I think it has been so recognized. Common opinion may not say that Alice is the American girl par excellence, but it certainly sees in her an American girl. American, too, are Mr. Howells's portraits of middle-aged and elderly women. He may be said, indeed, to have been the creator of the American mother, for it was in his writings that she appeared as a constant quantity for the first time; and although there has not been much ado made over her, the guild of writers show their appreciation of the character by adopting her — usually in the rôle of invalid as a conventional figure among minor characters.

But the personage after Colonel Sellers with whom the nation has concerned itself most, and whom it has accepted as most typical, is Daisy Miller. This study by Henry James has little intrinsic attraction at first sight; so little, indeed, at the very last that the verdict of success which it received proceeded from an instinctive perception of its accuracy more than from enthusiasm over its brilliancy. Her genre is that of the American girl abroad. Daisy, in company with her mother and a young brother, travels desultorily over Europe, coming at last to Rome. The mother is still on the level of underbreeding where persons describe themselves often and with unction as "ladies" or "gentlemen." The young brother, on his part, views the Old World with unmitigated contempt. His disgust reaches even to the European heavens. He declares that in America the moon always shines. Daisy does as she likes, and she likes doing abroad what she did at home, namely, to dress herself daintily and talk with "gentlemen." She meets with a cynical youngish American who has lived on the Continent for a long time. He has the flattering consciousness of seeing through the social grade of the Miller family, while Daisy is disturbed at perceiving that something in her is not right to his eyes. She is pleased as a child when

her propositions to go out with "gentlemen succeed, and flatters herself that she must be awakening the jealousy of the man who discomposes her. Unconsciously she refers to him in laying out her daily little schemes of conquest. There is an Italian who believes the family to be rich, and pays his court accordingly to Daisy, who treats him with her habitual little tyrannous self-confidence. Without being a princess, or ever in her life having studied one, she acts continually on the line of absolute sovereignty where men are concerned.

Her associations with the foreign-bred man become more frequent under the discouraging sense that the American is in town and watching her; for her unsophisticated brain has caught at the notion that he must approve of her more if he sees that somebody pays her "devoted attentions." She wants to visit the Coliseum by the light of the moon, and easily induces the Italian to take her. The American, on seeing the two at midnight alone in the desolate place, and knowing that others may see them, is indignant and enraged at the mother. But Mrs. Miller has no idea that she is criticised, or indeed that there is anything unusual in Daisy's doings. She meets her censor with tears when he calls, and with the news of Daisy's death from fever, caught at the Coliseum, tells him her daughter wished her to "she say was not engaged to the Italian, after all," or to naïvely reject the sole conventional pretense left to rescue Daisy's reputation!

The language of the author is unadorned and realistic. But Americans welcomed the disagreeable photographic truths of the study the readier, perhaps, because an open-hearted concession on the points of breeding left them the freer to claim the heroine's maiden purity as a national radical trait. Daisy's innocence, in other words, gives much more satisfaction than the peculiarities of her bringing-up can possibly cause

mortification. The worse for the Europeans who criticise her ways as peculiar! At bottom Daisy is a true Una among the beasts, and she triumphs as such; for the cynical American no less than the Italian is "set about thinking" considerably. The latter, in fact, does not refrain from giving expression to the result of his prolonged wonderment and ultimate conviction. It is in his testimony to Daisy's purity that the final element of success is presented, success which, as we have seen, the nation confidently looks for in the fate of its typical personages.

No like universality and persistency of judgment have been passed upon Elsie Venner and the heroines of books which exhibit modern forms of social activity; as indeed it lies in the nature of the subject of activity to be transient in respect of the poetic interest that can be got out of it, besides being exposed in every case to the suspicion of partisanship. Such a matter as the advocacy or the rejection of woman's rights, even if national to-day, may be international tomorrow. That cannot be called a trait, moreover, which is still in the process of formation. A national trait, on the contrary, is something already formed, the result of manifold preëxistent condi

tions.

The work of fiction that selects

its personages from among the advocates of the movements of the day may have every quality save the one of typical nationalism, which is just that quality which at present concerns us.

Similarly the charming characters of Mr. Cable must also be passed by. The provincialism which he depicts is quite unlike that of Hawthorne or of Bret Harte in being a provincialism which is doomed to decay. New England asceticism and Western enterprise and daring are ingredients which have leavened the character of the whole American people. Not so with French and Creole qualities. These have only a poetic and historic worth, and a narrowing local existence.

Briefly, we find that American writers have embodied the characteristics which distinguish Americans, but as yet have produced few characters that are universally accepted as typically American. Among these accepted characters is the sanguine materialist, who is rooted in selfishness, but sends out runners into the fields of public and private virtue, and the American girl, who is a favorite subject and a new creation in literature. The aged American is a figure totally unknown to our fiction; but the elderly woman, aged by nervous illness before her time, is a very familiar personage.

III.

Upon contrasting our view of American literature with the view which Germans have taken of it, the first fact that strikes us is the persistence of Germans in clinging to our novels of romantic adventure as furnishing the type of the American. Cooper and Bret Harte are the favorites in Germany, and the works of these writers circulate in excellent translations, while our contemporary society fiction, as represented by the works of James and Howells, is read less, and often only in the original; perhaps I should be correct in adding, only after the first-named authors, a fact which deserves attention, inasmuch as Americans by no means select for their reading the productions of the German romanticists in preference to the realistic novels of Auerbach and Freytag.

Scenes of adventure, however, of wild night landscapes, of powerful heroes, and of license in passion were long familiar to the German reading world. Their incorporation in the novels of Cooper and the tales of Bret Harte possessed, therefore, no outlandish strangeness save the one last stirring element of reality. America was a land of license to the unsophisticated burgher, and stories that had for heroes men of primeval recklessness and supreme magnanimity met with spontaneous popularity.

"In truth, our interest in America is of a romantic sort still," Julian Schmidt observes. "There is a preference for the primitiveness of the aboriginal mixed with the old enthusiasm for the champions of the American war for independence, which set the revolutionary movement going in Europe. . . . At first we saw the Indians with Châteaubriand's eyes; then came the series of Cooper's novels." 1

In Cooper's style, accordingly, are the novels of Sealsfield and Gerstaecker. From Ruppius, indeed, down to the German Pioneers of Spielhagen, published in 1872, the main feature of all German productions that have American life for their theme has been adventure. Imminent danger and escape make up their bulk, and heroic virtue, embodied in youthful healthy men and women, stamps all their leading characters. In Max Reichardt, of Ruppius's novel A German, the heroic takes even a Joseph turn, so that chastity is added to the older stereotyped list of superhuman qualities.

As a

We are in a field here with romantic shades for personages, too unsubstantial, in spite of their would-be-force, for analysis. All nuances fail. All likelihood is wanting. We are given mere contours of heroes, as empty as a coat of mail set up in a museum; and just as anybody can don a coat of mail, so might a citizen of any state in the world be fitted into these romantic cases. matter of fact, the outlines of Cooper's heroes are filled out by Gerstaecker, Ruppius, Möllhausen, Spielhagen, and Schücking with German occupants. Native Prussians, Bavarians, or Würtembergers supplant the early Yankee colonists as masters over Indians, enemies, and fate. Indeed, often the tables are turned wholly against the original Yankee. His shrewdness becomes unscrupulousness, while his pure virtues are

1 Deutsche Literatur in 19ten Jahrhundert. 1871. Leipzig.

shown up in the German hero of the story. From the beginning to the end of the tale American license is set in contrast with Teutonic civil order and conscientiousness.

Even Debit and Credit, which is the best novel, perhaps, that Germany has produced, discloses a survival of this romantic tendency. The evil portions of Von Fink's life are the years spent in New York. Freytag makes his hero relate what corruptions he fell into there as a young lad; and it is behind the desk of a German grocery store that the hero's manly sense of discipline and right is so far restored that he urges the American land speculators, who are his partners, to exercise humanity toward the immigrants on their land. When persuasion fails, he bribes the American press to expose the speculators and himself!—thus showing that your true German is as clever at Yankee dodges as the Yankee, besides being as virtuous on a large scale as the original Cooperite.

The truth is, the greater portion of the romantic literature under discussion, both American and German, depends for its characterization upon the field over which its personages move, upon the background of the plot. For this reason it was easy to replace Yankees by Germans; for where peculiarities of landscape and race are depicted with equal skill — and some of the pages of Möllhausen are unsurpassed the result conveys the same impression. It matters very little what nationality is ascribed to personages so long as these are the old ideals of literature, the old "heroes" dubbed with new names and titles.

Nationality after all is more political than geographical. But with Ruppius, Möllhausen, and Sealsfield the geographical and ethnological idea was predominant. Nor was it in their times that Americanism was seen to consist in many-sided social peculiarities, in character and habits, in opinions and views. Thus one fails to find such characteri

zation in their books, where the passive nature of the American hero is dwelt on more than the deeds which he accomplishes; where his surroundings are commonplace and dull (for in America as well as in the Old World most surroundings are commonplace and dull); where indeed the surroundings may be those of the European without in the least detracting from the subtle distinctness of his separate nationalism. An insight into the true nature of a people might have been expected of a literary nation like the German earlier than of the Americans themselves, whose time was engrossed with practical problems. But we seek in vain for evidences of such insight from German writers. On the contrary, they have borrowed from American literature what they possess of insight, and borrowed tardily. Möllhausen is still writing his American novels of adventure, and he has both readers and disciples. The era is a very recent one, in fact, in which "American" has come to mean something besides fighting with red Indians and squabbling with ruffianly gold diggefs.

The change in attitude toward American subjects is very slow in making itself felt. The novels of Cooper obtained a vogue rapidly, but a generation of writers has had time to flourish and decline since his day; yet the obscure levels of German fiction still swarm with Indians and adventurers whenever America is concerned.

Nearly all writers, meanwhile, introduced an American into their fiction, just as they still introduce if not an American, at least an Americanized German. Gutzkow treated the character in Ackermann, one of the personages of his famous Ritter vom Geist; Gustav Freytag, in his novels Soll und Haben and Die Verlorene Handschrift, and in Saalfeld, a character in his drama Die Valentine; while Spielhagen's hero, Leo, in the novels In Reih und Glied and Durch Nacht zum Licht, is also exposed to VOL. LXVIII. — NO. 410.

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American influences. Gutzkow, Spielhagen, and Von Moser have immortalized the Yankee spirit of enterprise in a mannér that contrasts strongly with the rôle which the German, on his side, is made to play in our humorous fiction, and more in accordance with George Eliot's forceful personification Herr Klesmer, who is presented in a large and catholic way.

Yet while the recent writing about Americans is realistic, sharper, better, and more discriminating, it is curious to note that fewer of the new men who occupy themselves with American characteristics have seen the United States than was the case with the old school. Ruppius, Gerstaecker, Sealsfield, and Möllhausen all lived in America for a time, at least. Of the moderns, or realists, perhaps Paul Lindau is the only one who has ever set foot upon the new continent. The material for the portrayal of American traits is gathered, therefore, by the later school, from American contemporary literature, and from Yankee tourists and residents in the fatherland.

The theory that one must see a country if he would write accurately of its people may seem to be disturbed by this fact; but the truth is, this whole subject of national fiction has yet to be worked out. It is easy to perceive that European writers possess certain advantages in separating a few individuals from the vast, confusing, loosely knit American life, and setting them against the compact, familiar background of home characters and manners. These characters stand out in relief, as it were, and can be studied in finest nuances of shade and light. The attention is concentrated. The feelings — and this is not a minor point remain undisturbed. Political and social prepossessions, the elements that unfit the mind most, in our day, for artistic international study, are forgotten before the spectacle of a solitary figure in his pilgrimage amidst

"Sniffs the prostrate wanderer whom he finds in his wide waste,

But starts with instant, lowering fury in a horde's opposing face."

The German in America may have remained the indistinct literary personage we find him because of this lack of isolation. For the two cases are not interchangeable. Germany sends thousands of emigrants to America, while America sends at once but a few lonely students and a mass of restless tourists.

The American author, therefore, has not, like the German, a single person or two for the subject of his studies, but a colony. Can any one predict an early change in the present condition? Is not an additional hindrance to an adequate delineation of the German in our literature to be detected in the continued absorption of the German in American life, an absorption that is likely to arouse the political prepossessions of German writers, and so give rise to a bitter partisan literature on their side, while the absorption confuses the German outline for our own writers?

The second source from which German novelists draw material for the portrayal of American characters, namely, contemporary American fiction, was opened by German authors who were driven from their country by the severity of its military and press laws, and found refuge in America.

Hence has arisen a literature similar to that of the émigrées from France at the beginning of the century; except that for one Madame de Staël who penetrates a foreign society and its literary life our newspaper age scatters the criticisms of innumerable refugees; and in place of long books, Germans write of us in letters, short journalistic notices, and monthly reviews. There is greater variety in the means, however, than is to be found in the results. For just as the French came to understand

through the writings of their exiles, so did the adherents of Scott and Cooper in Germany come to understand through the "men of '48" the traditional nature of the view which they were holding of Americans; they began to substitute Bret Harte for the author of The Last of the Mohicans, while German writers relinquished adventures in the West and began depicting Yankees in the fatherland; and the latest novel of a high order in which Americans play a rôle concerns itself solely with the American character; the American background is left out.

In The American Girl, by Sophie Junghans, the heroine is of German descent, and appears alone in Germany as a boarder in the family of the widow of a German medical man. Her wardrobe fills several trunks, and is so rich in quality and variety as to excite of itself a good deal of envious respect. The widow's daughters, who have been neglected hitherto, are patronized by the society of the town, and a lieutenant of the regiment of horse stationed in the place condescends also to their circle, in order to pay court to their wealthy boarder.

Miss Webster displays an uncommon frankness and force of will from the start. She is eager for distracting entertainment; she takes painting lessons, sings with an actress who has retired from the stage, gets up picnics, rides with the lieutenant, and undertakes to dispose of the leisure time of a young assessor. She flirts with the latter, and lets the lieutenant kiss her in a garden bower where they halt during a ride. Later, on the road home, she announces her expectation of an offer of marriage; whereupon the astonished young officer declares that he finds her grit and candor superb. He had been shocked and distressed at her emancipated American manners, more out of regard for what others would think than from personal