But the force and the novelty are not in the new writers;the force and the novelty are in the ancient heart of the English.
Anybody who studies them impartially will know that the first-rate writers of the colonies are not even particularly novel in their note and atmosphere, are not only not producing a new kind of good literature, but are not even in any particular sense producing a new kind of bad literature. The first-rate writers of the new countries are really almost exactly like the second-rate writers of the old countries. Of course they do feel the mystery of the wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for all simple and honest men feel this in Melbourne, or Margate, or South St. Pancras.
But when they write most sincerely and most successfully, it is not with a background of the mystery of the bush, but with a background, expressed or assumed, of our own romantic cockney civilization.
What really moves their souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of the wilderness, but the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
Of course there are some exceptions to this generalization.
The one really arresting exception is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as certainly an exception that proves the rule.
Olive Schreiner is a fierce, brilliant, and realistic novelist;but she is all this precisely because she is not English at all.
Her tribal kinship is with the country of Teniers and Maarten Maartens--that is, with a country of realists. Her literary kinship is with the pessimistic fiction of the continent; with the novelists whose very pity is cruel. Olive Schreiner is the one English colonial who is not conventional, for the simple reason that South Africa is the one English colony which is not English, and probably never will be.
And, of course, there are individual exceptions in a minor way.
I remember in particular some Australian tales by Mr. McIlwain which were really able and effective, and which, for that reason, I suppose, are not presented to the public with blasts of a trumpet.
But my general contention if put before any one with a love of letters, will not be disputed if it is understood. It is not the truth that the colonial civilization as a whole is giving us, or shows any signs of giving us, a literature which will startle and renovate our own. It may be a very good thing for us to have an affectionate illusion in the matter; that is quite another affair.
The colonies may have given England a new emotion; I only say that they have not given the world a new book.
Touching these English colonies, I do not wish to be misunderstood.
I do not say of them or of America that they have not a future, or that they will not be great nations. I merely deny the whole established modern expression about them. I deny that they are "destined"to a future. I deny that they are "destined" to be great nations.
I deny (of course) that any human thing is destined to be anything.
All the absurd physical metaphors, such as youth and age, living and dying, are, when applied to nations, but pseudo-scientific attempts to conceal from men the awful liberty of their lonely souls.
In the case of America, indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and essential. America, of course, like every other human thing, can in spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses.
