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AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
are really expressing imperfectly and unbeautifully, and that all are eager to repeat after the one who shall have the genius to say them rightly. A people may have given them by nature or by some great period of their history a great treasure and wealth of thoughts and feelings which crowd upon them for expression, but which find it adequately only in the voices of a few men. This is literature, and it is as spontaneous as if it had come full-throated from the whole nation.
And here it is to be insisted that it is the thoughts and feeling that test the spontaneity of literature, and not the objects that suggest them nor the material that is used in giving them expression. Had the singers of the Homeric poems invented every incident that they immortalized, their songs would still have been perfectly spontaneous, springing irresistibly, as wood flowers from the mould of the forest, from that intellectual and aesthetic soil which makes Greece Greek.
My conclusion, then, is that a native religion, a great treasure of traditions and folk-lore, and a certain seclusion from surrounding peoples, are not, any one of them or all, the necessary conditions of a national literature; but rather that any people having a distinct national character may also have a national literature; that this literature may have grown up around foreign and borrowed subjects, provided these have been thoroughly saturated with the spirit of the borrowing people, and penetrated with its genius; and, finally, that this process may be as complete in the mental laboratory of one great, thoroughly national, artistic genius as in that of the whole people.
Having said thus much as to the proper sense of the word national when applied to literature, it is time to approach the further question : If a national literature is still in
these latter days not an impossibility, may America hope ever to have one? May we of this great, widely extended, composite people, look forward to a literature that shall be national even in this more liberal sense? I venture to think so. Here one thing particularly must be borne in mind. Those very elements of our modern civilization that bring nations more and more into contact with each other, break down national isolation and national prejudice, and tend to make all in a certain sense cosmopolitan,—our telegraphs, cables, and telephones, our steam-cars and our steamboats, our daily mails by land and sea,—all these things, I say, tend still more strongly to bring all parts of our people closer together, to give the same direction to all their thoughts, and to make possible to a scattered population of various races a real union, a common development, and finally a national character. Certainly if it be, as has been affirmed, that the power of these agencies is so great as to threaten to make of the world at some far, future day one great, cosmopolitan people, it will not be denied that they are strong enough to weld all races and all sections of our nation into one harmonious whole. Neither will it be denied that there exists at almost every time the possibility of a great historical period, a severe national trial or an inspiring triumph, which shall kindle national fires that in a few years would do the work of a century in fusing the conglomerate mass and striking from the stubborn ore the fine, pure gold—that common thought and feeling from which the national literature springs. But more than all let us remember that it is a rash and withal profitless thing to attempt from our little circle of knowledge to lay limitations on the future. "The reality," says Lotze, "is always infinitely richer than our weak imagination." And from what a woefully in-