Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which all literature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, all great books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes to America. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If you were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the imported and the remote.
I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; its prevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man and woman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; its inheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universality of education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; and I love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians have done the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs--in saying which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America. America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; and among novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass a Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were no historians the masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. This article wishes to point out the quality and range of American historians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ample and fertile field.
Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard has made no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history. Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. The French and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching the early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been the historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin, Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; but they do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what one might name crude ore rather than refined gold.