reason it is also a symptom of editorial anxiousness to help to stop the national bloodletting. As early as 1839 S M recommends Ole Rynning's influential Truthful

Account of America, for Farmers and Others

(Christiania,

1838)

as " a good guide for emigrants" but adds the warning, later to become so familiar, that the book shows " t h a t only people with money and energy can expect to succeed over there" (SM 7/13 39). Hard-luck stories about emigrants appear frequently in both S M and INB. A Norwegian in Buffalo, New York, writes home about a cholera epidemic, a crime wave, the difficulties of clearing forest land, unscrupulous land speculators, high prices on land, frequent fires, garbage disposal problems, flagrant irreligiosity, and the demoralization of immigrant youth. T h e land is fertile enough, but many of the immigrants lack the farming skill to utilize it properly. Many of the men think it is degrading to have to perform chores done by women in Norway, e.g., milking (INB 12/4 52). An item from a Bergen newspaper tells the sad story of " a good, hard-working man from Alten-Talvig who last year moved to America with his whole family, bringing with him about 1,200 dollars, who now has returned destitute after losing several of his loved ones on the return trip" (INB 2/12 53). S M paraphrases a letter from a young man from Arendal who sought his fortune in Minnesota: " H e describes conditions over there as most

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miserable. T h e cost of living is high, daily earnings are small, Indians raid the country, and there are many other sad evils, particularly those caused by the Civil War. He urges people back home not to emigrate and hopes to return to Norway himself" ( S M 5 9 63). Both S M and I N B do in fact carry several notices about the return of disillusioned immigrants. T h e r e is no reason to doubt the actual operation of the psychological motive for some of the enthusiastic letters the new immigrants sent home, which is described in a letter from a young man " w h o left Aalesund for America last spring": I n very strong terms he warns heads of families against emigrating. He says that the accounts that describe everything in America as just wonderful are untrustworthy, because they very often have been written from selfish motives: the letter-writers want friends and relatives to come over and join them so that their own homesickness will be a little easier to bear. Of the fifty families who left Norway at the same time as the youth from Aalesund just about all are sorry they did. ( S M 9/21 61) More than one of the poems in I N B could be entitled " T h e Emigrant's L a m e n t . " There are heartbroken and forsaken old parents and beautiful-hills-of-home-never-to-be-seen-again in all of them and the anguished cry of " W h y did I ever leave ? " O n e of them is introduced as " a sincere and very moving poem about the mishaps that are likely to befall the immigrant in America. . . . W e hope it will keep people who are considering going there from rashly leaving their h o m e l a n d " ( I N B 3/19 53). T h e same article that describes the typical Norwegian peasant as joyful and carefree concludes by advising the prospective emigrant not to leave home if he is already making any kind of decent living in Norway — "you don't know what you'll find in A m e r i c a . " " B u t if you are now living in actual want and distress and have courage, persistence, and a strong body and character, and if you don't leave expecting things to be easy over there — then g o " ( I N B 2/17 61). I N B uses as an occasion for anti-emigration propaganda a review and brief summary of the book which Charles L . Brace wrote about his trip to Norway in the summer of 1856. T h e reviewer finds the American's impressions on the whole those of an intelligent, accurate, thorough, and objective observer who is favorably disposed to Norwegian life. " A n d perhaps this might suggest that, seen through the right pair of eyes, not everything here at home is as bad as the

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fanatic gospelers of emigration try to tell us it is" (INB 10/11 57). But the successful emigrant h o m e on a visit presented a powerful a p p e a l . Brace himself m u c h prefers the plain, simple, local farmers to their loud, affected, a n d overdressed cousins from America, b u t he notices the undisguised pride with which the former listen to their relatives talking in English with the American tourist, and afterwards all the Norwegians present assure him that they are "going to America next y e a r " (INB 10 18 57). A thoughtful little article taken from Norsk Handelstidende (The Norwegian Commercial Intelligencer) suggests a sociological reason for emigration. If every year more and more people leave Norway for America, the reason is not solely lack of economic opportunity in N o r w a y " b u t a false a n d obstinate pride, or rather snobbery, t h a t keeps people from taking what work is available." T h e American, on the other h a n d , "considers it a greater shame to remain idle just because he cannot find exactly the kind of work for which he considers himself particularly qualified t h a n to work for a while at some other kind of job, however lowly, and doing his best at it, while waiting for an opening in his own field" (INB 4/15 66). It is this democratic a t t i t u d e in America to a n y honest employment that tempts so m a n y Norwegians to emigrate and which accounts for the inspiring vitality in American society. "All of us must admire the free institutions t h a t have m a d e such conditions possible, and all of us recognize the Tightness a n d soundness of principles on which that society has been founded in which such attitudes prevail a n d where such astonishing results have been achieved" (INB 4 Ί 5 66). But as long as most Norwegians persist in their obsessive prejudices and their indolent pride, Norway is not likely to appeal as a p e r m a n e n t home to the willing w o r k m a n w h o w a n t s to make his way in the world by his own efforts. T h e chance to make something of one's life on one's own terms, freed f r o m the natural and artificial restraints placed on individual endeavor in Europe, was the strongest and deepest pull in Europe's A m e r i c a n d r e a m . It shaped and colored the U t o p i a n image of American history and of America's future, the vision of an emergent millennial society. J [ o r g e n ] H[ansen], the a u t h o r of a long, serialized article on " A m e r i k a " in S M in 1841, 7 strikes a note that is heard intermittently in both magazines, though he does so with more rhapsodic ardor t h a n most. T h e American Revolution is " o n e of history's most splendid events" ( S M 9/18 41), " w h i c h has launched the world upon an era for which the h u m a n spirit . . . nurtures the

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most beautiful hopes — hopes which are fastened nowhere more strongly than on the nation which first undertook the struggle for freedom" (SM 4/10 41). Latin-America has emulated her glorious neighbor to the north, "for only thus could the old colonies in untrammelled freedom follow and fulfil their own individual destiny" ( S M 7/10 41). T h e series of articles begins: T h e United States attracts more and more attention and more and more clearly manifests her destiny to become, and not in name only, the New World, in which men with renewed force can develop their individual abilities. . . . It is the land of the future, wherein, on the foundations of Old World experience, a new era will begin, in which, freed from the obstacles which the Old World still has to overcome, the race with redoubled fervor will pursue its forward path. (SM 5/1 41) Again and again, though less frequently as the Civil War approaches, American news items occasion pious reflections on the accumulating conquests made by "the human spirit" and the general advance of civilization. T h e "modest but handsome" house of J a c o b Stroham, a cattle farmer in Illinois, "deserves more of our admiration and respect than all the ruined castles of the robber barons of the Middle Ages" (INB 4/14 55). In a panegyrical biography of Benjamin Franklin the Revolution is called "the most sublime historical example" of how "an entire nation, inspired by the single emotion of wanting liberty and independence" can overthrow tyranny — not in murderous Jacobine rages but with the same "calm moderation and resolve" that now allow her to exploit her "self-acquired political advantages and the potential riches of her land" (SM 5/9 35). No fence will enclose the Bunker Hill monument, for "in a nation which is under no alien guardianship but is accustomed to use her own common sense no bars or chains are neded to protect works of art from vandalism" (SM 9/28 44). T h e way people of all nations and races in America "amazingly fast meld into one single political entity augurs an age of international harmony and peace" ( S M 1/15 48). " W h a t great expectations are we not entitled to have for a country that makes progress by such giant steps?" (SM 6/30 38). T h e complete emancipation of America from Europe is just a question of time. This applies equally to commerce, industry, and politics. When that time comes Europe will find that America can do better without Europe than Europe can do without

