against natural laws in this respect, is certain to work for them.

This is why I think that the American claim to a distinct nationality may fairly rest upon the same basis as that of the other colonies of England. "Colonies of England," I say, and say it advisedly. In the Greek sense, indeed, America is the only pure colony of England. And although other achievements of our racesuch, for instance, as that of building up a colossal empire in Asia on the basis of a handful of adventurous shop-keepers who had quarrelled with their brother shop-keepers of Holland about the price of pepper; and such, again, as the building up a congeries of wealthy states upon the basis of a few shiploads of forlorn convicts are exploits of a more dazzling kind than anything we have done in America; yet beyond doubt the chief glory of England's colonizing genius is exhibited by the United States. But he who would for one moment deny that English colonies these States are, would proclaim himself to be no scholar and no student of history. Can they ever become anything other than English colonies? Can they ever become a nation? That is the question which seems to be exercising the American mind at the very moment when they ought to be asking themselves the much deeper question, Can they, in face of the enormous disturbing influences from Continental Europe which I have glanced at-to say nothing of those deteriorating climatic influences which seem to have impressed Emerson as deeply as they impressed Humboldthope to remain, what it should be their chief pride to remain, colonies of the great mother of the English-speaking world? But if it should be found, on discussing this matter fully, that no colony inaugurated in stages of the world's his tory so late as ours can develop into a nation, how can America ever possess that "national literature" which the International Copyright Act has just been passed to foster ?

In order really and truly to transmute a literature whose seeds have been imported, to transmute it, I mean, into a growth possessing indigenous qualities, is there not something more required than what individual writers, however strong, can supply? Does there not need for such an end a long period of isolation from

the mother land, a period so long as to give time for the birth of a new temper, a temper born of new customs, and, if not of a new folk-lore, of a new modification of the old folk-lore? What was the case in Europe? What was the case in Asia? The waters of civilization slowly trickling through ages upon ages on the face of the earth, gathered and settled, if such an image may be allowed, in isolated lakes and pools; from which, after ages upon ages, other streams went trickling slowly out, to gather again and settle into still other lakes and pools. But has not the time long since gone by when civilizations can thus be inaugurated? It is in the merest superficial sense that history, which often seems to try to repeat itself, ever really does so. In the deep sense it is as true of the march of Clio as of the march of Nature through all the changes of time, that there are "no returning footsteps."

move

The truth is that the solidarity of the modern civilizations in which we makes the old disparate civilizations of Asia and Europe scarcely conceivable to any but systematic students of history. The story of the growth of the modern world is simply the record of the melting into each other of those lakes and pools of civilization to which I have just alluded. For instance, the small feudal centres around which European society crystallized after the death of Charlemagne were necessarily provisional merely. The seeds of dissolution were in them from the first, and, after the suzerainties merged into each other the growth of new nationalities was not long in coming to an end. This was so even before Science came, with her steam and her electricity, knitting together, if not consolidating, races that were once so wide apart that each had its own literature, more or less indigenous. If at the time when Goethe talked to Eckermann about his dream of "worldliterature" the distinctions between the literatures of Europe had already become less accentuated than theretofore, what shall be said of those distinctions now? And if those varieties of national flavor which in old days demarcated one literature from another, are, in spite of the diversities of language, becoming modified year by year, what shall be said about national distinctions among people having a common history, a common blood, and a common speech?

a

No American literary historian would affirm that any number of books written in the English language would merely because they were produced on Australasian or South African soil, suffice to make an Australasian or a South African literature. Where, then, is the difference between the United States and the other English colonies ?

Perhaps it may be urged that, in order to discuss this subject fairly and fully, I must do so in the light of those famous climatic and gastronomic theories of M. Taine, upon which the high philosophical criticism of France is based. But this, I confess, is beyond me; though to deny that the food a poet eats may have something to do with the songs he sings, in the same way that from the blackbird's note may be inferred what have of late been the blackbird's dinners-cherries or worms-night be rash in face of Mr. Moncure Conway's theories about what he calls "Gastronomic Civilization.”

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While Mr. Walt Whitman seems to think that, although there is for the "Variant" a great future (when he does come), his originality up to the present moment is inclined to express itself in pork" rather than in poetry, Mr. Moncure Conway, though he affirms that the "Variant's" actual existence has at last been discovered, admits that he, the discoverer, has been guided by the fact that in the gastronomic paradise of America there are many dishes.

