First of all, for future National Literature in
America, New England (the technically moral and schoolmaster region,
as a cynical fellow I know calls it) and the three or four great
Atlantic-coast cities, highly as they to-day suppose they dominate the
whole, will have to haul in their horns. _Ensemble_ is the tap-root
of National Literature. America is become already a huge world
of peoples, rounded and orbic climates, idiocrasies, and
geographies--forty-four Nations curiously and irresistibly blent and
aggregated in ONE NATION, with one imperial language, and one unitary
set of social and legal standards over all--and (I predict) a yet to
be National Literature. (In my mind this last, if it ever comes, is
to prove grander and more important for the Commonwealth than its
politics and material wealth and trade, vast and indispensable as
those are.)
Think a moment what must, beyond peradventure, be the real permanent
sub-bases, or lack of them. Books profoundly considered show a great
nation more than anything else--more than laws or manners. (This is,
of course, probably the deep-down meaning of that well-buried but
ever-vital platitude, Let me sing the people's songs, and I don't care
who makes their laws.) Books too reflect humanity _en masse_, and
surely show them splendidly, or the reverse, and prove or celebrate
their prevalent traits (these last the main things.) Homer grew out of
and has held the ages, and holds to-day, by the universal admiration
for personal prowess, courage, rankness, _amour propre_, leadership,
inherent in the whole human race.
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