peculiarly
national attitude toward the universal human questions.

In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics
of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De
Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It
may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in
fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these
particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the
results of American workers have recently received expert and by no
means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides
of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions
must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies.
He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance
writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere
intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses
of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for
self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of
personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and
knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the
age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling
that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation.

One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look
at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a
licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need
recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle
Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as
that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by
peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages
of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr.
Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad,"
at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary
recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and
one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is
obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife
and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly;
considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow
travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are
notic