perity had begun to develop in this country, the great cottongrowing of the South, for one thing, and for another, the manufactures of New England. Since the Civil War some similar economic facts have produced marked changes in our national equilibrium. One has been the opening of the great lines of transcontinental railway. Along with these has developed the enormous growth of bread-stuffs throughout the West, together with incalculable increase of our mineral wealth. These causes have effected the complete settlement of our national territory. At the close of the Civil War a great part of the country between the Mississippi and California remained virtually unappropriated. At present almost every available acre of it is in private ownership. The Spanish War of 1898, then, indicates something more than the political accidents or intrigues which superficially seemed to cause it. Just as truly as the Revolution or the Civil War, the Spanish War probably marked a critical fact in American history. Our continent is finally settled. Such freedom as our more adventurous spirits used to find in going West they must now find, if at all, in emigrating, like our English cousins, to regions not politically under our control. There they must face a serious question. Shall they submit themselves, in the regions where their active lives must pass, to legal and political systems foreign to their own; or shall they assert in those regions the legal and political principles which, for all the superficial materialism of their lives, the fact of their ancestral language makes them believe ideal? There is an aspect, which future years may prove profoundly true, wherein what we call imperialism seems a blundering awakening to the consciousness that if our language and our law are to survive, they must survive by unwelcome force of conquest. So for the first time since the settlement of Virginia and New England we come to a point where the history of England and that of America assume similar aspects. For nearly three centuries the national experience of England and the national inexperience of America have tended steadily to diverge. Our inexperience is fast fading. At the close of our first century of independent existence we find ourselves as a nation unexpectedly and regretfully face to face with the question which during the reign of her present Majesty has been the most important before the mother country. The growth of population during the nineteenth century, the incredible improvement of intercommunication by steam and electricity, and the immense consequent development of trade, are placing before us an unavoidable dilemma. Shall our language, with its ideals of law and of conduct, dominate; or shall it recede and yield to others? This same question presses on England, too. In this final historical fact of common experience there appears some chance of such future union of our ancestral language and ideals as the disuniting influence of three hundred years long placed almost beyond the range of hope. IV LITERATURE IN AMERICA SINCE 1800 It is only during this nineteenth century, as we have seen, that literature in America has advanced to a point where it deserves detached study. By chance its various phases, though not exactly like those of contemporary English literature, fall into chronologic groups very like those which we noted in the literature of the mother country. During the first thirty years of this century the chief development of literature in America took place in the Middle States, centring as the life of the Middle States tended more and more to centre in the city of New York. The literary prominence of this region roughly corresponds with those years between 1798 and 1832 which produced the poets of the Regency and the "Waverley Novels." Meanwhile, as we shall see later, New England, which for a century past had been less conspicuous in American intellectual life than at the beginning, was gathering the strength which finally expressed itself in the most important literature hitherto produced in our country. Broadly speaking, this literature was contemporary with the Victorian. In 1837, when her Majesty came to the throne, it was hardly in existence; before 1881, when George Eliot, the third of the great Victorian novelists, died, it was virtually complete. To-day it may be regarded as a thing of the past. What has succeeded it is too recent for historical treatment; at this we shall only glance. For in a study like ours to discuss living men seems more and more to be as far from wisdom as to sensitive temper it must seem from decency. In the chapters to come, then, we shall consider these three literary epochs in turn: first, the prominence of the Middle States; next, the Renaissance of New England; and, finally, what has followed. |