But I do not think it can be
said to have found full expression. It seems to me--I may well be
wrong--that in matters of culture, the American is far more
seriously bent on knowing what has been done in the past even than
the Englishman. The Englishman takes the past for granted; he is
probably more deeply and instinctively penetrated with its
traditions than he knows; but ever since the Romantic movement
began in England, about a century ago, the general tendency is
anarchical and anti-classical. Writers like Wordsworth, Browning,
Carlyle, Ruskin, had very little deference about them. They did not
even trouble to assert their independence; they said what they
thought, and as they thought it. But the spirit of American
literature does not on the whole appear to me to be a democratic
spirit. It has not, except in the case of Walt Whitman himself,
shown any strong tendency to invent new forms or to ventilate new
ideas. It has not broken out into crude, fresh, immature
experiments. It has rather worked as the Romans did, who anxiously
adopted and imitated Greek models, admiring the form but not
comprehending the spirit. A revolt in literary art, such as the
Romantic movement in England, has no time to concern itself with
the old forms and traditions. Writers like Wordsworth, Keats,
Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, had far too much to say for
themselves to care how the old classical schools had worked.
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