SPIRIT OF IMITATION.

25

lectual culture from abroad, and to seek the sources, the rules, and the sanctions of their art, in the old world. Their themes are frequently European, their treatment of them still more so; and their highest ambition, like that of all colonists, has hitherto been to receive a favourable verdict, not from the country of their birth, but from that of their ancestors. Among their early writers of note, Franklin was a practical disciple of Locke, Jefferson of the French Revolution. Latterly the Americans have followed the French in dress, talk, eating, and architecture, the English and Germans in thought their bonnets are Gallican, but their books are Teutonic. "The literary genius of Great Britain," says De Tocqueville, "still darts its rays into the recesses of the forests of the New World. I read the feudal play of Henry V., for the first time, in a log-house. They draw on the treasures of English literature; and I find the literature of England growing on their own soil. The small number of men who write are English in substance, and still more in form." Of the great number of men who have written since the date of this criticism, only a few have written anything to refute it. Another French critic has remarked that Washington Irving paints all countries but his own in the style of Addison-a remark applicable to all his works except his Knickerbocker, which is, because of its greater nationality, the most salient of the group. Fenimore Cooper, though possessed of less artistic power, less fluency, and less variety of illustration than Irving, is more vigorous and peculiar. His sea-pieces are unsurpassed; but on land he everywhere remembers Scott, and his heroes, his conversations, and his mottoes disclose the latent imitation. The writers of the last thirty years have been making strenuous efforts towards nationality; but they are still hampered by Transatlantic, often French, German, and Italian, rather than English, associations. In the style of Mr. Motley we cannot help tracing the influence of Carlyle,

and the reaction begun by Emerson against the reign of Lockist, and Scotch, psychology, is admitted to have derived some impulse from Sartor Resartus. Among the vagaries of its followers-as Alcott, Thoreau, Parker, and Margaret Fuller, none is more salient than their mania for German and Oriental quotations. But this movement merits a distinct study. Let it suffice, in this place, to remark on an unhappy commercial accident which operates as an external cause to restrain the graver intellectual energies of the people within the old grooves. The tyranny which five centuries' load of classics, in the same tongue, almost inevitably exercises over the mind of a nation not yet a century old, is materially strengthened by the non-existence of an international copyright. This gross injustice to the authors on both sides of the Atlantic, for the benefit of the publishers on one, leads to the intellectual market being glutted with stolen goods. Considerations of interest in business are of course everything; those of principle, or art, or patriotism, nothing. As long, therefore, as a publisher in Boston or New York can republish a good book or a bad book that has been puffed into large currency-written in Edinburgh or London, without paying for it, he is sure to prefer an undertaking involving no risk and comparatively little outlay, to another which involves both, i.e., the republication of the English to the new publication of an American book; for the English book has already attained its reputation, and its popularity in America is secured; while the American book, for the copyright of which he has to pay, has, except in the case of a few authors, still to win its spurs. But, this circumstance apart, the influence exerted, sometimes consciously sometimes uncon

1 American readers, as a rule, follow, almost slavishly, the verdicts of the ordinary British public. There are exceptions; they sometimes anticipate our appreciation of an original thinker, as Carlyle. On the other hand, they swallow, in larger doses even than we, such popular platitudes as those of A. K. H. B. and Tupper.

ENGLISH INFLUENCE.

27

sciously to those affected, by the writers of an older and stabler, if not more civilised, nation on those of a younger, is at first, in the nature of things, excessive; and in the intellectual relation of Continental to American art we have a modern version of the ancient "Græcia capta ferum." It is convenient for a foreign reviewer to take shelter behind the confession of a satirist who will not willingly endure from outsiders the repetition of his own rebukes. "Your buxom

goddess of freedom," he says to his countrymen

"Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist, And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste;

She loses her fresh country charms when she takes

Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.

You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought;
With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion

To what will be thought of it over the ocean."

If the people of the United States had spoken a language of their own, some modification of Mexican or Cherokee, it is probable they would have found originality more easily, without the violences and eccentricities in the midst of which they are beginning to "sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence." This fact is confessed by one of the few signatories, in whose pages there is neither eccentricity nor violence" Bred in English habits of thought, as most of us are, we have not yet modified our instincts to the necessities. of our new modes of life. Our philosophers have not yet taught us what is best, nor have our poets sung to us what is most beautiful in the kind of life that we must lead, and therefore we still read the old English wisdom, and harp upon the ancient strings.'

It may, however, be doubted if the writer of this sentence -the greatest prose artist of the States, himself a scion of the pure Pilgrim blood-realises (the mass of English critics certainly fail to realise) the complexity of the problem,

political, social, and intellectual, with which his countrymen have had to deal. America is not all English, not even all Caucasian. She has been from the first century of settlement a theatre open to first comers from every clime and of every origin. "Men," says one of her writers, "come hither in nations:" hence inevitable want of unity and composite spirit. In one locality the prevailing language is still French, in another Spanish. In all the principal towns there are German quarters, Chinese in shoals in the far west, and Irish everywhere. There are the germs of all politics"Aristocrat, Autocrat, Democrat "--and of all religions. The State that is blent, and the literature that is constructed, out of these often jarring elements must, in the long run, be like no one ingredient; it must be an amalgam of all. Englishmen are too prone to forget that the partially kindred blood, which ought to promote friendship, cannot insure identity of aim. Safe in their island home they smile at a turbulence largely due to the lawless spirits they have banished across the seas. The Old World is strong enough to overlook the petulance of the New, which in its turn is great enough to receive, and, it may be, in process of time to harmonise, the elements of discord in the Old. As regards literature, the best advice is that of the gentlest, finest, most cosmopolitan spirit of the West: "The greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word-Wait. . . . Our national character, with its feverish impatient throbs, wants the dignity of repose. We seem to live in the midst of a battle-there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to move slowly, in the press of our life to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main. The voices of the present say-Come! But the voices of the past say-Wait!"

PERIODS OF LITERATURE.

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CHAPTER II.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD.

WE may trace the influence of the controlling facts or tendencies to which we have referred, through the three great periods under which American history obviously falls:

I. The Colonial, or Period of Settlement.

II. The Revolutionary, or Period of Struggle for Independence.

III. The first three quarters of the Nineteenth century.

I. The voices of the first period are, to the modern English reader, few, faint, and far. It was a time of great and fruitful activity. The constitutions of the early states were being tentatively laid down, and social rules of life, destined to influence their descendants, were being formulated by the settlers; but literature, outside the range of a primitive politics and a severe theology, was only beginning, under unfavourable conditions, to exist. The prose and rude verse of the Colonial days are, with some exceptions, the stammering speech of an energetic, industrial people, whose hands are in constant conflict with barren deserts, wild beasts, or rude tribes ; whose hearts are aflame with fervour; but whose heads are bewildered by superstitions, as natural to their circumstances as to their age. That age was, in some respects, fortunate in having no professional authors; for the absence of literary ambitions, with their attendant jealousies, left the pioneers