No American
can live in Europe, unless he means to return home, or unless, at any
rate, he returns here in mind, in hope, in belief. For an American to
accept England, or any other country, as both a mental and physical
finality, would, it seems to me, be tantamount to renouncing his very
life. To enjoy English comforts at the cost of adopting English opinions,
would be about as pleasant as to have the privilege of retaining one's
body on condition of surrendering one's soul, and would, indeed, amount to
just about the same thing.
I fail, therefore, to feel any apprehension as to our literature becoming
Europeanized, because whatever is American in it must lie deeper than
anything European can penetrate. More than that, I believe and hope that
our novelists will deal with Europe a great deal more, and a great deal
more intelligently, than they have done yet. It is a true and healthy
artistic instinct that leads them to do so. Hawthorne--and no American
writer had a better right than he to contradict his own argument--says, in
the preface to the "Marble Faun," in a passage that has been often quoted,
but will bear repetition:--
"Italy, as the site of a romance, was chiefly valuable to him as <
affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would
not be so terribly insisted on as they are, and must needs be, in
America.
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