But we have what they have
not--a national imaginative tendency. There are no fetters upon our fancy;
and, however deeply our real estate may be mortgaged, there is freedom for
our ideas. England has not yet appreciated the true inwardness of a
favorite phrase of ours,--a new deal. And yet she is tired to death of her
own stale stories; and when, by chance, any one of her writers happens to
chirp out a note a shade different from the prevailing key, the whole
nation pounces down upon him, with a shriek of half-incredulous joy, and
buys him up, at the rate of a million copies a year. Our own best writers
are more read in England, or, at any rate, more talked about, than their
native crop; not so much, perhaps, because they are different as because
their difference is felt to be of a significant and typical kind. It has
in it a gleam of the new day. They are realistic; but realism, so far as
it involves a faithful study of nature, is useful. The illusion of a
loftier reality, at which we should aim, must be evolved from adequate
knowledge of reality itself. The spontaneous and assured faith, which is
the mainspring of sane imagination, must be preceded by the doubt and
rejection of what is lifeless and insincere.
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