on our Americanisms, and we take a certain malicious but pardonable delight in the pointing out of Briticisms. The fact with regard to this fundamental question, it need hardly be said, is that literary English in the United States does not differ, except infinitesimally, from that in Great Britain. Vulgar English in the United States, of course, differs in many minor points from colloquial and literary English, though, as our country is younger, as education is more generally diffused, and as the circulation so to speak — of population from district to district is vastly greater, these minor points of difference are considerably less marked than the corresponding points of difference in Great Britain. Our colloquial English, by which I mean the current speech of intelligent and educated people, differs only slightly from that of Great Britain. These instances of divergence are due, sometimes, to survivals of words or idioms that have now passed out of the British vocabulary, sometimes to changes that have occurred in Great Britain within the last century or two, and sometimes to similar changes in the United States,- changes which the diverse elements in our population and the rapidly shifting experiences of our people have made peculiarly fitting. But, as has been said, all this touches the literary language only in an infinitesimal degree. In the works of the authors from which extracts appear in this volume it is as hard to discover any real divergence in point of idiom from the English of colonial days as it is to discover a divergence from the idioms employed in the works of modern British writers. Whatever difference is felt between the use of the common tongue in American and in British literature is rarely a difference of idiom, and can usually be traced to a characteristic habit of American speech and writing, which lies at the basis both of the ubiquitous and picturesque American slang, and of a corresponding quality in style, a tendency that is, to treat words as mere instruments, diverting them, if occasion requires, to unaccustomed but valid uses, playing easily, as it were, with the ordinary forms of speech, as if we were so sure of the end to be attained that we could afford to reach it by an unconventional path.

As regards style, it would be unwise to add to the excellent descriptions of the various periods of the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries given in Mr. Craik's Eng

ture.

lish Prose, to which this volume is a necessary complement. The same general development, due to the same general social causes, have taken place during these periods in both branches of English literature, as well as in French and German literaThe line of development of American literature, of course, is much closer to that of British literature than to that of German or French, partly because of the great similarity of social development, and partly because it was in England that we long found our readiest literary models. The succession of schools, however, has not been precisely the same in both countries. It has been often remarked that European literary movements have been felt here only a generation later than in the lands of their origin. It would be truer to say that in the United States literature and style have been much less affected by the romantic movement than in England. Indeed, with very few exceptions, our literature is purely pre-romantic, purely eighteenth century in its simplicity and dignity, in its appeal to the judgment, in the degree to which it is directed to the intelligence and sympathy of the mass of the people, and in the extent to which it is written for their behoof, or comfort, or amusement. This is partly because the social centres in the United States were until recently compact, neighborly little places, very much like the London of Queen Anne's day. It is also because the conditions of political and social life long tended to keep the citizen's mind peculiarly alert, as in the little eighteenth-century London, to matters of common interest and welfare.

This strong tendency to what may be called citizen's literature has told somewhat against the more æsthetic qualities of style. We have had few "stylists," men who stake all on the turn of a phrase, on the mere appeal of words to the ear. Poe's effort, it is true, lay sometimes in this direction, but, as a rule, he impresses us, in his prose, far more by the substance than by the form of his composition, and it is hard to find, certainly among the authors represented in this volume, any one besides Hawthorne who paid deliberate attention to the æsthetic elaboration of his style, and even in him the trait was free from the morbidity which it tends to assume in later European prose. The characteristic American style is the plain diction of Emerson, Thoreau, and Lincoln, –

plain, but not without its noble dignity and reserve. It is only in political writing, when the citizen feels that national issues hang in the balance, and when he enunciates the principles on which his ideal of freedom rests, that, like Jefferson and Webster, he allows himself the sonority and exaltation of style that are then, and then only, appropriate.

In prose literature, fortunately, substance is more than style, and American literature, so weak in its appeal to the reader on the lookout for "word effects" alone, is strong in the substance it presents to the healthy mind, and in the broader characteristics of that presentation. These broader characteristics in American prose literature are, to my mind, resoluteness, nobility, simplicity, and humor. From first to last, from Cotton Mather to Parkman, there has been a marked tone of resoluteness in our literature, as if each writer had said, "This that I utter is the truth as I see it, and I am determined that it shall reach the ears of my fellows, and prevail with them." The attitude is also one full of nobility and simplicity, as of men who felt the importance of the message they bore, and the need of casting aside all mere trickery and casuistry in addressing their great and varied audience. The note of humor, too, is apparent, from Franklin on. It is the old mood of Steele and Swift and Defoe, and of the England that laughed with them and were swayed by them, a mood rather serious than merry, striving to recover a manly balance of thought and action by contemplating the typical absurdities of foolishness and prejudice.

