Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Diane Monico, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net THE AMERICAN MIND _The E. T. Earl Lectures_ 1912 By the Same Author The American Mind Park-Street Papers John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir Walt Whitman The Amateur Spirit A Study of Prose Fiction The Powers at Play The Plated City Salem Kittredge and Other Stories The Broughton House The American Mind By Bliss Perry [Illustration: The Riverside Press] Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company 1912 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Published October 1912_ TO WALTER MORRIS HART Preface _The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._ _The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._ B. P. CAMBRIDGE, 1912. Contents I. RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 3 II. THE AMERICAN MIND 47 III. AMERICAN IDEALISM 86 IV. ROMANCE AND REACTION 128 V. HUMOR AND SATIRE 166 VI. INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 209 THE AMERICAN MIND I Race, Nation, and Book Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and environment in determining the character of any literary production, what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly. Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions, must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual writers.