HAS AMERICA A LITERATURE?
5
The thought and feeling of an individual is given form by his belief, his habits and his system of action. It is with nations as it is with individuals. Before a nation can produce a literature essentially its own, it must have a kind of feeling and a system of thought peculiarly its own. These must permeate its social, political, domestic and religious institutions. It can not be when these organizations be borrowed from a parent state. If borrowed, they must be melted and recast.
With but a very moderate knowledge of national idiosyncrasies one is able to recognize the Frenchman, the German, the Scot, the Spaniard, or the citizen of any of the old world's countries, but who knows the American? In the old world some ideas have long, long ago taken unto themselves definite form; they have become hereditary; the environment aids their maintenance. Time has done its work, and the countries, if they possess the artists, will have the literature.
In America probably the form of government is the most original of any of its organizations, and even that bears the features of its parent in such a marked degree that we can trace its pedigree with the greatest ease. Our lawyers begin their studies with Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England; they familiarize themselves with English constitutional and political history, because from that fountain flows all American law both oratorical and practical. Our Senate and House of Representatives is a House of Lords and a House of Commons in all but name. Our religion, both theoretical and practical, its truths and its ceremonies, are the borrowed material of European countries. England gave us our social and domestic life. In this condition is America to-day. It could not be expected to be otherwise. A hundred years is not time enough for the development of those things which are the precursors of literary production. He who would expect a harvest of literature at this age of the United States would gather fruit out of season.
This age, the world over, is the age of material science. In no nation has the investigation of material science been so fostered by the whole people, as it has been by the Americans. The methods used in the investigation of material things are comparatively new. They had their rise in the philosophy of Bacon; they have been perfected till the revolution is all but complete. The almost universal study of the physical sciences, in this country, is giving form to the thinking powers of its citizens. These new methods of investigation are now being applied to the solution of moral, religious, intellectual, political, social and domestic problems. We hear the muttering thunder of the oncoming tempest in the political discussions that are now on hand; in the free discussions of religious topics in such periodicals as the North American Review, in the prohibition measure, and in a thousand ways we learn that we are in the morning of an age of reforms and revolutions in our organizations. Time will work them out; nothing of purity, nothing of right, nothing of truth itself can be lost. When these reforms and revolutions are over, and the citizens of our nation have settled for themselves a life peculiarly their own, then may the artist erect to the glory of America his monument of literature. We may then look far down the avenue of the future, and there see pictured out the age which American literature may call its own. It will be an age when this struggle for enormous wealth, for political notoriety, and material advancement, will be over; an age when in the fuller light of purified truth men will see and live more for the real object of