than seven hundred volumes of native novels and tales: his list of "remarkable men" is, in extent, like Homer's catalogue of ships. Every village, says one of their satirists, has its miniature copy of Milton, or Byron, or Shelley "A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons-- America has given birth to more than a fair proportion of eminent theologians, jurists, economists, and naturalists; but, with the exception of Russia, no great modern country has, in the same number of years, produced fewer works, of general interest, likely to become classical; and Bishop Berkeley's sanguine prophecy of another golden age of arts in the happier Empire of the West still awaits fulfilment. This fact, attributable in part to obvious historical causes, is fully recognised by the leading authors of the New World. "I hate to hear people talking of American literature," one of these recently remarked: “I find here no want of ability, but we have not had time to have a literature." The same authority has written, "It is the country of the future. From Washington,-proverbially the city of magnificent distances,-through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations." The conditions under which the communities of the New World were established, and the terms on which they have hitherto existed, have been unfavourable to art. The religious and commercial enthusiasms of the first adventurers on her shores, supplying themes to the romancers of a later age, were themselves antagonistic to romance. The spirit which tore down the aisles of St. Regulus, and was afterwards revived in England in a reaction against music, painting, and poetry, the Pilgrim Fathers bore with them in the Mayflower, and planted across the seas. The life of the early colonists left HINDRANCES TO LITERATURE. 15 no leisure for refinement. They had to conquer nature before admiring it; they had to feed and clothe, before analysing, themselves. The cares of existence beset them, to the exclusion of its embellishments. While Dryden, Pope, and Addison were polishing stanzas and adding grace to English prose, they were felling trees, navigating rivers, and fertilising valleys. We had time amid our wars to form new measures, to balance canons of criticism, to discuss systems of philosophy with them "The need that pressed sorest Was to vanquish the seasons, the ocean, the forest." The struggle for independence, absorbing the whole energies of the nation, developed military genius, statesmanship, and oratory, but was hostile to what is called polite literature. The people of the United States have had to act their Iliad, and they have not had time to sing it. They have had to place together the disjecta membra of all races, sects, and parties in a παντοπώλιον πολιτειών. Their genius is an unwedded Vulcan melting down all the elements of civilisation in a gigantic furnace, and welding them anew together. An enlightened people in a new land, "where almost every one has facilities elsewhere unknown for making his fortune," it is not to be wondered at that the pursuit of wealth has been their leading impulse; nor is it perhaps to be regretted that much of their originality has been expended upon inventing machines instead of manufacturing verses, or that their religion itself has taken a practical turn. One of their own authors confesses that the "common New England life is still a lean, impoverished life in distinction from a rich and suggestive one;" but it is there, almost alone, that the speculative and artistic tendencies of recent years have found room and occasion for development. Our travellers find a peculiar charm in the manly force and rough. adventurous spirit of the far West; but the poetry of the pioneer is unconscious. The moving incident is not his trade.1 The culture of the South, on the charms of which visitors of the upper class from England are wont to dwell, has been limited in extent if not in degree: it has been the comparatively rare hothouse fruit of wealth and leisure in a select society-a society whose prestige has been heightened by an outer circle of semi-barbarism. The civilisation of the States has diffused itself from two centres-the Puritan colony of the north-east, and the Old Dominion. The settlers in the former started with the idea of political freedom, which their descendants have maintained, and the idea of maintaining one form of superstition by the persecution of others, which their descendants have been educated or constrained to abandon. The imported republicanism of our commonwealth endures its stern theocracy has proved an exotic, and withered away. Not an unbending Calvinism, but a practical, self-relying, industrial spirit was destined to mould the thoughts of the cultivators of Ohio and the quellers of the wilderness. The South has taken another course, and its formulæ, remaining hard, have had to be broken in battle. In the Revolution days Virginia was the nurse of statesmen; and down to our own, her chosen sons have fought their way to the front in all the great national councils, and played in them for good and ill a powerful part. They will continue to hold a good place in history, by their resistance to the excessive centralising tendencies and mere commercial selfishness of the northern Plutocracy. One of the most philosophic political judgments of recent times admits, that "the honour of maintaining self-government, and making it possible for the Federation to dominate over the Continent, cannot be wrested from the Southern States." 2 But the same im1 Since the above was written, Mr. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller have done something to idealise the life referred to. 2 From unpublished notes on America, by the late Professor J. P. Nichol. partial spectator, in the same pages, prophesies the then impending struggle-a struggle made inevitable by the fact that, in the clash of rival interests and conflicting social principles, a fanaticism on both sides in politics is developed, only less fierce than that of rival religions; that when the strife thickens, the hottest, not the clearest, heads lead the masses. Compromises based on a mutual forbearance may be the preludes to gradual reform; compromises effected by concessions to force, as "Free California on one side, the "Fugitive Slave Law" on the other, are patched and hollow truces, such as paved the way for the rowdy wrestle for Kansas, the challenge to the flag at Fort Sumter, and its salvation by cannon at Gettysburg. The rival forces had been moving in opposite directions towards the past and towards the future, and tugging at the rope at opposite ends till it had to break, or one or other antagonist be drawn over the border line. As the heirs of the men who burned the witches and scourged the quakers, we had Winthrop and Hawthorne the heirs of Washington and Jefferson were Calhoun-as accomplished, but as hopeless, a reactionist as Julian, and President Davis-almost as distinct a traitor as Catiline. It has been pleaded for Athenian slavery that it made possible the culture of the whole free populace which led them to throng to listen to the "Antigone." If this were so, in view of the buffooneries that are the delights of a London or New York pit, we should have to arm all our moral sense to rejoice at the change. But the example of the West spares us the anachronistic regret: American slavery has done nothing but harm to the "mean whites" of Baltimore or Charlestown. If the literature of the North has been hitherto inferior to that of most European countries, the Southern States have produced scarcely any literature at all. In the world of letters they have shone by reflected light. In this respect it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is mainly owing to their connection with the North that the Carolinas have been saved from degenerating to the level of Mexico and the Antilles. Within this century, not half a dozen writers (if we except the mere orators) whose names are widely known have been born south of Mason and Dixon's line. Those of Calhoun, Maury, Simms, and Edgar Allan Poe (a Marylander accidentally born in Boston), are a meagre offset to those of Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Webster, Everett, Lowell, Bryant, Emerson, Sumner, Dana, Holmes, and Hawthorne, belonging to the single state of Massachusetts. Whether we look to India or Louisiana, it would seem as if the fire of a tropical sun had taken the poetic fire out of Anglo-Saxon veins. The indolence which is the natural concomitant of despotism has the same benumbing effect. Like the Spartan marshalling his Helots, the planter, lounging among his slaves, was made dead to art by a paralysing sense of his own superiority. Some thirty years ago, a scheme to establish a new Southern University was abandoned because the "cuticular aristocracy" would not associate with the teachers. It has been the common practice of the rich estate-holders to send their sons to be educated in the northern schools, the best of which it is impossible to overpraise. Almost all genuine Transatlantic literature is inspired by the spirit of hope and confidence in labour-the spirit of the workman who feels himself adequately equipped for an unfettered competition; of the farmer who stands erect on his own acres, overshadowed by no "superior," "where the tongue is free and the hand;" of the adventurer who fears the desert or the swamp as little as he dreads Mather's witches or the goblins of Scandinavia. For its best vitality and aspirations, its scant performance and large promise, we must turn to New England. Its defects and merits are those of the |