Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters

[88] since 1776? The external changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy. But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature. The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded The North American review. British critics in The Edinburgh and The Quarterly, commenting upon recent works of travel in America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil. Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared in 1820: “During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature. ... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?”

Sydney Smith's question “Who reads an American book?” has outlived all of his own clever