Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/772

740 Early literary efforts. [1620-1776 observed in regard to Emerson, was bound to provoke reaction in any minds predisposed to conservatism. To this somewhat alarmed reaction may be traced a tendency, still strong among Americans of a religious turn, toward the willing acceptance of ecclesiastical systems generally foreign to the freedom of their earlier traditions. For example, in New England and indeed throughout the country, the strength of the Protestant Episcopal Church has tended, for half a century, steadily to increase; and so has that of the Church of Rome. Independent America, of which we have now attempted to ascertain the legal and the philosophic temper, has displayed from the beginning of the Revolution a somewhat sensitive consciousness of nationality. This was nowhere more evident, at first, than in the efforts made by Americans, almost as soon as their national existence was assured; to enrich their country with a literature of its own. During colonial times there had been a good deal of publication in America ; but little of this had been li terary in character. The American writings of the seventeenth century, mostly produced in New England, had been chiefly theological ; those of the eighteenth century, before the Revolution, had been chiefly political or historical. Such American work as had taken literary form had been frank and rather amateurish imitations of more or less fashionable English models. That America, as such, possessed anything resembling a native literature had never occurred to anybody. Accordingly, when certain patriotic Americans set themselves to the task of creating such a literature, their efforts might have been expected to be vigorously uncouth. The voice of a newly-born republic, estab- lished in a continent still mostly wilderness, might naturally have possessed a wild melody of its own ; but no one would have predicted for it any special grace of modulation. A certain consciousness of this presumption probably combined with the conservative instinct so characteristic of Americans to make the beginning of their literature rather deliberately formal. Literature, those who then wrote were apt to feel, was essentially an expression of high civilisation ; whoever would aspire to literary distinction must therefore prove himself, to begin with, highly civilised; and the prime evidence of high civilisation is an impressive manner. Accordingly, the chief characteristic of literature in America for many years was punctilious care for form ; and indeed this kind of care has persisted in America to this day. It is instantly evident when we remember that the species of literature in which Americans have proved most successful is the short story, the merit of which depends so manifestly on formal precision. The tendency which bore its first fruit in the short stories of Irving subsequently made itself felt in other ways ; as a tendency, however, it has been evident all along. Even before the Revolution some clever young men in Connecticut had begun to publish essays, fashioned after the Spectator and its