I do not wish to seem to be docketing all American literature in these brief comparisons. What I desire is to point to this common interest of our writers in the needs of democracy. Whitman, who wrote always for the most vigorous and sometimes for the best emotions of the many, might continue the argument. Howells, whose zest for the familiar experience kept his penetrating intellect busy with problems important for democracy, is another example. Poe, and Henry James in his later years, fall without both groups, being as indifferent to democracy as they are solicitous for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it is by such men that the writers who sway the masses are trained in the technique of their craft. In short, by and large, our literature is remarkable for its substructure of what might be called democratic idealism--idealism applied to the needs of a growing democracy. If the reader doubts, let him compare Emerson with Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and answer whether our writers have not been formed by the social needs of America. That this is true of so many men, and has led to the cross-fertilization between popular writers and intellectuals of which I have written above, is perhaps more readily explained when one considers how homogeneous our society has been, how few and how slight its mental cleavages. Conservative and radical, traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, democrat and aristocrat--such clefts have not gone so deep with us as with other nations. Except for times of stress, as in the decade between 1765 and 1775, or in the years just before the Civil War, it would be hard to group, for example, our writers by fundamental differences in their philosophy of living. Whitman one could classify, and Poe and Irving, but the difficulty rapidly increases as the list lengthens. We have been homogeneous by a common tradition of liberalism, by a common environment varying not too greatly between Boston and the newer West. And our literature has resembled us. And now, when at last our literature, like our politics and our economics, must at last challenge world scrutiny, this national character, and all that represents it, has come suddenly to seem of vast importance. We have become vividly aware of it, and we realize that we are in dire need of self-expression--of self-expression by new literature. The self-consciousness of Americans throughout the nineteenth century, which showed itself keenly in their restlessness under foreign criticism and their irrepressible desire to talk about God’s country, was of a different kind. It was due to a nervous uncertainty as to the success of the American experiment. We were more concerned with what others thought of our qualities than with what we were or had been. But three things have altered our situation radically, and made us think more of character and less of reputation.