oubt that it
is on its literature that a country must rely for its permanent
representation? The countries that are forgotten, or are of no
importance in the councils of the world, are countries without
literature. Greece and Rome are more real in print than ever they were
in marble. Though, as we know, prophets are not without honour save in
their own countries and among their own kindred, the time comes when
their countries and kindred are entirely without honour save by reason
of those very prophets they once despised, rejected, stoned, and
crucified. Subtract its great men from a nation, and where is its
greatness?

Similarly, everything, however trifling, that has been written about,
so long as it has been written about sufficiently well, becomes
relatively enduring and representative of the country in which it is
found. To an American, for example, the significance of a skylark is
that Shelley sang it to skies where even it could never have mounted;
and any one who has heard the nightingale must, if he be open-minded,
confess its tremendous debt to Keats: a tenth part genuine song, the
rest moon, stars, silence, and John Keats,--such is the nightingale.
The real truth about a country will never be known till every
representative type and condition in it have found their inspired
literary mouthpiece. Meanwhile one country takes its opinion of another
from the apercus of a few brilliant but often irresponsible or
prejudiced writers,--and really it is rather in what those writers
leave out than in what they put in that one must seek the more reliable
data of national character.

A quaint example of association occurs to me from the experience of a
friend of mine, "rich enough to lend to the poor." Having met an
American friend newly landed at Liverpool, and a hurried quarter of an
hour being all that was available for lunch, "Come let us have a
pork-pie and a bottle of Bass" he had suggested.

"Pork-pies!" said the American, with a delighted sense of discovering
the country,--"why, you read about them in Dickens!" Who shall say but
that this instinctive association was an involuntary severe, but not
inapplicable, criticism? A nightingale suggests Keats; a pork-pie,
Dickens.

Similarly with absinthe, grisettes, the Latin Quarter, and so on.

Why, you read about them in Murger, in Musset, in Balzac, and in
Flaubert; and the fact of your having read about them is, I may add,
their chief importance.

So ram