CONCLUSION

THE literary history of America is the story, under new conditions, of those ideals which a common language has compelled America, almost unawares, to share with England. Elusive though they be, ideals are the souls of the nations ~ which cherish them, the living spirits which waken nationality into being, and which often preserve its memory long after its life has ebbed away. Denied by the impatience which will not seek them where they smoulder beneath the cinders of cant, derided by the near-sighted wisdom which is content with the world-old commonplace of how practice must always swerve from precept, they mysteriously, resurgently persist.

The ideals which for three hundred years America and England have cherished, alike yet apart, are ideals of morality and of government,- of right and of rights. Whoever has lived his conscious life in the terms of our language, so saturated with the temper and the phrases both of the English Bible and of English Law, has perforce learned that, however he may stray, he cannot escape escape the duty which bids us do right and maintain our rights. General as these ▾ phrases must seem, common at first glance to the serious moments of all men everywhere, they have, for us of English-speaking race, a meaning peculiarly our own. Though Englishmen have prated enough and to spare, and though Americans have declaimed about human rights more nebulously still, the rights for which Englishmen and Americans alike have been eager to fight and to die are no prismatic fancies gleaming through clouds of conflicting logic and metaphor; they are that living body of customs and duties

and privileges, which a process very like physical growth has made the vital condition of our national existence. Through immemorial experience, the rights which we most jealously cherish have proved themselves safely favourable at once to prosperity and to righteousness.

Threatened throughout history, both from without and from within, these rights can be preserved by nothing short of eternal vigilance. In this we have been faithful, until our deepest ideal of public duty, which marks Englishmen and Americans apart from others, and side by side, has long

defined itself. The vitally growing rights bequeathed us by our fathers, we must protect, not only from invasion or aggression attempted by other races than ours, but also from the internal ravages both of reaction and of revolution. In loyalty to this conception of duty, the nobler minds of England and of America have always been at one.

Yet to careless eyes the two countries have long seemed parted by a chasm wider even than the turbulent and foggy Atlantic. Wide it has surely been, but never so vague as to interpose between them the shoreless gulf of sundered principle. The differences which have kept England and America so long distinct have arisen from no more fatal ✓ cause than unwitting and temporary conflicts of their common law. The origin of both countries, as we know them to-day, was the England of Queen Elizabeth, with all its spontaneity, all its enthusiasm, all its untired versatility. From this origin England has sped faster and further than America. Throughout two full centuries, then, America and England have faithfully, honestly quarrelled as to just what rights and liberties were truly sanctioned by the law which has remained common to both.

How their native tempers began to diverge we have already seen. During the seventeenth century, England proceeded from its spontaneous, enthusiastic Elizabethan versatility, through the convulsions of the Civil Wars, to

Cromwell's Commonwealth; and from the Commonwealth, through the baseness of the Restoration and the renewing health of the Glorious Revolution, to that state of parliamentary government which, in vitally altering form, still persists. English literature meanwhile proceeded from the age of Shakspere, through the age of Milton, to the age of Dryden. During this same seventeenth century, the century of American immigration, the course of American history was interrupted by no such convulsion as the wars and tumults which destroyed Elizabethan England. American character, then, which from the beginning possessed its still persistent power of absorbing immigration, preserved much of the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the versatility transported hither from the mother country when Virginia and New England were founded. So far as literature went, meantime, seventeenth-century America expressed itself only in occasional historical records, and in a deluge of Calvinistic theology. Though long since abated, these first outpourings of New England have left indelible traces. Partly to them, and still more to the devout source from which they welled, is due the instinctive devotion of America to such ideals of absolute right and truth as were inherent、 in the passionate idealism of the Puritans.

It was here that America most distinctly parted from the mother country. In England, the Puritan Commonwealth, with its nobly futile aspiration toward absolute right, so entwined itself about the life of Cromwell that when he died. it fell. In America a similar commonwealth, already deeply rooted when Cromwell was still a sturdy country gentleman of St. Ives, flourished fruitful long after his relics had been cast out of Westminster Abbey. Generation by generation, the immemorial custom of America, wherein America has steadily discerned the features of its ancestral rights and liberties, grew insensibly to sanction more abstract ideals than ever long persisted in England.

Whoever will thus interpret the seventeenth century need be at little pains to understand the century which followed. The political events of this eighteenth century - the century of American independence forced England into prolonged international isolation; and this, combined with reactionary desire for domestic order, bred in British character that insular conservatism still typified by the portly, repellent integrity of John Bull. English literature meanwhile proceeded from the Addisonian urbanity of Queen Anne's time, through the ponderous Johnsonian formality which satisfied the subjects of George II., to the masterly publicism of Burke and the contagious popularity of Burns.

Eighteenth-century America was politically free from the conditions which so highly developed the peculiar eccentricities of England. There is no wonder, then, that American character still retained the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the versatility of the elder days when it had shared these traits with the English. Nor is there any wonder that Americans went on traditionally cherishing the fervent idealism of the immigrant Puritans, wherein for a while the ancestral English ideals. of right and of rights had fused. Unwittingly lingering in its pristine state, the native character of America became less and less like the character which historical forces were irresistibly moulding in the mother country. The traditional law of America- the immemorial rights, the customs and the liberties, of a newly conscious people eagerly responsive to the allurements of absolute truth-seemed on its surface less and less like the more dogged and rigid system which was becoming the traditional law of England. When disputes arose, the spirit of old Babel was reawakened. Despite their common language, neither of the kindred peoples, separated not only by the wastes of the ocean but also by the forgotten lapse of five generations, could rightly understand the other. Dispute waxed fruitlessly high. The inevitable result was the American Revolution.