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. But at the present
moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not
how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to
its end. It is only a verbal question whether the American
civilization is young; it may become a very practical and urgent
question whether it is dying. When once we have cast aside, as we
inevitably have after a momen