Litera ture. Victorian respond with the Regency and the reign of William IV. The literature which has ensued will probably be known to the future as Victorian; and it is still too near us for any confident generalization. But although there has been admirable Victorian poetry, of which the most eminent makers are now thought to have been Tennyson and the Brownings; and although serious Victorian prose, of which perhaps the most eminent makers were Ruskin and Carlyle, has seemed of paramount interest, posterity will probably find the most characteristic feature of Victorian literature to have been fiction. It is almost literally to the reign of Queen Victoria that we owe the whole work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and the numberless lesser novelists and story-tellers whose books have been the chief reading of the English-speaking world, down to the days of Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Broadly speaking, we may accordingly say that up to the time of the Reform Bill the English literature of the nineteenth century expressed itself first in that body of aspiring poetry which seems the most memorable English utterance since Elizabethan times, and secondly in those novels of Sir Walter Scott, which, dealing romantically with the past, indicate the accomplishment of a world revolution; and that since the Reform Bill decidedly the most popular phase of English literature has been prose fiction dealing with contemporary life. Slight as this sketch of English literature in the nineteenth century has been, it is sufficient for our purpose, which is only to remind ourselves of what occurred in England during the century when something which we may fairly call literature developed in America. III AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 1800 TO 1900 REFERENCES GENERAL AUTHORITIES: Excellent short accounts are Channing, Student's History, 317-end; Hart, Formation of the Union, 176-end; Wilson, Division and Reunion. SPECIAL WORKS: The authorities mentioned in the brief bibliographies at the beginnings of chapters in the books mentioned above, and, for minute study, the works referred to in the larger bibliography mentioned below. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 167-214. AMID the constant growth of democracy, amid practical assertion of the power which resides in the uneducated classes, and which our Constitution made conscious, our national life began with bewildering confusion. To the better classes, embodied in the old Federalist party, this seemed anarchical; the election of Jefferson (1800) they honestly believed to portend the final overthrow of law and order. Instead of that, one can see now, it really started our persistent progress. Among the early incidents of this progress was the purchase of Louisiana, which finally established the fact that the United States were to dominate the North American continent. So complete, indeed, has our occupation of this continent become that it is hard to remember how in 1800 the United States, at least so far as they were settled, were almost comprised between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. In less than Expanone hundred years we have colonized, and to a considerable sion. The degree civilized, the vast territory now under our undisputed control. Our expansion began with the purchase of Louisiana. Nine years later, under President Madison, came that second war with England which, while unimportant in English history, was very important in ours. The War of 1812 asserted our independent nationality, our ability to maintain ourselves against a foreign enemy, and, above all, our fighting power on the sea. The War of 1812, besides, did much to revive and strengthen the Revolutionary conviction that England must always be our natural enemy. Before that war broke out there were times when conflict seemed almost as likely to arise with France. It was an incident, we can now see, of that death-grapple wherein England was maintaining against Napoleonic Europe those traditions of Common Law which we share with her. America had felt the arbitrary insolence of Napoleon, as well as that of England; neutrality proved impossible. We chanced to take arms once more against the mother country. Thereby, whatever we gained,—and surely our strengthened national integrity is no small blessing, we certainly emphasized and prolonged our Revolutionary misunderstanding. The next critical fact in our history was the assertion in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine. In brief, this declares that the chief political power in America is the United States; and that any attempt on the part of a foreign power to establish colonies in America, or to interfere with the governments already established there, will be regarded by the United States as an unfriendly act. This declaration has generally been respected. Except for the transitory empire of Maximilian in Mexico, the integrity of the American continent has been respected since President Monroe's famous message. War. During the next thirty-five years developed that inevi- The Civil table national disunion which culminated in the Civil War of 1861. The economic and social systems of North and of South were radically different: generation by generation they naturally bred men less and less able to understand each other. The Southerners of the fifties were far more like their revolutionary ancestors than were the Northerners. General Washington and General Lee, for example, have many more points of resemblance than have President Washington and President Lincoln; and Lee was really as typically Southern in his time as Lincoln in those same days was typically Northern. The Civil War involved deep moral questions, concerning the institution of slavery and national union; but on those moral questions North and South honestly differed. What ultimately makes the War so heroic a tradition is the fact that on both sides men ardently gave their lives for what they believed to be the truth. The conflict was truly irrepressible; the two sections of our country had developed in ways so divergent that nothing but force could prevent disunion. Disunion did not ensue. Instead of it, after a troubled interval, has come a union constantly stronger. Our history since the Civil War is too recent for confident generalization. Two or three of its features, however, are growing salient. Long before the Civil War certain phases of material prosperity had begun to develop in this country, the great cotton-growing of the South, for one thing, and for another, the manufactures of New England. Since the Civil War some similar economic facts have produced Develop ment of marked changes in our national equilibrium. One has been the opening of the great lines of transcontinental railway. Along with these has developed the enormous growth of bread-stuffs throughout the West, together with incalculable increase of our mineral wealth. These causes have effected the complete settlement of our national Reunion; territory. At the close of the Civil War a great part of the country between the Mississippi and California the West. remained virtually unappropriated. At present almost every available acre of it is in private ownership. Our continent is finally settled. Such freedom as our more adventurous spirits used to find in going West they must now find, if at all, in emigrating, like our English cousins, to regions not politically under our control. There they must face a serious question. Shall they submit themselves in these foreign places where their active lives must pass, to legal and political systems foreign to their own; or shall they assert in those regions the legal and political principles which the fact of their ancestral language makes them believe more admirable? So for the first time since the settlement of Virginia and New England we come to a point where the history of England and that of America assume similar aspects. For nearly three centuries the national experience of England and the national inexperience of America have tended steadily to diverge. Now the growing similarity of the problems which confront both countries suggests that in years to come we may understand each other better. |
