from history. If American literature be really
"Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions," as defined by
the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical
product of American literature. A certain modicum of truth may rest in
this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted
liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the
future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy
past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself,
and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living
present. He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of
the ranks of American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as
his early writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its
face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.

To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be
placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely
unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less
arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour
because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly
comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British
critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they
would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The
New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the
futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for
extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth
in America eternally gives to old age. "America has produced great
artists," admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains that "that
fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the
end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are
not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave,
barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with
the spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and
startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man." This sweet
and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr.
Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two
American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the
art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and