social life in which he shared. If it fortunately happens that the authors and the people of a country think and feel about the same objects in ways not so dissimilar as to make them unintelligible to each other, and thus possess an essential bond of union, literature becomes an expression of national life, a permanent embodiment of the national spirit. The literature of England answers most nearly to this idea of a national literature; and therefore M. Taine, as he himself says, chose to write of it, because it best illustrates and supports his theory that a nation's life---the character and circumstances of its people and the special social movements of its successive ages-determines, by a force akin to natural law, a specific literature. If he had chosen to write of American literature, how ill would it have served his purpose! Perhaps M. Taine would reply that we in America are not a literary people, that we have no national literature, and that what literature has flourished among us is of a leaf and fibre sprung from foreign soil; in such a reply, indeed, there would be much truth. Certainly, our literature has been, to a remarkable degree, remote from the national life. There has been but slight mutual obligation between our books and our politics or our society. Even among men of genius, who are usually more withdrawn than others from the influence peculiar to their time, and are either indifferent to them or masters over them, our men of genius seem pe culiarly isolated. Their temperaments, in so far as these were the result of past human experience working secretly through the subtle channels of hereditary descent, were born of a civilization far different from our own, a civilization religious, colonial, and local, not secular, self-sustaining, and national. These men fashioned, the treasures of our literature by their own creative force and artistic instinct, with but slight obligation to their country either for the material of their work or for the knowledge of their craft. Engrossed with their own unshared powers and qualities, they stood aloof from the nation and its concerns. They set out on the eternal search for beauty and truth, guided, like all the greatest, by the elemental principles in human nature, like

a

voyagers on strange seas, steering by the pole star, borne on by trade wind or gulf-stream; but their ships were unfreighted with a public hope. Orsince voyagers is too venturesome name for them-say rather, they joined the company of pure artists, who, illuminating the spirit of man rather than the spirit of their age, acknowledge the lordship of no country, but belong to the race the men who gather within themselves, as into a star of intenser light, the scattered and obscure rays that are a lamp of beauty to the feet of every man. Amid that company how should they hear the axe ringing in the lonely wilderness of the Genesee, or catch the joy on the face of the adventurous explorer on hard-won mountain peaks, with the promised land spread out westward before him? Some unreal Hiawatha-echo did penetrate even there; some prospect of an Astoria, with its natural marvel and human hardihood (less prized than the ruinous, legend-haunted Alhambra), was caught sight of; a spell of romance was woven about the Hudson, and a mysterious beauty evoked from the wintry life of Puritan dwellers by the shores of Massachusetts Bay; but to the America present before them it is scarcely too much to say our men of genius were well-nigh deaf and blind. There is something startling in this spectacle of the gifted and trained mind absorbed in its pursuit of imaginative delight, heedless of the humble muscle which was meanwhile building up a great nation; seldom, in literary history, has there been so complete a sundering of the changeless work of men's spirits from the work of men's hands which, however transmuted, still no less endures.

Our men of genius were isolated in yet another way. Underived and solitary genius has frequently not only stimulated and delighted its contemporaries; it has gathered about itself a band of disciples, has kindled zeal, deepened conviction, hardened intellectual strength, so that on its eclipse its battle with darkness went on in the victory of younger men, men not of genius, but of culture. Among us literature has had no such continuous tradition; where the torch fell it was extinguished. Irving, it is true, had imi

tators, who came to nothing; but our fiction does not seem to be different because Hawthorne lived, no poet has caught the music of Longfellow, no thinker carries forward the conclusions of Emerson. These men have left no lineage. They are not connected with their countrymen even by the secondary tie of calling into being a body of literature with power to enter effectively into the nation's life, to shape the character and determine the expansion of its thought. We have not earned the right to claim these men as a national possession by any important contribution to the growth of their genius, nor have they given us that right by anything distinctively national in their work or their influence; ushered in by Donatello and Evangeline, they find a welcome at the hearthstone of every lover of the beautiful, but, except for the accident of birth, there is little reason why the welcome should be warmer in America than in England.

