"Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land"
About this Quote
Melville lashes out at a provincial reflex in young America: the habit of measuring itself against Europe and bowing to foreign laurels. He chooses a deliberately shocking contrast, preferring even mediocrity at home to the finest genius abroad, to force a change in critical sympathy. The provocation is strategic. Before a culture can grow great, it needs confidence, infrastructure, and critics willing to attend to its own apprentices. Praise, even generous and imperfect praise, is a kind of investment capital; it keeps local talent at the desk, the easel, the press.
The line belongs to the mid-19th-century push for an American literature equal to the nations that had long dominated letters. Melville, writing amid the American Renaissance alongside Emerson, Hawthorne, and later Whitman, felt the gravitational pull of British standards, reviews, and canons. Readers and critics, anxious not to seem parochial, often crowned imported work while dismissing domestic attempts as derivative. Melville sought to reverse the gaze: look first and seriously at what is being made here, nurture it, and let excellence arise from that attention. The hyperbole about praising mediocrity is less a defense of shoddy art than a call for protective tariffs in culture, the infant-industry argument transposed to letters.
There is an ethical nuance, too. To withhold recognition until perfection arrives is to ensure it never will. Apprenticeship requires a community willing to see promise before it is fully formed. Melville knew how fragile reception could be; his own ambitions needed a national audience that believed American experience deserved its own mythic voice. The admonition is not xenophobic but diagnostic: uncritical adoration of foreign models can stunt originality at home. By shifting praise toward local effort, even when rough, a nation clears space for its distinct idiom to mature, so that one day it need not choose between homegrown mediocrity and foreign brilliance, because excellence will have taken root on native soil.
The line belongs to the mid-19th-century push for an American literature equal to the nations that had long dominated letters. Melville, writing amid the American Renaissance alongside Emerson, Hawthorne, and later Whitman, felt the gravitational pull of British standards, reviews, and canons. Readers and critics, anxious not to seem parochial, often crowned imported work while dismissing domestic attempts as derivative. Melville sought to reverse the gaze: look first and seriously at what is being made here, nurture it, and let excellence arise from that attention. The hyperbole about praising mediocrity is less a defense of shoddy art than a call for protective tariffs in culture, the infant-industry argument transposed to letters.
There is an ethical nuance, too. To withhold recognition until perfection arrives is to ensure it never will. Apprenticeship requires a community willing to see promise before it is fully formed. Melville knew how fragile reception could be; his own ambitions needed a national audience that believed American experience deserved its own mythic voice. The admonition is not xenophobic but diagnostic: uncritical adoration of foreign models can stunt originality at home. By shifting praise toward local effort, even when rough, a nation clears space for its distinct idiom to mature, so that one day it need not choose between homegrown mediocrity and foreign brilliance, because excellence will have taken root on native soil.
Quote Details
| Topic | Pride |
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