AMERICAN LITERATURE ONCE MORE.
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this sense in which Homer and Aischylos are Greek and in which Chaucer and Shakespeare are not English is not a sense which ought to belong to the word national. For by common consent Shakespeare has no superior in the power of appropriation—of making everything wholly his own. What vestige of their native Greece is left to Timon and his Athemans, and how does the sea-washed Bohemia of the Winter's Tale differ from Prospero's enchanted island? Are Hamlet of Denmark and the British Lear any less English than Wolsey or Fat Sir John? No; every material underwent a subtle alchemy in the poet's brain; whether Greek silver or Roman bronze, Italian copper or French dross, he turned it all to gold. And as he was a thorough Englishman withal, this gold bore, as it fell from his hand, the unmistakable stamp of the English mint. It is a worthless distinction to call only that part of a country's literature national which has grown up around subjects of national or popular origin. Shakespeare's Pericles, were it couched in choicest Attic phrase, would not be Greek, nor would Homer—or any of the Homers, if you prefer—had he sung the border wars of England and Scotland, have made an English ballad. It was their different ways of looking at things, intellectually, morally, and aesthetically, their different ways of feeling the world, that made Homer Greek and Shakespeare English, and it is nothing more and nothing less that makes one people Greek and the other people English. The literatures of Greece and of England are national because on the one hand they grow out of, and on the other perfectly mirror, these national ways of looking at things and of feeling the world; so is every literature national that flows naturally and spontaneously out of that unique way of thinking and feeling that belongs to every
people possessing a nationality. I say spontaneously, for another demand upon a national literature in the article in question is that it be spontaneous; but here again I can consent to understand spontaneity in no such sense as would exclude the conscious literary workmanship of a Chaucer or a Shakespeare—to abide still by these two poets as illustrations. Very wide of the mark is it, it seems to me, to speak of any poem, even the rudest folk-song, as the spontaneous production of a whole people, or of any considerable portion of it. There was a school of criticism which held that the people, assembled at their public meetings or at their feasts, or drawn up on the field of battle, composed the songs together under a sort of universal inspiration, or that one sang one line and another the next, and so on. In illustration it is said that at the present day negroes, under the stimulus of strong religious excitement, compose after this fashion the songs used at their meetings. So perhaps negro camp-meeting songs may be composed; but be assured that not one line of the great Iliad, that not even one verse of the Nibelungen Lied, was made in any such wise. Poetry that lasts is the work of an artist, and the artist is always an individual; and I do not believe there is a single beauty in all the Iliad and Odyssey that does not owe its being to some particular, individual, artist-mind, Homer's or another's I care not. Every people has a stock of stories and traditions, but not every people has the rich heritage of a literature; to them artists have been wanting. If then all these materials must go through the mint of an artist-mind before they become literature, in what does the spontaneity of literature consist? Simply in this, that it expresses perfectly and beautifully those common thoughts and forms of feeling that all are trying to express, and many