men sojourning in the new country, and they had precisely the same right to be termed American, as had Charles Dickens, when he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit, or Mr. Arnold Bennett, when he produced Your United States. Furthermore, nearly every American work ever published prior to the nineteenth century was written in New England or in Virginia. If one looks for the history of early Dutch literature in New York, early Swedish literature in Delaware, early German literature in Pennsylvania, or early French literature in the Middle or Southern states, one literally stares at blank pages. Our Colonial annals furnish no parallel to the French literature of Canada, the French and Italian literature of Switzerland, the Flemish literature of Belgium, the Polish literature of Russia, or the Slavonic literature of Austria-Hungary. Even when New England and the South ceased to have a monopoly on American authors, we still find practically all of our writing done by the descendants of Englishmen. The only great man of letters produced by Colonial Pennsylvania, for instance, was not a German; but Benjamin Franklin, a simon-pure New England Yankee. And if we look to Dutch New Jersey during the same period, we find a single noteworthy name, that of John Woolman, an English Quaker. Indeed, the only prominent non-British names to be found in American literature before the year 1800 are Philip Freneau and Hector St. Jean Crèvecœur, and both these writers used the English language as their medium of expression.

Moreover, our early national literary history is but a repetition of the same old tale. During the first half century of our existence as an independent nation nearly one million aliens came to our shores, and of these newcomers a very large proportion were non-English-speaking people. From the very close of the Revolution to the present time, we have steadily grown less and less Anglo-Saxon in blood. But let us make a list of the chief American writers of the nineteenth century. Such list must include the names of Brown, Drake, Halleck, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Alcott, Fuller, Emerson, Stowe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Taylor, Poe, Simms, Timrod, Hayne, Lanier, Stedman, Harte, Aldrich, Clemens, and Howells. Yet how many of these

thirty names would sound essentially foreign to a British ear? Absolutely none but the two names Lanier and Thoreau. And it should not be forgotten that the Laniers, though obviously of French origin, became thoroughly Anglicized by a long residence in England many generations before the birth of Sidney Lanier. In view of these facts, is it any wonder that Andrew Lang made so bold as to regard our literature as a sort of colonial branch of English literature, belonging in the same category as the writings of Canada and Australia? Is it any wonder that Mr. John Macy, at the beginning of his Spirit of American Literature, dogmatically declares American literature to be "a branch of English literature, as truly as are English books written in Scotland or South Africa"?

In an article in Harper's for March, 1913, Professor Thomas R. Lounsbury calls attention to the prediction once made that the language of America would one day be markedly different from that of Britain. This prophecy seems now, in the light of actual history, as absurd as it must have seemed natural and plausible when it was made.

Several years ago on a transatlantic liner, the writer chanced to overhear an animated colloquy between a cocksure Englishman and a bumptious German-American. The Englishman, it appeared, had been trying to prove that America was indebted to the mother country for practically everything, from government to dinner-jackets. And the German-American was insistent that we owed practically nothing to England-not even our language. "We don't speak English," he declared; "we speak United States." "But, I say," replied the Englishman with quiet sarcasm, "your blooming United States, in spite of all its faults-its beastly burr and old-maid 'ants' and 'toons' and 'dooties'-is a jolly close imitation of English."

In the foregoing argument Percy certainly had the better of Hans. English, as our national vernacular, has come to stay. No thinking person doubts that now. And the past has indeed given us reason to wonder whether our literature may not be as permanently English as is our language. Yet the present is fraught with many new signs-many signs which make us persist in the query: Is our literature still English?

With a million foreigners entering our country annually (less than one-sixth of whom are natives of English-speaking territory); with fourteen per cent of our total population foreignborn; with an additional twenty-one per cent born of foreign parents; and with an overwhelming majority of our people partially or wholly Continental in descent, we have abundant reason to look for the outcropping of strikingly un-English traits in our literature.

Attention has been called to the dearth of non-British names among American authors, both Colonial and nineteenth-century. For the sake of comparison, it might be well to look at a few familiar contemporary American literary names—such names as Van Dyke, Repplier, Bynner, Guiterman, Cawein, Roosevelt, Oppenheim, Dreiser, Kauffman, Neihardt, Knoblauch, Santayana, Schauffler, Viereck, Benét, Hagedorn, and Untermeyer. Obviously, if there is anything in a surname, we Amercans are no longer dependent solely upon Anglo-Saxons for our literature.