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America. The entire political and social life of Europe will have to be reformed — reduced. Europe will no longer be the master of the world but just another partner in one, single world economy. Dynastic wars and conquerors' campaigns will become things of the past, nations will be masters of their own destiny, and a happier age will dawn for all mankind. (SM 11/6 41) This is the raptly visionary side of the comments on America's role, past, present, and future, in world affairs. The other side is sober concern with Realpolitik — worry rather than idealistic optimism. O n e of the first references to the United States in INB is a news item about the victory of an American schooner (named "America," though the symbolism is not noted) over English boats in a race around the Isle of Wight — the first of the "America's" Cup races. INB comments: "Although the race was only a sporting spectacle, its outcome nevertheless suggests the growing superiority of the American navy, and, since the command of the high seas is involved in it, it should be a source for serious reflection in the minds of the proud English" (INB 10/25 51). Perhaps it was, for when Washington made noises about "incorporating the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii] into the Union," the British and French consuls on the islands protested (INB 12/3 53). Already in 1844 the American president is as important a political figure as the rulers of the mightiest empires (SM 9/28 44). "America's political influence grows with her material power" (INB 3/26 53). And Washington is beginning to flex her muscles. Reparations are demanded of Greece for jailing an American missionary (SM 6/4 53), Commander Perry opens up J a p a n to American trade "by force" (INB 10 21 54), and President Pierce insists on negotiating for free passage for American ships through the 0resund (INB 12/30 54). Without taking an editorial stand, INB recognizes that annexation of Cuba would strengthen America's position in international power politics (INB 10 21 54) and worries lest the realization of this and other of the South's designs for territorial expansion in the Caribbean area perpetuate the institution of slavery indefinitely (INB 9/13 56). With unusual obtuseness INB predicts that the election of Buchanan will bring about a deterioration of relations between the United States and Great Britain, since the new president is known to be a proslavery imperialist who may well permit the resumption of the African slave trade (INB 11/29 56). Even in the middle of a Civil Wrar both North and South adopt a belligerent attitude to the European powers 4

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— evidence that the Americans are less phlegmatic and more intransigent than the British (INB 3/12 65). Queen Victoria is said to be not at all eager for a quick conclusion to the Civil W a r ; the W a r weakens the United States, which is already strong enough to take on any European power (INB 3/12 65). During the international crisis over Mexico, Jonas Lie reports in INB with considerable consternation that the United States, regarding the French adventure as a violation of the Monroe doctrine, is said to have pledged her support of Russia in case of any future war between that country and Britain and France (INB 9/20 63). Such re-alignment would be shocking, obviously, because it would mean a complete reversal of America's traditional role as the enemy of the old systems of political absolutism in Europe. In 1851, for example, an American frigate was sent over to Europe to bring back the Hungarian revolutionary and freedom fighter Kossuth to an enthusiastic reception in the States, causing ominous diplomatic rumblings in Vienna and St. Petersburg (SM 12/20 51). And ten years before the Mexican crisis, INB expresses liberal Europe's traditional view of the United States' role as a potential world power: It is true, of course, that her geographical location will keep the U.S. from interfering in the Crimean conflict for as long as she can, but she is too proud a country and too powerful to want to conceal, under a mask of neutrality, her anti-Russian and antiAustrian feelings. And if it should ever become Europe's destiny to be conquered by Russia, in fulfilment of Napoleon's prophecy that "in fifty years Europe is either republican or Muscovite," the determined conduct of this giant republic may well turn out to be the last hope of all friends of civilization and liberty. (INB 1/21 54) What is vaguely worrisome about America's growing political and military strength and what tempers Europe's traditional trust in her as a bulwark and champion of political and economic liberalism is the fear that one day the giant democracy will want to export her ideals and institutions by force (INB 3/26 53). There is no enthusiasm in INB's report that the Democrats in Congress favor American intervention in Europe to reverse the setbacks suffered by the liberal cause in the revolutions of 1848. One senses a general feeling that though republican liberty is a fine thing and a noble inspiration for the oppressed peoples of Europe, the old continent is on the whole better off as long as both the reality and the ideal are kept on the far side of the

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Atlantic. Europe may be "rotten" and all fair-minded progressives wish for the ultimate triumph of free representative government over the absolutism of decadent monarchies (INB 8 5 66), but the possibility of American democratic militancy haunts the pages of both S M and INB as much as a specter as it does as a hope. Idea and reality are again in uneasy opposition in comments on America's domestic politics and her public institutions. Quadrennial presidential elections, it is said, are a potential source of political instability even in the best of times; when the country is already deeply divided, North against South, an election can be catastrophic (INB 12/23 60). A comprehensive and informed article describing the American electoral system and the relationship among the branches of government assumes a friendly but slightly condescending tone toward a nation that has given herself such a cumbersome and primitive political machinery (SM 2/14 46). Outright acidulous is an article that begins, " T o say something nice about the United States is to risk being regarded as a revolutionary," then quickly steps back from the risk: "But the country deserves only brief, superficial mention; the details of her public life are not attractive," and concludes in crushing metaphor: " T h e great idea, forcing its way into reality, is impressive in its magnitude and entices us with its manifold diversity, . . . but when we step closer to the magic cauldron, we find at the bottom the same dregs, the same mean passions, the same selfishness, falseness, brutality, despotism . . . which in the Old World seethe and bubble between us and Life" (SM no. 95 37). On close inspection, the grand melting pot turns, at least for William Russell in New York, into " a sewer of people" (INB 6/21 63). T o another visitor the whole United States is "the promised land for adventurers, bankrupts, swindlers, and Mormons" (SM 6/4 53). From such seeds, what fruits can grow? T h e low caliber of her politicians and public officials corrupts America's public life from top to bottom. Since the days of Washington and Jefferson, since de Tocqueville wrote his famous book, American manners have spectacularly deteriorated. In the middle of unprecedented material prosperity and commercial and industrial activity far beyond that of any other country, moral and intellectual life has strangely retrogressed, particularly in politics. . . . T h e conduct of the Union is in the hands exclusively of a group of men without tradition, without education, and all too often without morals — men

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who beneath meaningless party labels conceal a complete lack of principles and blind obedience to the whims of the masses. ( S M 11/29 62) Elections are commonly rigged, and campaigning is rough, vulgar, libellous, and concerned with personalities rather than with issues and principles (INB 12/16 60). Political rowdyism is endemic. Lobbyists blatantly ignore public interest for private gain; this is the sole reason why the transcontinental railroad has not yet been completed ( S M 6/13 63). False notions of equality — " I am just as good as y o u ! " (INB 2/17 61) — keep the common man from respecting public officials or the dignity of their office ( S M 7/6 61). T h e spoils system is another reason why men of integrity and intelligence are not attracted to public service: " T h e evil, in other words, is rooted in the system by which public office is awarded in the United States, in the impermanence and insecurity of the official's tenure, in his exposed position, and in the temptation to personal enrichment and to abuse of trust and office because of the inadequacy of his salary and the absence of any kind of pensionary system" ( S M 7/6 61). T h e results are apparent on the highest levels of public life. Russell finds Lincoln a bit of a boor, remarks on his unpopularity with the upper classes and the intelligentsia, and finds his trick of turning away difficult questions with a folksy anecdote cheap and irresponsible (SM 5/23 63). President Johnson is drunk at his own inauguration, though overenthusiastic friends and the conventional ceremonial of the occasion may be given some of the blame (INB 5/28 65). A European visitor to the House of Representatives is appalled by the shortness of the debates and the inanity of the speeches ( S M 5/5 38). Another witnesses a fistfight between two congressmen (INB 3/31 55). At the same time, the intense devotion with which Americans throw themselves into political life at election time compels a certain fascinated respect. An English observer describes a night-time political rally on Broadway as "Saturnalian" and is impressed when he realizes that the huge, rough, unruly crowd is not going to riot or loot stores and warehouses. This admirable restraint, he concludes, must be attributed to the fact that "for this people happiness is politics" ( S M 11/21 63). Newspapers, of large format, poorly printed on bad paper, and full of advertisements, are everywhere, feeding the popular interest in politics in shrill, uneducated editorials ( S M 12/11 41). An article in S M paints a picture both somber and lurid of American justice. American law has retained only the worst features of British

