ABSTRACT
To my mind America, vast and fruitful as it appears today, is even yet, for its most important results, entirely in the tentative state. (Its very formation-stir and whirling trials and essays more splendid and picturesque, to my thinking, than the accomplished growths and shows of other lands, through European history or Greece, or all the past.) Surely a New World literature, worthy the name, is not to be, if it ever comes, some fiction, or fancy, or bit of sentimentalism or polished work merely by itself or in abstraction. So long as such literature is no born branch and off-shoot of the Nationality, rooted and grown from its roots and fibred with its fibre, it can never answer any deep call or perennial need. Perhaps the untaught Republic is deeper, wiser, than its teachers. The best literature is always a result of something far greater than itself-is not the hero, but the portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there must be the transaction. Beyond the old masterpieces, the Iliad, the interminable Hindu epics, the Greek tragedies, even the Bible itself, range the immense facts of what must have preceded them, their sine qua non-the veritable poems and masterpieces, of which these are but shreds and cartoons.
