The best writing of our American cousins has, of course, much that it shares with our own, much that is purely English in source and inspiration.  Longfellow, for instance, might almost have been an Englishman, and his great popularity in England probably owed nothing to the attraction exercised by the unfamiliar.  The English traits, moreover, are often readily discernible even in those works that smack most of the soil.  When, however, we seek the differentiating marks of American literature, we find that many of them are also characteristics of the writings of Mr. Du Maurier, while they are much less conspicuous in those of Mr. Hall Caine.  Among such marks are its freshness and spontaneity, untrammelled by authority or tradition; its courage in tackling problems elsewhere tabooed; its breezy intrepidity, rooted half in conscious will and half in naive ignorance.  Besides these, we find features that we should hardly have expected on a priori grounds.  A wideness of sweep and elemental greatness in proportion to the natural majesty of the huge new continent are hardly present; Walt Whitman remains an isolated phenomenon.  Instead, we meet in the best American literature an almost aristocratic daintiness and feeling for the refined and select.  As compared with the British school, the leading American school is marked by an increased delicacy of finesse, a tendency to refine and refine, a perhaps exaggerated dread of the platitude and the commonplace, a fondness for analysis, a preference for character over event, an avoidance of absolutely untempered seriousness and solidity.  Mr. Bryce notes that the verdicts of the best literary circles of the United States often seem to “proceed from a more delicate and sympathetic insight” than ours.

This fastidiousness of the best writers and critics of America is by no means inconsistent with the existence of an enormous class of half-educated readers, who devour the kind of “literature” provided for them, and batten in their various degrees on the productions of Mr. E.P.  Roe, Miss Laura Jean Libbey, or the Sunday War-Whoop.  The evolution of democracy in the literary sphere is exactly analogous to its course in the political sphere.  In both there is the same tendency to go too far, to overturn the good and legitimate authority as well as the bad and oppressive; both are apt, to use the homely German proverb, “to throw the baby out of the bath along with the dirty water.”  This lack of discrimination leads to the rushing in of fools where angels might well fear to tread.  All sorts of men try to write books, and all sorts of men think they are able to judge them.  The old standard of authority is overthrown, and for a time no other takes its place with the great mass of the reading public.  This state of affairs is, however, by no means one that need make us despair of the literary future of America.  It reminds me of the mental condition of a kindly American tourist who once called at our office in Leipsic