What we wish to have explored for us are not only the nooks and corners of our own nation; those of other races appeal also to our sympathetic curiosity.  These inquiries help us to understand the larger peoples, of whom the smaller communities are constituent elements.  They serve to sharpen our insight into the differences which divide one race from another; and the contrast of Daudet and Maupassant on the one hand with Mark Twain and Kipling on the other brings out the width of the gap that yawns between the Latins (with their solidarity of the family and their reliance on the social instinct) and the Teutons (with their energetic independence and their aggressive individuality).  With increase of knowledge there is less likelihood of mutual misunderstandings; and here literature performs a most useful service to the cause of civilization.  As Tennyson once said:  “It is the authors, more than the diplomats, who make nations love one another.”  Fortunately, no high tariff can keep out the masterpieces of foreign literature which freely cross the frontier, bearing messages of good-will and broadening our understanding of our fellowmen.

IV

The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the representation of provincial peculiarities is to-day accompanied by an increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers of race and of language.  More than fourscore years ago, Goethe said that even then national literature was “rather an unmeaning term” as “the epoch of world-literature was at hand.”  With all his wisdom Goethe failed to perceive that cosmopolitanism is a sorry thing when it is not the final expression of patriotism.  An artist without a country and with no roots in the soil of his nativity is not likely to bring forth flower and fruit.  As an American critic aptly put it, “a true cosmopolitan is at home,—­even in his own country.”  A Russian novelist set forth the same thought; and it was the wisest character in Turgenieff’s ’Dimitri Roudine’ who asserted that the great misfortune of the hero was his ignorance of his native land:—­“Russia can get along without any of us, but we cannot do without Russia.  Wo betide him who does not understand her, and still more him who really forgets the manners and the ideas of his fatherland!  Cosmopolitanism is an absurdity and a zero,—­less than a zero; outside of nationality, there is no art, no truth, no life possible.”

Perhaps it may be feasible to attempt a reconciliation of Turgenieff and Goethe, by pointing out that the cosmopolitanism of this growing century is revealed mainly in a similarity of the external forms of literature, while it is the national spirit which supplies the essential inspiration that gives life.  For example, it is a fact that the ‘Demi-monde’ of Dumas, the ‘Pillars of Society’ of Ibsen, the ‘Magda’ of Sudermann, the ‘Grand Galeoto’ of Echegaray, the ‘Second Mrs.