er. The moulding hand of the German
university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for
seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the
influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars
and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark
upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used
to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry,
reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there
assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the
great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot
be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson.
Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American
imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris
was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the
prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon
experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse
toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the
delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely
what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present
hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought
of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the
torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any
country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even
though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory.

Finally, we must bear in mind that purely literary evidence as to the
existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many
non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the
characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to
select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as
sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must
broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature
must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional
quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for
purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of
letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as
the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of