e could voice the opposite desires of the
northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern
languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies
the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its
own use. Indeed, these racial characteristics are so distinct and so
evident to us now that we fancy we can detect them even tho they are
disguised in the language of Rome; and we find significance in the fact
that Seneca, the grandiloquent rhetorician, was by birth a Spaniard, and
that Petronius, the robust realist, was probably born in what is now
France.

The segregation of nationality has been accompanied by an increasing
interest in the several states out of which the nation has made itself,
and sometimes even by an effort to raise the dialects of these provinces
up to the literary standard of the national language. In this there is
no disloyalty to the national ideal,--rather is it to be taken as a
tribute to the nation, since it seeks to call attention again to the
several strands twined in the single bond. In literature this tendency
is reflected in a wider liking for local color and in an intenser relish
for the flavor of the soil. We find Verga painting the violent passions
of the Sicilians, and Reuter depicting the calmer joys of the
Platt-Deutsch. We see Maupassant etching the canny and cautious Normans,
while Daudet brushed in broadly the expansive exuberance of the
Provencals. We delight alike in the Wessex-folk of Mr. Hardy and in the
humorous Scots of Mr. Barrie. We extend an equal welcome to the patient
figures of New England spinsterhood as drawn by Miss Jewett and Miss
Wilkins, and to the virile Westerners set boldly on their feet by Mr.
Wister and Mr. Garland.

What we wish to have explored for us are not only the nooks and corners
of our own nation; those of other races appeal also to our sympathetic
curiosity. These inquiries help us to understand the larger peoples, of
whom the smaller communities are constituent elements. They serve to
sharpen our insight into the differences which divide one race from
another; and the contrast of Daudet and Maupassant on the one hand with
Mark Twain and Kipling on the other brings out the width of the gap that
yawns between the Latins (with their solidarity of the family and their
reliance on the social instinct) and the Teutons (with their energetic
independence and their aggressive individuality). With increase