Spotlight on Neglected Worth: A Giant Among Giants

My favorite among all the Modern Library Giants that I have acquired over the years is “The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It”, edited by Edmund Wilson. The title is taken from a line by Herman Melville: For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

In my copy, this generous selection of essays by mostly American writers about American writers runs to 1290 pages. It was first published in 1943. It is now out of print; inexpensive copies are available on line.

For anyone interested in American literature, or literature generally, or writing of any sort, or just life, this book is a wide deep bowl of fresh salted peanuts. That it should be available only in inexpensive second hand copies speaks to the degree to which educated Americans are curious about their country’s literary past.

The value of this book is partly one of convenience: it gathers together in one place a number of easily available essays, such as Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classical American Literature.” It also includes a number of unfamiliar or hard-to-find essays, such as John Jay Chapman’s essay on Emerson, or Henry James’s essay on Hawthorne, or H. G. Wells’s essay on Stephen Crane.

A book such as this is open to the objection that it includes nothing written by women or by members of minority groups. This limitation, while regrettable, does not make the book any less rewarding as far as it goes.

I would find it hard to say which of the essays in this book is my favorite — but not impossible. “My Mark Twain” by William Dean Howells is a masterpiece of celebration, and one of the few things by Howells that departs from his usually equable tone and displays real passion.

As editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Howells was one of the first members of the east coast literary establishment to give Twain recognition, both by printing his writing and by reviewing it favorably. He was one of the first to perceive the seriousness and the genius of this popular platform performer from the uncouth west. Twain became his unshakably loyal lifelong friend.

Howells ended his memoir with a peroration as eloquent as it was just:

Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes–I knew them all and all the rest of our
sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
of our literature.