One reason, perhaps, was that they had the good sense to perceive that a national literature never has been, and never can be, produced in this way. It is not made to order. It grows.
Another reason, no doubt, was the fact that they already had more books than they had time to read. They were the inheritors of the literature of Europe. They had the classics and the old masters. Milton and Dryden and Locke wrote for them. Pope and Johnson, Defoe and Goldsmith, wrote for them. Cervantes and Le Sage wrote for them. Montesquieu and Rousseau wrote for them. Richardson and Smollett and Fielding gave them a plenty of long-measure novels. Above all, they found an overflowing supply of books of edification in the religious writings of Thomas Fuller, Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Philip Doddridge, Matthew Henry, and other copious Puritans. There was no pressing need of mental food for the Americans. The supply was equal to the demand.
Another reason, possibly, was the fact that they did not have a new language, with all its words fresh and vivid from their origin in life, to develop and exploit. This was at once an advantage and a disadvantage.
English was not the mother-tongue of all the colonists. For two or three generations there was a confusion of speech in the middle settlements. It is recorded of a certain young Dutchwoman from New Amsterdam, travelling to the English province of Connecticut, that she was in danger of being tried for witchcraft because she spoke a diabolical tongue, evidently marking her as “a child of Satan.”
But this polyglot period passed away, and the people in general spoke
“the tongue that Shakespeare spoke,”—
spoke it indeed rather more literally than the English did, retaining old locutions like “I guess,” and sprinkling their talk with “Sirs,” and “Ma’ams,”—which have since come to be considered as Americanisms, whereas they are really Elizabethanisms.
The possession of a language that is already consolidated, organized, enriched with a vast vocabulary, and dignified by literary use, has two effects. It makes the joyful and unconscious literature of adolescence, the period of popular ballads and rhymed chronicles, quaint animal-epics and miracle-plays, impossible. It offers to the literature of maturity an instrument of expression equal to its needs.
But such a language carries with it discouragements as well as invitations. It sets a high standard of excellence. It demands courage and strength to use it in any but an imitative way.
Do not misunderstand me here. The Americans, since that blending of experience which made them one people, have never felt that the English language was strange or foreign to them. They did not adopt or borrow it. It was their own native tongue. They grew up in it. They contributed to it. It belonged to them. But perhaps they hesitated a little to use it freely and fearlessly and originally while they were still in a position of tutelage and dependence. Perhaps they waited for the consciousness that they were indeed grown up,—a consciousness which did not fully come until after the War of 1812. Perhaps they needed to feel the richness of their own experience, the vigour of their own inward life, before they could enter upon the literary use of that most rich and vigorous of modern languages.