SюThe idea of an American literature was conceived, late in the eighteenth century, to deal with a single, inescapable problem: the literature in question, when it finally appeared, would be written in English. If, as Walter Channing wished some thirty years later, the Revolution had only driven the English language out of America along with the British troops and erected in its place a linguistic counterpart to the new national government. the task of our literary patriots would have been much simpler. They would not have had to call for an American literature, argue about what form it should take, and then sit around wondering when it was going to arrive. It would have come into being the minute someone wrote a literary work in the new language. With each subsequent production, it would have grown larger, and we would now have an American literature-whether good, bad, or indifferent- whose existence need never have been proclaimed, its proper con- tents debated, its differences from other literatures insisted upon, its rights to membership in the Modern Language Association dis- puted. Like French literature or Russian literature, it would exist independent of our pronouncements on its behalf, simply by virtue
of its language.
