CONCLUSION Our review of the later American writers has kept pretty carefully within the field of legitimate letters. Did we care to extend the survey to the borders of that field where knowledge counts for more than imagination, we should be met at once by an army of industrious authors, including some, indeed, who might well find a place in this record. Oratory would offer no names, for the pulpit, the halls of legislature, and the public platform alike, reveal no speaker of importance since Curtis. Journalism, however, history, and the various departments of science, are fields of intense activity. In historical writing a prodigious amount of work is being done, and of such a sound quality that it threatens to make obsolete most of the work of the past. The names are many—in the field of American history, Goldwin Smith, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, Von Holst, Fiske, Eggleston, Winsor, Schouler, Rhodes, McMaster, Woodrow Wilson; in American history and literature, Moses Coit Tyler and Barrett Wendell; in ecclesiastical history, Henry C. Lea; in British naval history, Captain Mahan. Of these names (Goldwin Smith, as an English Canadian, scarcely comes within our purview), perhaps three stand out conspicuously-Henry Adams, Hermann von Holst, and John Fiske; though it is probable that only Mr. Fiske has touched on such subjects and employed such a method and style as to reach many readers whose interests lie outside of special historical lines. The methods of the later historians have not tended to make general literature of their work; and the same thing is true in all branches of scholarship. It is, indeed, difficult to resist including here the names of many specialists, -such as Francis A. Walker and Richard T. Ely in social and political science, E. L. Godkin in government, William James and Josiah Royce in philosophy, Simon Newcomb and N. S. Shaler in science, Francis J. Child and H. H. Furness in English language and literature, Drs. Eliot, Thwing, and Butler in education. But our definition of literature, as something that, even while it instructs, entertains by its appeal to the imagination, must often exclude greater names in favor of lesser. The conditions now obtaining in pure literature have already been somewhat specifically set forth. Much poetry is being written, and some of it is read. The hundreds of versifiers have all a mastery of technique, and nearly all enough of the poetic spirit to keep them safely above the prose level. But they lack the qualities of real genius. Perhaps the highest promise of American poetry just now is to be found in Canada, where men like Charles G. D. Roberts, William Wilfred Campbell, and Bliss Carman (some of them now drifted across the border) are putting the wild beauty and romantic color of their native north into such intensely lyrical verse that American literature will speedily have to reckon with them. But in general our late poetry commands nothing more than a passing admiration; it plays no such part in our spiritual life as the earlier poetry played and still plays. Here As for literary drama, it is neither written nor read. and there a man like Bronson Howard, the author of Saratoga and Shenandoah, has cultivated play-writing with practical success, but America seems to be farther from producing anything like genuine literary drama than it was in the days of Thomas Godfrey. Of course, the novel is in some sense a substitute for the drama and precludes the need of it. What the novel has developed into, we have seen. The interest New in the local or special novel is by no means abating. fields are being ransacked-the Bowery, the tenement house, the club, the college, the corporation. Gold-hunters in the Klondike are bringing back strange and thrilling stories, and we may soon look to hear from the Philippines and Cnina. Another notable direction, too, fiction is now taking, in the revival of the romantic "historical novel." There promises to be no longer the dearth of tales of the colonial and revolutionary days that there once was, and some writers are even seeking far-away foreign and mediæval themes, often with little historical or antiquarian knowledge upon which to base their fancies. This is perhaps a natural outcome of the revived taste, largely fostered by Robert Louis Stevenson, for the story of incident and adventure. Whether it will lead to a full revolt against realism and bring in once more a domination of romance, remains to be seen; but certain it is that some of the writers just now riding on the highest wave of popularity are workers in the field of more or less legitimate historical fiction. Lastly, there is the essay-critical, social, religious, discursive,—perhaps the highest literary outcome of journalism. The frequency with which volumes of collected essays make their appearance would seem to indicate a peculiarly flourishing condition of the type. Certainly the type is popular, and many essayists may be readily named-Mr. Stedman, Mr. Woodberry, Mr. Mabie, Mr. Robert Grant, Dr. van Dyke, — several of whom have already been discussed. But distinctive work in this kind is rare; scarcely one essayist in a century attains greatness, and scarcely two in a generation are read into the next. The work of a hundred present day essayists is likely to be summed up and surpassed by some great social philosopher of the future. Meanwhile, one aspect of the contemporaneous essay deserves attention. Since the day of Emerson and Thoreau the charm of out-door life-the lure of nature, tame or wild—has never quite lost its hold upon us. To-day we have, for strong witness to this fact, the writings of John Burroughs, Maurice Thompson, Ernest SetonThompson, and a large body of less known votaries. And we are bound to feel that this wide and healthy outlook of our present literature upon nature and humanity alike, is in reassuring contrast to the narrow, sombre, and introspective character of so much of the literature of two hundred years ago. |