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Common Law. The judiciary is full of odd quirks and shot through with corruption. Many individual judges, of course, are honest and competent men, but as a matter of general principle a judgeship should not be an elective office. Some judges offend against good taste and even against the dignity of the court. Good lawyers prefer private practice because it offers greater financial security. Because American trial procedure tends to reward tricky legalism and smart oratory, true justice is often subverted: both sides are more interested in winning the case than in establishing the facts (SM 4/28 55). Some verdicts seem farcical to a European. In a town in California a theater manager tries to kill a journalist who has insulted his wife. T h e manager is arrested, tried, and sentenced — not for attempted murder but for firing his gun in a public place. T h e journalist is censured from the Bench for affronting the honor of a lady (INB 4/17 59). But lynch law, of course, is the most notorious feature, in European eyes, of American mock justice. Particularly reprehensible is the tendency among many Americans to defend the practice by "equating Lord Lynch with the prestigious concept of 'popular justice' " (INB 8/17 62). At best, lynchings may be termed a necessary evil, but they are still a disgrace in a presumably civilized state (SM 4/28 55). It is a moot question, says SM, "whether those people can be looked upon as wise and fortunate who leave a country where lawful order is the rule in all areas of life and where life and property are considered sacrosanct, in order to go to live in this much-praised America" (SM 6/4 53). But SM's editorial stand on the issue was eclectic. Only a few weeks after this patriotic blast against American lawlessness, the journal carefully reviewed Undersecretary Ole Munch Raeder's report to the Norwegian Storting on the American jury system, and here more moderate tones are heard. The report, says the reviewer, demolishes the European image of America as a lawless society, at the mercy of arbitrary judges, corrupt lawyers, and sadistic mobs. Tales of lynchings and mob justice are greatly exaggerated in European accounts. Americans are fiercely committed to the jury system. T h e Vigilantes are (as a rule, at least) sober and responsible citizens who perform a necessary function in upholding the idea and authority of the law in newly settled regions. T h e impression one derives from Mr. Raeder's book . . . is that Americans are an industrious, God-fearing, and highly enlightened people, whose respect for the law and whose realization of the

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importance of a sound, stable, and equitable legal system are at least equal to those of the European nations. Moreover, they strongly respect and are willing to defend everybody's basic h u m a n rights, including the criminal's. This is particularly true in the northern states that have been settled longest. It is less true in the South, where the institution of slavery blunts the general sense of justice . . . and in some of the frontier regions out west, . . . where lynch law is practiced only when the enforcement of other laws proves impossible. (SM 7/23 53) Europeans should remember that America is passing through the Old World's entire cultural development in the course of a few decades. Surely the young nation must be allowed a few years of "judicial medievalism" before she can be expected to establish a modern system of law everywhere. More onesidedly negative are the comments in both weeklies on religious life in America. T h e intensive missionary work which the Mormons were conducting in Norway probably explains why they are the American sect that comes in for most of the hostile comments. Prospective emigrants are warned against their "oily tongues" (INB 6/19 52). Mormon theology is described as "pure h u m b u g " (SM 4/13 44) and as "the silliest hodgepodge" (SM 4/3 52), though the Mormons' industry and their fortitude in the face of intolerance and persecution are reluctantly admired (SM 10/25 51) and INB defends the sect's right to hold its outrageous doctrines (INB 2/9 62). Mormonism is only one item of evidence of the religious anarchy which unlimited freedom of faith leads to in the United States. There are said to be between 20- and 21,000 sects in America — a preposterous situation. Protestant individualism run wild is ultimately to blame: "With a Bible in his hand every Protestant is Pope" (SM 4/3 52). But this would be no more than misguided zeal. It is when "spiritual aberration" combines with "shrewdness in the things of this world" (SM 10/13 60) that sectarianism becomes sinister. Many sects are fronts for charlatanism, superstition, pathology, and unspeakable sexual practices. Even when innocent, they cultivate an unhealthy atmosphere of sensuality and emotionalism that sets the stage for orgiastic excess. A Shaker dance is a grotesque spectacle, and a Methodist camp meeting (in an interesting sequence of adjectives) is "disgusting, hypocritical, blasphemous, and lascivious" (SM 4/3 52). Worldliness and hypocrisy are found to prevail also among the middle and upper classes, who generally belong to more conventional religious groups. People go to church because it is expected of them, and

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sharpers and swindlers buy respectability with large donations (INB 3 10 61). Just about the only dissenting voice in this chorus of condemnation and ridicule is that of a clergyman in western Norway who tells Brace that he much prefers the separation of church and state in the United States to the Norwegian Establishment: " W e are in chains in this country!" (INB 11 22 57). Attitudes to the American Indian in S M vacillate oddly between a modified concept of the noble savage whom the European in his smug, superior ignorance chooses to call " b a r b a r i a n " only because his culture and vital values are different from his own — the warrior's code of honor against our sentimentalization of sexual love (SM 7/11 35, 8 29 46) — and explicit refutations of the myth of the noble redskin as nothing more than the effete and nostalgic white man's romantic idealization of a race that is, however well endowed it may be physically, mentally indolent and limited, cruel, dirty, and unconquerably nomadic (SM 6/5 41, 7/12 45). In the first view the white man's treatment of the Indian seems like an atrocious injustice. Parallels are cited between the beautifully poetic concepts about life, death, god, and reality in some Indian legends and certain tenets of Neo-Platonism (SM 9/18 52), and the whole notion of intrinsic racial inferiority is denounced (SM 8'29 46). In the second view the accelerating physical and moral degradation of the Indian may be considered humanly regrettable but also proof of his susceptibility to the worst aspects of our more advanced civilization (SM 1/15 48). His inevitable extinction is a necessary price mankind has to pay for progress: only the white man can do justice to the potentials of the land (SM 1/14 54). The author of "Sketches from the United States" — apparently a Norwegian — is saddened when " a n Indian Chief" stops him on the street in St. Louis and asks for money to travel to Washington "in order to speak for his tribe before the Great White Father" (INB 2/24 61). T h a t the author very likely fell for a fraud does not reduce the significance of his response to what he took to be a case of genuine racial pathos. But it is, as we might expect, in the comments on slavery that we find most of the European expressions of indignation with the way Americans treat their colored minorities. A frequent polemical device is to call attention to the irony that in the western world slavery remains as a legal institution only in the country that was expressly founded on man's inalienable right to be free. T o refer to the United States as "free states" is "to be guilty of an appellation of the most hideous irony

