portant to an intelligent perception of the
quality of our literature. This task is less simple than the critical
assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where
the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition
unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more
easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French
studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a
personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and
labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what
perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for
example, or Brunetiere, in their books on Balzac, proceed to indicate
those impulses of race and period and environment which affected the
character of Balzac's novels! The fact that he was born in Tours in
1799 results in the inevitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about
Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the Touraine surroundings
of his youth, and the post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and
analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his removal to Paris in the
Restoration period, his ventures in business and his affairs of love,
his admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore Cooper; his mingled
Romanticism and Realism; his Titanism and his childishness; his
stupendous outline for the Human Comedy; and his scarcely less
astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers
with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually in
the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race,
biographers familiar with every page of French history, and profoundly
interested, like their readers, in every aspect of French life. Alas,
we may say, in despairing admiration of such workmanship, "they order
these things better in France." And they do; but racial unity, and long
lines of national literary tradition, make these things easier to order
than they are with us. The intellectual distinction of American
critical biographies like Lounsbury's _Cooper_ or Woodberry's
_Hawthorne_ is all the more notable because we possess such a slender
body of truly critical doctrine native to our own soil; because our
national literary tradition as to available material and methods is
hardly formed; because the very word "American" has a less precise
connotation than the word "New Zealander."

Let us suppose, for instance, that