It is not, of course, that American journalism,
whether of the daily or monthly sort, has consciously set itself
to supplant the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and
economic factors enter into such a problem. But few observers
will question the assertion that the influence of the American
magazine, ever since its great period of national literary
service in the eighties and nineties, has been more marked in
the field of conduct and of artistic taste than in the
stimulation of a critical literary judgment: An American
schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the
schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion,
through the illustrated magazines, of better standards of
artistic taste. But--whether the judgment of school-teachers and
schoolchildren upon a piece of literature is any better than it
was in the red schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a disputable
question.
But we must stop guessing, or we shall never have done. The
fundamental problem of our literature, as this book has attempted
to trace it, has been to obtain from a mixed population dwelling
in sections as widely separated as the peoples of Northern and
Southern Europe, an integral intellectual and spiritual activity
which could express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and
truth, the motions stimulated by our national life.
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