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as long as slavery persists" (SM 3/20 57). "Slavery disfigures this free land" (INB 6/10 54). After affirming that a slave has no rights, is outside the law, cannot legally receive an education, and "has no wife and children, only a female and young," SM concludes: "Such are the conditions to which more than two million human beings are condemned in a nation that prides herself on her liberty and her civilization" (SM nos. 90-91 37). Every day appear "new, horrible accounts of this enormous cruelty, degrading to human kind, which at this very moment is callously practiced in the land of so-called culture, civilization, and human rights" (SM 5/3 51). At a dinner party in Christiania in the summer of 1856 Brace learns that slavery has been the main reason why Scandinavian attitudes to the United States have changed radically over the last five years from boundless admiration to a cynical and often disgusted view of a morally corrupt society of dollar-chasers, socially and politically unjust, chargeable at the bar of humanity for so cruelly betraying, in its treatment of the Negro, its pristine promise of liberty and equality for all. While his Norwegian hosts berate his country poor Brace can only silently remind himself that, being so far removed from America and "absorbed in their own petty problems of trade and politics," Scandinavians cannot be expected to understand the powerful frictions at work in such a large and complex a country as the United States (INB 12/13 57). INB does not comment. Some support for Brace's self-defensive feeling that Norwegians (like other Europeans) are naive on the issue of race may be found in several overtly anti-slavery short stories which both journals reprint from foreign journals, without, apparently, any awareness of their covert assumptions of White superiority. There is one, for example, in which the point is the contrast in character between a Negro girl and a White girl. Because of a switch in the cradle, the rightful heiress of the plantation grows up as a slave, the light-skinned slave girl as pampered heiress. But the former's degrading circumstances never affect her virtue and sweetness, while all the loving care expended on the latter fails to change her innate viciousness (SM 8/15-22 63). Such prejudice seems almost innocent in its purity. But both weeklies also published sophisticated comments on slavery, though whether the sophistication reflects editorial insight into the problem or is fortuitous is — as usual — hard to say. The existence of racial intolerance in the North as well as in the South is recognized. INB hails Lincoln's Declaration of Emancipation of the slaves as

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" a milestone in world history," whose "effects are bound to be salutary," but it qualifies its enthusiasm with the observation that psychological reality will make true emancipation of the American Negro a slow, gradual, and painful process — and not just in the conquered South. The plight of the Northern Negro, in fact, is such, says a contributor to Das Ausland, that unless it is radically alleviated he may one day demand his full freedom and equality on terms and in a manner that may "threaten the stability and very structure of American society" (SM 11/28 63). A pre-war observer argues that slavery demoralizes North and South equally and that there is no telling what terrible price the whole nation will have to pay before the evil is eradicated (INB 9/13-10/4 56). There is a good deal of hypocrisy in the North's assumption of moral superiority over the South on the slavery question (INB 2/7 64). In an article reprinted from Revue des deux mondes, the distinguished French critic Emile Montegut finds that not even the militant Abolitiorist loves the Negro in the true spirit of Christ's injunction of neighbourly love; like Harriet Beecher Stowe he only protests against the degrading treatment of the Negro slave in the name of abstract social justice (INB 9/13 56). But most editorial indignation with the treatment of the Negro in the United States is, of course, reserved for the South. INB asserts that there is no Biblical authority for slavery and invokes modern science in support of the mental and moral equality of all races (INB 6/10 54). S M deals ironically with a Southern article trying to reconcile slavery with Christianity (SM 7/4 63). The bravery of the Negro regiments in the Union army and the intellectual brilliance of a Negro chaplain are cited as examples that expose the fallacy of the Southern attempt to justify slavery on biological grounds (INB 2/7 64). It is grudgingly admitted that by and large the slaves are humanely treated (though an American review is cited that praises Uncle Tom's Cabin for its "realism" (INB 1/4 57) ), but the slave owner cannot claim any moral merit for this, since it is obviously in his economic interest to look after the physical welfare of his valuable chattel (SM 9/11 41, 3/16 61). The lot of the free Negro in South Carolina is not enviable, mainly because the poor whites, as everywhere in the South, use hatred of the Negro as a means of maintaining their own self-respect (SM 3/16 61). Similarly, when white servants are brought over from Europe, they quickly become pert and lazy because they feel superior to the blacks (INB 1/5 62). The Times's Russell thinks that life in the North on the whole is happier and more prosperous t h a n in the South

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because the former has escaped "this curse on the human race that slavery is" (SM 5 23 63). Perhaps no European commentator in either of the two journals is more wholeheartedly committed to abolitionist sentiment than a music reviewer in INB who is indignant with the composer Meyerbeer for calling his new opera The African Woman even though it is not a tract against slavery (INB 5/22 65). The longest, most objective and most reflective article on slavery is Emile Montdgut's. He traces the history of slavery in the United States, the many missed opportunities for a permanent solution or at least for a political settlement that would have avoided the Civil War which now is surely coming, the hardening of attitudes on both sides, and the psychology of slave, slave owner, and the wife of the owner of young, female slaves (INB 9/13-10/4 56). There are at least gestures toward objectivity in other comments on Southern slavery as well. An article from Chambers's Journal admits that the aristocratic plantation culture of South Carolina is attractively refined and that the treatment of the slaves, though strict, is not inhumane. But the fatal flaw in a slave-based white culture is evident in the fact that Othello cannot be staged (SM 3/16 61). Though Russell finds behind the legendary "fine Southern gentleman" only a brutal, boastful, smug, and cowardly barbarian (SM 5/23 63), he does make room for this Southern apologia: We have developed a way of life that allows us to leave the harvesting of the fruits of the soil to a race whom we have lifted up from barbarism and assigned to its proper place in the scheme of things. T h e system leaves us free to cultivate the arts and other refinements in life, to further scientific progress, and to devote ourselves to the duties of government and to learning more about the conditions and the concerns of our country. (INB 7/5 63) But he also finds that the constant supervision of the slaves belie the Southerner's reiterated assurance that there is no reason to fear a general slave uprising. Without condoning the evils of the system, Jorgen Hansen, the author of the article "Amerika" in SM, makes an honest effort to explain slavery in the South in terms of the natural economic resources of the land, rather than simply condemning it in a spirit of moral outrage (SM 9/11 41). Deriding the naive utopianism of the comment that race prejudice is " a n unnatural emotion, which, like some destructive demon, comes between Europeans and the Black and prevents that integration of the two races that surely would further the

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ennoblement of both . . . " (SM no. 62 36), he considers the complete a m a l g a m a t i o n of the races an unlikely event even in the distant f u t u r e . But even d u r i n g the Civil War there were articles in both weeklies t h a t took a non-partisan, or even a pro-Confederate stand. A biography of Jefferson Davis is favorable to the Confederate president himself and reveals a certain degree of sympathy for the Southern cause. T h e South, to be sure, is vulnerable on the slavery issue, but she has nevertheless gained Europe's sympathy because of the courage a n d e n d u r a n c e with which she defends her right to freely evolve her own way of life against a more powerful enemy and because of the superior quality of her leading m e n and her political institutions. " B o t h distinguish themselves favorably from the corrupt, grasping, treacherous, and lukewarm Yankee politicians and their p r a c t i c e " ( S M 2/14 63). T h e slavery' issue is not the only, or even the chief, cause of the Civil War. T h e conflict is first of all between two different cultures and two competing economic systems ( S M 6 8 61). Such a dispassionate analysis sets off the violent partisanship of, on the one h a n d , an A m e r i c a n author who sees the N o r t h - S o u t h conflict simply as one of vitality, energy, and progress against stagnation, apathy, and brutality ( S M 9 5 63), and, on the other h a n d , of a G e r m a n writer in Das Ausland who lays the blame for the war on Lincoln's stupid obstinacy in punishing the Confederates as " r e b e l s " rather t h a n as t e m p o r a r y secessionists quite willing to negotiate their differences with the North. Lincoln is a " c i p h e r " , a p a w n in the h a n d s of the party machine, inflicting economic punishment on the South in the n a m e of the indivisibility of the Union. His refusal to advocate Abolitionism is symptomatic. All "noble elements" have now disappeared f r o m political life in the N o r t h ; talent and dedication have been sacrificed to party interest. Lincoln's sole claim to the presidency was his mediocrity and the circumstance that he had not attracted much public attention and hence was not the object of wide public distrust. T h e South, on the other hand, still has men like Davis and Lee. . . . As the political and economic hegemony shifts north and as a strong, centralized government supersedes a confederacy of free states — "Democracy" ceding to "Republicanism"—, the South has no choice but to try to establish itself as an independent oligarchy in order to preserve its social and cultural institutions and traditions. But — the future undoubtedly belongs to the North and her ideology. Though the Yankee has no moral right to parade as the champion of the Negro, his public view that slavery is an abomination will surely triumph. (SM 2/21 63)

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The attitudes to Lincoln to which S M and INB give voice are not so much complex and ambivalent as simply inconsistent. To the denigrations already cited may be added a statement (from Harper's Weekly !) to the effect that "the emancipation of the Negro is nothing but a fine-sounding phrase behind which the President of the United States tries to conceal the real, far less attractive, reasons for the W a r " (INB 2/7 64). But after his assassination SM eulogizes him editorially as "the best and noblest-minded of all the presidents who have ruled the United States" (SM 7/1 65), and its caption under a portrait of J a y [jiV] Booth speaks of "the awful fame of a man whose deed has filled two continents with horror and whose name is cursed by millions" (SM 5/20 65). And in INB Jonas Lie apotheosizes Lincoln's martyrdom: "Providence saw fit to use one of history's greatest seals, the blood of an American president, to keep the Emancipation Act from slipping back into the sordid intrigue of a smaller generation" (INB 7/1 66). As late as December, 1860 (after Lincoln's election), INB confidently predicts that there will be no Civil War, partly because the Americans are too practical-minded a nation to engage in destructive internecine warfare and partly because the blame for the current crisis must be shared equally by the two sides (INB 12/23 60). Four years earlier, in an editorial comment on the election of Buchanan, the magazine had seemed less fatuous in making the same prediction for much the same reasons (INB 11/29 56). When the War does come, the military news items in both weeklies generally maintain a neutral tone. There are exceptions, however, as when INB reprints a British comment on the Battle of Chicamauga as " a brilliant Confederate victory, which, unfortunately, was not so decisive as there was reason to expect it would be" (INB 1/10 64). The physical fighting is described as atrocious in its mass engagements, wholesale destruction, and savage cruelty. Both sides execute prisoners of war (SM 12/13 62). T h e nature of the United States that will finally emerge from this terrible ordeal, "the worst in modern times" (SM 1/17 63), is a question that must concern us all (INB 6/23 61). Whatever the actual changes brought about by the Civil War in the texture and structure of American life, the War cannot be seen to have greatly altered the views expressed in S M and INB. T h e nature of the disillusionment — pre- and post-war — may first be illustrated in comments on some small matters in American life. Cumulatively they build an image of the national character at

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once ugly, ridiculous, and ominous. New Yorkers designate their streets by numbers, " a highly prosaic device," but perhaps a wise one, "since the Anglo-American race has sufficiently demonstrated its inability to find apt and euphonious geographical n a m e s " ( I N B 1/20 55) — a comment which only ignorance can excuse. State names are abbreviated in writing because " a busy, go-ahead nation cannot take the time to write the names in full. If this is not the reason, it's going to be hard to find another" ( S M 7/16 64). Barnum is "the world's greatest con-man in the homeland of h u m b u g , " " a master in catering to his countrymen's taste for the extraordinary," "the prototype of the American entrepreneur" (INB 1/9 59, 4/8 66, S M 6/13 63). His beauty contest for babies in Springfield, 111., draws this piece of delicate sarcasm from I N B : " W h a t old Europe has never thought of doing for its backsliding races — less because of careless indifference than because it refuses to relinquish the prejudices by which the marriage institution is degraded — a young and active people, forever attempting great things, has tried to achieve" ( I N B 12/2 54). Russell finds " h u m b u g , swindling, and money worship" the main characteristics of people in New York (INB 6/21 63) and sees in the contrast between Fifth Avenue and Skid Row " a reminder of the ugly realities which the American enthusiasts conveniently overlook" ( S M 5/23 63). It is to be hoped that the tawdry, the trivial, the cheap, the frivolous, the faked, and the gawdy may sink under the gravity of public events during the Civil War: " E v e n in the United States, the original nursery for humbug, people are getting tired of it, now that the seriousness of life, in all its giant dimensions, has confronted her children and the War proves to them that not everything in life is just a mountebank's fraud but that certain great causes are worth living - and dying — f o r " (INB 4/8 66). Americans judge everything by materialistic standards, and everything is big. A person's weight is part of his vita as a matter of course, and obesity is a sign of culture and of having " a r r i v e d " ( I N B 4/19 63). Perhaps the reason for this is that most American males on the way up are pale, thin, anemic creatures, with "piercing eyes, wan cheeks, and wiry h a i r " (INB 6/21 63), "all nerve and no muscle" ( S M 6/8 61). Trollope makes a similar observation, but he is alone in attributing it to "central heating" ( S M 6/21 62). Bigness affects everything. When 1,000 candlelights illuminate a concert and an impresario hires forty pianists for a single performance, the natives are pleased with such signs of cultural refinement (INB 11/18 66).

