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upon us some genius from Queensland or Canada, through whom we are expected to smell the
odours of the bush or the prairie. As a matter of fact, any one who is even slightly interested in
literature as such (and I, for one, confess that I am only slightly interested in literature as such),
will freely admit that the stories of these geniuses smell of nothing but printer s ink, and that not
of first-rate quality. By a great effort of Imperial imagination the generous English people reads
into these works a force and a novelty. But the force and the novelty are not in the new writers; the
force and the novelty are in the ancient heart of the English. Anybody who studies them impartially
will know that the first-rate writers of the colonies are not even particularly novel in their note and
atmosphere, are not only not producing a new kind of good literature, but are not even in any
particular sense producing a new kind of bad literature. The first-rate writers of the new countries
are really almost exactly like the second-rate writers of the old countries. Of course they do feel
the mystery of the wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for all simple and honest men feel this in
Melbourne, or Margate, or South St. Pancras. But when they write most sincerely and most
successfully, it is not with a background of the mystery of the bush, but with a background, expressed
or assumed, of our own romantic cockney civilization. What really moves their souls with a kindly
terror is not the mystery of the wilderness, but the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
Of course there are some exceptions to this generalization. The one really arresting exception
is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as certainly an exception that proves the rule. Olive Schreiner
is 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
85
Heretics Gilbert K. Chesterton
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 moment s thought, the fanciful
physical metaphor involved in the word youth, what serious evidence have we that America is
a fresh force and not a stale one? It has a great many people, like China; it has a great deal of money,
like defeated Carthage or dying Venice. It is full of bustle and excitability, like Athens after its
ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline. It is fond of new things; but the old are always fond
of new things. Young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers. It admires strength and
good looks; it admires a big and barbaric beauty in its women, for instance; but so did Rome when
the Goth was at the gates. All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and decay.
There are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can show itself essentially glad and great
by the heroic in government, by the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art. Beyond government,
which is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most significant thing about any citizen
is his artistic attitude towards a holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight that is, his way
of accepting life and his way of accepting death.
Subjected to these eternal tests, America does not appear by any means as particularly fresh or
untouched. She appears with all the weakness and weariness of modern England or of any other
Western power. In her politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up, into a
bewildering opportunism and insincerity. In the matter of war and the national attitude towards
war, her resemblance to England is even more manifest and melancholy. It may be said with rough
accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights
small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights
small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient
emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself. England exhibited
this symptom of decadence very badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it
worse in the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else
the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of
a weak enemy. America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of
the Caracallan triumph, the triumph over nobody.
But when we come to the last test of nationality, the test of art and letters, the case is almost
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