There is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is the question whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarm our patriotism.  Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold Frederic, as well as in Mark Twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is very great; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair measure of home-keeping authorship.  Our destitution is not nearly so great now in the absence of Mr. James and Mr. Crawford as it was in the times before the “struggle for material prosperity” when Washington Irving went and lived in England and on the European continent well-nigh half his life.

Sir Lepel Griffin—­or Sir Lepel Griffin’s reporter—­seems to forget the fact of Irving’s long absenteeism when he classes him with “the old race” of eminent American authors who stayed at home.  But really none of those he names were so constant to our air as he seems—­or his reporter seems —­to think.  Longfellow sojourned three or four years in Germany, Spain, and Italy; Holmes spent as great time in Paris; Bryant was a frequent traveller, and each of them “drew his inspiration” now and then from alien sources.  Lowell was many years in Italy, Spain, and England; Motley spent more than half his life abroad; Hawthorne was away from us nearly a decade.

II.

If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do not feel that I am proving too much in another.  My facts go to show that the literary spirit is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere.  If any good American were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, I should first advise him that American literature was not derived from the folklore of the red Indians, but was, as I have said once before, a condition of English literature, and was independent even of our independence.  Then I should entreat him to consider the case of foreign authors who had found it more comfortable or more profitable to live out of their respective countries than in them.  I should allege for his consolation the case of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more latterly that of the Brownings and Walter Savage Landor, who preferred an Italian to an English sojourn; and yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who voluntarily lived several years in Vermont, and has “drawn his inspiration” in notable instances from the life of these States.  It will serve him also to consider that the two greatest Norwegian authors, Bjornsen and Ibsen, have both lived long in France and Italy.  Heinrich Heine loved to live in Paris much better than in Dusseldorf, or even in Hamburg; and Tourguenief himself, who said that any man’s country could get on without him, but no man could get on without his country, managed to dispense with his own in the French capital, and died there after he was quite free to go back to St. Petersburg.  In the last century Rousseau lived in France rather than Switzerland; Voltaire at least tried to live in Prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; Goldoni left fame and friends in Venice for the favor of princes in Paris.