from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like
begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or
'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona
Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the
Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is
greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its
prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to
the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.

This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no
one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in
literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the
literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never
seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that
both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in
literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever
was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was
not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered
in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the
great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which
the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs
of those who had brought the learning of the universities to
Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage
as the English of the mother-country.