Page:Men of Mark in America vol 2.djvu/15

 IDEALS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE ix the soul speaks with the authority of perfect truth. So we turn to the great passages of the Bible for the clearest glimpses of the Hebrew spirit; to Homer and the tragedies for the fullest unveiling of the genius of the Greek; to Spenser and Shakespeare for the secret of the tremendous vitality of the English spirit in the age of Elizabeth.

It is to the literature of the American people, therefore, and not to their manifold and consuming activities, that we turn when we try to discover what they care for most; those ultimate aims which we call ideals. There is more of New England in Hawthorne's books than in the formal histories; more of the secret hopes of America in Emerson's essays than in all political documents and orations; more of the spirit and quality of the old social order in the South in the stories of Mr. Page, Mr. Allen, Mr. Harris than in contemporary records. It is genius alone which divines what is in the heart of a people, and genius alone has the skill to lay that heart bare to the world. The older America has left its record in the pages of Emerson, Irving, Hawthorne, Bryant, Lowell, Poe, Whittier, Holmes, Thoreau; the America of the period which followed the Civil war wrote much of its inner history in the prose and verse of Whitman, Lanier, Taylor, Sill, Warner, Higginson, Hale; the spirit and life of the America of today is reflected in the work of Aldrich, Stedman, Howells, Cable, Page, Allen, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Mrs. Deland and their contemporaries.

In our earlier books there was a certain unity which revealed a common stock of ideas, sentiments, literary tradition. Poe stands by himself, but neither in mood nor in feeling for his art is he wholly separated from Hawthorne, with whom he shares the highest honors of distinctly artistic achievement. In a general way Irving, Hawthorne and Poe express American life at the period when that life first came to consciousness in literature. The introspection of New England and the subtlety of self-analysis which was bred in the Puritan; the cosmopolitan urbanity, humor and regard for diversities of taste and charm of New York; the refinement of feeling for women,