THROUGH THREEFOLD TENSION 197 



the American branches of the English-speaking 

 people, contemporary literature was in 1860 

 of well-defined importance. By that date the 

 United States had fairly freed itself from the 

 reproach of utter unproductiveness in this field. 

 Only the most narrow and hidebound devotees 

 of expiring English Toryism still failed to find 

 a readable American book. Irving, Cooper, 

 and Poe had won distinct, if not wildly enthu 

 siastic, recognition from the oracles of literary 

 taste in Britain. Prescott, Motley, and Emer 

 son were receiving attention. Not a few other 

 writers were wresting from the cultivated classes 

 of the United Kingdom the hesitating admis 

 sion that the American democracy might yet 

 mean something in the life of the spirit. The 

 harmonizing influence of this feeling had its 

 complement in the impression made by British 

 writers in America. The stars of the mid- 

 Victorian galaxy were glowing with meridian 

 splendor in 1860. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, 

 Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, and George 

 Eliot to name but a few were honored as 

 intensively, if not as extensively, in the United 

 States as in England. One of them, Charles 

 Dickens, had vogue and popularity far above 

 all the rest in the United States, and this de- 



