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Updated: June 4, 2025
If literature is feeble to arrest degeneracy when it is lofty, inasmuch as it reaches only the cultivated few, how inadequate it is when it is itself corrupted!
The unrelenting warfare which the ghost of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later, against the Caesarian monarchy a warfare of plots and of literature was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies.
Certainly many of them must be entirely passed over, or more important things will never be reached. In their literature and in their reference books many little difficulties are met with that must likewise be overlooked.
He therefore, much as he studied his favorite art, yet occupied more time in literature, philosophy, and politics, than in the composition of his speeches. His preparation was less particular than general. So it has been with other eminent speakers.
But then I have remembered that this is only as it were the preface, or forerunner, of a body of literature, which the events and wants of our times will call forth. We have come to the brink of a great intellectual change.
It was an aspiring generation that produced Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, and the rest, and if one considers the character of American culture, its lack of unity, and the still youthful nature of its people, it is easy to understand the pride in its budding art and maturer literature, the sensitiveness to foreign criticism, the provincialism which demands attention and a "place in the sun."
'Why don't you try journalism, Le Breton? he said to Ernest one night, as they sat discussing possibilities for the future in the little parlour together. 'Literature in some form or other's clearly the best thing for a man like you to turn his hand to. It demands less compliance with conventional rules than any other profession.
But the New England literature of the great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs of those who had brought the learning of the universities to Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage as the English of the mother-country.
And although no progress will take the conceit out of men, there may appear a Man so amenable to ordinary reason that he will give up the notion that he can lift himself up by his bootstraps, or make one grain of wheat two by calling it two. One of the Biminis that have always been looked for is an American Literature.
He was all for literature, and for literary men as the superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal, for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man like sitting in judgment on a man like you!"
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