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Because the A m e r i c a n believes in living life to the full he constantly exposes himself to d e a t h : every year crowds of people are killed by exploding steam boilers on river boats and by reckless railroad engineering ( I N B 4/19 57). H e sacrifices beauty, like safety, to speed. H e travels t h r o u g h magnificent scenery at night, w h e n nothing can be seen, in order to start doing business first thing on arrival in the m o r n i n g ; " t i m e is m o n e y " is the national motto (INB 12/2 60). I n a beautiful forest the E u r o p e a n visitor's American companion sees only potential l u m b e r ( I N B 3 15 57). T h e a u t h o r of "Sketches f r o m A m e r i c a " feels t h a t t h e people are committing great crimes against the lovely land they h a v e been given in trust. Flora and f a u n a are being despoiled; a d v a n c i n g civilization turns n a t u r a l b e a u t y into ugliness. Is this t r u e progress? (INB 3/10 61). T h e r e are no a r t galleries or museums in New York, so w h a t good is all its garish wealth, its banks and court houses trying to look like Greek temples? ( S M 4/12 62). O n e notable exception — mentioned twice by S M — is the Capitol in Washington D.C., where the combination of beautiful architecture a n d bad acoustics proves t h a t Americans on occasion are capable of p u t t i n g esthetic considerations above utilitarian ones ( S M 5/5 38, 12/28 61). Rich Americans travel a b r o a d not to see b u t to be seen a n d are therefore not really interested in the cultural treasures of E u r o p e ( S M 2 Ί 6 56). W h e n Bayard T a y l o r sums u p his impressions of Norwegians as selfish, dishonest, lethargic, a n d dirty, I N B admits t h a t there is a good deal of truth in w h a t he says but t h a t his general conclusion is invalid because, "like all Americans, h e looks at everything f r o m a purely utilitarian point of v i e w " (INB 8/8 58). "Business is the American's pleasure and wealth his g o a l " (INB 12/16 60). H e has only c o n t e m p t for whatever c a n n o t be turned into money ( S M 3/30 61). A n article f r o m Das Ausland in S M ironically praises the "typical American businessman's" ability to t u r n everything to his profit, regardless of means. "Notions of mine a n d thine are more easily confused over here t h a n in the less f l a m b o y a n t E u r o p e , " and to be considered " s m a r t " is every American's highest ambition ( S M 6/13 63). Dishonesty extends to journalism. I N B thinks both U n i o n and Confederate estimates of battle casualties "notoriously u n r e l i a b l e " (INB 5/11 62, 7/20 62). It does not believe t h a t Blondin actually crossed the N i a g a r a on a slack rope (though it also prints an English eyewitness' rebuttal of a charge t h a t the F r e n c h m a n ' s feats are the invention of an enterprising Niagara innkeeper (INB 10/2 59) ). S M

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quotes a description of American journalists from All the Year Round as " a flock of pesky, obnoxious vultures, engorging themselves on cliches and exaggerations" (SM 11 29 62). Even physiognomies are vaguely dishonest in America. Facial features and expressions are levelled to a dull sameness that gives no clue to the owner's occupation, education, and social class. Even prostitutes can look respectable. " W e more truthful Europeans wear our hearts in our faces" (SM 9 21 61). A noble ideal cheapened and hardened into convention and cant is responsible for this deadening uniformity, which depresses every European visitor, regardless of class (SM 11 '29 62). As the virtues of free enterprise and hard work account for "the noisy chaos of incessant activity in the Great Republic" (SM 11 17 60), so the mania for democracy accounts for much of the vulgarity and triviality in American social life. Conversation is dull, shallow, and philistine (SM 11/29 62); manners are awful (SM 6/13 63). As if afraid that the ordinary amenities of civilized behavior will mark him as a man in bondage, the "free" American spits and swears in public. Yet everybody, regardless of background and breeding, insists on being considered — and on considering everybody else — a "gentleman" or a "lady." "Even farm girls try to look ethereal," and "wife" is too low a word to be used in genteel company (SM 6/29 61). S M traces the cult of women in the United States to the short supply of women in frontier society (SM 6/29 61). As a result, the American woman is now a proud, spoilt, frail, and vain creature, lacking in grace and charm, and without "true elegance" and "truly sublime and noble b e a u t y " (SM 6'21 62, 5/25 61). Nowhere in either journal is there a tribute to the brave and sturdy pioneer wife, but there is plenty of criticism of her affected and self-indulgent eastern sister. That Japanese diplomats in Paris find American women "generally prettier" than the French (INB 11/8 63) does not seem like much of a compliment, and French emigrants to the United States write letters back to French newspapers urging young women to come over and marry them because American girls use "indelicate language" (INB 4/17 59). If the American wife tyrannizes her family, the reason, according to Frederika Bremer, the Swedish novelist and feminist, is that "the men want it that way," but INB tartly observes that Miss Bremer is in favor of woman's emancipation because she herself "has long been emancipated from true wOmanhood" (INB 12/31 53). O n the news that a company of women volunteers serve in the Union

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army the same journal comments: "A martial mustache is said not to be an absolute pre-requisite for enlistment" (INB 12/21 62). Most male European observers feel that American women have betrayed their obligations not only to their own womanly selves but also to their husbands and children. American children, says Trollope, " a r e insufferable brats who have all been taught to wriggle their rears" (SM 6/21 62). When they grow u p they are expected to leave home and make their own fortunes; the family is dispersed. T h e more clannish Canadians may be less wealthy, but they have a happier and more harmonious family life (SM 11/17 60). T h e author of "Sketches" visits several American and Norwegian-American homes and finds them clean, comfortable, and tastefully decorated. But in all of them he misses the sense of what a Norwegian calls "hygge," that is, cozy, relaxed, congenial intimacy in a close-knit family group (INB 12/16 60). T h e formidable image of the great American Mom of recent popular sociology shows through even in the one piece in either of the two journals in which the American woman is unequivocally praised. T h e author — he is anonymous but seems to be a Norwegian — has a friend who has just returned from the United States quite smitten. T h e American woman is a perfect mistress of mores and manners. Her flirtation is always decorous. Family life is the center of American society and woman the sovereign center of family life. She is respected, privileged, well educated, and is free to marry or not to marry. Professional women are highly esteemed. Divorces are difficult to get, but, by the same token, the institution of marriage is well protected, because a happy family life is a mark of a man's integrity in private life and in business. She is dignified, poised, charming, beautiful, practical, sensible, and knows what she wants. She is, in fact, "divine" (INB 10/2 64). T h e longer one ponders the more or less incidental comments on the "American national character" in the two weeklies, the more one is struck with the longevity of current European clichds. The image of the typical American most often evoked is that of the character which nineteenth-century Europeans liked to refer to as "the Yankee," often without regard to the limited geographical application of the term in traditional usage. There are features of "the Yankee" in Trollope's distinction between the typical American and the typical Englishman. T h e former, he says, is the livelier, more enterprising, of the two, but he is also less tolerant, adaptable, and imaginative — a tense and pragmatic materialist (SM 6/21 62).

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A long article on " T h e Yankee" from Das Ausland restricts the word to the New Englander, or at least to the Northerner, and presents a more balanced and inclusive picture of the shrewd, bustling, prosaic stereotype than most items on the subject in the two weeklies. Yankee schools, it is said, are superior to those in the South, and the American Parnassus is populated almost entirely by Northerners, despite the common view of the Yankee as earth-bound and soulless and of the Southerner as passionate and imaginative. T h e romantic, idealistic, speculative side of the Yankee character is not so much at odds with his practical bent as it beautifully complements it. T h e Yankee, for all his love of business and profits, for all his "smartness' and his obvious and admitted materialism . . . is also suffused with a deeply felt love of religion. . . . It is easy enough to make fun of the severity and pedantry of the Puritans; the fact is that they reared a race of virtuous men and women. . . . What can the South offer to rival the magnificent sermons and the profound theological discourses of a Channing, a Parker, and an Emerson? (SM 8/22 63) And then the ultimate tribute: "These can safely be set beside the best in German metaphysical scholarship." From Das Ausland this is high praise. T h e eulogy is qualified but not cancelled by the paragraph that opens the series of articles, in which the author states his intention of dealing only with the unique achievements of Yankee culture, "since the defects of the Yankee character are already too well known" (SM 8/8 63). Even economic motivation issuing in practical enterprise has achieved worthwhile cultural ends: " T h e land of the Yankee is easily the most sensitive and receptive part of the entire American body politic. Here those sparks are first struck which, cascading in dazzling fireworks, ignite all reforms in industry, commerce, and education throughout the country" (SM 8/15 63). The Yankee is at his best in the small and pretty towns of the Midwest: "After visiting them one is almost tempted not to turn one's back on the Americans after all and certainly to find them less intolerable than when they are forever holding forth about how 'great' everything is that they do and own" (SM 8/8 63). There is arch mischief in the following, but also a kind of indulgent affection: "There is nothing the Yankee doesn't do better than the Southerner. Even a man with a toothache can enter any dentist's office in any town in Yankeeland fully confident that the usually unsettling experience of having one of one's teeth 5

