Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/762

Rh 718 AMERICAN LITERATURE I. INTRODUCTORY. The literature of the United States, while still half our own, is pervaded, to a degree not easily estimated, by a foreign element. The relationship between Englishmen and Americans, making them ignorant of their mutual ignorance, operates against the soundness of their judg ment on each other s work. Community of speech, which ought to be a bond of union, is often a medium of offence ; for it dispenses with a study of the language, and in studying a language we learn something also of the habits and social histories which are reflected in, and serve to interpret, distinctly alien literatures. Facility of travel, making it easy to acquire first impressions, is a temptation to such hasty estimates as many of the most accomplished Americans have formed of England, and many of the most accomplished Englishmen have formed of America. The least satisfactory works of some of their foremost writers, as Mr Hawthorne s Old Home and Mr Emerson s English Traits, are those associated with their transatlantic experiences. But of the mistakes on both sides, ludicrous and grave, we have had perhaps the larger share. Few Americans have ever so misconceived a British statesman as we misconceived Mr Lincoln, or gone so far astray in regard to any crisis of our history as we did in reference to the moving springs and results of their Civil War. The source of this greater ignorance lies not so much in greater indifference as in greater difficulty. England is one, compact and stable. The United States are many, vast, various, and in perpetual motion. An old country is a study, but a new country is a problem. Antiquity is brought to our firesides in the classics, till Athens and Rome &quot; To us are nothing novel, nothing strange.&quot; We are more familiar with the Acropolis than with the Western Capitol with Mt. Soracte than with the Catskills. Our scholars know more about Babylon than about Chicago. Dante immortalises for us the Middle Age ; Plantagcnet England is revived in Chaucer ; the inner life of modern England has a voice in Tennyson and the Brownings. Where is the poet who will reveal to us &quot; the secrets of a land,&quot; in some respects indeed like our own, but separated in other respects by differences which the distance of 3000 miles of ocean only half represents ; which, starting on another basis, has developed itself with energies hitherto unknown in directions hitherto unimagined? Who will become the interpreter of a race which has in two centuries diffused itself over a continent, the resources of which are not more than half discovered, and which has to absorb within itself and harmonise the discordant elements of other races for whom the resources of the Old World are well-nigh exhausted 1 Caret vate sacro ; but it does not want poetical aspirations as well as practical daring : &quot; This land o ourn I tell ye s gut to be A better country than man ever see ; I feel my sperit swellin with a cry That seems to say, Break forth and prophesy. strange New AVorld, thet yet wast never young, Whose youth from thee by gripin want was wrung, Brown foundlin o the woods, whose baby bed &quot;Was prowled round by the Injun s cracklin tread, An who grcw st strong thru shifts an wants an pains, Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains.&quot; H. CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. The number of writers who have acquired some amount of well-founded reputation in the United States is startling. The mere roll of their names would absorb a great part of the space here available for an estimate of the works which best represent them. Mr Griswold informs us that he has in his own library more than 700 volumes of native novels and tales; his list of &quot;remarkable men&quot; is like Homer s catalogue of ships. Almost every Yankee town has indeed its local representatives of literature, reflecting in prose or verse the impulses and tendencies of the time. But while America has given birth to more than a fair proportion of eminent theologians, jurists, economists, and naturalists, hardly any great modern country, excepting Russia, has in the same number of years produced fewer works of general interest likely to become classical ; and Bishop Berkeley s prophecy of another golden age of arts in the Empire of the West still awaits fulfilment. This fact, mainly attributable to obvious historic causes, is frankly recognised by her own best authors, one of whom has confessed &quot; From Washington, proverbially the city of magnificent distances, through all its cities, states, and territories, ours is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations.&quot; The conditions under which the communities of the New World were established, and the terms on which they have hitherto existed, have been unfavourable to Art. The religious and commercial en thusiasms of the first adventurers to her shores, supplying themes for the romancers of a later age, were themselves antagonistic to romance. The spirit which tore down the aisles of St Regulus, and was revived in England in a reaction against music, painting, and poetry, the Pilgrim Fathers bore with them in the &quot; Mayflower,&quot; and planted across the seas. The life of the early colonists left no leisure for refinement. They had to conquer nature before admiring it, to feed and clothe before analysing them selves. The ordinary cares of existence beset them to the exclusion of its embellishments. While Dry den, Pope, and Addison were polishing stanzas and adding grace to English prose, they were felling trees, navigating rivers, and fertilising valleys. We had time, amid our wars, to form new measures, to balance canons of criticism, to dis cuss systems of philosophy ; with them &quot; The need that pressed sorest Was to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest. The struggle for independence, absorbing the whole energies of the nation, developed military genius, states manship, and oratory, but was hostile to what is called polite literature. The people of the United States have had to act their Iliad, and they have not had time to sing it. They have had to piece together the disjecta membra of various races, sects, and parties, in a iravroTruXiov TroXtretaii/. Their genius is an un wedded Vulcan, melting down all the elements of civilisation in a gigantic furnace. An enlightened people in a new land, &quot; where almost every one has facilities elsewhere unknown for making his fortune,&quot; it is not to be wondered that the pursuit of wealth has been their Lading impulse ; nor is it perhaps to be regretted that much of their originality has been expended upon inventing machines instead of manufactur ing verses, or that their religion itself has taken a practical turn. One of their own authors confesses that the &quot; com mon New England life is still a lean impoverished life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one;&quot; but it is there alone that the speculative and artistic tendencies of recent years have found room and occasion for develop ment. Our travellers find a peculiar charm in the manly force and rough adventurous spirit of the Far West, but