our
literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to
include "the social and economic and geographical background of
American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the
passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth
and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history
must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory,
for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas
debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the
beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all
their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled
ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed
in material things."

Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again
and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a
Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like
the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_,
without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which
has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or
moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all.
The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness,
simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been
but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a
noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may
instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen
literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions
which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not
to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and
the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme.
Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen
literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men,
there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are
now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been
expressed by our representative writers.

Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance
calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during
a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The
most rudimentary biograp