I suppose it will not be disputed that the glory of a nation’s literature lies in the fact that it is national—that it reflects truly the spirit and the life of the people with whom it is concerned, by whom it is written, and to whom it belongs. It will not be denied either that this final splendour has not yet descended on the literature of America. The happy and tonic optimism of Emerson is a gift which could hardly have been bestowed upon any man in an old country. It belongs to a land and a time of boundless aspiration and of untired youth, and in virtue of this possession Emerson is amongst the most characteristically American of Americans. In the walks of fiction, with which alone we have to deal in these pages, the Americans have been distinctively English in spirit and in method (until within recent years), even when they have dealt with themes chosen from their own surroundings. There is nowhere in the world, and never was until now, and possibly never again will be, such another field for the born student of human nature as is afforded by the United States at this time. The world has never seen such an intimate mixture of racial elements as may be found there. A glance at the Newspaper Directory shows the variety and extent of the foreign elements which, though in rapid process of absorption, are as yet undigested. Hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of journals minister to the daily and weekly needs of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Russians, Hungarians. There are Polish newspapers, and Armenian, and Hebrew, and Erse and Gaelic. Sleepy old Spain is rubbing shoulders with the eager and energetic races of Maine and New York and Massachusetts. The negro element is everywhere, and the Chinese add a flavour of their own to the olla podrida. So far no American writers of fiction have seen America in the large. Bits of it have been presented with an admirable art; but as yet the continent awaits its Dickens, its Balzac, its Shakespeare, or its Zola.

Mr. Bret Harte has made California his own, but it is not the California of to-day. ‘Gone is that camp, and wasted all its fire,’ but the old life lives in some of its pages still, and will find students for a long time to come. He has given us three, perhaps, of the best short stories in the world, and a man who has done so much has a right to gratitude and goodwill. Possibly there never was a writer who gave the world all the essentials personal to his art so early, and yet so long survived in the race for popularity. Bret Harte’s first book was something like a revelation. In workmanship he reminds the reader of Dickens, but his surroundings were wholly novel, and as delightful as they were strange. He bewitched the whole reading world with ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’ and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat,’ and ever since those days he has gone on with a tireless vivacity, telling the same stories over and over again, showing us the same scenes and the same people with an apparent unconsciousness of the fact of repetition which is truly astonishing. The roads of dusty red and the scented pine groves come back in story after story, and Colonel Starbottle and Jack Folinsbee look like immortals. The vagabond with the melodious voice who did something virtuous and went away warbling into the night is alive in new as in old pages, in defiance of fatigue. Preternaturally murderous gamblers with a Quixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhuman splendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph of their history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. The oddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Since he first delighted us he has scarcely troubled himself once to find a new story, or a new type of character, or a new field for his descriptive powers. He took the Spanish mission into his stock-in-trade, and he has since made that as hackneyed as the rest. And yet there remains this peculiarity about him—his latest stories, are pretty nearly as good as his first. It would seem as if his interest had not flagged, as if the early impressions which impelled him to write were still clear and urgent in his mind. He is amongst the most singular of modern literary phenomena. The zest with which he has told the same tale for so many years sets him apart. It is as if until the age, say, of thirty he had been gifted with a brilliant faculty of observation, and had then suddenly ceased to observe at all. There seems to have come a time when his musical box would hold no more tunes, and ever since then he has gone on repeating the old ones. The oddness is not so much in the repetition as in the air of enjoyment and spontaneity worn by the grinder. He at least is not fatigued, and to readers who live from hand to mouth, and have no memories, there is no reason why he should ever grow fatiguing.

Mr. Henry James is a gentleman who has taken a little more culture than is good for the fibre of his character. He is certainly a man of many attainments and of very considerable native faculty, but he staggers under the weight of his own excellences. The weakness is common enough in itself, but it is not common in combination with such powers as Mr. James possesses. He is vastly the superior of the common run of men, but he makes his own knowledge of that fact too clear. It is a little difficult to see why so worshipful a person should take the trouble to write at all, but it is open to the reader to conjecture that he would not be at so much pains unless he were pushed by a compulsory sense of his own high merits. He feels that it would be a shame if such a man should be wasted. I cannot say that I have ever received; from him any supreme enlightenment as to the workings of that complex organ, the human heart, but I understand quite definitely that Mr. James knows all about it, and could show many things if he were only interested enough to make an effort He is the apostle of a well-bred boredom. He knows all about society, and bric-À-brac, and pictures, and music, and natural landscape, and foreign cities, and if he could feel a spice of interest in any earthly thing he could be charming. But his listless, easy air—of gentlemanly-giftedness fatigued—provokes and bores. He is like a man who suppresses a yawn to tell a story. He is a blend of genuine power and native priggery, and his faults are the more annoying because of the virtues they obscure and spoil. He is big enough to know better.