Men of culture, whose work makes up the larger portion of any literature, are much indebted to circumstances and opportunity. In America they have been, as has been seen, without a literature of virile power; they have also been without a society vigorous enough to stamp an image of itself in letters. In the days of Queen Anne and the first two Georges, the wit, sense, and malice of a cultivated society expressed themselves with such intelligence that the age, although one of high political excitement and of great consequence to the institutions and civilization of England, is yet mainly known as a literary age. The society from which American men of culture took their bent was civilized in other ways than that at Twickenham, but it was so inferior to it in its sense of the value of literature to life, in active, keen intelligence, and in consummate mastery of the art of speech, that it was incapable of any similar literary expression. The lack of such a The lack of such a society as the wits of Queen Anne moved in, sent our men of culture to attend in English drawing-rooms and at English dinner-tables. This resort to the old world was natural, and, indeed, inevitable.

The Revolution made us an independent nation, but in literature we remained a province. At the beginning

of the century it was sneeringly, yet truly, said that the Americans let Europe make their fashions and their books for them, as if our women were without taste and our men without mind. We developed ancient English political ideas, and, with our ears intent upon the future, we put ourselves under the sway of the ideas to come, democracy and its unrevealed forces; in literature, on the contrary, we sought neither to disestablish nor to amend the English tradition. We kept not only the unchangeable standards of good literature, but so possessed were we by the social spirit and tastes of the mother-country that we kept also the subject and the style in which the peculiarities of a nation manifest themselves if at all. Thus Irving, our first great man of letters, deriving his culture from social life abroad, taking his style from Addison and Steele, and interesting his readers in sketches of English rural life or in foreign legend, came to leave (in Mr. Lowell's phrase) a name either English or Yankee." So, too, Ticknor, Allston, and their successors were molded by the foreign influence; the foreign standard of education and literature became firmly established, and has not yet yielded its ground.

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"You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought,

With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion

To what will be thought of it over the ocean.'

What Mr. Lowell wrote of his generation has not ceased to be true of our time. To-day American authors make their reputation by English criticism, and American magazines are rivals for English pens. In these later years, however, our strongly marked national life has given rise to a domestic literature (if I may so term it) having to do with ourselves and our own concerns; it reflects, it is true, the ruder elements of our civilization-our rough life on the border, our vulgar life abroad, our homely middle-class life in the Eastand it is usually embodied in fugitive and imperfect forms, but sometimes, as in the work of Mr. Howells and Mr. James, in forms of exquisite finish.

This literature, whatever its defects, is the product of our own soil, and unsheathes a green blade of hope. In England some of it has met with a sort of criticism-as if, being American, it were absolved from old-world canons of excellence and free to indulge whatever extravagance, nonsense, or immodesty it pleases, if only a flavor of the soil be kept that shows clearly enough that English taste is no longer definitive for us, and in this fact there is also a sign of promise. But if we except this younger and less perfect literature, it would seem that the nation has contributed but little more to culture like Lowell's, adorned by dignities and graces that are the acquirements of laborious years, than to genius like Hawthorne's, aureoled by its own effluence. If humor be left out of the account, it is broadly true that whatever is characteristically American in our men of culture as a class has been overborne, checked, blighted, deadened by the mastering spirit of the English tradition.

This state of things is, however, neither dishonorable nor disheartening. The existence of a powerful foreign in fluence has never proved innate and pervasive feebleness in the men who receive and assimilate it. It shows an unsatisfied craving, a need of human nature making itself imperatively known and seizing with avidity on what it requires; it shows, in a word, the incompleteness of native culture. Thus the young men of England in one age resorted to Italy, in another to France; that great age of Queen Anne was woven warp and woof, English sense, strength, and grossness with French taste, skill, manner, as well in the Court as in the literary sets; in each age the foreign influence supplemented native culture, but did not displace it; transformed and refined, but did not destroy it. The uninterrupted, though lessening, ascendancy of the English tradition in American literature indicates not only that our civilization is of English descent, and that we rightly claim a share with Englishmen in the honor of their literary past, as is too often and too boastfully said; it indicates that our national life has not provided nutriment for intellect, that our men of culture have submitted to be Anglicized as

their only resource for remedying this defect in our civilization-a defect, to adapt a phrase of Mr. Arnold, in the sense of the value of intelligence applied to literature.

