Our task is to
make a bourgeois democracy fruitful. We must work with what we have.
Much has been said of the advantage for us, and perhaps for the
world, which has come from the separation of the American colonies
from Great Britain. Two systems of closely related political
thinking, two national characters, have developed and been
successful instead of one. Your ancestors opened the door of
departure for mine, somewhat brusquely it is true, but with the
same result, if not the same reason, as with the boys they sent
away to school--they made men of us.
So it is with literature. American literature will never, as some
critics would persuade us, be a child without a parent. In its
fundamental character it is, and will remain, British, because at
bottom the American character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed
upon customs and ideals that have the same origin and a
parallel development with yours. But this literature, like our
political institutions, will not duplicate; like the seedling, it
will make another tree and not another branch. In literature we
are still pioneers. I think that it may be reserved for us to
discover a literature for the new democracy of English-speaking
peoples that is coming--a literature for the common people who do
not wish to stay common.
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