Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/763

Rh AMERICAN LITERATURE 719 the poetry of the pioneer is unconscious. The attractive culture of the South has been limited in extent and degree. The hothouse fruit of wealth and leisure, it has never struck its roots deeply into native soil. Since the Revolu tion days, when Virginia was the nurse of statesmen, the few thinkers of America born south of Mason and Dixou s }i ne __outnuinbered by those belonging to the single State of Massachusetts have commonly migrated to New York or Boston in search of a university training. In the world of letters at least, the Southern States have shone by reflected light ; nor is it too much to say, that mainly by their connection with the North the Carolinas have been saved from sinking to the level of Mexico or the Antilles. Whether we look to India or Louisiana, it would seem that the tropical sun takes the poetic fire out of Anglo- Saxon veins, and the indolence which is the concomitant of despotism has the same benumbing effect. Like the Spartan marshalling his helots, the planter lounging among his slaves was made dead to Art by a paralysing sense of his own superiority. All the best transatlantic literature is inspired by the spirit of confidence often of over-con fidence in labour. It has only flourished freely in a free soil ; and for almost all its vitality and aspirations, its comparatively scant performance and large promise, we must turn to New England. Its defects and merits are those of the national character as developed in the Northern States, and we must seek for an explanation of its peculiari ties in the physical and moral circumstances which sur round them. When we remember that the Romans lived under the sky of Italy, that the character of the modern Swiss is like that of the modern Dutch, we shall be on our giiard against attributing too much to the influence of external nature. Another race than the Anglo-Saxon would doubt less have made another America ; but we cannot avoid the belief that the climate and soil of America have had something to do in moulding the Anglo-Saxon race, in making its features approximate to those of the Red Indian, and stamping it with a new character. An electric atmosphere, and a temperature ranging at some seasons from 50 to 100 in twenty-four hours, have contributed largely to engender that restlessness which is so conspicuous &quot; a note &quot; of the people. A territory which seems boundless as the ocean has been a material agent in fostering aa ambition unbridled by traditionary restraints. When European poets and essayists write of nature, it is to con trast her permanence with the mutability of human life. We talk of the everlasting hills, the perennial fountains, the ever-recurring seasons. &quot; Damna tameii celeres reparant coelestia lunse nos ubi decidimus &quot; In the same spirit Byron contemplates the sea and Tennyson a running stream. In America, on the other hand, it is the extent of nature that is dwelt upon the infinity of space, rather than the infinity of time, is opposed to the limited rather than to the transient existence of man. Nothing strikes a traveller in that country so much as this feature of magni tude. The rivers like rolling lakes, the lakes which are inland seas, the forests, the plains, Niagara itself, wiih its world of waters, owe their magnificence to their immensity ; and by a transference, not unnatural although fallacious, the Americans generally have modelled their ideas of art after the same standard of size. Their wars, their hotels, their language, are pitched on the huge scale of their distances. &quot; Orphaned of the solemn inspiration of anti quity,&quot; they gain in surface what they have lost in age ; in hope, what they have lost in memory. That untravelled world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when they move,&quot; is all their own : and they have the arena and the expecta tions of a continent to set against the culture and the ancestral voices of a thousand years. Where Englishmen remember, Americans anticipate. In thought and action they are ever rushing into empty spaces. Except in a few of the older States, a family mansion is rarely rooted to the same town or district ; and the tie which unites one gene ration with another being easily broken, the want of con tinuity in life breeds a want of continuity in ideas. The American mind delights in speculative and practical, social and political experiments, as Shakerism, Mormonism, Pan- tagamy ; and a host of authors, from Emerson to Walt Whitman, have tried to glorify every mode of human life from the transcendental to the brutish. The habit of in stability, fostered by the rapid vicissitudes of their com mercial life and the melting of one class into another, drifts away all landmarks but that of a temporary public opinion ; and where there is little time for verification and the study of details, men satisfy their curiosity with crude generalisa tions. The great literary fault of the Americans thus comes to be impatience. The majority of them have never learnt that &quot; raw haste is half-sister to delay;&quot; that &quot; works done least rapidly, art most cherishes.&quot; The makeshifts which were at first a necessity with the Northern settlers have grown into a custom. They adopt ten half measures instead of one whole one ; and, beginning bravely, like the grandi loquent preambles to their Constitutions, end sometimes in the sublime, sometimes in the ridiculous. Many of the artistic as well as many of the social pecu liarities of the United States may doubtless be traced to their form of government. After the most obvious wants of life are provided for, Democracy stimulates the produc tion of literature. When the hereditary privileges of rank have ceased to be recognised, the utility, if not the beauty, of knowledge becomes conspicuous. The intellectual world is spurred into activity: there is a race in which the prize is to the swift. Everyone tries to draw the eyes of others by innumerable imperfect efforts with a large insignificant sum total. Art is abundant and inferior: whitewashed wood and brick pass for marble, and rhythmical spasms for poetry. It is acknowledged that the prevailing defect of Aristocratic literatures is formality; they are apt to be precise and restricted. A Democratic literature runs the risk of lawlessness, inaccuracy, and irreverence. From both these extremes the Athenian, the Florentine, and the Elizabethan classics were preserved by the artistic inspirations of a flexible tradition. The one is exemplified in the so-called Augustan ages of letters, in the France of Louis XIV. and the England of Queen Anne, when men of genius, caring more to perfect their style than to estab lish truth, more to captivate the taste than to stir the passions, moved with clipt wings in a charmed circle of thought. The other has its best illustration in the leaders of our own romantic schools, but its most conspicuous development in America; a country which is not only democratic but youthful without the modesty of youth, unmellowed by the past and untrammelled by authority, where the spirit of adventure is unrestrained by feelings of personal loyalty where order and regularity of all kinds are apt to be misnamed subservience where vehemence, vigour, and wit are common, good taste, profundity, and imagination rare; a country whose untamed material infects the people, and diverts them from the task of civilisation to the desire of conquest. American literature is cramped on another side by the spirit of imitation. It has been in great measure an offshoot or prolongation of our own. As English sculptors study at Rome and Naples, the most prominent Western artists in every department have almost invariably inaugurated their careers by travelling in Europe, and writing descriptions of the foreign lands where they have found their richest intel-