"Greater
Britain." Was Hawthorne possibly right in his instinct that politics
did make a difference, and that in writing _The Marble Faun_,--the
scene of which is laid in Rome,--or _The House of the Seven
Gables_,--which is a story of Salem,--he was consistently engaged in
producing, not "colonial" or "Greater-British" but distinctly American
literature? We need not answer this question prematurely, if we wish to
reserve our judgment, but it is assuredly one of the questions which
the biographers and critics of our men of letters must ultimately face
and answer.

Furthermore, the student of literature produced in the United States of
America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of
race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to
observe the American refashioning of the English temper into something
not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the
complexities which have resulted from the mingling of various European
stocks upon American soil. But take, for the moment, the mere obvious
matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged to reckon, not with a
compact province such as those in which many Old World literatures
have been produced, but with what our grandfathers considered a
"boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago
"organized" for political purposes: but so far as literature is
concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been
constantly observed, no literary capital, like London or Paris, to
serve as the seat of centralized authority; no code of literary
procedure and conduct; no "lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of
letters, whose judgments are recognized and obeyed. American public
opinion asserts itself with singular unanimity and promptness in the
field of politics. In literary matters we remain in the stage of
anarchic individualism, liable to be stampeded from time to time by
mob-excitement over a popular novel or moralistic tract, and then
disintegrating, as before, into an incoherent mass of individually
intelligent readers.

The reader who has some personal acquaintance with the variations of
type in different sections of this immense territory of ours finds his
curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence of sectional and local
characteristics. There are sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of
course, in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in
all of the countries a correspondin