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.
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