This does not involve our being an illiterate people. On the contrary, we are, as a nation, anxious for literary fame. We are grateful to our men of letters. We honor their works among the noblest ornaments of the Republic. The illustrious names in our literary annals are familiar in our households and ready on our lips. The grief that was felt at Irving's death, men of his generation say, was only less than the mourning over Washington. The loss of Bryant revealed undiminished admiration for the pursuit of literature. From what does this popular feeling spring? Is it rooted in a perception of the civilizing power of literature, in an adequate comprehension of the great offices that are discharged by literature, as a mode of refined amusement, as a treasury of knowledge about the things of the mind, as a bond of sympathy with humanity, as an open access to the fellowship of the great? Something of this conception there is; but the popular desire for literary fame springs, there is too much reason to fear, from a jealous national pride, and is rooted in the thin soil of national vanity. But whatever its cause may be, this popular appreciation of success in literary pursuits encourages literature, and we are, besides, a reading people. Why, then, in spite of these two favorable conditions for literary production, are we deficient in the sense of the value of applying intelligence to literature?

The answer is obvious. In the great work of furthering civilization-that multiform and complex result of many powers working toward the one final end of harmonizing the best in man's nature with the normal conditions of human life-in this great work where the nations are enlisted each in the service of some few of these many powers, and make progress each along those lines which are either indispensable or most expedient for itself, it has fallen. to the lot of our people to be penetrated by the value of two great ideas, and we serve these with all our strength and with all our heart; the ideas, namely,

of democracy, as a means of securing the well-being of great multitudes of men, and of the economy of labor, as a means of lessening human toil and increasing the share of material goods that the ordinary man will obtain. These two ideas, belief in the power of democracy to lift the masses into a life of larger freedom and more active intelligence, belief in the power of the utilization both of natural forces and of human ingenuity to increase the comfort of life, control our civilization, and subordinate to themselves all other ideas in which a civilizing power lies. We are not Greeks secure of our liberty and our bread and wine, interested in the things of the mind, in beauty, and wisdom; our interest, for better or worse, is to make sure the welfare of those engaged in the humble occupations of life. To this task we are irrevocably committed; in achieving it man can afford to lose much else that is also valuable.

Let us consider the influence of these two great ideas upon our literature successively. Democracy created the common schools for a public defence against popular ignorance. The common schools gave rise to a great reading class; they made us, indeed, a nation of readers. This great class is eager for information, teachable, sensible of the uses of books for amusement and instruction. It is endowed with the tastes and attached to the standards that naturally belong to a class accustomed by its democracy and Protestantism to rely above all things upon private judgment; that is, to trust decisions of which the validity is limited by a narrow experience. Curiosity is its most noticeable characteristic. It is curious to know what is going on in the world, to learn the manners and customs and the aspect of distant lands, and the events that take place in them, to understand mechanical processes, and the scientific explanation of natural phenomena; and these interests, the variety and relative force of which may be measured with considerable accuracy by the contents of Harper's Monthly Magazine (still more by the columns of our Sunday newspapers), are unduly stimulated by the multiplicity of books consequent on modern facilities for travel, the diversity of our industrial development, and

the exhaustless variety of scientific experiment and enterprise. This great reading class is curious, too, but in a far less degree, to know biography and history; here its curiosity stops. It does not care to reflect, to generalize, to frame rational conceptions of theories, or to perfect a rule of living; in other words, it has no curiosity about ideas. The same class in France, the readers among the French people, are interested in the ideas of speculative politics; our public is indifferent to them, for it has a complacent satisfaction with our institutions as they are, and is possessed by a Conservative instinct. The ideas of rational religion, too, our public hears of, for the advocacy of them is loud-voiced and aggressive; but the public shrinks from them. It does not escape from them; they have lessened the vehemence with which hereditary ideas in religion are held, have increased tolerance, and have made men easy in holding vague notions and content with half convictions; but they have discredited religious discussion, and have failed to enter into the national life with the disintegrating and destroying power of continental rationalism. The curiosity of our public enlarges mental horizons and multiplies mental activities; but it does not penetrate to the spirit, it does not vitalize thought, or result in wisdom. It is a curiosity about facts, about concrete things, the things of the world; it is not a curiosity about the things of the mind, about ideas.

