I28
AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
as none before had done, conquered for the American people an undisputed right to a representative in the parliament of the world's literature." † With this high estimate I confess I am unable fully to agree. But it at least shows this, that the German critic could find nothing English in the contents of his pages. Indeed, I think he is right with respect to Harte's Americanism; only he is wrong in his reason therefor. It would be untrue to those notions I have advanced of what a national literature should be to consider the unique character of the life he portrays quite enough to make him thoroughly American. It was rather because he himself was thoroughly imbued with the ideas out of which the life of the mining camps grew—ideas, it seems to me, of a decidedly American stamp. And in regarding merely the strangeness and freshness of the material in which he worked, and in overlooking quite these ideas, our German critic, like so many others, overlooked other writers more really American than Bret Harte. He overlooked Hawthorne for instance, and he overlooked Mrs. Stowe. Hawthorne is without doubt the greatest literary genius the new world has brought forth. To that all are at last agreed. That he was also distinctively American will receive less ready assent. Yet it should seem that he had been an impossibility in any other land. We fail thoroughly to comprehend him, I think, unless we project him against that dark, sombre, Puritan background of Colonial, witch-burning New England. No one can fail to recognize this who has read carefully G. P. Lathrop's study of Hawthorne, or who has made himself perfectly acquainted with both Puritan New England and Hawthorne's works. However bleak and unpromising for literature the soil about Plymouth Rock seem, it is there that all those tender flowers have
†Nord und Sued, 1831.
their root that blossom so richly in his tales. His intense spirituality is only the strong New England sense of the real presence of invisible things that made wichcraft so credible and saw the possibility of a witch in every old woman—but this sense etherealized, freed from all its grossness. So his power of subtle analysis of human thought and feelings, his metaphysical insight into the workings of the heart, was a legacy from generations of theologians. Time was when our fathers were brought up to the discussion of those metaphysical questions. The freedom of the will, fore-ordination, and all the dark perplexities which these suggest,were common subjects of conversation with them. They were accustomed to think of them every day, and to debate them with their neighbors or the minister, not much I fear, to the advantage of metaphysics as a science, but greatly to the improvement of their own thinking machinery. Of the powers thus cultivated even in running to waste Hawthorne was the heir, but not Hawthorne alone but the whole people. That is, in two of his prominent characteristics as an author, he was the out-growth of the ideas and conditions that existed for a long time among a large proportion of Americans, and which have left their visible impress on the great, complex America of our own day.
In the work of Mrs. Stowe we detect the presence of the same historical background. She too had been impossible without the Puritan times and the theological ancestry. But besides this connection with the people's past, her works stand in even closer relation to the people's present. Her greatest book sprang out of the clash of ideas that heralded the impending civil struggle, and those with which the book is vital have since made good their right to be considered national by rising triumphant out of a terrible war.