BOOK-CLASSES--AMERICA'S LITERATURE
For certain purposes, literary productions through all the recorded
ages may be roughly divided into two classes. The first consisting of
only a score or two, perhaps less, of typical, primal, representative
works, different from any before, and embodying in themselves their
own main laws and reasons for being. Then the second class, books and
writings innumerable, incessant--to be briefly described as radiations
or offshoots, or more or less imitations of the first. The works of
the first class, as said, have their own laws, and may indeed be
described as making those laws, and amenable only to them. The sharp
warning of Margaret Fuller, unquell'd for thirty years, yet sounds in
the air: "It does not follow that because the United States print and
read more books, magazines, and newspapers than all the rest of the
world, that they really have, therefore, a literature."
OUR REAL CULMINATION
The final culmination of this vast and varied Republic will be the
production and perennial establishment of millions of comfortable city
homesteads and moderate-sized farms, healthy and independent, single
separate ownership, fee simple, life in them complete but cheap,
within reach of all. Exceptional wealth, splendor, countless
manufactures, excess of exports, immense capital and capitalists, the
five-dollar-a-day hotels well fill'd, artificial improvements,
even books, colleges, and the suffrage--all, in many respects, in
themselves, (hard as it is to say so, and sharp as a surgeon's lance,)
form, more or less, a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity,
except as they contribute by curious indirections to that
culmination--seem to me mainly of value, or worth consideration, only
with reference to it.
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