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AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP 
 
 OF 
 
 THE PRESENT-DAY 
 
 (SINCE 1890) 
 
AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP 
 
 OF 
 
 THE PRESENT-DAY 
 
 (Since: 1890) 
 
 BY 
 
 T. E. RANKIN 
 University of Michigan 
 
 ann arbor 
 
 George: Wahr 
 
 1918 
 
Copyright, 191 8 
 By T. E. Rankin 
 
 THE ANN ARBOR PRESS 
 ANN ARBOR 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Not all of us can agree with Brunetiere that in art 
 and literature the beginning of wisdom is to distrust 
 what we like. But there is no division of opinion 
 about the kind of books to which the majority of read- 
 ers to-day devote themselves, — it is only the kind 
 that they "like." I do not believe that we ought to 
 deny to ourselves what gives us pleasure just because 
 it gives us pleasure ; but it is the aim of this little book 
 to be an aid to better reading than that which gives 
 mental excitement alone. "Our heritage as Americans 
 is independence, originality, self-reliance, and sympa- 
 thetic energy animated by a strong ethical instinct, 
 and these are the forces which can produce a higher 
 and broader civilization than the world has yet seen 
 if we choose to have it so." We shall not be choos- 
 ing to have it so, if in feeding the mind, as the mass 
 of people do by reading chiefly, we overlook the books 
 which touch moral truth and human passion with 
 largeness, sanity, and attractiveness of form. The fol- 
 lowing pages attempt to indicate only those books 
 which, amid the deluge of publication during the last 
 quarter of a century in the United States and Canada, 
 are most worth while finding and keeping for com- 
 panionship. 
 
 393917 
 
— 4 — 
 
 I wish to acknowledge indebtedness to the eager 
 spirit in search of "good reading" which is constantly 
 displayed by my students; and to Professor R. W. 
 Cowden for patient and valuable aid in reading the 
 proofs for this volume. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. PROSE page 
 
 General Literature ... 9 
 
 Fiction 23 
 
 Drama ...... 59 
 
 II. POETRY 
 
 Poetic Drama . . . -67 
 
 Chiefly Lyrical . . . .69 
 
 III. CANADIAN AUTHORS 
 
 Fiction Writers . • • • 9 1 
 The Poets 94 
 
 IV. TABLE OF AUTHORS . . .103 
 
 V. INDEX . . . • .117 
 
I 
 
 PROSE 
 
I 
 
 PROSE 
 
 The Profession of Letters. — Joseph Story, As- 
 sociate Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote, in 1819, ° u n n e dred 
 "So great is the call for talents of all sorts in the active years ago 
 use of professional and other business in America, 
 that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote ex- 
 clusively to literature or the fine arts, or to composition 
 on abstract science. This obvious reason will explain 
 why we have few professional authors and those not 
 among our ablest men." Precisely, such is the situation 
 now one hundred years after the eminent jurist courte- 
 ously explained the state of letters in his day. The call And to-day 
 for talent in the varied activities of a public character 
 never was greater in the world's history, and the ability 
 and energy now devoted to affairs of state and of busi- 
 ness are of the highest order. And yet many able men 
 and women are giving themselves almost exclusively 
 to thoughtful and artistic authorship; furthermore, 
 many whose vocation is the law, or medicine, or bank- 
 ing, or teaching, or editing, are also employing a por- 
 tion of their talents in adding to the beauty, uplift, 
 refreshment, and inspiration which it is the function 
 of literature to bring to men. We need many more 
 whose brains can beat into rhythm what we, "busy" 
 people, can feel only, who can express what we, too, The Future 
 hold, that things beautiful are best. 
 
IO 
 
 The majority of those who are making the litera- 
 ture of America to-day are engaged in writing 
 
 Fom prose fiction or drama or poetry. Yet there are nu- 
 merous scholarly and influential historians, philoso- 
 phers, and essayists whose work is contributing to the 
 advancement of thought and life, though, with but few 
 exceptions, their productions lack the antiseptic of 
 style. But all are writing because they must, — they 
 are actuated by the drive of impulse from within, — 
 and because there is an eager demand for what they 
 can supply. If there has been any change in methods 
 
 stylo of composition and in details of style since fifty years 
 ago, it has been in the direction of simplicity, terse- 
 ness, and elimination of ornament. However, the ex- 
 treme brevity of sentence which is the vogue with the 
 younger generation often gives the impression of thin- 
 ness of thought, and rather wastes than conserves the 
 attention by the over-emphasis which results from the 
 explosive character of the short, sharp phrase. 
 
GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 Historians. — Within the past thirty years many 
 historians have flourished, the work of whom will al- a multitude 
 ways be indispensable to the student of history. Among 
 them have been John Fiske, Henry Adams, James Ford 
 Rhodes, James Schouler, Edward Channing, John 
 Bach McMaster, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Albert Bush- 
 nell Hart, and Woodrow Wilson, but of these perhaps 
 only John Fiske and Woodrow Wilson will be consid- 
 ered by future historians of literature. 
 
 John Fiske was born at Middletown, Connecticut, 
 in 1842. From his earliest youth he was distinguished Fiska 
 as an eager reader and a serious thinker both in his- 
 tory and in science. He soon began to display wide 
 scholarship and diversified mental interests. One of 
 his earlier books manifested also a gift .for story-tell- 
 ing and for the play of fancy. This book was enti- General 
 tied Myths and Myth-Makers. It traced to their 
 sources many popular superstitions and legends based 
 upon both fancy and fact. His Outlines of Cosmic Phi- 
 losophy is an interpretation of the discoveries of 
 Charles Darwin and a development of the thought of 
 Herbert Spencer. The Destiny of Man and The Idea 
 of God were also among Fiske's contributions to philo- 
 sophic thought. His Excursions of an Evolutionist 
 interestingly and convincingly presented his experi- 
 ence and thinking in the field which the title indicates. 
 Then the American Political Ideas is among the best 
 of books setting forth the fundamental things in Amer- 
 ican political life. 
 
12 
 
 Fiske's best work of all was done in the field of his- 
 His tory proper, particularly in The Discovery of America. 
 
 The Beginnings of New England, and The Critical 
 Period of American History. Of these three books The 
 Discovery of America is the ablest. It is not only an ac- 
 count of the voyages of Columbus and of his prede- 
 cessors and those who soon followed him, but is also 
 a summary of the old world stories of a fabled western 
 world and a masterful and attractive description of 
 the background of European civilization at the time of 
 the discovery of this continent. In addition to the 
 popularity accruing from these and other volumes, the 
 work of Fiske as a university lecturer brought to him 
 great renown. He died July 4, 1901, a loss to popular 
 philosophy and science and history and to literature. 
 Woodrow Wilson, professor in and then president 
 Wilson of Prmceton University, Governor of New Jersey, and 
 President of the United States for two terms, begin- 
 ning in 19 12, first attracted attention by his political 
 and semi-literary writings while he was teaching in 
 Georgia. He has written one important book, The 
 State, upon the theory of government, and others of 
 less importance upon the same subject. The most val- 
 uable of his works consist of a small volume entitled 
 Division and Reunion, which treats of the period of 
 the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a series of five 
 volumes containing in interesting narrative form, and 
 with thoughtful comment, the history of the United 
 States and of the American continent before the for- 
 mation of the union. The addresses and state papers 
 written during the great World War are almost ideal 
 for their clearness, directness, and energy. An early 
 
— 13 — 
 
 volume entitled Mere Literature and Other Essays 
 had already given artistic promise which these state 
 papers have amply fulfilled. 
 
 Essayists in Journalism, Philosophy, and General 
 Culture. — Of general essayists to-day, the number is 
 almost beyond reckoning, but the talents of most of 
 them have found employment in writing chiefly for the 
 periodical press. The greater part of the content of journalism 
 the periodicals is doomed to brief life and fame, but is 
 certain of a large immediate circulation. Journalism 
 in America, including daily, weekly, monthly, and 
 other serial publications, at the beginning of the twen- 
 tieth century had attained the phenomenal quantity of 
 eight billions of copies of periodicals for twelve 
 months, with a market value of two hundred and twen- 
 ty-five millions of dollars. The subsequent eighteen 
 years have seen a progress in volume whose raptdity 
 has been almost beyond belief. It has been estimated 
 that two hundred and fifty millions of dollars are now 
 spent annually in the United States for newspapers The 
 only, and that these newspapers represent a cost of Newspapcr 
 two hundred and thirty-seven millions more than all 
 the text-books in all the public schools. Newspapers 
 pour from the press in unending succession and in edi- 
 tions that are enormous. New York city, as might be 
 expected from its size, location, and great wealth, has 
 drawn to it the most ambitious publishers and editors. 
 The Evening Post, The Tribune, The Sun, The Times, 
 and The World, are unsurpassed for enterprise and 
 influence. Opinions vary as to their relative merits,, 
 but The Times gives more attention to literature than 
 does any one of the others, and at present contains the 
 
