INFLUENCES OF CLIMATE. 19 national character as developed in the Northern States, and we must seek for explanation of its peculiarities in the physical circumstances that environ and the moral conditions that pervade thein. When we remember that the Romans lived under the sky of Italy, that the character of the modern Swiss is like that of the modern Dutch, we shall be on our guard against attributing too much to the influences of external Nature. Another race than the Anglo-Saxon would doubtless have made another America, but we cannot avoid the belief that the climate and soil of America have had something to do in moulding the Anglo-Saxon race, in making its features approximate to those of the Red Indian, and stamping it with a new character. An electric atmosphere, and a temperature ranging at some seasons from 50° to 100° in twenty-four hours, have contributed largely to engender that restlessness which is so conspicuous a trait of the people. A territory which seems boundless as the ocean has been a material agent in fostering an ambition unbridled by traditionary restraints. When European poets and essayists write of Nature, it is to contrast her permanence with the mutability of human life. We talk of the everlasting hills, the perennial fountains, the ever-recurring seasons. "Damna tamen celeres reparant cœlestia lunæ-nos ubi decidimus," as Sir Walter Raleigh translates it, "Our leaf once fallen springeth no more." In the same spirit Byron contemplates the sea, and Tennyson a running stream. In America, on the other hand, it is the extent of Nature that is ever present to the mind-the infinity of space rather than the infinity of time is opposed to the restricted, rather than to the transient, existence of man. Nothing strikes a traveller in that country so much as this feature of magnitude. The rivers, lakes, forests, plains, and valleys-Niagara itself, with its world of watersowe their magnificence to their size; and, by a transference not unnatural, although fallacious, the Americans generally have modelled their ideas of art after the same standard. Their wars, their hotels, their language, are pitched on the huge scale of their distances. Compared with Europeans, they have gained in surface what they have lost in age. "That untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when they move," is all their own, and they have the hopes of a continent to set against the memories of a thousand years. Where Englishmen recall, Americans anticipate. In thought and action they are constantly rushing into empty spaces. New York "Central Park," and the largest streets, in the plan of Washington, are on the outer verges of these cities. Emigration is the normal condition of a great part of the inhabitants. When the backwoodsman's fields in Iowa begin to look less wild, he crosses the Missouri. We have heard of a North Virginian farmer complaining that he had neighbours within fifty miles, and preparing to move away from the encroach ment. "I'm crowded just to think that folks are nigh, The domestic attachments of the people are intense : they generally spoil their children; but it is rare, save in country farms, to find a family mansion rooted to the same town or district. "Jonathan," says Mr. Lowell, ❝is one drop of a fluid mass who knows where his home is to-day, but can make no guess of where it may be to-morrow." The tie which unites one generation with another is easily broken, and this want of continuity in life breeds a want of continuity in ideas. The American mind, in which fitfulness and pertinacity are strangely mixed, delights in speculative and practical, social and political experiments, as Shakerism, Mormonism, Pantagamy; and the very tenacity with which the majority of Americans cling to their written constitution is due, in part, to the acknowledged want of other anchorages. Within this fence everything is allowed: European idealism and materialism are, each in turn, exaggerated by writers, who—from Emerson to Walt Whitman-have tried to glorify every mode of human life, from the ascetic to the semi-brutish. The habit of instability is fostered by the rapid vicissitudes of commerce and the melting of one class into another, by which all landmarks but that of a temporary public opinion are drifted away. The great fault of the people is impatience: they will not stop to verify and study details, and satisfy themselves with generalisations, which are superficially conclusive rather than "suggestive or rich." The mass of them have never learnt that "raw haste" is "half-sister to delay;" that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well; that "work done least rapidly art most cherishes." Our agriculturists tell us that the Americans traverse their best land like locusts, leaving heaps of stones behind them. Solid Scotch engineers inform us that a shaft which takes six weeks to turn on the banks of the Clyde is thrown out from the yards of New York in a fortnight; that the boats on the Mississippi are built of papiermache, and the summer-houses of veneer. This is not quite so; but there is a grain of truth in the satire. A Hudson or Mississippi steamer is stocked with luxuries unknown on the Thames, the Clyde, or the Mersey: a line of rails, sometimes of painted wood, is laid over 1500 miles with marvellous speed; but insurance companies demur to take the lives of the passengers. The makeshifts which were at first a necessity with the northern settlers have grown into a custom they adopt ten half-measures instead of one whole. one, and, beginning with a bravery like that of the opening bars of "Lohengrin" or the preambles to their codes, they end sometimes in the sublime, sometimes in the ridiculous. The changes constantly passing over those codes are a series of indices of the direction in which American Republicanism is proceeding and the rate at which it moves. Of the thirteen original States of 1787 only two have preserved the form of their original constitutions; and ten date from 1830; that of New York from 1846 and it has been remarked that some of their modifications "have already stamped with legality principles subversive of all previous opinions on the conduct of Government." Of these the election by popular assemblies of judges, for a fixed term of years, without a retiring allowance at their close, has been of very questionable advantage. The official patronage reposed in the hands of the President, investing him with the wholesale dismissal and appointment of every subordinate functionary of State, be he Consul, Comptroller of Customs, or village Postmaster, has proved itself an unquestionable evil.1 The same haste and habit of swift transition has a noxious effect on a literature where the shallow omniscience and superficial wit, now threatening to demoralise our own, is intensified in parody. To weigh the merits of any great question or man requires thought and leisure, to pour ridicule or laudation on either is easy; consequently American, even more than English judgments, lean to the one or the other extreme. The satirists of the West are apt to play the part of clowns— the disciples of idolators. Nothing in history or romance is safe from Mark Twain; no seclusion of quiet life from the carnival of oratory held over the coffins of the poets. In England, democratised as it is, a week elapses before our magazines teem with "the personal recollections" of the lionhunters who have been once graced with a scowl from Carlyle or a smile from Longfellow. Reviewing, with few exceptions, in both hemispheres is a pretext for the obtrusion of the critic's own crochets or person; but "interviewing" is a 1 See Chapter IV. Transatlantic invention for intruding on the great man's privacy and, then, misreporting him. To similar causes is due the plethora of books of American travel, to which we shall readvert, and their attempts to commemorate what their authors have hardly allowed themselves time to see. None can write really well of a city or of a mountain without having allowed its influences to saturate slowly into his soul. But the newspaper correspondent must have its secret by photograph, in a trice, and register it by telegraph. Some of the artistic, as well as many of the social, peculiarities of the United States may doubtless be traced to their form of government. After the obvious wants of life are provided for, democracy stimulates the production of books. An intellectual world, where the utility if not the beauty of knowledge is universally recognised, rises on the ruins of rank. There is a race in which the prize is to the swift, and every one tries to draw the eyes of others by innumerable imperfect efforts. Multa non multum. Art is abundant and inferior: whitewashed wood and brick pass for marble, puerile buffoonery for humour, and rhythmical spasms for poetry. Antiquity presents only apparent exceptions to this rule. Athens ultimately attained the utmost democracy, consistent with the institution of slavery; but her citizens had previously inherited, from a past so vague that they claimed to have originally sprung from their narrow soil, a set of prescriptions in pre-established harmony with the Hellenic mind. The ideas of limit and order were paramount on their stage they never knew when they had done enough, but they always knew when they had said enough. Their most agitated assemblies were still critical; and no orator ventured to address them in the style of a Western member of Congress. Formality is the prevailing defect of aristocratic literatures: they are apt to be precise and restricted. A democratic literature runs the risk of lawlessness, inaccu |