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And next to their conversion, the object most important to be kept in view is, the necessity of encouraging in every possible way the amalgamation of the native races with the white population. It is true that this end must be pursued under proper precautions. We must take care that we do not, under the plea of putting the Indian on perfect equality with the white man, leave him in effect without any protection against him. Indeed, until we have raised the natives to a real equality with the settlers, perhaps the less we use the term the better. If we invest the Indian with all the rights and privileges of the European, if we give him for instance freedom of contract and freedom of alienation, one of two consequences will certainly follow. Either he will be cajoled to use his liberty to his own detriment, or he will be useless to, and therefore unemployed by, the settler. For a time, at all events, the old Spanish system of treating the Indians as minors, is probably the safest that can be devised; but, with this proviso, the more useful the natives can be rendered to the settlers, the better for their own ultimate position. The Hudson's Bay Company have long employed them to good purpose in several capacities. They are admirable boatmen and herdsmen; and as colonisation progresses these are just the services for which there will be most demand in settlements where a large portion of the internal intercourse must be carried on by water, and where much of the wealth of the inhabitants will consist of cattle and horses. But the relation of master and servant, though the most obvious, is not the only one which will grow up between the two races. The absence of any female white population in British Columbia must lead to a very large mixture of blood. If this can be effected without that utter corruption of morals which is to be dreaded, even under more favourable circumstances, in a community so miscellaneous and so degraded as the miners of British Columbia, this species of amalgamation is decidedly matter for congratulation. The presence of a half-breed population, such as already exists at the Red River, forms a most important link between the native and the European, while it is an element which, if it does not bear an undue proportion to the community at large, is in itself very well suited to the incipient civilisation of settlements just reclaimed from the wilderness. How far these and similar measures will be productive of any substantial benefit to their objects it would, after so many efforts and so many failures, be rash to predict. But it is none the less our duty to make the attempt; and if the prospect afforded by the sad retrospect of death and suffering, which the history of our dealings with aboriginal races offers to our view, is one of no ordinary discouragement, its contemplation may at least supply us with some dearly bought experience, and some salutary warnings.

ART. V.-DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND ELSIE VENNER.

Elsie Venner; a Romance of Destiny. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co.

IN one of his earlier essays, Mr. Martineau illustrates the shadowy and inchoate perceptions which in many minds supply the place of fixed and definite convictions, by reference to the stage direction in a certain German drama, in which Adam is represented as crossing the stage "going to be created." We have much the same feeling in the perusal of many American works. The literature of the United States has as yet scarcely a substantive existence: it passes before us "going to be created." Its best works are scarcely more than a promise of excellence, the precursors of an advent, shadows cast before; and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung. We speak especially of creative and original literature, of poetry and fiction, of art in its widest sense, and of criticism which can no more exist apart from the contemporaneous production of great works of art than vision can exist without light. Indeed, the absence of great critics in America would of itself furnish sufficient indirect evidence,—if direct evidence were wanting,—of the absence of creative literary genius. According to Dr. Holmes, "Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left." Authors, therefore, are the necessary condition of critics. The latter are chips of the same block; and if the material be sound and good in the one, it will be so also in the other. They are homoousian, to adopt a theological word. When criticism is at a low ebb, in any community that has attained the reflective stage, it is because art is not at a high one. The stream cannot ascend higher than its source. In other departments than the belles lettres, American literature shows to less disadvantage. In law, in history, in divinity, in even speculation, she occupies a respectable place. The names of Kent and Story and Wheaton, of Prescott, Bancroft, and Motley, of Channing and Parker, of Bushnell and Emerson, would occupy a distinguished rank in any literature. American life is essentially practical; and literature, with a bearing on affairs, has at once scope and stimulus. The first business of a young

society is to organise itself; the great work of a free and selfgoverning society is administration. Studies, therefore, which have to do with social organisation, and with the institutions and laws, which are the channels and regulators of social life, will flourish in such a people. The habits of local self-government which the parish, municipal, state, and federal institutions of the country foster, afford the materials and create the necessity of judicial science. Acquaintance with modern political life throws essential light upon past politics, that is, on history, and receives light from it in return. To this circumstance probably, acting upon an hereditary character formed in the English struggles for freedom, America owes its really great jurists and its respectable historians, no less than its orators and statesmen. For we must not allow Polk and Buchanan and Marcy and Cass to lead us into forgetfulness that, at no distant date, America had its Clay and Calhoun and Webster. Oratory, statesmanship, jurisprudence, and history, these are the natural product of the action of American circumstances and inherited character upon the higher intellect of the nation. The strongly marked speculative and religious tendencies of the American mind are in part the contrasted effects of the same cause. The first settlers, Puritans to start with, and thrown face to face with nature and its wonderful forces, compelled to strive with and subdue the forest and the torrent, felt themselves very near to God,startled by his presence. They were religious, as the mountaineer and sailor, and those who lead a life encompassed by perils and deliverances, are religious. The same feeling still characterises the Western settler. On the other hand, in the great cities of New England and the Northern States, religion is a relief sought from the wearing monotony of business, or a counter-excitement against its excitements. Where religion is, philosophy, in some form or other, is sure to be; just as where art is, we shall find, when the first stage of instinctive creation is past, criticism. Philosophy, indeed, is the critique of religion. Both are engaged on the same transcendent themes, before which the one bows down in reverent humility, exclaiming, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me," while the other seeks, with not less reverence, to know. Speculation and worship have alike their origin in wonder, exciting awe and stimulating curiosity. The cherubim and the seraphim render their differing homage to Him who, while He is Love, is also Light in which there is no darkness.

