too ardently, perhaps) by the spirit
of free America in writing the great epic of religious and political
freedom in Europe. Finally, it must not be forgotten that in _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, a tragically American production, Mrs. Beecher Stowe added
to the literature of the English language the most potent, the most
dynamic, pamphlet ever hurled into the arena of national life.

Of all that living Americans are doing for the literature of our common
tongue it is as yet impossible to speak adequately. Since 1870, a new
spirit of nationalism has entered into American literature, which has
not yet been thoroughly studied in America or appreciated in England. So
far from having no national literature, America has now, perhaps, the
most intimately national body of fiction in the modern world. Before the
Civil War there was practically no deliberate and systematic study of
local and racial idiosyncracies. Hosea Biglow was a mask, not a
character, and Parson Wilbur was a literary device. Even Hawthorne
thought primarily of the element of imagination in the romances--the
universal, not the local, element. His leading characters are
psychological creations, with nothing specifically American about them;
his local colour and local character-study, though admirable, are
incidental, or at any rate stand on a secondary plane. In the South
there was no literature at all, local or otherwise, with the one
startling exception of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.[O] But since 1870, and
mainly, indeed, within the past twenty years, a marvellous change has
come over the scene. Not only the national but the local
self-consciousness of America has sprung to literary life, until at the
present day there is scarcely a corner of the country, scarcely an
aspect of social life, that has not found its special, and, as a rule,
very able interpreter through the medium of fiction. Pursuing technical
methods partly borrowed from abroad (from France rather than from
England), American writers have undertaken what one is tempted to call a
sociological ordnance-survey of the Republic from Maine to Arizona, from
Florida to Oregon. There is scarcely a human being in the United States,
from the Newport society belle to the "greaser" of New Mexico, that has
not his or her more or less faithful counterpart in fiction. No European
country, so far as I know, has achieved anything like such comprehensive
self-realisation. Comprehensive, I say--not necessarily profound.
Perhaps