x INTRODUCTION. 



it would almost seem that while superior excellence of produc 

 tion may long remain the attribute of England, the decisive 

 voice in criticism may pass to America. In proportion as 

 literature becomes, as it is becoming, cosmopolitan, as the great 

 author is received as the common heritage of all nations, the 

 more liberal and universal taste must supplant the narrower 

 and more exclusively national. While indigenous American 

 literature, the only native article which has no help from a 

 protective tariff, struggles as hopelessly with the foreigner as 

 British corn contends with American, and for the same reason ; 

 the affluence of importation, mischievous in many respects, 

 fosters that width of view and freedom from conventional 

 prejudice which distinguishes American judgment in literary as 

 in other matters. Americans far surpass us English in the 

 prompt recognition of excellence. Carlyle, De Quincey, 

 Coventry Patmore, James Martineau, found their first consider 

 able audiences across the Atlantic. Americans are quicker to 

 discover the merits of a foreign author, more thorough in 

 naturalising him, and demand a higher standard of excellence 

 in the translation of his works. Hence they are better fitted 

 than we to assign a writer his proper place without unreasonable 

 delay, and to recommend him to the world. All the novels of 

 Marie Schwarz have been translated in America ; in England 

 scarcely one. Turgeneff, Bjorson, Jonas Lie, are almost as much 

 household words as Hawthorne or Henry James. At the same 

 time, writers of that peculiarly intense nationalism which 

 circumscribes itself within the limits of a district, such as Cable 

 and Egbert Craddock, are no less popular. This flexibility and 

 catholicity of taste will invest American criticism with especial 

 authority, as it becomes more generally recognised. It 

 admirably fits America to do for England what Greece might 

 have done for Rome to win an entrance for her literature into 

 nations hitherto repelled by her insularity, or, failing that, to 

 make her independent of them. 



Two natural and inevitable developments may be remarked 

 in American criticism. There is first the classical, conservative, 

 cautious school of the Irvings and Channings and Ticknors, 