— 14 — 
 
 best written editorials. The Boston Transcript, The 
 Springfield Republican, and The Chicago Tribune are 
 now generally considered the ablest of the newspapers 
 published outside the metropolis. 
 
 The eighteenth century saw the rise and decay of a 
 Magazines score of good monthly magazines in this country, from 
 the early ventures of Franklin to the attempts of 
 Charles Brockden Brown. During the first half of 
 the nineteenth century nearly all the foremost thinkers 
 and authors were associated with magazines, either as 
 editors or as contributors. Among the editors were 
 Washington Irving, Richard Henry Dana, Sr., George 
 P. Morris, Samuel Woodworth, Nathaniel P. Willis, 
 William Cullen Bryant, Charles Fenno Hoffman, 
 Edgar Allan Poe, George R. Graham, George Ripley, 
 Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Park Ben- 
 jamin, and Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland. The contrib- 
 utors included practically all the names that find men- 
 tion in American history from 1800 to 1850. But only 
 one or two of the magazines of that half-century have 
 survived, the most important being the North Ameri- 
 can Review, which was founded in 181 5, and is now 
 the oldest of all periodicals. 
 
 In 1850 Harper's New Monthly Magazine was es- 
 tablished, and was quickly followed by the founding 
 of Putnam's Monthly Magazine and The Atlantic 
 Monthly. Between 1868 and 1895 the following popu- 
 lar monthlies were established : Lippincotfs Magazine, 
 The Overland Monthly, The Century Magazine, Scrib- 
 ner's Magazine, The Forum, The Cosmopolitan, The 
 Arena, Munsey's Magazine, McClure's Magazine, and 
 The Bookman. The finest contributions have been 
 
— i5 — 
 
 made to The Atlantic, Harper's, . The Century, and 
 Scribner's. The Nation, a weekly, T/te Dial, a 
 monthly, and The Sewdnee Review, a quarterly, are 
 among the ablest of the publications devoted to reviews Critical 
 
 . publications 
 
 and literary criticism. A recently founded review, The 
 New Republic, came at once into favor, especially 
 among those who were wearied of the cock-sureness 
 and air of intellectual superiority which have so long 
 characterized The Nation. But the newer magazine 
 appears to be finding it difficult to avoid the beaten 
 path. 
 
 It is amid this variety and this immensity in number 
 of publications that the essayist has almost lost him- 
 self ; for, in writing for the daily newspaper he speaks 
 chiefly for the moment and to the passing crowd, and 
 in writing for the magazines he is not often doing more 
 than trying himself out. But if his magazine contribu- 
 tions prove to be successful, they are likely at a later 
 time to be found in book form. Newspaper arti- 
 cles published as books have usually found but brief 
 popularity. 
 
 Among the many essayists of this day, a few have 
 stood forth prominently, — William Dean Howells, ™^ a ists 
 F. Marion Crawford, Frank Norris, Samuel McChord 
 Crothers, Agnes Repplier, Paul Elmer More, and Laf- 
 cadio Hearn being those who seemingly are sure of 
 readers fifty years hence. We can hardly fail to 
 include John Burroughs among the essayists of our 
 day, though his greater works were all published be- 
 fore 1890. His books since that date include fourteen 
 titles, and one of them is a volume of poems. Mr. 
 Howells also belongs to a generation older than the Howells 
 
16 — 
 
 present, but his Criticism and Fiction was published as 
 late as 1895. F. Marion Crawford's little book called 
 
 Crawford The Novel — What It Is will certainly be a classic in 
 the field of inquiry concerning the art of the novel. 
 
 Norris Frank Norris's The Responsibilities of a Novelist will 
 not fail to stimulate every reader who is awake to 
 what is important and original in criticism. 
 