It is not for the well-bred Englishman to endorse too readily theories so unpoetical as those of the two American writers I have quoted, because, by doing so, the Englishman-bewildered by Leaves of Grass, and stifled by American anthologies would be tacitly saying to the one writer "maximize your pork, minimize your poetry," and to the other writer, let the motto of your gastronomic

civilization' be Advance the national stomach."

Yet when Mr. Conway tells us triumphantly that "this superior gastronomic civilization, which will not be disputed, is symbolical," we may, at least, be pardoned for asking him to what the symbol applies. No doubt in the Frisian language one and the same word (as Carlyle loved to think) does duty to express both soul and stomach; but then we English have even a greater leaven of Frisian blood

than the Americans themselves, and hence the "superior gastronomic civilization" of America can hardly be taken as a symbol of independent nationality in regard to America's stomach or America's soul.

With regard to Mr. Conway's allegation that "on Colonial tables English dishes are maintained at whatever cost, while the additions offered by nature remain comparatively uncultivated "-this is an impeachment which our Canadian poets--a very vigorous fraternity-must answer for themselves. Enough for the old country to defend as she may her own imperfect gastronomic civilization-as to which Mr. Couway gives an anecdote that is certainly disquieting and might have modified inaterially M. Taine's views of Shakespeare's art had it been brought before his notice. "It is an old story, ," he goes on to say,

that a delicate English lady, at her first dinner in an American hotel, asked for the vegetables in season and was presently appalled by finding twenty-seven dishes around her. Her experience would hardly have been less remarkable had she called for the meats or fruits in season. A large proportion of these are of American creation; and, apart from them a number of things which abroad are luxuries of the rich, are democratic, so to say, in America."

I take it, however, that Mr. Moncure Conway is far too well equipped a writer to maintain that, whatever may be the "gastronomic superiority" of America, a new race can be inaugurated on American soil by the mere processes of digestion, however fine. All he claims is that, from the assimilation of courses so many, so various, and so excellent, a "Variant" is or will be digested into birth, even as, according to that old Norse mythology of which he is so fond, "in the maw of the Fenris wolf" the European world is, one day, to be digested, through chaos, into a world that is new. If he is right the new-comer should of course express himself through a literary voice that is new. Are there at present any signs that he is doing so? Are there any signs that he is likely to do so? My concern here is mainly with poetry. And let me begin by reminding our friends across the Atlantic that, as a producer of poetry, the position of the mother-land of England in relation to America is very greatly like that held by the "Mother city" of old in relation to one of the Greek colonies.

A poem written in the English language, whether produced in England or in some other part of the vast English-speaking world, is an English poem, no more and no less, and it has to be judged upon its own absolute merits, its own absolute defects.

The poetry beginning with Piers Plowman and ending, up to now, with certain English, American, Canadian, Australian and South African bards whose name is legion, is the birthright of every Englishspeaking man wheresoever he may have been born-in London or in New York, in Levuka or in the Falkland Islands-exactly as a poem in the Greek language was the birthright of every Greek whether born in Athens, in Thebes, or in Sparta. Nor is there any reason why in the United States or in Canada or in Australasia or in Capeland or in Mashonaland English poetic genius should not in the twentieth century blossom as vigorously as it blossomed in the England of Shakespeare. But English poetry it will be-English poetry to be judged by the canons of criticism of the mother-land. In any one of these colonies the Shakespeare of the twentieth century may be born. But splendid as is the present glory of the United States splendid as is the promise of Canada, Australasia and South Africa -these colonies can never produce a Shakespeare who is not an English poet. Even if England were to-morrow to be sunk under the sea the land of Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth must remain the mother-land of every Englishspeaking poet. As this article deals mainly with poetry, the prose fiction of America cannot be fully discussed here. Perhaps, if it could, I might be ready to admit that, although colonial poetry cannot depart from the classic note of the mother-land without becoming secondrate, this need not be so emphatically affirmed with regard to colonial prose fiction; for it is of the very nature of novels to represent through literary expression the husks of life as well as the kernels.

While Colonial poetry, as belonging to essential art, can only depart from the classic note of the mother-land by becoming deteriorated, Colonial prose literature, whose first business is mainly that of reflecting the external life of nature or the external life of man, may be so steeped in the Colonial atmosphere as to present

some of the qualities of an indigenous. growth.

