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Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America., IV: civilization in the United States. (search)
ir most signal distinctions. Far from admitting that in literature they have as yet produced little that is important, they play at treating American literature as if it were a great independent power; they reform the spelling of the English language by the insight of their average man. For every English writer they have an American writer to match; and him good Americans read. The Western States are at this moment being nourished and formed, we hear, on the novels of a native author called Roe, instead of those of Scott and Dickens. Far from admitting that their average man is a danger, and that his predominance has brought about a plentiful lack of refinement, distinction, and beauty, they declare in the words of my friend Colonel Higginson, a prominent critic at Boston, that Nature said, some years since: Thus far the English is my best race, but we have had Englishmen enough; put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American. And with that drop a new range of promis