The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-07-28
American Literature.
 From Harper's Weekly.

As the language is a possession com mon to all the English speaking peoples so also is the literature. A share i'll the fame of Chaueer and of Shakespeare, or Milton and of Dryden, is part of the in- heritance of every one of us who has English for his mother tongue, what ever his fatherland If there be any where a great poet or novelist or his torian, it matters not where his birth, or his residence, or his nationality, if he makes use of the English language, he is contributing to English hteratLre. To distinguish the younger divls.ons or English literature from the older, we shall have to call that older division
 British, meaning thereby that portion of our common literature which is now produced by those who were left be-
 hind in the old home when the rest of the family went forth one by one to make their way in the world Thus English literature, which was one and undivided until the end of the eigh- teenth century, has now in the nine teenth century two chief divisions British and American; and it bids fair in the twentieth century to nave three more-Canadian,, Australian and Ind. ian.
 Some such distinction between the several existing divisions of the English literature of our time is needful, and it will be found useful. Absurd and very misleading is the antithesis sometimes
 made between American literature and English, since American is but one of the divisions of the literature of our time Not long ago a pupil of one of the best private schools in New York maintained that American literature was just as important as English lit erature, producing as proof two com panion manuals of the same size exter- nally, although, of course, internally on l a wholly different scale. Such lack l of proportion in the treatment of dif- ferent parts of the literature of the | English language is foolish and harm
 full. But a comparison of American ! literature with the merely British lit- l erature of to-day might be proper
 enough. What we need to grasp clear l ly is the fact that the stream of Eng 1 fish literature had only one channel un- | til the end of the last century and that | in this century it has two channels. The new mouth that this massive current 1 has made for itself is American, and so
 we are compelled to call the old mouth l British.
 Through which of these channels tie fuller stream shall flow in the next cen
 tury no man can foretell to-day. It is
 a fact that the population of these | United States now is nearly twice as large as the population of the British
 Isles, and not inferior in ability or en- ergy. But it is fact also that in
 America a smaller proportion of the ability and the energy of the people seems to be devoted to the cause of letters. In a new country life itself
 offers the widest opportunities; and lit erature here has keener rivals and more
 of them than it can have in a land which has been cleared and titled and tended since a time whereof the mem- ory of man runneth not to the contrary. The earliest Americans had other du- ties than the writing of books; they
 had to lay deep the foundations of this mighty nation. It was more than two hundred years after the establishment of the first trading post on the island of Manhattan before Washington Irv- ing published the Sketch Book" the first work of American authorship to
 win a wide popularity beyond the bor- ders of our own country-before Fen nimore Cooper, a little later, published | "The Spy," the first work of American
 authorship to win a wide popularity
 beyond the borders of our own Ian lguage. We may say that American lit
 erature is now but little older than the
 threescore years and ten allotted as the span of mans natural life.