Initial Studies in American Letters

607-1765.

The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as history

than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual vigor of the

English colonists in America by the books that they wrote; those "stern men

with empires in their brains" had more pressing work to do than the making

of books. The first settlers, indeed, were brought face to face with strange

and exciting conditions-the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and

fauna of a new world-things which seem stimulating to the imagination,

and incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to

poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports which

were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole, hardly rise

into the region of literature. "New England," said Hawthorne, "was then in

a state incomparably more picturesque than at present." But to a contem-

porary that old New England of the seventeenth century doubtless seemed

any thing but picturesque, filled with grim, hard, work-day realities. The

planters both of Virginia and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and

3 HENRY A. (HENRY AUGUSTIN) BEERS

starvation, constantly threatened by Indian Wars, and troubled by quarrels

among themselves and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles

between the royal governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Domin-

ion, and the theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial

records, are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did

we not bear in mind to what imperial destinies those conflicts were slowly

educating the little communities which had hardly yet secured a foothold on

the edge of the raw continent.

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements,

when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and com-

merce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and generous liv-

ing and fine society, the "good old colony days when we lived under the

king," had yielded little in the way of literature that is of any permanent

interest. There would seem to be something in the relation of a colony to

the mother-country which dooms the thought and art of the former to a

helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia are great provinces, wealthier

and more populous than the thirteen colonies at the time of their separa-

tion from England. They have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds

of thousands, well-equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly pub-

lic buildings, all the outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet

what have Canada and Australia contributed to British literature?

American literature had no infancy. That engaging naivete and that heroic

rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs of Europe

find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of emerging from the

twilight of the past the first American writings were produced under the

garish noon of a modern and learned age. Decrepitude rather than youth-

fulness is the mark of a colonial literature. The poets, in particular, instead

of finding a challenge to their imagination in the new life about them, are

apt to go on imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country.