Now, already American literature has long been a subject in regard to which a library of books has been written. The authors of by far the most of these books are themselves Americans, and they have thus looked at our literature and at our civilization from within; the authors of the rest are foreigners who have investigated and philosophized from the outside. Altogether, native and foreign, they have approached their theme from divergent directions, with diverse aims, and under the influence of deep differences in their critical methods and in their own natures. But so far as the writer of these words is aware, no one of them either native or foreign has ever set about the study of American literature, enlightened with the only solvent principle that can ever furnish its solution.
That solvent principle is contained within a single proposition. That single proposition is the one upon which our forefathers deliberately chose to found the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World: that it should not be a civilization of States which were not a Nation; that it should not be the civilization of a nation without states; but that it should be a Nation of States.
Now, if any man aspires to draw from American literature the philosophy of its traits, if he sets it as the goal of his wisdom to explain its breadth and its narrowness, its plenty here and its lack there, its color in one place and its pallor in another, let him go back to the will of the fathers in the foundation of the Republic and find the explanation of our literature at the basis of our whole civilization. He will never find it anywhere else. He will find it there as he there finds the origin of our system of government, of our system of industry, of our system of political barriers, of our system of education: in the entire nature of our institutions as derived and unfolded from the idea that we should be a nation of states. Our literature—our novels and our poetry—have been as rigorously included in this development as all the other elements of our life.
For the first time in this way he may come to see a great light; and with that light shining about him he may be prepared to write the first history of American literature.
None has yet been written.
