AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
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adecquate survey of the innumerable and wonderfully varied strands that are being woven in time's loom do we construct for ourselves the pattern of the web to be.
Much more profitable and satisfactory will be the answering of another and a last question: Has America to-day, or has she ever had, a literature that may fairly be called national? Or, in other words, does the literature that has sprung up on our soil flow naturally from a fund of ideas and from a manner of feeling common to the majority of Americans, and to no others, in such a way that it were impossible to conceive of its having been produced in any other spot under the sun? To this question, I am aware, the majority will answer, no. To which I can only reply, very immodestly, it may be, that I think the majority are wrong. Their mistake is, it seems to me, that they regard too lightly, if they do not wholly overlook, those original qualities which American writers, however much they may have in common with the English, do certainly possess, and those radical differences which, in spite of the fact that one is the child of the other, make English society and American society two very distinct and dissimilar things. The very fury with which certain cliques of our society apply themselves to the imitation of English customs, proves this dissimilarity. If further proof were needed, English criticism of American fiction would furnish it in plenty. We have our own way of looking at things which the Englishman, who looks at them in his way, which is a different way, can not understand. Listen, for instance, to this criticism on Mr. Howell's "Lady of the Aroostook:"
"The really 'American thing' in it is, we think, quite undiscovered either by the author or his heroes, and that is the curious confusion of classes which attributes to a girl brought up on the humblest level all
the prejudices and necessities of the highest society. Granting that there was anything dreadful in it, the daughter of a homely farmer in England is not guarded and accompanied like a young lady on her journeys from one place to another. * * * The difference is that the English girl would not be a young lady. She would find her sweetheart among the sailors, and would have nothing to say to the gentlemen. This difference is far more curious than the misadventure, which might have happened anywhere, and far more remarkable than the fact that the gentlemen did behave to her like gentlemen, and did their best to set her at ease, which we hope would have happened anywhere else. But it is, we think, exclusively American, and very curious and interesting, that this young woman, with her antecedents so distinctly set before us, should be represented as a lady, not at all out of place among her cultivated companions, and ready to become an ornament of society the moment she lands in Venice.'* Will you say that American society is only English society after that?
And certainly no one will claim that England-or any other country-has anything to place by the side of certain phases of our life that have grown up under peculiar circumstances of our material development-the wild frontier life, for instance, or the rough, tumultuous society of the mining camps, in which Bret Harte sought his materials so industriously and with such striking success.
Surely here was something new and fresh and unique enough to be forever free from the suspicion of English models and English influences. Some foreign readers of Bret Harte have felt this. This is what a German says: 'Bret Harte is of all Americans the most American. He it was who,
*Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1883.