dant cause for strenuous effort among those who give their lives to the intellectual service of America, but there is no cause for fear. If we can only avoid incorporating superficiality Into our institutions, literature will come when all is ready, and when it comes will be of the best. It is not enough to make England or France our standard. There is something in the present atmosphere of England which seems fatal to genius : its fruits do not mature and mellow, but grow more and more acid until they drop. Give Ruskin space enough, and he grows frarftic and beats the air like Carlyle; and Browning’s last volume is scarcely better. Thackeray was tinged with the same bitterness, but he was the last Englishman who could be said, in any artistic sense, to have a style; as Heine was the last German. The French seems the only prose literature of the present day in which the element of form has any prominent place ; and literature in France is after all but a favored slave. This surely leaves a clear field for America.
But it is peculiarly important for us to remember that we can make no progress through affectation or spasm, only by accepting the essential laws of art, which are the same for the whole human race. Any misconceived patronage— to call anything art merely because it interests us as American — must react against us in the end. A certain point of culture once reached, we become citizens of the world. Art is higher than nations, older than many centuries ; its code includes no local or partial provisions. No Paris Exposition is truly universal, compared with that vast gallery of Time to which nations and ages are but contributors. So far as circumstances excuse America from being yet amenable before this high tribunal, she is safe ; but if she enters its jurisdiction, she must own its laws. Neither man nor nation can develop by defying traditions, but by first mastering and then remoulding them. That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world. Above all other races and all other times, we should be full of hearty faith. It is but a few years since we heard it said that the age was dull and mean, and inspiration gone. A single gunshot turned meanness to self-sacrifice, mercenary toil to the vigils of the camp and the transports of battle. It linked boyish and girlish life to new opportunities, sweeter self-devotions, more heroic endings; tied and loosed the threads of existence in profounder complications. That is all past now; but its results can never pass. The nation has found its true grandeur by war, but must retain it in peace.
Peace too has its infinite resources, after a nation has once become conscious of itself. It is impossible that human life should ever be utterly impoverished, and all the currents of American civilization now tend to its enrichment. This vast development of rudimentary intellect, this mingling of nationalities, these opportunities of books and travel, educate in this new race a thousand new susceptibilities. Then comes Passion, a hand straying freely through all the chords, and thrilling all with magic. We cannot exclude it, a forbidden guest. It re-creates itself in each generation, and bids art live. Rouge gagne. If the romance of life does not assert itself in safe and innocent ways, it finds its outlet with fatal certainty in guilt; as we see colorless Puritanism touched with scarlet glory through the glass of Hawthorne. Every form of human life is romantic; every age may become classic. Lamentations, doubts, discouragements, all are wasted things. Everything is here, between these Atlantic and Pacific shores, save only the perfected utterance that comes with years. Between Shakespeare in his cradle and Shakespeare in Hamlet there was needed but an interval of time, and the same sublime condition is all that lies between the America of toil and the America of art.
