Mr. Townsend's fellow countrymen must feel themselves to be put under
a beautiful obligation to him by his work entitled _Kentucky in
American Letters_. He has thus fenced off for the lovers of New World
literature a well watered bluegrass pasture of prose and verse, which
they may enter and range through according to their appetites for its
peculiar green provender and their thirst for the limestone spring.
This strip of pasture is a hundred years long; its breadth may not be
politely questioned!
For the backward-looking and for the forward-looking students of
American literature, not its merely browsing readers, he has wrought a
service of larger and more lasting account. Whether his patiently done
and richly crowned work be the first of its class and kind, there is
slight need to consider here: fitly enough it might be a pioneer, a
path-blazer, as coming from the land of pioneers, path-blazers.
But whether or not other works of like character be already in the
field of national observation, it is inevitable that many others soon
will be. There must in time and in the natural course of events come
about a complete marshalling of the American commonwealths, especially
of the older American commonwealths, attended each by its women and
men of letters; with the final result that the entire pageant of our
literary creativeness as a people will thus be exhibited and reviewed
within those barriers and divisions, which from the beginning have
constituted the peculiar genius of our civilization.
When this has been done, when the States have severally made their
profoundly significant showing, when the evidence up to some century
mark or half-century mark is all presented, then for the first time
we, as a reading and thoughtful self-studying people, may for the
first time be advanced to the position of beginning to understand what
as a whole our cis-Atlantic branch of English literature really is.
Thus Mr. Townsend's work and the work of his fellow-craftsmen are all
stations on the long road but the right road. They are aids to the
marshalling of the American commonwealths at a great meeting-point of
the higher influences of our nation.
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.
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