These causes, which have naturally and obviously given Americans an honourable place in law, in oratory, and in history, and which have as naturally, though not so obviously, conspired, with the accidents of individual genius, in the production among

her of great divines and acute and original thinkers,—the causes which have so operated have been fatal, or at least have militated against the growth of imaginative literature of the brightest order. That the poet is born, and not made, is, as it is commonly understood, a far more questionable saying than that poetry grows, and is not made. It is a spontaneous product, requiring, indeed, pruning and culture, not a manufacture. The hurry and bustle in which the Americans, as a nation, live, the rough conflict with outward things in which, of necessity, they are engaged, do not allow them to wait for the germination and unfolding of those seeds of thought from which every great imaginative work must spring. The ground must lie fallow to be productive, and the Americans never let their ground lie fallow. A poetic conception must have lain long in the mind before it develops its own intrinsic character, and surrounds itself with suitable external relations. It is first there as a faint suggestion of a truth in, or soon assuming, symbolic form,—parable, allegory, narrative, surrounding itself, by a sort of elective affinity of ideas, with appropriate imagery, circumstances, and action. The thought and its outward shape grow together: they are one and inseparable; the idea being apprehended only as it slowly bodies itself forth, and then only complete when its outer habitation is complete. For this, as for all things which involve the operation of faculties in a great degree independent of the will, time is necessary. Pressure cannot be put on to hasten the work. Hence it is that a man, even of the highest faculties, can no more say, "Go to; I will make a great poem, or fiction, or painting," than he can say, "Go to; I will make a religion." Leisure and tranquil contemplation are essential; and it is for these that American life affords the least scope. Nor does the country possess those associations on which the imagination loves to feed. As Dr. Wendell Holmes himself more than half hints, the "common New England life" is a "lean, impoverished life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one." "There is no sufficient flavour of humanity in the soil out of which we grow." What America has of romantic interest runs back to other and perishing races. With a single illustrious exception, the only fictions which are indigenous to the country, which are in any sense racy of the soil, are Cooper's stories of the red men. The only poem of which the same can be predicated, with any plausibility even, is Longfellow's Hiawatha. They confirm what we have said; for though these stories and the poem are American in scenery and incident, they are American in the ethnologist's sense, and not Anglo-American. They might have been written on either side of the Great Lakes. Once clear of the hunting-grounds and the wigwam,

Mr. Cooper sinks to the level of Mr. G. P. R. James as an imitator of Scott; and Mr. Longfellow-we will not say to that of Dr. Charles Mackay-but to that of an ingenious experimenter in verse, filled with graceful European culture, and fresh from the European schools. The greatest of American novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne- confesses, or rather complains, that America will not grow romances. He feels or fancies himself obliged to transport even his fertile genius to a foreign soil, before it will bring forth its maturest fruit. He may indeed be cited against his own theory. The Scarlet Letter, The House with Seven Gables, The Blythedale Romance rise up in protest against his doctrine. But Mr. Hawthorne is the proverbial "one swallow." He is the solitary exception to his own rule; and he may very well, under the circumstances, stand excused for having, with characteristic modesty, overlooked that exception. The only other illustrious name which could be appealed to against us is that of Washington Irving. But Washington Irving was not an American. We admit that, by an accident which we cannot account for, and for which we are not responsible, he was born in America. He was really, however, an Englishman; and not even a modern Englishmen, but an Englishman of the time of Queen Anne, a contemporary of Addison and Steele; and in tastes, culture, and style, belongs to the Kit-Cat Club. In poetry, the case is even worse. The names of Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier, bring to our minds much touching or generous sentiment, and satiric or fantastic humour, clothed in fitting verse; but they only prove that America as yet caret vate sacro. Edgar Allen Poe, infinitely lower in many respects, exceeds them all in intensity, and makes the nearest approach to genius. The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence; any more than Belgian or Swiss literature has a separate existence as distinguished from that of France. The United States have yet to sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence. They are mentally still only a province of this country. They import their literature ready made. Any one who will look at the columns of almost any American newspaper will see how completely this is the case. The stories of Bulwer and Dickens, of Thackeray and Trollope, even of the thrilling authors who supply the London Journal or Family Herald with its weekly banquet of horrors, fill the broadsheets of the United States. This circumstance coöperates with the others which we have described to depress home talent. The market is glutted with better and cheaper (because stolen) articles from abroad. In the end, however, honesty would be the better policy. In literature, the principle of protection to native indus

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