Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/18

 in my opinion is making American writing so bad and what in present day conditions tends to make it better.

As no man can speak of the writing of a country without saying something of the history of the intellectual life of the country, I shall have to begin by speaking of that.

It is, I think, pretty well understood among us that the intellectual life of America had its home nest in New England. Our culture is as yet a puritanical New England culture. The New England states, all cold, hard and stony, produced a rather cold and stony culture, but the New Englander, like so many repressed and defeated peoples, was intellectually energetic. He spread his notion of life out over the country. Living as he did in a land where the ground was cold and comparatively unproductive underfoot and the skies cold and forbidding overhead, he spent a great deal of