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قراءة كتاب Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2

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Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2

Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 2

Altogether, native and foreign, they have approached their theme from divergent directions, with diverse aims, and under the influence of deep differences in their critical methods and in their own natures. But so far as the writer of these words is aware, no one of them either native or foreign has ever set about the study of American literature, enlightened with the only solvent principle that can ever furnish its solution.

That solvent principle is contained within a single proposition. That single proposition is the one upon which our forefathers deliberately chose to found the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World: that it should not be a civilization of States which were not a Nation; that it should not be the civilization of a nation without states; but that it should be a Nation of States.

Now, if any man aspires to draw from American literature the philosophy of its traits, if he sets it as the goal of his wisdom to explain its breadth and its narrowness, its plenty here and its lack there, its color in one place and its pallor in another, let him go back to the will of the fathers in the foundation of the Republic and find the explanation of our literature at the basis of our whole civilization. He will never find it anywhere else. He will find it there as he there finds the origin of our system of government, of our system of industry, of our system of political barriers, of our system of education: in the entire nature of our institutions as derived and unfolded from the idea that we should be a nation of states. Our literature—our novels and our poetry—have been as rigorously included in this development as all the other elements of our life.

For the first time in this way he may come to see a great light; and with that light shining about him he may be prepared to write the first history of American literature.

None has yet been written.

James Lane Allan Signature

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[Pg xi]

PREFACE

I

What is a Kentucky book, is the one great question this work has elicited. Surely a Kentucky book is one written by a Kentuckian about Kentucky or Kentuckians and printed in Kentucky; surely it is a book written by a Kentuckian upon any subject under the sun, and published in any clime; surely it is one written in Kentucky by a citizen of any other state or country, regardless of the subject or place of publication, for, "in general, I have regarded the birthplace of a piece of literature more important than that of the author." But is a book, though treating of Kentucky or Kentuckians, regardless of its place of publication, whose author was not born in, nor for any appreciable period resided in, this state, entitled to be properly classified as a Kentucky work? The writer has responded in the negative to this question in the present work.

There have been several noted American authors who have written volumes about Kentucky or Kentuckians, and they themselves were not natives of this state, nor resided within its confines. Those early Western travelers rarely omitted Kentucky from their journeys. The first of them, F. A. Michaux, published his famous Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, at London, in 1805; two years later F. Cuming's Tour to the Western Country, through Ohio and Kentucky, was printed at Pittsburg; and in 1817 John Bradbury got out the first edition of his now noted Travels in the Interior of America, at London. Bradbury died in 1823 and to-day lies buried

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