The American Mind / The E. T. Earl Lectures

The E. T. Earl Lectures 1912
By the Same Author
By Bliss Perry
Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company 1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published October 1912
TO WALTER MORRIS HART
The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality.
The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title American Traits in American Literature. In revising them for publication a briefer title has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of Jefferson's phrase The American Mind, as suggesting, more accurately perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion.
B. P.
Cambridge, 1912.

Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and environment in determining the character of any literary production, what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are bred there, all left their trace upon A Midsummer Night's Dream , and Every Man in his Humour and She Stoops to Conquer ? Undoubtedly. Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions, must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual writers.