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war, with green sprigs in their hats, twirling their rifles in the air, and singing as they marched, did we not, while admiring, still feel a little shamefaced for them, as if they were guilty of some indecorum? which, nevertheless, after the assuming habit of our race, we graciously forgave them, because they were foreigners, and so did not know how to behave themselves "respectably."

It is beyond denial that there is no really English music, indigenous, "native and to the manner born," either in England or America. Of airs properly national, it should be remembered, the composers are not known. They are found existing among the people, who are ignorant of their origin. They are, to borrow a German phrase, folk-music.

This barrenness of popular melody is a reproach to us among the nations; and instead of admitting it candidly, we painfully go about to remove or evade it. On the other side of the water musical antiqua'ries gather together such faded and forlorn fag-ends of melody as they can find songs tacked to, and thus succeed only in establishing by auricular demonstration that we have been utterly unable to produce a popular air worth listening to.* Or they magnify the "solid and manly" style of Fairfax, Taverner, Shepherd, Bird, and all the other worthies so lauded and

* See, for instance, Chappell's "Collection of National English Airs," London, 1838; a work very creditable to the research of its author, but in which there is hardly an air more than a hundred and fifty years old, the frequent repetition of which would not make any real lover of music, except a Briton brimfull of prejudice, insane.

glorified by Master Thomas Morley in the dreary dialogues of "Practicall Musicke" which he holds with Polymathes and Philomathes, and which Humfrey Lownes imprinted for him at London in 1608. Or they sanctify themselves in the ecclesiastical style of Tallis and Boyce, Locke and Blow, on hearing or reading whose "learned" compositions, we wonder whether they were written by single or double entry, or were worked out upon the binomial theorem.*

In this country some of us being asked for our national melodies, reply, it seems, by referring our querists to the negro melodies! They might as well fasten upon us the songs of the Chinese coolies in California, or the war-whoops of the Cherokee Indians, as our national melodies. These are no more to us as a people, or even as a nation, because they are

* Henry Purcell, it is true, had some semblance of musical inspiration. But even he wrote not a single air which is remembered and sung out of England. The prophets of English music, unlike all others, have their honor in their own country. It may be worth while to add here, that an English critic has remarked that "in all single songs [i.e. airs] till those of Purcell appeared, the principal effects were produced from the words, not the melody; for the English airs antecedent to Purcell's time [he composed 1682-1695] were as misshapen as if they had been composed of notes scattered about by chance, instead of being cast in a regular mould." The same writer adds, "had his short life been protracted, we might, perhaps, have had a school of secular music of our own which we cannot to this day boast of." And since that day, with the exception of a clever composition or two by Dr. Arne and Sir Henry Bishop, we have been wise enough to let the Italians, Germans, and French write music for us.

+ "When a foreigner asks and inquires about national melodies, he is unanimously (?) directed to hear the so-called negro melodies."— Gurowski's America and Europe, p. 179.

heard in this country, than the songs of the birds or the howling of the wolves. We have no national melodies; nor has there been either occasion or mode by which we should obtain them. It seems also pretty sure that we shall never have them. For national melodies are the nursery songs of a people, heard in the dimly recollected days of its infancy, lingering in its maturer memory, and cherished there even more for the sake of dear associations than for their inherent power of pleasing. But this nation was born of full age.

So people demand of us a national literature. But there shall no national literature be given them. What semblance of reason have they for asking it? We have not existed long enough as a nation to produce a distinctive literature. And, in any case, what have political forms, where the essence of liberty is preserved, to do with literature? Something, but very little; and that regarding the mere husk of it. As a people, we have a grand literature, stretching as it does for five hundred years and more, through Milton and Shakspeare, back to Chaucer and Wicliffe; and occupied, as we must needs be, chiefly with the material interests of life, our share of contributions to that literature, in the last fifty years, is one, of which, neither as to its quality nor its quantity, need we be ashamed. Irving, Dana, Bryant, Prescott, Webster, Everett, Longfellow, Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Motley, not to mention others, write good English words, and think good English thoughts. They are, with a single exception,

quite as highly appreciated, and perhaps as much read in the mother country as here; while Scott and Bulwer, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Macaulay and Grote, Lamb, Dickens, and Thackeray, have ten readers here, and Shakspeare twenty, for one across the water. De Quincey and Carlyle met their recognition in America; and, on the other hand, Longfellow attained his present eminence first in England.

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Strangely enough, as some people call negro songs American national music, others meet the demand for a national literature, by referring the inquirer to our "Indian legends-the traditions of a savage people which is vanishing away before our race, with which it has not even a single point of affinity or of contact! I have even seen Mr. Longfellow's "Hiawatha" welcomed by a foreign critic as something "at last truly American." And does subject determine nationality? Alas, then, for the English claim to thirteen of Shakespeare's fourteen comedies, and to eleven of his twelve tragedies! These people who call for a distinctive American literature, should be very careful that their children are not born in stables, lest they should turn out to be horses or something else.

As to the arts of design, in landscape paintingthe special development of that art in this age-we have already attained peculiar excellence. But this is the result of local physical causes which do not operate upon music and literature.

English literature is the literature both of the Anglo-Britons and the Anglo-Americans. Its wealth.

is common to them as a people; and even as nations neither can set up a separate claim that is a century old. The time may come, two or three hundred years hence, when there will be a distinctive American literature, though not founded upon Indian legends. But even this is doubtful; for in all that might be relied upon to produce a distinctive charac ter in our thought, or even in our language, England is overtaking us faster than we are getting away from her.*

*It is needful to remark here upon what is meant by the words uation' and 'people' respectively. Within a comparatively short period, necessity, which rules nowhere more despotically than in language, has perverted the former to a sense almost the converse of that which etymologically belongs to it, which implies a mere community of birth and blood, and by natural consequence, identity of language and customs. To these notions of the elements of nationality there came to be added, quite as naturally, those of existence in the same country and under the same government. Thus Sir William Temple says: "A nation properly signifies a great number of families derived from the same blood, born in the same country, and living under the same government." Crabbe, however, the author of "English Synonymes," excludes entirely the elements of country and government from nationality. He says (in not very clear language): "The Americans, when spoken of in relation to Britain, are a distinct people, because they have each a distinct government; but they are not a distinct nation, because they have a common descent." And William Taylor, of Norwich, a far better scholar and closer thinker than Crabbe, in his English Synonymes, thus discriminates between nation and people. "Nation makes the connexion of birth, and people that of common subordination. * * * A nation is a great family; a people, a great corporation. We do not yet [A. D. 1856] oppose the American nation to the British nation, because the ties of kindred, the marks of common birth and descent, are not yet withdrawn; but we oppose the American people to the British people, because the ties

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