 Samuel McChord Crothers has published several 
 
 Crothers books whose material has been collected from various 
 magazines. The Gentler Reader surpasses all the rest, 
 and has made an epoch in many a young student's 
 reading life. The work of Mr. Crothers has an un- 
 broken charm, humor, and uplifting power. 
 
 Reppiier Agnes Repplier, born of French parentage in Phil- 
 adelphia, exhibits much of the strongly individual 
 temperament which makes the writer of power. She 
 is interesting for the note of protest which runs 
 through all her work, a dissent from widely accepted 
 modern views of things. Yet she is keenly alive to all 
 that is occurring in the world of to-day, and not hos- 
 tile to its life so much as critical of its easy-going 
 opinions. Her essays may be found in almost every 
 first-class magazine, where they are eagerly sought for 
 by the cultivated reader. From Books and Men pub- 
 lished in 1888 to The Cat, 19 12, there is a baker's 
 dozen of books, all of them pleasant, witty, and 
 thoughtful. 
 
 A more scientific, more widely informed, and more 
 philosophic critic than Miss Repplier is Paul Elmer 
 More, formerly a teacher and now on the editorial staff 
 
 More of The Nation. Mr. More has appealed to the reader 
 who is not merely cultivated but cultivated within a 
 
— i7 — 
 
 special field, that of criticism which is based upon in- 
 terpretative philosophic insight rather than upon per- 
 sonal impressions. His Shelbume Essays, in several 
 volumes, represent the best that is known and thought 
 to-day in the way of a steadfast spiritual interpretation 
 of what men of letters have been doing in the world. 
 He is greatly interested in artistic form, and in all ele- 
 ments of natural beauty to be found in books ; but he 
 is interested even more in the fundamental brain-work 
 which is inspired by and guided by ethical and religious 
 mood. 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn must be accorded, even in so brief Lafcadio 
 
 Hearn 
 
 a book as this, much more extended treatment, for his 
 creative imagination sets him as an artist far above 
 most of his contemporaries. His origin was not 
 American. He was born in 1850 upon one of the 
 Greek islands. His father was an Englishman and his 
 mother a Greek. He was educated in England, but 
 removed to America and became a journalist at Cin- 
 cinnati and then at New Orleans, and later a teacher, 
 and finally an extensive traveller. The last, years of 
 Hearn were spent in Japan. He is best known as a 
 writer upon topics connected with that country, where 
 he became a Japanese citizen, married a Japanese 
 woman, and upon his death in 1904 was buried with 
 full Buddhist rites, the first foreigner, if a citizen of a 
 country can be called a foreigner there, to be so distin- 
 guished in the island empire. 
 
 Several of Hearn's books were published before our 
 period, among them Stray Leaves from Strange Lit- Early work 
 eratures, Some Chinese Ghosts, and Chita. The first 
 two show their author's faculty for assimilation of 
 
— i8 — 
 
 foreign ideas and for stamping them with his own 
 imagery and thought. Stray Leaves reveals his early 
 interest in things Egyptian, Indian, Finnish, and He- 
 brew. Some Chinese Ghosts re-tells the content of 
 certain bits of Chinese literature. Comprehension of 
 and sympathy with the elusive mystery of the Orient 
 is here both strong and delicate; the work is original, 
 too, as gems cut and re-set are counted original with 
 the lapidary. Chita: A Memory of Last Island, is a 
 story of the sea and of the hurricane which destroyed 
 a Caribbean Sea island resort of wealthy citizens of 
 New Orleans, a story of human love and misery, a 
 tragic story of how 
 
 Nature whistled with all her winds, 
 Did as she pleased, and went her way. 
 
 In descriptive power no other book by its author ex- 
 ceeds Chita. But others are more thoughtful, as they 
 were more mature. 
 Later and Just before his death, Lafcadio Hearn read the print- 
 work er's proofs of the most thoughtful of his books, Japan, 
 an Interpretation. Three others, however, are more 
 often read, — Kotto, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 
 and Kokoro. The word "Kokoro," as the sub-title 
 "Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life" indicates, 
 means something equivalent to "heart," as when we 
 speak of "the heart of things." This book contains sev- 
 eral brief essays, each complete in itself, and is replete 
 with ideas that are somewhat unusual to the western 
 mind. Some of the essays are extraordinary both for 
 thought and for artistic grace and power, among them 
 "By Force of Karma," "The Idea of Preexistence," 
 and "The Genius of Japanese Civilization." The last is 
 
— 19 — 
 
 the most interesting to one who is an observer of the 
 recent entrance of Japan into a sphere of world-activ- 
 ity. In 1917 was brought out an edition of Hearn's lec- 
 tures delivered at a Japanese University, and entitled 
 Life and Literature. This book is an excellent one 
 with which to initiate oneself into the thought and 
 work of Hearn. The student of literature is interested 
 to find style defined here as character, and literature, 
 in so far as it is a fine art, as the best expression of the 
 most intimate experience. 
 
