It is only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson:  “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic . . . .  I embrace the common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . .  Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote . . . .  The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries . . . .  The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . .  To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise . . . .  Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos.”

Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple of Delphos to the dull people; but if we ought, and if we did, they would still insist upon having them.  An English novel, full of titles and rank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people; their weak and childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; they know what they are reading; the fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them; whereas a story of our own life, honestly studied and faithfully represented, troubles them with varied misgiving.  They are not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is good society; its characters, so like their own, strike them as commonplace; they say they do not wish to know such people.

Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weak with most people, with the vast majority who “ask for the great, the remote, the romantic,” who cannot “embrace the common,” cannot “sit at the feet of the familiar and the low,” in the good company of Emerson.  We are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the fine people we have read about.  We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore “the worth of the vulgar,” in believing that the superfine is better.

XVII.

Another Spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me great pleasure, is so far from being of the same mind of Senor Valdes about fiction that he boldly declares himself, in the preface to his ’Pepita Ximenez,’ “an advocate of art for art’s sake.”  I heartily agree with him that it is “in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, to attempt to prove theses by writing stories,” and yet if it is true that “the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithful representation of human actions and human passions, and to create by this fidelity to nature a beautiful work,” and if “the creation of the beautiful” is solely “the object of art,” it never