years, beginning to find their way into English popular
reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to
an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school
was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the
Lake Poets. So little thought have Englishmen given to the literature of
the United States, that they commonly assume any author who wrote in
English to be, as a matter of course, an Englishman. It is only the
uneducated among the educated classes who do not know that Longfellow
was an American--though I have met such,--but among the educated a small
percentage only, I imagine, would remember, unless suggestion was made
to them, that, for instance, Motley and Bancroft among historians, or
Agassiz and Audubon among men of science (even though one was born in
Switzerland) were Americans. To the vast majority, of course, such names
are names and nothing more, which may not be particularly reprehensible.
But while on the one hand a general indifference to American literature
as a whole has carried with it a lack of acquaintance with individual
writers, that lack of acquaintance with the individuals naturally
reacted to confirm disbelief in the existence of any respectable body of
American literature. And the chilling and century-long contempt of the
English public and of English critics for all American writing produced
its result in a national exaggeration in American minds of their own
shortcomings. Only within the last ten years have Americans as a whole
come to believe that the work of an American writer (excepting only a
very small group) can be on a plane with that of Englishmen.

In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy
a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades
ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its
fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a
well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the
United States as--perhaps more certain than it was--in England. That has
changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in
England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of
necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to
their own writers--a dozen or a score of them--and only then do they
seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name
may be that it bears,