attained their majority, it is indeed time that England should cease to assume the attitude of their guardian; but it is also time that they should cease to be on the alert to resent the assumption. Meanwhile, "qui s'excuse s'accuse" continues to have its application across the sea, where in matters of Art, if no longer in Politics, a nervous self-assertion remains to indicate a lingering self-distrust. He who attempts to give, as the result of long and careful study, a sympathetic sketch of American Literature, must be prepared to suffer rebuke for patronising the writers he has praised, and the reproach of ignorance for omitting to mention those he has inwardly condemned.

"There are ten thousand

Geese, villain?

Authors, sir,"

is Byron's appropriate adaptation of " Macbeth." We must "prick our face and over-red our fear." I, however, disclaim in these chapters attempting a catalogue or playing the part of an auctioneer. I am content to illustrate, mainly from the works of a few representative artists in prose and verse, the general impressions derived from some direct knowledge of a great people, and some familiarity with the recorded thoughts and fancies that seem most conspicuously to display the leading features of their character.

It has become a platitude to say that the developments of History and of Literature run in parallel lines; but much of our education consists in the unfolding of universally acknowledged principles which, when applied to various times and places, often lead to previously unexpected results. Only he who has realised the stagnant solemnity of the East can read the Vedas: the impulse of the Athenian Drama was due to Marathon and Salamis as much as to the elder Myths half the soul of Plato's political philosophy was in the laws of Sparta, the other half in the oratory of Pericles.

:

HISTORY AND LITERATURE.

5

The Augustan age of Latin Literature was the product of a period of repose, inspired in part by the spirit of the foregone Republic, in part by that of the Empire newly crowned. The Medieval Church, the English Commonwealth, the reign of Scepticism in France, and the tempest of ideas which marked the closing years of the eighteenth century in Germany, are embalmed in Dante, Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe. In Spain the traditional Cid and the pathetic Quixote represent the palmy days and the decline of Chivalry. Two great nations of the modern world remain without an adequate literary expression of their political power. The one, long struggling into historical prominence, has its intellectual life still benumbed by the frosts of northern despotism: the other is even yet a giant in swaddling-clothes; it has just begun to have a past, and belongs mainly to the future. What the reading of History is to the past, Travel is in some measure to the present: it enables us by our own eyes and ears to refute misrepresentations, sometimes to resolve perplexities; but we must not expect too much from it. "Patria quis exsul." "Cœlum non animum." We can only gather interest on the capital we take with us. "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." Many English men and women who run abroad, a show to others, themselves see nothing. If we go to Chicago or Hong-Kong only to sell dry goods, we come back to Bristol or Birmingham with a dry-goods' return. Emerson keeps repeating with a half-truth and a shade of conceit, "I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, the principle of each and of all eras in my own mind;" and one of his pupils quotes from Beowulf, "Far countries he can safest visit who is himself doughty." Dr. Johnson and Kant obeyed the precept, "Let a man first travel round the terra incognita inside his own threshold." But we know the value of the verdicts of the former on far

countries and men. The latter more wisely confined himself to criticise the region he had explored, and few important changes have been made on his map of it.

We are not bound to make ourselves familiar with other lands, but unless we have some degree of acquaintance with them we had better not pronounce sentence on them. Even with a view to the British interests, of which we hear so much, it is not always safe to treat a great country after the manner of the reviewer who never read a book on which he was about to decide, lest it should prejudice his judgment. There are some cases, indeed, in which imagination and hearsay may be made to supply the place of knowledge. Mere sights can be brought home, and old records lit up by fancy to revive old events; but some experience is required to realise the conditions under which, starting from a point, a race has in two centuries spread over a continent, within whose arena, as on a vast theatre, different phases of civilisation are contending.

The two nations of the civilised world who have most in common are the two whose acquaintance with each other is, in many respects, the most imperfect. Their separate political history is included within a century; when they write of each other it is already to draw contrasts like those drawn by Herodotus between the manners of the Greeks and the Egyptians. "Fathers and mothers in America," writes Mr. Trollope, "seem to obey their sons and daughters naturally, and as they grow old become the slaves of their grandchildren." "An Englishman," writes Mr. Emerson, “walks in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walking-stick, wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands upon his head, and no remark is made." Religion in America, asserts Mr. Trollope, is characterised by a certain rowdiness. Religion in England, declares Mr. Emerson, is torpid and slavish. Both authors confirm, by their example, the state

ENGLISH IGNORANCE OF AMERICA.

7

ment that "it is hard to write about any country so as not to represent it in a more or less ridiculous point of view;" and yet both are candid and able beyond the majority of critics. The relationship existing between Englishmen and Americans makes them ignorant of their mutual ignorance. They are near enough to set great store by each other's judgments, and not near enough to form just judgments extemporaneously. Their jealousies are those of competitors: their disputes the χαλεποὶ πόλεμοι ἀδελφῶν. Their community of speech is itself too often a medium of offence, for it dispenses with a study in the course of which they learn. something of the habits and social histories of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. One has, indeed, heard of Americans in England being complimented on the rapid progress they had made in the language. This mistake hardly occurs every day; but it is rivalled by popular fallacies almost as patently absurd; e.g., during the war it was in some quarters a European belief that the Northern States were contending with the mongrel Spaniards of South America, and that raids of Pawnee Indians from Ohio were apprehended in the Broadway of New York, a city lying, according to one of our members of Parliament, on "the Potomac." It was somewhere reported that Mr. Lincoln, whom it was then the fashion to revile, had ordered guillotines from Paris to establish a reign of terror; and Mr. Tupper is said to have remonstrated against the enormity by a letter to the President. Another savant visiting Boston took up a volume of Webster's Lexicon with the remark, "He was a wonderful man to find time in the midst of his great political career to write that dictionary; but what a sad end he had!"1 An older parallel is Byron's anecdote of the Englishman in Venice who asked the American Consul if it was true that Washington had been killed

1 Tres juncti in uno-Daniel Webster, Noah Webster, and Webster the chemist, hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman.

by Burke in a duel. Throughout the Civil War it was currently held in London that half of the Union armies was made up of foreign mercenaries, that the North were fighting for empire, the South for freedom, and that the slave-holders would prove invincible. Their advocate, Mr. Spence, persuaded the people of Glasgow, that Andrew Jackson and Jefferson Davis were the most disinterested of American presidents. All these and worse confusions, as that between pioneer life and the society of Boston or New York, are the result of reports so hasty that it has been said, “If their writers were accused of having committed crime in the 'States,' the production of their volumes would prove an alibi."

The facility of travel, which makes it easy to acquire first impressions, is itself a temptation to superficial people. The ambition of the ordinary British tourist in the States is satisfied when he has seen Niagara, called at the White House, and been introduced to the literati of Boston, to whom he afterwards refers with an exceptional complacency. "English travellers," says Washington Irving, with a gentle satire, whose edge has hardly been blunted by fifty years, "are the best and the worst in the world. Their travels are more honest and accurate the more remote the country described. I would place implicit confidence in an Englishman's description of the regions beyond the cataracts of the Nile, of unknown islands in the Yellow Sea, of the interior of India, or of any other tract which other travellers might be apt to picture out with the illusions of their fancies; but I would cautiously receive his account of his immediate neighbours, and of those nations with which he is in habits of the most

frequent intercourse. However I might be disposed to trust his probity, I dare not trust his prejudices." "Mutato nomine de te" is our sole retort. Readers of books on the other side of the Atlantic-of books, that is, by their own countrymen