Adams & Historical Literature

[alice wellintown]

After a brief venture into art, Adams turns to the American Puritan as
subject, but not before he relegates British Historical Fiction to the
dust bin. Now, why the Puritans? Can you say Wigglesworth? Sure you
can. Wierd name for America's "Milton" and the author of Anerica's
first "great" epic, but P liked the name enough. Puritans and Capatain
John Smith? Yeah, that and the head of the cow guy from Spain.

Enjoy tgis fro The Education.

What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as wrong.
Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew it, but
perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were scrappy, and ought
to be studied so. Turning from British art to British literature, one
met the same dangers. The historical school was a play-ground of traps
and pitfalls. Fatally one fell into the sink of
history—antiquarianism. For one who nourished a natural weakness for
what was called history, the whole of British literature in the
nineteenth century was antiquarianism or anecdotage, for no one except
Buckle had tried to link it with ideas, and commonly Buckle was
regarded as having failed. Macaulay was the English historian. Adams
had the greatest admiration for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who
should even distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt.
One might as well imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was
wrong here, for the poet and the historian ought to have different
methods, and Macaulay’s method ought to be imitable if it were sound;
yet the method was more doubtful than the style. He was a dramatist; a
painter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the English mind, method,
genius, or whatever one might call it; but one never could quite admit
that the method which ended in Froude and Kinglake could be sound for
America where passion and poetry were eccentricities. Both Froude and
Kinglake, when one met them at dinner, were very agreeable, very
intelligent; and perhaps the English method was right, and art
fragmentary by essence. History, like everything else, might be a
field of scraps, like the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace.