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Daughter, come rising out of the dark and would reproach me with ingratitude, did I not pay this last tribute of respect to their author.

There are other things in the English papers. In The Athenaeum there is a long article by Mr. Conrad Aiken on the English attitude towards American literature ; and, on this point, which is, I suppose, of interest to readers of The Dial as well as to me, I may be permitted to make a few observations. Mr. Aiken is profoundly dissatisfied with what he conceives us to think of you. "We remain," he says, "for the English, a nation of barbarians—uncouth, restless, sharp at a bargain; enormously conceited and naked of culture." This he calls "the Dickens legend" and not unnaturally he dislikes it. He goes on to cite a number of American authors who are approved in England; and of these, some, he says, such as Hawthorne and Poe, we put out of the argument as not being truly American, while others, such as Whitman and O. Henry, we welcome by reason of their barbarity, determined as we are to see in your literature only what we expect to see there, and moreover, only what will leave us with a comfortable sense of superiority and condescension. "Give us," says his imaginary Englishman, "the broad, the elemental and the raw! . . . This is what America is for. Here we have the fine flower of its singular culture." No wonder Mr. Aiken is annoyed! But the first observation that comes to my pen is that his imaginary Englishman is, in fact, so far as I know, quite imaginary. We discuss American literature a great deal in England, but I can put my hand on my heart and declare that I have never excluded any book from the discussion on the ground that it was not sufficiently American, though I have heard Americans do so. Why indeed should I? National characteristics are possible and indeed inevitable in any given part of that body.

The literature of Italy and the literature of England present, as wholes, sufficiently vivid contrasts; but there are Italian influences in, say, Spenser and Shelley. French literature as a whole has its own character, but who can deny the English and, let me say, the American influences visible in the work of Baudelaire and Verlaine? These foreign influences are not necessarily bad things. They are bad only when their power is due solely to the fact that they are exotic. One's complaint against certain American poets is not that they are not sufficiently "American," but that they resemble too much bad French or English poets—and that is a complaint that