It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men as Mark Twain that one
finds the best proofs of the Puritan influence in American letters, for
it is there that it is least expected and hence most significant. Our
native critics, unanimously Puritans themselves, are anaesthetic to the
flavour, but to Dr. Kellner, with his half-European, half-Oriental
culture, it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it, not only in
the harsh Calvinistic fables of Hawthorne and the pious gurglings of
Longfellow, but also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness of
Howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James Lane Allen, and even in the
work of Joel Chandler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well, why not?
What could be more erroneous than the common assumption that Puritanism
is exclusively a Northern, a New England, madness? The truth is that it
is as thoroughly national as the kindred belief in the devil, and runs
almost unobstructed from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to the
Gulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the North, that it takes on
its most bellicose and extravagant forms.
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