4
HAS AMERICA A LITERATURE.
After two or three hours rest I took my prospectus and set off down the road, a very weary, a sadder, but a wiser book-
agent, swearing by all that is good, bad or indifferent, never again to drive a mower or pitch millet. BOOK-AGENT.
HAS AMERICA A LITERATURE?
Before a nation can become a possessor of a literature, it is necessary for many conditions of a very broad und far-reaching character to be complied with. To be distinguished by geographical lines of boundary is not enough, nor is the having of a political existence co-equal with the powers of earth enough. The nation that would desire to look with pride to its literature must have an individuality, the result of centuries of customs and manners. Literature is the artistic expression of a people's thought and feeling. Has America those natural characteristics which mark individuality? If it has, have they ever found expression?
It is quite common for people to call things by the name of the country in which the thing is produced. This reckless habit of naming things, particularly those of such a character as the one now under consideration, from location instead of some inherent quality, gives rise to much abuse of terms and a great confusion of ideas. Can the Irish boy trained by Irish parents to love Irish manners, to form Irish habits, to live Irish life, trained to be patriotic to Ireland first and the Constitution of the United States second, can he be truly called American? Can the Chinese, although perchance he may have been born on American soil, he is early, very early, trained to know that his race in America is on a foraging expedition, pillaging the harvests of American liberality, energy and labor, and that soon he is 40 return to his home beyond the ocean,
there to live in opulence; can he be called American in any meaning of that term? The world at large takes entirely too little account of hereditary influences. It takes much time and potent agents to stamp out old habits and graft new ones into a people If it required no more than mere nativity, a mere name, then all that has been written on our soil would be American literature, and by some writers this is made the basis of distinction between American and English literature. The basis is a convenient but illogical one.
If this principle were carried out England would loose many of her master-pieces of literature, for many of her poets gave birth to the children of their imagination upon alien soil. Byron, moody and disconsolate, and hourly sinking deeper into the quagmire of dispair, sang his songs on cliff and in vale, on stream and lake of Greece and Italy. Shelley, in his retreat among the picturesque waters and mountains of Switzerland, or in his boat on the dreamy shores of the Mediterranean, breathed for us his master-pieces. Coleridge in Germany, Goldsmith in his wanderings, and in fact nearly every literary character of England, has given us pictures of foreign life and scenery painted on foreign soil; but those are none the less parts of England's literature. These workmen were products of centuries of English customs, manners and all that goes to make up English life. In every sentence we see the English thought, the English emotion,