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pulled will be over quickly and be performed with expertise and to his complete satisfaction and enjoyment. I think it is highly significant that the Yankee excels in this particular art. I think I see a connection here with the fact that it was a Yankee who a few years ago won a famous and coveted prize at a British exhibition by picking open a safety lock" (SM 8/15 63). Usually, however, the Yankee appears in both S M and INB simply as the representative American, regardless of regional home. Again the figure is ambivalent. INB snidely introduces an American short story: " T h e reader must not expect anything that will appeal to his heart or elevate his mind. T h a t can hardly be expected in a story from a country in which two-thirds of the population is made up of human scum from every corner of the earth." Though the story is old, it is still representative of its homeland, "for the wheel of the Yankee's spiritual culture does not turn so easily as the rest of his machinery, and it is more than likely that a lever here or a cog there may have broken down because of the War. Poor America! Imagine we pitying you! For things do indeed look bad for you. . . . Nothing but dark shadows where earlier we saw nothing but dazzling light. But probably most of it was just an optical illusion. T h e reflected glory of George Washington blinded us as well as the Americans themselves" (INB 4/9 65). But there is genuine admiration for the Yankee's distinctive accomplishments in the following passage, and the negative note on his literature rings more in sorrow than in scorn: This nation which every year more and more strikes amazement into the hearts of the Old World with its unparalleled progress, its peculiar institutions, and its giant achievements, . . . which, while still in its infancy, inspired the French Revolution, . . . this nation that controls the world's greatest rivers and waterways, clears hundreds of jungle miles, erects huge cities, and every year puts thousands of acres of wilderness to the plow, . . . this nation which in the political and industrial spheres is already a giant, . . . is still a mere child in literature. (SM 8/29 57) The reasons are that it has no language of its own, no distinct sense of nationhood, and is remarkable only for " a certain primitive sense of personal freedom and a liking for big woods." At a time when Poe's work was complete, Emerson and Thoreau were defining and rousing to moral action the American consciousness, the first edition of Leaves of Grass had appeared, and Hawthorne and Melville had written their greatest novels, Cooper is said to be the only significant

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and well-known American author. T h e stereotype of the materialistic Yankee is on hand also when INB asks, at the end of a "Miscellany" item to the effect that an edition of 25,000 copies of Macaulay's History of England was set, printed, and bound in fifty hours and that in Boston a printing of 11,000 copies of a book can be readied in a day, "But what about the proofreading?" (INB 8/30 66). But the article on the New Englander in Das Ausland is not alone in recognizing the peculiar spiritual import of Yankeeism in its wider sense. It was the glory of the American Revolution that its aims were practical and rational and the manner of its conduct answerable: " . . . it was not so much that [the American] felt that his soul was being fettered and suppressed, but rather his very life — his life as a free citizen seeking to make a living. . . . H e took up arms to defend his economic interests and fought his fight with deliberation and perseverance" (SM 8 21 41). T h e Yankee spirit sustains the homesteader out west no less than the New England inventor-manufacturer-businessman. T h e breathtaking magnitude of the nation's achievements rivals the sheer size of the land (INB 9/24 53) — is, as it were, the fitting corollary to its forests, prairies, mountains, rivers, and lakes. T h e awareness of duality in the Yankee character, the dynamic tension in "the Puritan businessman" (INB 3/10 61) between the heroic and the mercenary, the worldly and the spiritual, is the burden of two long analyses. T h e first is from Jorgen Hansen's series of articles on "Amerika": The American's main ambition is pragmatic, directed toward the external side of life, and it is supported by the seriousness and common sense that mark his whole nature. Its goal in life is a position that will satisfy his desire for freedom and independence. . . . This seriousness . . . characterizes also his religious feelings. Freedom of faith and religious sincerity go together. . . . It is true that this concern with life's material side in many assumes extreme forms and . . . often results in something artificial or mechanical or unnaturally tense in his manner. . . . O n the other hand, it is by no means true that the spiritual life in America is about to be extinguished, or is being ignored or contemned, even in the midst of all this materialist activity. There are already esteemed American names in all branches of science, and educational institutions, elementary as well as advanced, are steadily increasing in number and size. American students can now be found at European universities, and an indigenous American literature is about to emerge. (SM 9/18 41)

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The second is by Frederika Bremer: Α Yankee is a young man (even when he is old) who makes his own way in the world, in complete confidence of his own power, who never hesitates, never runs away, finds nothing impossible, has endless faith, hopes for everything, undergoes everything, comes through everything — always the same. . . . He never slows down. He has the courage and the will always to work, to build, to start over again with something new and different, always making, developing, expanding himself and his land. . . . Wherever he goes and under whatever conditions he finds himself, he carries with him the double consciousness that he is a man who can rely on himself and that he is a citizen of a great nation, destined one day to be the greatest in the w o r l d . . . . These qualities sometimes assume strange, sometimes ridiculous, forms of expression, but it is impossible to deny that there is in them something of a fresh, invulnerable, inspiriting magnificence and that they can acomplish great things. (INB 10/1 53) SM puzzles editorially over the ambivalence, as if it defied safe and established categories of human attitude and behavior: "The Americans are both a calculating and a gambling people, while at the same time they exhibit certain distinctly romantic traits. They are a strange nation" (SM 1/15 48). In closer human relationships the Yankee spirit of restless exuberance and optimism, of bustling commitment to practical action and breezy democratic manners, can seem less attractive — as in the contrast noted by Franz Löher, a German traveller: In the majority of the common people in Europe I detect something of suffering and sorrow which they try to conceal behind proper manners.... People pass each other in the street, sadly and thoughtfully, and yet with an air of politeness and friendliness, as if each intuitively knew his neighbor's troubles and tried by quiet good breeding to make them a little easier for him to bear. How different manners are in America! Such untroubled, feverish activity, such self-confidence and ruthlessness in every face. . . . Everybody tries for a youthful appearance; old age and poverty are things one tries to conceal. (SM 5/18 61) One recognizes the sentiment from many European visitors to modern America: the dim yet pervasive sense that frustration, failure, fatigue with existence itself are un-American emotions, that the still, small voice of human sadness is an embarrassing and tactless intrusion into the general cheer. "Keep smiling" and "grin and bear it" are the national slogans — wholesome, useful, excellent, and sometimes

