Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 2

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 commerce was building up large towns, and there were
wealth and generous living 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 separation from England.
They have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands,
well-equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public 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 _naïveté_ 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 youthfulness 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. America was settled by
Englishmen who were contemporary with the greatest names in English
literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, nine years before
Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise, Captain John
Smith, may not improbably have been a personal acquaintance of the
great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal tragedies on the stage,"
wrote Smith. Many circumstances in The Tempest were doubtless
suggested by the wreck of the Sea Venture on "the still vext
Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his True Repertory
of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at
Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the Polyolbion, addressed
a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic
minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode
which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature:
"And as there plenty grows Of laurel every-where-- Apollo's sacred
tree-- You it may see A poet's brows To crown, that may sing there."
Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the Civil Wars, had
also prophesied in a similar strain:
"And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our
tongue, to what strange shores . . . What worlds in the yet unformed
Occident May come refined with accents that are ours?"
It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter
Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He
was one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made
voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely
things have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in

1632 he should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the
colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before. Sir
Henry Vane, the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend--
"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"--
came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts.
These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver
Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was
prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail
thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance
Paradise Lost missed being written in Boston. But, as a rule, the
members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the
feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society
which America has only begun to reach during the present century.
Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great
distributing centers of the English race." The men who colonized the
country between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large
extent, from the literary or bookish classes in the old country. Many of
the first settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for
the good of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and
spirit, "of good means and great parentage." Such was, for example,
George Percy, a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who
was one of the original adventurers, and the author of A Discourse of
the Plantation of the Southern Colony of Virginia, which