In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism is not a final word either of blame or praise. It is a word of useful characterization. Only American books, and not books written in English in America, can adequately represent our national contribution to the world's thinking and feeling. So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But the younger of these two poets came to realize in his old age that the New World and the Old World are fundamentally one. The literature of the New World will inevitably have an accent of its own, but it must speak the mother-language of civilization, share in its culture, accept its discipline.
It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow and his friends: "The houses of the Brahmins had only eastern windows. The souls of the whole school lived in the old lands of culture, and they visited these lands as often as they could, and, returning, brought back whole libraries of books which they eagerly translated." But even if Longfellow and his friends had been nothing more than translators and diffusers of European culture, their task would have been justified. They kept the ideals of civilization from perishing in this new soil. Through those eastern windows came in, and still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the American spirit. To decry the literatures of the Orient and of Greece and Rome as something now outgrown by America, is simply to close the eastern windows, to narrow our conception of civilization to merely national and contemporaneous terms. It is as provincial to attempt this restriction in literature as it would be in world-politics. We must have all the windows open in our American writing, free access to ideas, knowledge of universal standards, perception of universal law.
An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's History of American Literature during the Colonial Time, 2 volumes (1878) and Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 volumes (1897). For a general survey see Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (1900), W. P. Trent, American Literature (1903), G. E. Woodberry, America in Literature (1903), W. C. Bronson, A Short History of American Literature (1903), with an excellent bibliography, W. B. Cairns, History of American Literature (1912), W. P. Trent and J. Erskine, Great American Writers (1912), and W. Riley, American Thought (1915). The most recent and authoritative account is to be found in The Cambridge History of American Literature, 3 volumes edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren.