But, in one respect, we are likely to diverge.  I refer to literature; in that, assimilation is neither probable nor desirable.  We were brought up on the literature of England; our first efforts were imitations of it; we were criticised—­we criticised ourselves on its standards.  We compared every new aspirant in letters to some English writer.  We were patted on the back if we resembled the English models; we were stared at or sneered at if we did not.  When we began to produce something that was the product of our own soil and our own social conditions, it was still judged by the old standards, or, if it was too original for that, it was only accepted because it was curious or bizarre, interesting for its oddity.  The criticism that we received for our best was evidently founded on such indifference or toleration that it was galling.  At first we were surprised; then we were grieved; then we were indignant.  We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the English critics say of us.  We have recovered our balance.  We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to “Knickerbocker’s New York”; that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the “Biglow Papers.”  We used to be irritated at what we called the snobbishness of English critics of a certain school; we are so no longer, for we see that its criticism is only the result of ignorance—­simply of inability to understand.

And we the more readily pardon it, because of the inability we have to understand English conditions, and the English dialect, which has more and more diverged from the language as it was at the time of the separation.  We have so constantly read English literature, and kept ourselves so well informed of their social life, as it is exhibited in novels and essays, that we are not so much in the dark with regard to them as they are with regard to us; still we are more and more bothered by the insular dialect.  I do not propose to criticise it; it is our misfortune, perhaps our fault, that we do not understand it; and I only refer to it to say that we should not be too hard on the Saturday Review critic when he is complaining of the American dialect in the English that Mr. Howells writes.  How can the Englishman be expected to come into sympathy with the fiction that has New England for its subject—­from Hawthorne’s down to that of our present novelists—­when he is ignorant of the whole background on which it is cast; when all the social conditions are an enigma to him; when, if he has, historically, some conception of Puritan society, he cannot have a glimmer of comprehension of the subtle modifications and changes it has undergone in a century?  When he visits America and sees it, it is a puzzle to him.  How, then, can he be expected to comprehend it when it is depicted to the life in books?