But we must get at more vital matters. We must see whether or not our literature itself is actually undergoing marked changes which tend to brand it as increasingly un-English. To reach any definite conclusions in this matter, we shall find it necessary to consider two things: subject-matter, and method of

treatment.

Of course, it is very easy to point out that we have always had authors who have shown certain un-English characteristics, both in matter and in manner. For example, it is perfectly evident that such themes as the Indians of J. Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms, the prairies of Francis Parkman, the quaint Dutch-American characters of Washington Irving, and the fiery anti-slavery tirades of John G. Whittier could never have derived their inspiration from the British Isles. And to a close student, a subtle analyst, it is equally evident that the bald, bare moralizing which Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell frequently indulged in would differentiate each of them sharply from any English Victorian poet. But, certainly, Indians and prairies are as typically Canadian as they are American, and the moralizing bent of our nineteenth-century New England bards ay be traced directly to ancestors of pure English stock. More

over, even when Washington Irving is dealing with DutchAmericans, he is so patently Anglo-Saxon in his viewpoint that he might as well be an Englishman patronizingly interpreting the life and customs of Holland. Truly, the Anglophobe who surveys American literary history of the seventeenth, eighteeth, and nineteenth centuries finds scant cause for rejoicing.

Turning, now, from the past to the present, we must bear in mind that we are not concerned with the questions: Is our literature improving? or, Is our literature becoming more distinctively American? We are simply concerned with the query: Is our literature still English.

To the person who would answer this last-mentioned question affirmatively let me suggest a brief survey of backgrounds. Let me suggest a glance at the cosmopolitan East Side characters of the late Myra Kelly, the Jews of James Oppenheim, the Italians of T. A. Daly, the Pennsylvania Germans of Georg Schock and Helen R. Martin, the Louisiana French of George W. Cable, and the Michigan Dutch of Arnold Mulder. Here, surely, we have half a dozen backgrounds which are as un-English as they can be.

When we pass from subject-matter to technique, we are treading on dangerous ground; for we are raising a number of rather difficult questions. Can English literature be classed as a definite entity, sharply distinguished from the various kinds of Continental literature? Taking such catalogue as a criterion, can we find a sharp line of cleavage between English and Amercan literature? If there is such thing as a distinctively Continental technique, is that technique followed more by non-English American writers than by American writers of prevailingly English stock? Is a tendency to follow Continental methods necessarily resultant from the fact that the Continental elements in our population are becoming relatively stronger and stronger numerically?

It would be folly to declare that any of these questions can be answered with absolute finality; but one can, at least, bring forth certain facts which bear closely upon the questions.

In the first place, it is fairly safe to assert that there has been, in the history of the English literature, one period which may

be regarded as more typically English than any other. Assuredly, that period was not the Elizabethan period, with its strikingly un-English, almost Celtic exhilaration, volubility, lack of reticence. Nor was it the Jacobean period, with its strange, abnormal contrast to somber Puritanism and rollicking libertinism. Nor was it the Classical period, with its thoroughly un-English grossness, soullessness, artificiality, hatred of democracy, and contempt for nature. Nor, yet, was it the Romantic period, with its well-nigh Oriental delight in the wild, the remote, the improbable, the gaudy. It must, therefore, by the process of elimination, have been the Victorian period, that period during which the liberty-loving Anglo-Saxon race made its greatest developments along the lines of democracy.

How, then, may the Victorian period be characterized? What traits may be safely set down as typically Victorian? In attempting an answer, we shall do well to consider the poetry of that arch-Victorian, Tennyson, whom minor contemporaries followed to a remarkable degree, and with whom even Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites had much in common. Undeniably Tennyson-together with a clear majority of his fellow-Victorians-evinced such marked qualities as a correctness of form, a spirit of scientific accuracy, a tendency toward religious and philosophic questioning, a willingness for gradual change (change which broadens down "from precedent to precedent'), a distaste for things ugly or repulsive, a provincially English mental attitude, and a comparative indifference to the remote past. Add to these qualities the things which the three leading Victorian novelists, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, possessed in common: a thoroughly subjective point of view (in contradistinction to Continental objectivism); an accompanying tendency to intersperse one's story with philosophic moralizing and general "editorial comment"; and, finally (in contrast to relentless Continental naturalism), a bent for tingeing all realism with the idealistic. And here you have the quintessence of Victorianism. Here you have certain definite strata which run through the English literature of all time, underlying the surface differences of Elizabethanism, Classicism, Romanticism, twentieth-century-ism, and so forth. Here you have a tolerably