We became, suddenly, the merest and maddest partizans in
letters. Our papers spoke of "tariffs" and "protection." Our Magazines
had habitual passages about that "truly native novelist, Mr.
Cooper," or that "staunch American genius, Mr. Paulding." Unmindful of
the spirit of the axioms that "a prophet has no honor in his own land"
and that "a hero is never a hero to his valet-de-chambre"- axioms
founded in reason and in truth- our reviews urged the propriety- our
booksellers the necessity, of strictly "American" themes. A foreign
subject, at this epoch, was a weight more than enough to drag down
into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writer owning
nativity in the States; while, on the reverse, we found ourselves
daily in the paradoxical dilemma of liking, or pretending to like, a
stupid book the better because (sure enough) its stupidity was of
our own growth, and discussed our own affairs.
It is, in fact, but very lately that this anomalous state of feeling
has shown any signs of subsidence. Still it is subsiding. Our views of
literature in general having expanded, we begin to demand the use-
to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism- to regard it
more as an art based immovably in nature, less as a mere system of
fluctuating and conventional dogmas. And, with the prevalence of these
ideas, has arrived a distaste even to the home-dictation of the
bookseller-coteries.
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