Counter-Currents
thusiastic editors confided to us that "the world has never known such storehouses of well-selected mental food as are furnished by our American magazines." Complacent critics rejoiced that American poets did not sing like Tennyson, "nor like Keats, nor Shelley, nor Wordsworth"; but that, as became a new race of men, they "reverberated a synthesis of all the poetic minds of the century." Finally, American novelists assured us that in their hands the art of fiction had grown so fine and rare that we could no longer stand the "mannerisms" of Dickens, or the "confidential attitude" of Thackeray. We had scaled the empyrean heights.
There is a brief paragraph in Mr. Thayer's "Life and Letters of John Hay," which vividly recalls this peculiar phase of Americanism. Mr. Hay writes to Mr. Howells in 1882: "The worst thing in our time about American taste is the way it treats James. I believe he would not be
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