That was Emerson's way (in spite of his
expansiveness), and Thoreau's also. You read them by pithy
sentences, not paragraphs. They assail you by ideas, not by
insidious structures of thought. The second is an easy-going
comment on life, often slangy or colloquial and frequently so
undignified as not to seem literature. Mark Twain and Josh
Billings wrote that way; Ring Lardner writes so to-day.
When the straight-from-the-shoulder American takes time to finish
his thought, to mold his sentences, to brain his reader with a
perfect expression of his tense emotion, then he makes literature.
And when the easy-going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor,
or a contributor to _The Saturday Evening Post_, takes time to deepen
his observation and to say it with real words instead of worn symbols,
he makes, and does make, literature. More are doing it than the
skeptical realize. The new epoch of the American essay is well under
way.
But the desire to "make literature" in America is too often
wasted. The would-be essayist wastes it in pretty writing about
trivial things--neighbors' back yards, books I have read, the
idiosyncrasies of cats, humors of the streets--the sort of
dilettantish comment that older nations writing of more settled,
richer civilizations can do well--that Anatole France and occasional
essayists of _Punch_ or _The Spectator_ can do well and most of us do
indifferently.
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