It is likely enough that to Mr. James the fact of having been bred in the United States has proved a disadvantage. To the robuster type of man of letters, to the Dickens or Kipling kind of man, it would be impossible to wish better luck than to be born into that bubbling pot-full of things. But Mr. James’s over-accentuated refinement of mind has received the very impetus of which it stood least in need. He has grown into a humorous disdain of vulgar emotions, partly because he found them so rich about him. The figures which Bret Harte sees through a haze of romance are to him essentially coarse. The thought of Mr. James in association with Tennessee and Partner over a board supplied with hog, flapjack and forty-rod awakes a bewildering pity in the mind. An hour of Colonel Starbottle would soil him for a week. He is not made for such contact. It is both curious and instructive to notice how the too-cultured sensitiveness of a man of genius has blinded him to the greatest truth in the human life about him. Born into the one country where romance is still a constant factor in the lives of men, he conceives romance to be dead. With stories worthy of a great writer’s handling transacting themselves on every hand, he is the first elucidator of the principle that a story-teller’s business is to have no story. The vision of the sheet which was let down from Heaven to Peter was seen in vain so far as he is concerned, but the story of that dream holds an eternal truth for the real artist. Mr. James is not the only man whose best-nursed and most valued part has proved to be destructive With a little more strength he might have kept all his delicacies, and have been a man to thank God for. As it is, he is the victim of an intellectual foppery.

Mr. W. D. Howells has something in common with Mr. James, but he is of stronger stuff—not less essentially a gentleman, as his books reveal him, but more essentially a man. He has a sterling courage, and has never been afraid of his own opinions. His declaration that ‘all the stories have been told’ is one of the keys to his method as a novelist A work of fiction is something which enables him to show the impingement of character on character, with modifying effects of environment and circumstance. His style is clean and sober, and his method is invariably dignified. He has deliberately allowed his critical prepossessions to exclude him from all chance of greatness, but within his self-set limits he moves with a certain serene mastery, and his detail is finely accurate.

Miss Mary Wilkins, who is a very much younger writer than any of the three here dealt with, reminds an English reader both of George Eliot and Miss Mitford. ‘Pembroke’ is the best and completest of her books. So far as pure literary charm goes it would be difficult to amend her work, but the suggestion of character conveyed is surely too acidulated. Such a set of stubborn, self-willed, and uncomfortable people as are gathered together in these pages could hardly have lived in any single village in any quarter of the world. They are drawn with an air of truth which is not easy to resist, but if they are really as accurately studied as they seem to be Pembroke must be a place to fly from. It is conceivable that the members of such a congregation might be less intolerable to each other than they seem to the foreign outsider, but the ameliorating effects of usage must needs be strong indeed to make them fit to live with. For the most part they are represented as well-meaning folk; but they are exasperatingly individual, all over sore corners, eager to be injured at their tenderest points, and implacable to the person who hurts them. In Pembroke a soreness of egotism afflicts everybody. Every creature in the book is over-sensitive to slight and misunderstanding, and every creature is clumsy and careless in the infliction of pain. It is a study in self-centred egotism. People who have an opportunity of knowing village life in the Eastern States proclaim the book a masterpiece of observation.

Bret Harte, studying a form of life now extinct, which once (with certain allowances made for the romantic tendency) flourished in the West; Mr. Howells, taking micro-graphic studies of present-day life in the great centre of American culture; Mr. James, with a clever, weary persiflage skimming the face of society in refined cosmopolitan circles; and Miss Wilkins, observing the bitter humours of the Eastern yokel, are none of them distinctively American either in feeling or expression. Mr. Samuel L. Clemens—otherwise Mark Twain—stands in striking contrast to them all. He is not an artist in the sense in which the others are artists, but he is beyond compare the most distinct and individual of contemporary American writers. He started as a mere professional fun-maker, and he has not done with fun-making even yet, but he has developed in the course of years into a rough and ready philosopher, and he has written two books which are in their own way unique. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the two best boys in the whole wide range of fiction, the most natural, genuine, and convincing. They belong to their own soil, and could have been born and bred nowhere else, but they are no truer locally than universally. Mark Twain can be eloquent when the fancy takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest and plainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like an American, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not the exponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, excepting Walt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a great democracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, as he displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves are not reverend, and since its point of view is not one from which all things are visible it seems occasionally overbold and crude; but the creed it expresses is manly, and clean, and wholesome, and the man who lives by it is a man to be admired. The point of view may be higher in course of time, and the observer’s horizon widened. The limitations of the mind which adopts the present standpoint may be found in ‘A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.’ Apart from its ethics, the book is a mistake, for a jest which could have been elaborated to tedium in a score of pages is stretched to spread through a bulky volume, and snaps into pieces under that tension.

The great war of North and South has been answerable for more fiction than any other campaign of any age, and it has quite recently furnished reason for the novel, ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ by Mr. Stephen Crane, which is out of counting the truest picture of the sort the world has seen. It seemed at first impossible to believe that it had been written by any but a veteran. It turns out that the author is quite a young man, and that he gathered everything by reading and by hearsay. Here again the method is national and characteristic. After all these years of natural submission to British influence American writers are growing racy of their own soil.