commonplace with some people that America has not developed a great
_American_ literature. If this merely means that, in casting off her
allegiance to George III., America did not cast off her allegiance to
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, the
reproach, if it be one, must be accepted. If it be a humiliation to
American authors to own the traditions and standards established by
these men, and thereby to enrol themselves in their immortal fellowship,
why, then it must be owned that they have deliberately incurred that
humiliation. One American of vivid originality tried to escape it, and
with what result? Simply that Whitman holds a place of his own, somewhat
like that of Blake one might say, in the literature of the English
language, and has produced at least as much effect in England as in
America. If, on the other hand, it be implied that American literature
feebly imitates English literature, and fails to present an original and
adequate interpretation of American life, no reproach could well be more
flagrantly unjust. It is not only the abstract merit of American
literature, though that is very high, but precisely the Americanism of
it, that gives it its value in the eyes of all thinking Englishmen. Only
one American author of the first rank could possibly, at a superficial
glance, appear--not so much English as--European, cosmopolitan. I mean,
of course, Edgar Allan Poe, who has left perhaps a deeper impress upon
literature outside the English-speaking countries than any other
imaginative writer of the century, with the exception of Byron. Poe was
a born idealist, a creature of pure intelligence. Whether in poetry or
fiction, he was always solving problems; and it is hard to be
distinctively national in an exercise of pure intelligence. We do not
look for local colour in, for example, the agreeable essays of Euclid.
But Poe's intelligence was, at bottom, of a characteristically American
type. He was the Edison of romance.[N] As for the other great writers of
America, what can be more patent than their Americanism? Speaking only,
for the present, of those who have joined the majority, I would name two
who seem to me to stand with Poe in the very front rank of original
genius. They are Emerson, that starlike spirit, dwelling in a serener
ether than ours, which, though we may never attain, it is yet a
refreshment to look up to; and Hawthorne, not perhaps the greatest
romancer in the English to