The pecuniary poverty of the printers of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century caused many American authors to go to England for the printing of their production. Barlow's 'Columblad) was printed in England. Irving's books appeared first in London. In deed, Irving's wide reputation may be said to have been English before it was American. And he spent much of his early life in Europe, perhaps from the feeling that for a man of letters Europe was a home while America was a wilderness. James Fenimore Cooper made Europe his home for many years, feeling appar ently that he could not find society of his own kind in his own land. The same is true of other American writers as far down as the thirties of the 19th century. That was the worse for the infant literature of the nation. Writers watched painfully for the expressions of English criticism, and one line from a Grub street critic was sweeter to them and worth more than any words from their own country men. It is indeed impossible to overstate the effect which was eventually produced by the system," as it was called, in the discussions of tariff legislation which followed the short war with England. From the moment when the American printer could send out to the world books as well printed as the printers of England, one may trace new strength in American authorship. The International Copy right Law of 1891 compels the publishers of all books which claim American copyright to print them in America. In a truly celebrated article in the Edinburgh Review of 1820, of which no other line is remembered, Sydney Smith said: "Who reads an American book? Who looks upon an American picture?" The men who painted American pictures were very mad, as their vernacular would say; and the men and women who wrote American books were equally mad. The writers had a better chance to ex press their anger than the painters. The sneer implied was the more cutting because for most purposes of literature it was true. Possibly it had some share in the growth, almost from that moment, of a literature which can fairly be called American. The worst of it was, per haps, that Sydney Smith was an advance guard of the Liberals of England. He could not be called the product of an "effete civiliza tion," and his words could not be ascribed to Tory jealousy. American readers had known how to prize him and they read his articles if they did not read their own. But really an American author had little right to complain so long as Mr. Cooper called a woman a female simply because Walter Scott did, so long as our writers knew more of robin-red-breasts and bulfinches than they knew of bluejays or modc ing birds, so long as their best actors came from England as every play upon their stage was English, and so long as their scholarly men read the Edinburgh Review and the London Quarterly and the New Monthly Magazine as they read no American journal. The American college boy knew much more of the loves and hates of literary men in England, one might almost say, than the English boy of the same time did. The English reviews and magazines passed from hand to hand in the American reading-rooms while their American rivals died a slow death due to the incompetency of most of the writers. But as the 19th century ad vanced the tide turned. Dr. Holmes in a happy phrase, quoted as often as Sydney Smith's which has been ated, fixes Emerson's first Phi Beta Kappa address as "our intellectual declaration of independence.° I heard the address in 1837, and half a century afterward I heard his second Phi Beta address. Whoever will compare the two will see what Dr. Holmes means. To the thoughtful reader now it seems impossible that Emerson's first address should have seemed extravagant or in any way, indeed, out of the common to the men of that time. But it did seem so then.
It is true that ever since the century began such addresses on Commencement days or on other literary occasions have still given four fifth of the time to pathetic appeals to young men to create an American literature. The orators, generally clergymen or lawyers, did not understand that such books as Lewis and Clark's journals were American literature, that Pitkin's statistics was a book of American liter ature, that Flint's 'Mississippi) or Pike's 'Ad ventures) were vigorous bits of proper national literature, that the Constitution of the United States or John Adams' proposals for the State Constitutions were American literature, as much as the Waverley Novels belong to Scotch litera ture, or Petrarch's 'Sonnets) to Italian litera ture. But by the middle of the 19th century,
people had found out that literature is not a thing by itself to be worshipped and loved like some lonely classical statue in some separate shrine in a gallery, but that literature is simply the expression of what is. In the matter of American literature it proved that Americans had to state for the world the foundation prin ciples of government. They had to describe for the world physical features of a continent of which the larger world knew nothing. And even the language in which they spoke would bear marks of the climate, the soil and the history of that continent. So soon as we throw aside the follies of talking about literature as literature and of worshipping it as a separate idol, so soon American literature can be spoken of as a thing in any sort distinct from the litera ture of the feudal system or other literature of the ancient world.
To review in the very briefest way the literary advance of the nation from the era of independence we have to look first at the speeches and letters and pamphlets of the statesmen; and next at the reports of the ex plorers. There are individual poems and a few sporadic books in prose which linger in the remembrance of antiquaries — Philip Frenau's Revolution poems, one or two sermons, per haps may be classed among such memorials. To speak in a broader sense the first work of Irving stands as the first work in the large calendar of our modern literature. His amus ing studies of early New York were known then, but the 'Sketch Book' as it was pub lished in London in the years between 1820 and 1822 at once obtained a wide reputation, both in London and in America. Irving showed from the first that he could handle American subjects with a pen as light and a fancy as charming as gave life to 'Bracebridge Hall' or his other English studies. In 1825, when Navarrete first published in Madrid the original documents of Columbus' voyage, Alexander H. Everett, who was then our minister in Spain, called Irving's attention to these invaluable memoirs and suggested his work on the life of Columbus. Irving went at once to Madrid and was attached to the American legation there while he studied the subject which is so closely identified with his name. And afterward, when the Spanish people received him as our minister there he enjoyed his well-deserved fame. Here was an American who could meet English writers on their own terms. Irving was master as well as they of whatever is meant by style or method in literature, whatever secret of the guild there is.
In our time there is no longer a patron who shall endow a book as an emperor might endow an opera house at his capital. For a time or a nation without patrons, you must have such patronage of the public in advance as Dr. Dwight sought for with his subscription book; or, as it has proved, in 150 years, you must have magazines. This means, if one speaks to the Philistines, that you cannot have large wholesale business, no, and you cannot have manufactures unless there be retail business. Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith had found this out when they worked for Cave and the Gentleman's Magazine. One and another ad venturer tried the magazine experiment in Bos ton or Philadelphia or New York. But alas, the printers of the magazines were almost as poor as the authors were. The people of the country also were very poor in other affairs. As late as 1834 Dr. Holmes wrote for the New England Magazine the first papers of the 'Au tocrat of the Breakfast Table.' But the New England Magazine, even with such contributors, died for want of readers. The new series of the Autocrat, in 1857, begins with the words, °As I was saying when you interrupted me,') which referred to the death of the first series a quarter century before. Still, the names of those old magazines are interesting gravestones which show the roadway for a struggling na tional literature. The Harvard Register of 1807 is one of the earliest. The Lyceum follows the Collegian, Harvardiana, and now almost every university gives this excellent field for the tour nament of squires and even of pages who look forward to golden spurs of knighthood. A few lines of the Harvard Lyceum of 1810 may be worth copying. They are from a clever parody of Barlow's