The wholesome value of such qualities as these has been somewhat obscured by recent literary criticism, born of a romantic philosophy, which has laid stress on the minor niceties and subtleties of style. Even our own taste has been long beguiled by the delicate and unfamiliar beauty of foreign tongues, and by the more imposing mass of foreign literatures, which it has been the fashion to study so much more ardently than our own. But we are turning, again, as if impelled by a deep instinct, to our native land. We are learning to prize its history, its traditions, its civilization, its scenery, its life, its education, its language, its literature. Ours is the lesser branch of a great literature, but it has its own virtues, particularly in those prose forms which are most fitting to the national genius, and they are worthy of honor and praise.

G. R. CARPENTER

T

COTTON MATHER

[Cotton Mather was born in Boston, Feb. 12, 1663. The son of Increase Mather, minister of the Second Church of Boston, the grandson of John Cotton, minister of the First Church of Boston, and of Richard Mather, minister of Dorchester, he inherited with his blood the most ardent traditions of the pristine theocracy of New England. Graduated at Harvard in 1678, he became two years later assistant to his father at the Second Church in Boston. Here he preached all his life; he never travelled a hundred miles from his birthplace. He died on the day after his sixty-fifth birthday, Feb. 13, 1728.]

THROUGHOUT his life, a life of rare restlessness and activity, Cotton Mather was utterly devoted to the principles which, in the times of his father and of his grandparents, had prevailed in New England. Until his active life was well begun, indeed, these old principles still seemed dominant. Church and state, the fathers held, should alike be subject to the rule of the Puritan clergy. So Cotton Mather fervently believed all his life; but, before his life was half done, New England had ceased to believe it. More and more impotent, more and more misunderstood, more and more hated, he waged a losing fight, to end only with his days, against that spirit of liberalism which from his time to ours has been the chief trait of his native region. From his time to ours, then, tradition has called him bigoted, foolish, wicked, at best grotesque. Reformers are relentless haters, even of the dead. In sober fact, as one studies him now, Cotton Mather reveals himself, for all his peculiarity, as the most completely typical of Boston Puritans. Almost the last of that stern race, and hardly ever absent from the capital town which they had founded and pervaded, he had all their isolation, all their prejudices, all their errors; but he had, too, all their devout sincerity, all their fervor, all their mystic enthusiasm.

In the course of his life, he wrote and published more separate books than have yet come from the pen of any other American; they number between four and five hundred. Many of these

were mere sermons or tracts; but at least one was a considerable folio. This, the most notable and best known of his writings, is the Church History of New England entitled Magnalia Christi Americana. According to his diary, he conceived the idea of writing it in 1693; it was published in 1702. Whoever knows the history of New England will recognize these dates as intervening between that tragedy of Salem witchcraft which broke the political power of the clergy, and the final conquest of Harvard College, the ancestral seminary of Puritan doctrine, by the liberal party which has dominated Harvard ever since. This historical circumstance throws on the Magnalia a light which has been too little remarked.

The book is commonly criticised as if it were a history written in the modern scientific spirit. Really it was a fervent controversial effort to uphold the ideals and the traditions of the Puritan fathers, in such manner as should revive their failing spirit among those whom Cotton Mather thought their degenerate descendants. In its whole conception it is such a history not as that of Thucydides, but as Plutarch's. It has been aptly described as the prose epic of New England Puritanism. In an epic spirit it tells the facts of New England history; it recounts the lives of the early governors and ministers; it describes the founding of Harvard College; it sets forth the doctrine and the discipline of the New England churches; and it details the attacks of the devil on these strongholds of the Lord, particularly in the forms of witchcraft and of Indian warfare. Throughout it is animated by a fervent desire to present all its material in an ideal aspect; its purpose is not so much to tell the truth and shame the devil as to shame him by pointing out what truth ought to be. As a record of fact, then, the Magnalia is untrustworthy; as a record, on the other hand, of Puritan ideals it is priceless. Whoever grows thus sympathetically to know it, grows more and more to feel it a good book and a brave one.

To be sure, even those who like the Magnalia best find it quaint. In 1702, when it was published, John Dryden was already dead; and the literary style now recognized as characteristic of eighteenth century England was fairly established. Cotton Mather meanwhile, in that Boston which one of his German contemporaries mentioned in correspondence as 66 a remote West Indian wil