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intolerable. For Yankeeism also involves the belief that there is no pain or weariness of the heart that some healthful occupation or happy companionship won't cure. Franklin's little parable on the pretty and the ugly foot, with its moral about looking for the silver lining in every cloud (SM no. 70 36), expresses the national trust in the power of positive thinking. I n their balanced comprehensiveness, Löher's reflections may serve to conclude this survey. In some respects, he says, Europe is clearly behind the United States: . . . in the free spaciousness of her physical nature and in the equal and equitable distribution of the blessings of cultural and material prosperity in the middle classes. . . . But the European landscape and her architecture possess greater variety and charm, and Europe alone has real culture and a sense of tradition. America's greater wealth is due to its economic liberalism, the ease with which everyone can follow his own inclinations and talents in choice of occupation. Americans, therefore, have more self-confidence, more initiative, more energy, than the Europeans. . . . But their social manners are inferior. American informality can be attractively relaxed, but it can also express itself in cruel tactlessness, indiscretion, and sheer rudeness. (SM 5/18 61) Culturally America is still an underdeveloped country, a vacuum in which human stereotypes hustle in perpetual motion. " I n the United States there is plenty of food and drink; there is a tonic feeling of being a free citizen in a young, progressive nation — the effect is exciting and invigorating. But really to live . . . is possible only in Europe" (SM 5/18 61). And after his return ("how good once more to be able to enjoy all the things which the cultured person must do without in America"), this coda of kaleidoscopic reminiscence: Still before my eyes were the greatness and the power of all I had seen. I remembered everything in magnified outline: the terrifying waterfalls, the delightful prairies between the deep, dark primevid forests, the youthful population of these free states, of character single-minded yet proud, and in the background the quiet, dying crowds of Indians. . . . I saw the huge, magnificent cities and the pretty little towns and villages with their buying and selling crowds forever under the eye, the well-dressed men and women and the lovely young girls, popular gatherings and public parades, sectarian fanaticism, socialistic colonization, the shipping of slaves and the rowdyism, frigates and Indian forts, hunting and fishing excursions — in brief, the whole, vast conglomerate of a life that is uniqely American. (SM 5/18 61)

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III From the articles and from the briefer, incidental comments in S M and I N B on emigration, on the role of the United States in world affairs, on her domestic politics, public institutions, and public men, on her system of law and her religious practices, on her treatment of the Indian and the Negro, on her Civil War and its issues, and on the character and the mores and manners of her people, the modern reader is left with two general impressions of what the editors hoped to achieve with their American coverage. It is not always easy to sort one impression from the other, and the editorial intentions are rarely articulated in explicit statement, but they can be abstracted. On the one hand, we sense a genuine desire to do justice to what was fresh and free and viable in American life, to make allowance for crudities and failures as inevitable in the process of building a new civilization on the foundations of the old in a new land, and to keep Europe's American dream alive in the face of disappointing realities. On the other hand, behind the supercilious irony, the indignant moralizing, and even the honest efforts at balanced objectivity we sense a distrust of the new American patterns as alien to traditional value norms in European society and a fear that these might be disrupted by the importation of speciously attractive American models. T h e image of America changes with the angle of vision. T h e tension may not be felt in single articles or comments, but it is palpable in their cumulative effect. Nineteenth-century America, a "Hercules in the cradle" ( S M 8/29 57), no less than today's certified superpower, both attracted and repelled Europeans — repelled, sometimes, because it attracted. And beneath the shifting topicalities of cultural and economic, political and military influence the underlying reasons, in fact and prejudice, then and now are similar. As a conclusion, this may seem both trite and suspect. Trite, not just because it only confirms the findings of more ambitious studies of this kind, but also because to our age ambivalence has come to seem like the very shape of experience: when, we ask, was human reality not ambivalent? Suspect, because a consciousness informed by a sense of ambivalence and sceptical of every absolute is inclined to suspect its recognition of itself in the recorded experience of a past age as nothing more than a failure to observe elementary historical relativism or as a facile surrender to a fashionable intellectual idio-

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syncrasy. Uncomfortably, we may feel that our truism may be less than true. But the historian of public opinion need not rest in this defeatist position. If he cannot be sure that the responses to American life that the editors of S M and INB made available to their readers actually were shared by those readers themselves, he knows that they were, roughly, the responses that editors of the popular press in other European countries were making available to their readers. T h e general agreement between his sources and similar sources elsewhere entitles him to make inferences. This is the kind of material he must work with if he is to work at all, and it is interesting in its own right. T h e assertion that two specimens of the popular weekly press in Norway between 1835 and 1865 presented an ambivalent image of the United States may not seem very exciting at this stage of American studies, but it achieves significant substance and shading when the terms of the ambivalence are specifically defined. Then the fact that the two Norwegian weeklies conformed to the general pattern of divided attitude reflected in other European publications of this kind contributes the Norwegian variant of the larger European response to the United States in the nineteenth century. Let me, therefore, end by trying to compress the American image in S M and INB in polarized antithesis. T h e conflict is between a response to a peculiarly American kind of idealism, at the same time romantic (in its confident perfectionist vision) and puritan (in its dutiful missionary diligence), and a response to a mean, narrow, and calculating pragmatism. A characterization of Benjamin Franklin juxtaposes the two: Franklin is, as it were, the epitome of the North-American character, which in full consciousness of what it can and will do carries its purpose through with steadfast determination and without fear of obstacles. But there is one quality that makes this great man less admirable. . . . Noble-minded and honest though he was, he valued nothing except insofar as it was useful. He wrote poetry in order to learn how to write prose, and when he mentions his marriage he says nothing about his love for his young wife or about her beauty but only that she was a help to him as the manager of his household. (INB 10/4 57) T h e positive image is of a promised land for Old World millions trapped in squalor and drudgery and virtual or actual serfdom, of a vigorous young republic founded on liberty and equality and frater-

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nity and offering unlimited opportunity for a better, richer, braver individual life. Her spectacular growth keeps alive the stubborn romantic dream of continuous human progress; she is a melting pot of nations, nourishing the world's dream of universal peace and prosperity; the final destination of man's long trek from east to west in search of dignity, happiness, and personal fulfilment. " I n America," says Lola Montez, King Louis I of Bavaria's banished mistress, " t h e right to vindicate one's life is a holy privilege" (INB 10/21 60). Her phrase is both beautiful and apt. But Lola Montez died in poverty and distress in her new homeland, and dispiriting concretes rather than lofty abstracts make up the negative image. As the realities of American life are being brought home to Europe in emigrants' letters, in the observations and reflections of foreign visitors, and in increasingly fuller news reports of public events, uncertainty and disillusionment begin to tarnish the ideal. T h e vast, virgin spaces are being filled. Life can be mean and hard both on the lonely prairie and in cities teeming with the dregs of Europe. Slavery corrupts private morality and darkens the political skies. T h e restless, grasping enterprise of a business ethos impoverishes spiritual and intellectual life. The new civilization is raw and ruthless; its politics and legal systems are crude and corrupt. It is a country only for the young, the strong, the tough. The rage for equality tears or coarsens the delicate fabric of European manners. In economic life freedom too often means just the freedom to exploit, in religious life the spiritual anarchy and grotesque antics of the sects. The very climate is unhealthy in its extremes. There is something symbolic in the impression recorded more than once that birds sing less sweetly in America and that her flowers are less fragrant. Between the two images the glorious promise of a New Eden remains, but shaken, diminished, beclouded, and only uneasily held on to. T h e new Adam is turning into an unheroic, unregenerate, and vulgar businessman. His garden is overgrown, rank and gross, its freedoms restricted or withheld. The American myth alters as the European's innocence turns to experience. The emotions with which his modern descendant reacts to events in Dallas and Detroit, Los Angeles, Mississippi and Viet Nam, prove that the painful process of adjusting ideal to reality is still going on. But the pain perhaps also proves that the myth is still, somehow, alive.

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NOTES A debt of gratitude is owed to Norges Almenvitenskapelige Forskningsräd, which by a research grant in 1952 enabled the author to collect the material for this article. 1 See Sigmund Skard's bibliography for his article "The Image of America in Europe," American Civilization. An Introduction. Ed. A. N.J. den Hollander and Sigmund Skard (London, 1968). 1 The comparison with Meyer's study is less germane than that with R