racial origin. Their traditions, institutions, and social customs are closely related. Naturally, then, in American literature, we see the working out of the same inherited tendencies, the same traditions, and, to some extent, the same current influences, that we have observed in England. We must not, however, expect to find identical causes producing identical results. In literature, the spirit of an age must express itself through the indiDifference viduals. Individual genius never duplicates. Were there two Englands, similarly descended, similarly influenced, we should find, in the two, similar periods of literary development, but we should find a great difference in the works of individual writers. America, had the conditions of its growth been precisely like those of England, would have had a period of Augustan "correctness, a period of "heroic couplets," but it would not have had a Pope or an Addison. America, however, does not duplicate English conditions. American literature consequently shows considerable divergence from English. Yet even in this divergence, one can see common elements.

American literature begins late in the eighteenth century, one might even say, at the beginning of the nineEighteenth teenth. Up to the time of separation from Century England the two literatures are practically one, like the stem of a Y before it reaches the split. In the scant two centuries of colonial life what little was written may be regarded practically as English literature written by Englishmen in America. As a rule, the colonists were too busy clearing land, dealing with Indians, and establishing government, to create works of literature. Neither the Puritan severity of New England nor the Cavalier elegance of the South expressed itself in a form that

will live. New England Puritanism gave no Bunyan, and Virginian aristocracy gave no Herrick.

English eighteenth-century writers must have had American readers and admirers. The Spectator must have circulated in the "Church" and Tory circles of Boston, Salem, and Newport, and generally through the South. The heroic couplet gained a footing, and held it long after the Romantic Movement had banished it from England. In the latter part of the century one writer stands out as the American result of the causes that in England produced Samuel Johnson. Benjamin Franklin embodies eighteenth-century qualities. Where Johnson was a Tory, Franklin was a democrat; where Johnson made his "little fishes talk like whales," Franklin adopted the homely directness of Poor Richard. Yet in both men, one finds the same spirit, a clear, aggressive, practical common sense, the spirit of an age that would try the tests of reason upon literature, upon theories of government, even upon the lightning from heaven! In Franklin, more than in English writers of his own time, one sees the influence of the French questioners of accepted traditions, of Rousseau, and Voltaire. In Thomas Paine this influence is still more striking.

Revival

The Romantic Revival appears early in minor poetry, though the heroic couplet long held its own. English poetic influences crossed the Atlantic slowly, Romantic taking from a quarter to a half century to produce their full effect. Scott and Byron were felt before Coleridge and Wordsworth. The strange feature of the early century lies in the way in which writers of different periods in England were discovered and imitated at once. Americans were, one might say, rummaging

the whole cargo of English literary fashions, and out of the collection different writers adopted what pleased their individual fancy. Of the earlier poets, Drake, Halleck, Freneau, and a few others show the effect of the Romantic Movement. On the other hand we find writers constructing long "heroic" Columbiads, and composing blank-verse poems on the pattern of Thomson's Seasons and Young's Night Thoughts.

In fiction the influence of the supernatural romances of Mrs. Radcliffe is seen in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown. Poe and Hawthorne, writing later, carried this type of fiction higher than any writer of England. Hawthorne developed the novel of atmosphere and poetically romantic suggestion. Poe did with the short tale of horror and wonder what Coleridge had done for the poem of the same type. His House of Usher is a worthy prose companion to the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.

From its opening almost to its end, the nineteenth century in America was a time of discovery,, of deliberate imitation, of renaissance. Puritan New Eng

Relation to Past

land had intentionally turned its back upon old world standards. The aristocratic South had been too comfortably at ease to consider them. The new nation, in the intervals of building railroads and organizing industry, had to rediscover European culture. As a result, we find the general confusion of standards mentioned above, the imitation, at one moment, of half a dozen different periods. New England, which now pursued worldly art and culture as energetically as it had formerly proscribed it, was simultaneously absorbing everything from Chaucer to Tennyson and grasping excitedly at everything that Greece and Rome and France and Italy could offer.

A result of this was a certain imitative and provincial weakness. The new American writers had not the aggressive genius of those greater Elizabethans who used the learning of the past as fuel for their own inspiration. The Elizabethan, whatever he took from others, was vigorously himself. The spirit of younger America was too careful, too timid. Its authors were missionaries of past culture, not creators of new. Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, and their contemporaries, radiated much the same kind of light that they absorbed.

The Novel

In the novel less was done than in poetry. Cooper is far less inferior to Scott in plot and character than in style. Our other novelists of the early century, excepting Brown and Hawthorne, hardly repay study. Only in the latter part of the century do we find the novel developing, under English inspiration (with some influence from French and Russian fiction) into the work of Howells, James, Holmes, Crawford, Stockton, Cable, and others. In the best of these there is marked independence. They deal with America in the spirit of the best English fiction.

The essay and the short story in the hands of Irving developed along the same general lines as similar work of the same period in England. Irving, a man The of originative power, was in contact with Essay English writers and developed American material in the spirit of such men as Lamb and Southey. Later men, of less power, like Whipple and White, belong approximately to the school of Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and the later English writers for the reviews. Through them we find the essay developing into the newspaper and magazine article of to-day.

The philosophical tendency shown in Wordsworth and Coleridge and later in Carlyle and Ruskin developed in America in one movement, led by a New England group. America, some say, discovered Carlyle. Just as clearly, it was Carlyle that awakened New England to the significance of German literature and philosophy. Emerson's poems and essays are America's contribution to the literature of abstract meditation. In him one feels a strong creative independence. The nearest approach to Wordsworth lies in his work and in that of Thoreau, the tramp and mystic. In Bryant's best poetry, too, one finds something of Wordsworthian dignity and nearness to nature.

In the work of the nineteenth century in America one feels increasingly a spirit of independence. The American Independence

writer who truly inherits the traditions of

English writers does not merely imitate. He aims not at identity, but at similarity. He will do the same kind of thing, but in his own way. Doing this, he is not imitative or provincial.

Longfellow, for all his learning and talent, suffers from his humility before the literary past. Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, Poe, and Lanier, though of less poetic industry and less evenness of talent, surpass him in originative power. It is interesting to note that the men most individual of all, the men most like the great writers of England in seeing for themselves in their own way, were hardly regarded as writers of "literature." Whitman, like Blake and Burns, and Mark Twain, like Fielding and Defoe, pictured life as they saw it. They tried to do not what great English writers had done, but as they had done. We are gradually coming to realize their greatness. Of present American literature it is hard to speak def