America's Mother Genius

 

In Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, he describes the lineages of national literary geniuses: 

Shakespeare is one of five or six writers who have everything neeed to nourish the mind. These mother-geniuses seem to have birthed and brought up all the others. Homer impregnated Antiquity; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, and Virgil are his sons. Dante gave rise to modern Italy, from Petrarch to Tasso. Rabelais created French letters; Montaigne, La Fontaine, and Moliere are his descendants. And England is all Shakespeare, even down to the latest times; he has lent his language to Byron, his dialogue to Walter Scott. 

I would add: Cervantes in Spain, and the two-headed monster of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russia.

But what of America? Who is our “mother-genius”? My strong feeling is that no American writer has soared to the firmament inhabited by the Homers, Dantes, and Shakespeares… no American vies to be the next name on the Mt. Rushmore of literature. We just aren't an old enough people, a deep enough people. 

With that caveat, if I had to choose a mother-genius for American literature, I suppose it would have to be Thoreau. If there is an American national genius, it has to be the writer escaping from the city to the woods to try to live consciously. 

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. 

What could be more American than that?