ken of
the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of
political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment
of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring
even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does
affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is
demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation
is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying
dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on
a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable
evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a
masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations.
These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in
America.

There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the
influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of
Keats. He can no doubt be assigned to the George the Fourth period by a
critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic
political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost
untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the
seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis
Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore,
Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged
Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he
attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, from
Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find
in Poe, who is one of the indubitable assets of American literature,
anything distinctly American.

Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer,
there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature,
and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate
representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known
to-day that the so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most of
which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to
four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and
that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most
characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their
more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all
the lost statues, plays, poems, an