There are discoveries everywhere for
those who can make them. Nature, indeed, is vivid in a surprising
number of American brain cells, marking them with a deep and endurable
impress. And our flood of nature books has served to
increase her power.
It was never so with the European traditions that we brought to
America with us. That is why no one reads early American books.
They are pallid, ill-nourished, because their traditions are
pallid. They drew upon the least active portion of the American
sub-consciousness, and reflect memories not of experience,
contact, live thought, but of books. Even Washington Irving, our
first great author, is not free from this indictment. If,
responding to some obscure drift of his race towards humor and the
short story, he had not ripened his Augustan inheritance upon an
American hillside, he, too, would by now seem juiceless, withered,
like a thousand cuttings from English stock planted in forgotten
pages of his period. It was not until the end of our colonial age
and the rise of democracy towards Jackson's day, that the rupture
with our English background became sufficiently complete to make
us fortify pale memories of home by a search for fresher, more
vigorous tradition.
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