Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/198

CHAPTER XXXII Non-English Writings II Aboriginal PROBABLY never before has a people risen to need a his- tory of its national literature with so little conscious relation to its own aboriginal literature. Yet if we ex- tend the term America to include the geographical and racial continuity of the continent, unbroken at its discovery, we have here the richest field of unexploited aboriginal literature it is possible to discover anywhere in the world. It begins in the archaic and nearly inarticulate cry of awakening consciousness, and carries us to about the point at which Greek literature began to exhibit continuity of thought and style. Only in America we have the advantage of having all these literary patterns developed on a consistent warp of language, and with the woof of an unmixed racial psychology. Varied as all its tribal manifestations were, from Aleut to Fuegian, the aboriginal American was of one uncontaminated strain. Something more than a scholarly interest attaches to this unparalleled opportunity for the study of a single racial genius. To the American it is also a study of what the land he loves and lives in may do to the literature by which the American spirit is expressed. These early Amerinds had been subjected to the American environment for from five to ten thousand years. This had given them time to develop certain characteristic Americanisms. They had become intensely democratic, deeply religious, idealistic, communistic in their control of public utilities, and with a strong bias toward representative govern- ment. The problem of the political ring, and the excessive 6io