But taking Fischer's definition of art, "life in form," as being better than any other, we must remember that, while in poetry form is the very life itself, in prose fiction (as we see in Don Quixote, in Gil Blas, in Wuthering Heights, etc.) form may be secondary to life. Indeed it is no disparagement to prose fiction to say that its form is almost necessarily so lawless and so loose, its literary texture is almost necessarily so homely, when compared with the opalescent texture of poetry, that it only occasionally passes into the region of essential art. And doubtless it is this fact which causes every writer who has once tasted the delight of working in a form where every word has to be the best he can find, and set in the best place, to turn away from his own prose writing, however carefully knit together, with an undefined sense of dissatisfaction and of failure.

Colonial prose fiction, therefore, may be tried by Colonial standards, and, being found excellent, according to those standards, may be absolved from trial before the classic tribunal of the mother-land. And of course there is a kind of verse which, partaking largely of the quality of prose, may, in like manner, be excellent, though departing from the classic note. I allude to the familiar or worldly or comic verse in which America is so rich. It is of the very essence of the Biglow Papers, and of Mr. Bret Harte's comic verses, that they should be Colonial in accent. These are, indeed, typically American, but only because, relying as they do upon external accidents, they lie outside the world of essential art.

When the author of the Biglow Papers writes a Harvard Ode, he gives us a poem which only in its intellectual substance is American, as distinguished from English. In all artistic qualities, in everything that goes to distinguish it from a prose oration, and to make it a poem, it has to be tried by the same standard, even to the smallest nuance of expression, as though it had been written on the shores of the Cumberland lakes. In short, the moment that Colonial verse begins to pass into essential art and become poetry, it loses all the accidents of its Colonial origin, and must stand or fall as a classic. In other words, to be artistic in Fischer's sense, it has to

us.

be as purely English as the work of Milton or Wordsworth. American poets believe that there is no delicate refinement of the most artistic of the poets of England which is not as perceptible to them as to If they are right as I am sure they are, how can there be a national note distinguishing an American from an English poem? In George 11. Boker's sonnet, England, there is in intellectual substance an American quality, and a very noble one, but from the artistic point of view, where is its American accent?

Stand, thou great bulwark of man's liberty! Thou rock of shelter, rising from the

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You can turn this poem into a Scotch sonnet by carefully changing the "man" into mon" and chopping off a few of the consonants, after the fashion so dear to the Scotchman's soul. You can say, "Stan', thou great bulwark o' mon's liberty! Thou rock o' shelter, risin' frae the wave,' or you can turn it into a Dorsetshire sonnet by carefully studying William Barnes's vocabulary and changing every s into a z, or you can turn it into a Lincolnshire sonnet by carefully studying the Northern Farmer. But not all your study of the elaborate cacography which forms so important a part of American local color will enable you to turn it into a serious American sonnet as distinguished from an Eng

lish one.

II.

The fine work of the poets of America shows, not that there is any probability that a national poetry will ever be developed in America, but that English poetry can be enriched by English writers born on American soil: thus will stand the

case, I think, on the 1st of July, 1891, when the new Copyright Act, called International, is to come into operation. But could the case ever have stood otherwise? Was there ever a time in the history of America when she could have produced an independent literature of essential art? Was there ever a time when Americans could, with some show of reason, have said to each other, "Let us evolve a Variant-the difficulty of doing so under the conditions of modern civilization will be immense-but let us start a literature of our own; let us grow sprouts from our own minds upon which our future offspring may browse?'' And if there ever was a time when Americans might have thus communed with themselves with a fair hope of a profitable result, when was it? Without affirming that a time ever did exist when a national American poetry might have been born, I remind the reader that every.commay munity has a plastic period- -a period when it is extremely sensitive, not only to the impact of external impressions, but to those mysterious and spontaneous inner movements of the organism which we call the forces of growth. Without such have existed; for even the now stationary plastic periods no civilization could ever civilization of China must have moved from primeval babarism. When was the plastic period of the American people? Clearly it was when the colony broke away from English rule. In material things the energy that creates and the energy that seizes and holds showed then an activity which to the old world was astonishing. If ever a national literature was to be born

this was the time. Under the conditions of imperfect communication which then existed, when steam-vessels and telegraph cables were not, the isolation of colony from mother-land might almost be compared with the isolation of country from And after a country in ancient Europe. few years there came another war with England, which aided the isolating effect of distance. From the very first the Americans had dreamed of their future greatness; from the very first they had an eye upon the prospective Variant. And what were the means they adopted in order to produce him?

No doubt after securing their independence the desire of the Colonists to become a separate nation was natural enough,