ilby," it seems
to me it would have been an American rather than a full-blooded
Englishman. The keenness of the American appreciation of the book
corresponds to elements in the American nature. The Anglo-French blend
of Mr. Du Maurier's literary genius finds nearer analogues in American
literature than in either English or French.

The best writing of our American cousins has, of course, much that it
shares with our own, much that is purely English in source and
inspiration. Longfellow, for instance, might almost have been an
Englishman, and his great popularity in England probably owed nothing
to the attraction exercised by the unfamiliar. The English traits,
moreover, are often readily discernible even in those works that smack
most of the soil. When, however, we seek the differentiating marks of
American literature, we find that many of them are also
characteristics of the writings of Mr. Du Maurier, while they are much
less conspicuous in those of Mr. Hall Caine. Among such marks are its
freshness and spontaneity, untrammelled by authority or tradition; its
courage in tackling problems elsewhere tabooed; its breezy
intrepidity, rooted half in conscious will and half in _naive_
ignorance. Besides these, we find features that we should hardly have
expected on _a priori_ grounds. A wideness of sweep and elemental
greatness in proportion to the natural majesty of the huge new
continent are hardly present; Walt Whitman remains an isolated
phenomenon. Instead, we meet in the best American literature an almost
aristocratic daintiness and feeling for the refined and select. As
compared with the British school, the leading American school is
marked by an increased delicacy of _finesse_, a tendency to refine and
refine, a perhaps exaggerated dread of the platitude and the
commonplace, a fondness for analysis, a preference for character over
event, an avoidance of absolutely untempered seriousness and solidity.
Mr. Bryce notes that the verdicts of the best literary circles of the
United States often seem to "proceed from a more delicate and
sympathetic insight" than ours.

This fastidiousness of the best writers and critics of America is by
no means inconsistent with the existence of an enormous class of
half-educated readers, who devour the kind of "literature" provided
for them, and batten in their various degrees on the productions of
Mr. E.P. Roe, Miss Laura Jean Libbey, or the _Sunday War-Whoop_. The
evolution of democ