The second obvious characteristic of our great reading class is its fondness for sensation, its desire for strong, pungent, and unusual effects-the analogue of the barbarian's delight in glaring colors. An acute observer of large experience has lately told us-and any news-stand will bear out his testimony

what is the imaginative literature on which our least cultivated reading class feeds-tales of romantic adventure on the high seas, of ruffianism on the border, of impossible deeds, and ridiculous successes. But what is the case with the reading of the higher class, the class that is the best product of the common schools, that reads Dickens, Macaulay, Poe, and even, sometimes, Carlyle? Is not one reason why Dickens is more popular than Thackeray with this class

his lack of temperance which led him to caricature rather than portray, which led him at times to discolor and distort human nature? Is not one reason why Macaulay is so widely read the fact that his rhetoric deals with the raw pigments, the contrasts, exaggeration, and untruth that belong to sensationalism, and that in his hands discolor and distort history? Are not Poe's tales attractive because of the thrill they send along the nerves, the shock of surprise they give, their terror, their hideousness, their evil charm? I say nothing of the marvellous genius, too little acknowledged, by which the greatest master of fantastic romance contrived to give real and lasting interest to such monstrosities; but I think Americans must reply that the fascination of his tales over the popular mind is so great as it is, not because of his genius, but because (so to speak) he created discoloration and distortion in an unreal realm, and thereby left work as utterly false as the sensation-mongers of our lowest reading class. Carlyle is a thinker, but he is among the first to be read by that small portion of the public which has a nascent and fitful interest in the things of the mind; and he is read by them and by others of larger culture because he wields a Thor-hammer, because when he celebrates the dignity of work he is thinking of the labors of Hercules, because when he adores heroism he has in mind Valhalla warriors, because even when he exalts the virtue of silence he raises a din of words. Here, too, I say nothing of the truth that is in him, but is not one great source of his power the fact that he uses the sensational manner, that he discolors and distorts truth? These great men of letters, in whose work imagination has so large a share, hold reality with a slackened grasp, and this commends them the more to readers of imperfect culture, which is, perhaps, most surely tested by such delight in illusion as characterizes our great reading class. The taste of our public, in imaginative literature, errs by departing from the real it also errs by departing from the beautiful. To say this is to say that our public, discontented with reality and contented with ugliness, has no conception of pure art or the attempt to

evolve the beautiful out of the real; it does not reject pure art (for the highest privilege of pure art is that it gets itself acknowledged wherever there is a spark of feeling or a ray of mind), but it does not require art to be pure. To sum up, the curiosity of our public leaves the mind too opaque to ideas, its fondness for sensation leaves the spirit too impatient of truth, too tolerant of what is gross and rude. There is little need to add that the patronage of such a public will not of itself give rise to any valuable speculative or imaginative literature.

The second great idea of which mention was made, the idea of economizing labor as a means of material progress, has developed the characteristic national virtues, resolution, enterprise, ingenuity, industry, and has wrought out vast and beneficent results. What is praiseworthy in its work is familiar to all. In respect to literature, its most obvious influence has been to lessen the amount of intelligence in the service of literature. It has had the giving of the prizes that men are prone to think the great prizes of life-riches, power, and the social consideration that comes of these; it has drafted off the intelligence of the country in pursuit of them, and has discouraged literature as it has discredited other modes of human activity. In doing this, however, it has created wealth, and one great function of wealth is the encouragement of literature. How has wealth discharged this function in America? In other countries wealth creates a body of cultivated intelligence in the community, a class of men such as Mr. Arnold addressed upon equality, and which he described: "The large class of gentlemen as distinct from the nobility, with an abundance among them of serious knowledge, high accomplishment, and refined taste. In England this class has been built up mainly from the younger branches of the aristocracy, from the universities, and from the owners of hereditary wealth amassed in the commerce of the last two centuries. We, in America, are glad that we have no aristocracy; we are accustomed to sneer at the possessors of wealth inherited from the commerce of two or three generations ago the blue blood; we have universities, scores and hundreds