ENGLISH LITERATURE IN AMERICA.

INTRODUCTORY.

AFTER the people of the United States had gained their political independence from Great Britain they had to bear tauntings for their lack of originality and for their unproductiveness in literature. The reproaches cast upon them were plausible, inasmuch as the Americans had not poets, or historians, or novelists to be compared with the writers of the mother country. There were few American authors living in the eighteenth century whose fame had passed beyond their own country. The English critics cast ridicule and reproach upon us; a friendly disposition would have found excuse for our shortcomings in the peculiar history of our people. That history is naturally divided into three periods; viz. the colonial, the revolutionary, and the national. During the first period the literature was chiefly religious; in the second, political; while in the third it has been richly productive in poetry, in fiction, and in history.

Throughout the colonial period our people were in a condition most unfavorable to the production of literature. They had no cities. They lived in villages scattered along a thousand miles of seacoast. They were beset by savages; were ravaged by pestilence; were pinched by poverty.

They were hindered in their national growth by their own sectional jealousies, and were far removed from the helping influences of European civilization. They had no special impulses to literary work, nor was there any need for them to write books, since books were supplied in abundance in their own language.*

The revolutionary period of our history, beginning with the war and lasting until the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, was equally unfavorable to authorship. At the outset there were the seven years of warfare, in which the national life was taxed to the utmost. The army absorbed the national forces. No man was spared for the pursuit of literature. When the war was over, the land was stripped and desolate, and poverty swayed the scepter, compelling her people to toil for their daily bread. Literature does not thrive where there is no leisure class, nor where the people have not quiet confidence in the security of their government. Both of these essentials to literary prosperity were wanting throughout the revolutionary period of our history.

When the adoption of the Constitution came to mark the beginning of national prosperity, the same unfavorable conditions existed which had been in the way of literary achievement during the colonial period. The people were poor; they had no credit abroad; they had no real money. Exchange was mere barter, such as we expect to find only in rude civilization. And when the people began to emerge from their poverty, they came upon an epoch of astonishing activity in material industries. Agriculture had rich rewards for all who would come to her service;

*"Literature, the Americans have none; no native literature we mean. But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads?"- Edinburgh Review, Vol. XXXI., p. 144.

manufacture was even more alluring; highways were to be built, rivers to be bridged; the laborer commanded such wages as were offered in no other market of the world, and the educated man was driven by the public necessity into the professions of the engineer, of the architect, of the lawyer, of the politician. Moreover, the nation has absorbed immigration from all countries of Europe, until it has grown from a population of about three millions at the beginning of the century to more than sixty millions. The center of population in 1800 was in Carroll County, Maryland, and it has been crowded westward, until to-day it is found in Indiana. Amid these bewildering conditions there could not be the leisure and quiet essential to the production of literature. Reflecting upon the stupendous results achieved in the material affairs of our country, it would seem that all men must have been busied in building our cities, or that all must have been at work in bridging our rivers and in making the highways of commerce, or that all men must have been helping on the conquests of agriculture. It seems unreasonable to look for a display of literary effort and success. Not the colonial period, nor the revolutionary, nor the national period has been favorable to the production of literature. And yet for a quarter of a century the best writers of England and of America have been working side by side, with equal industry and with equal skill, making additions to the noble literature of their common language. Sydney Smith's question, "Who reads an American book?" is not repeated, and the criticism of the English reviewer upon the sterility of our national literature is silenced. That criticism, though ungenerous, was helpful, inasmuch as it added the incentive of patriotism to the personal ambition of American authors.