CHAPTER XIV.

THE PRESENT DAY

In this book the American literary leaders chosen for study have all been drawn from the ranks of the dead. Critics of literature are agreed as to the danger of dealing with the living, whose work is perhaps still incomplete; with whom the critic may have personal relations, or who are not far enough away from us to be judged in the proper perspective and with the judicial calmness of Time. The dozen writers we have considered rest from their labors and their works do follow them; they have taken what is pretty sure to be a firm, final place in American literature. Moreover, they are one and all in some sort representative.

Yet this method of selecting a few typical figures makes necessary the exclusion of many writers of importance, past and present, some of them hardly less significant than those treated herein; writers who, in a complete survey of our attainment of letters, would come in for attention such as has been given them in numerous excellent manuals. To supplement the present volume the condensed studies of American literature by such scholars as Professor Brander Matthews, Professor Katharine Lee Bates, Mr. Julian Hawthorne, and Professor Walter C. Bronson will be found most helpful; while for a fuller and

more atmospheric treatment, that by Professor Charles F. Richardson is especially recommended. In our study, the object has been to bear down on the dominant things; as one's eye seeks the salient features of a landscape, before trying to observe details and appreciate the less obvious attractions. A few words may now be spoken touching the omissions of earlier makers of literature and on the present situation.

Names in the past clamor for mention. Oratory, for example, has furnished mighty men: Patrick Henry, Henry Clay, Randolph, Calhoun, and the giant Webster; later, Choate, Everett, Wendell Phillips and pulpit speakers like Parker, Beecher, and Storrs. It must always be remembered, however, that oratory is a kind of halfbrother to literature, since even the great effects of a Daniel Webster are so much dependent upon voice, presence, personal magnetism, that the magic is lost when one turns to the cold replica of the printed page. In thinking of the Concord group, too, one feels that our literature would have been poorer indeed without the essays of Thoreau, quaint hermit friend of Emerson, original both in mind and manner: that rare phenomenon, a genuine essayist. And there are later essayists of charm and distinction: "Ik Marvel" (Donald G. Mitchell), George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, rush to the mind, all save Mitchell now gone; while of the living, sturdy John Burroughs stands at the head of a group of nature writers who have made themselves welcome for wholesome attraction of theme and pleasantness of presentation. The essay, critical and creative, is by no means dead, and is likely to gain in authority and acceptance when the now prevalent autocracy of fiction is past. One living writer

of indisputable genius stands halfway between fiction and the essay, hard to catalogue, so unique is he: Mark Twain, whose place in the popular heart is of the household kind; whose work, when it is looked back upon in its entirety, will be recognized as that of a humorist in the large meaning of the word, an essentially serious-minded man who really preaches and teaches while we laugh. And writers of history we have had whose work is literature; Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Parkman, —the list might easily be augmented.

As to poetry, it will be well, while conceding that the first creative burst from the elder bards has subsided, not to overlook the good work that is still being done. The average of verse technique is higher than it was fifty years ago; and there are so many aspirants for favor that it is relatively harder for one voice to be distinguished in the general chorus. Some who now seem minor may later be recognized as of real importance. With greater attention to form, there has been a loss in vital subjects; natural enough, perhaps, although the settling of new states, the extension by war and "benevolent assimilation" of foreign territory, the great capitalist ventures and labor throes and the deeper realization of the tremendous scope and significance of the American idea, would seem to suggest no lack of themes. The very complexities of our mighty civilization, with its cosmopolitanism and material miracles, may possibly stagger the poet, for the very reason that there is so much to interpret: it is a case of embarrassment of riches. Singers of deserved reputation are still living the veteran lyrist R. H. Stoddard, Stedman, cultured and thoughtful in verse as he is in criticism one of our foremost students, and Aldrich, an artist in his exqui

site finish and in his earlier work by no means wanting in vibrant humanity; and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, whose "Battle Hymn" still makes the blood beat and the feet keep time. Now and again poets like Emily Dickinson and Edward Sill have come and gone before we were fully aware how rare was their spirit. Bayard Taylor's importance was such as to give him a chapter to himself in Mr. Stedman's study of our native singers. The temptation to add almost indefinitely to the list of capable lyric poets, both living and dead, must be sternly resisted. Nature has been worthily depicted in the late lyric work of a group of Canadians headed by Bliss Carman, and no phase of present verse work is more conspicuous than this of the reverent and rapturous appreciation of nature. The homely life of common humanity (if any humanity can rightly be called common) has been interpreted with truth and pathos by a band of dialect poets of whom Riley is easily first. Nor are signs wanting that our poets are likely in the near future to essay more sustained work in narrative and dramatic verse, encouraged thereto by the very evident tendency to rehabilitate the literary drama.

By far the most significant literary movement of this generation in the United States (as indeed wherever literature is cultured) has been that of the development of prose fiction. This modern form, for better or worse, has come to occupy a tyrannous central position, well-nigh to the crushing out of elder forms like poetry, the essay and drama, in the general regard. Fiction appeals to the widest audience (the play is an exception, but as yet we hardly have a literary drama in this country), simply because it is most easily understood by the people, the most democratic of literary molds in that it can best

receive the impress of the very form and image of our time. It surveys classes and masses alike; every state, section, even village, has its novelist; within the pages of the story all humanity jostles and hobnobs. The service thus done by fiction in teaching the different parts of the land to know each other and so to realize the variety and vastitude of our national life, is likely to be underestimated rather than the reverse. The novel, in this thought, is a mighty civilizer, drawing men together as do the wonderful material uses of electricity, and for the higher purposes of a comprehensive sympathy and love.

In the United States since 1860, there has been a remarkable growth and perfecting of the novel of real life realistic fiction, in the critical phrase. In the middle century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, besides writing in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" an epoch-making book, vital in power, whatever its defects and prejudices, initiated in her other stories a faithful first-hand study of homely New England character, which has been fruitfully developed by an able band of later-day followers with Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett at their head. The names throng here and cannot be enumerated. Two leaders, however, must have special mention: Howells and James, for they, more than any others, started the present-day school. Mr. James, whose earlier and better work dealt with American conditions, often in their European aspects, has of late years lived abroad and written of life there, meanwhile deteriorating both in the breadth and clarity of his art. But Mr. Howells has steadily produced a series of fictional studies which the future social historian is likely to recognize as the most comprehensive and truthful survey of certain sections of Eastern life-especially that in cities