 JH earn was an unusual artist in words. Restrained 
 in representing his thought, suggesting rather than set- JJjJ thought* 
 ting it out in systematic detail, strangely subtle in the 
 bearing of his suggestions, graceful and deft in de- 
 scriptive touch, he is sure of bringing back again and 
 again to his books any intelligent reader who once 
 dips within them. The thought of Hearn reverberates 
 in one's mind, after he has read him, as the music of a 
 bell-like instrument, and moves one with the meanings 
 with which it is fraught. It is disturbing, too, to some 
 traditional ideas of the occidental mind concerning 
 things we have deemed of importance. His most im- 
 posing thinking has been exerted upon the effort to 
 fuse the spirit of western evolutional science with the 
 Indian Buddhism which had already fused itself with, 
 or grafted itself upon, the artistic sense of Japan. A 
 strange compound he makes, but a most modern one. 
 The beauty of his language is partly due to its 
 strangely new meaning, and to the fact that it is char- 
 acterized, as the Japanese language is, by an aversion 
 to saying all and leaving nothing to the reader's im- 
 agination. Mingled with the savor and flavor of 
 
20 
 
 Hearn's western experience, all this is intensely mod- 
 ern, — even ahead of its time. He will be more eagerly 
 claimed by us as time advances. 
 
 Philosophy American philosophy has tended in our day to ex- 
 
 pend its interest upon practical psychology and educa- 
 tional problems rather than upon the problems of the 
 origin and nature and destiny of the universe, or what 
 is called metaphysics. The average man ignores the 
 claim of philosophy to be the science of the sciences, 
 and desires to know what the philosopher can do to 
 help him get on in the world. The philosopher of to- 
 day seems to desire to meet the demand as much as he 
 can, though is not entirely neglectful of the old search- 
 ings after the truth about first and ultimate things. 
 Hence the prevailing character of the labors of John 
 Dewey, William James, Borden Parker Bowne, and 
 Josiah Royce. 
 
 Dewey John Dewey stands among the foremost of the 'in- 
 
 tellectuals" of the present day in America. His studies 
 in educational theory and in social conditions have led 
 to a number of thoughtful volumes, all lacking, how- 
 ever, in warmth and fervor and therefore having lit- 
 
 Bowno tie appeal to the average reader. Professor Bowne's 
 
 Principles of Ethics falls within the present period, 
 having been published in 1892, and, as are his earlier 
 works upon psychological theory, upon the philosophy 
 of Herbert Spencer, upon theism, and upon metaphys- 
 ics, is worthy of careful perusal by the student of the 
 
 josiah Royce thought of the United States. Professor Royce, a 
 Calif ornian, who gave his attention largely to popular- 
 izing the thought of Hegel, was a much more free and 
 fresh and vigorous author than either Dewey or 
 
21 
 
 Bowne, even though he wrote of the more theoretical 
 aspects of man's thought upon the world and man 
 rather than upon the practical procedure of man's 
 life. The Spirit of Modem Philosophy, The Concep- 
 tion of God, Studies of Good and Evil, The Concep- 
 tion of Immortality, and The World and the Individ- 
 ual, all published between 1892 and 190 1, are notable 
 books of a notable thinker. 
 
 But it is William James who has held the advantage yjjjjj™ 
 over his fellow philosophers because of the clearness 
 and simplicity and audacity of his style. He has at 
 times written of philosophical problems in almost the, 
 language of "the man in the street." Perhaps he has 
 occasionally thinned his thought down by doing so, 
 but his influence in both America and Europe appears 
 as yet to have been all the more effective for this fresh- 
 ness and even carelessness of style. Between 1890 and 
 1907 William James wrote Principles of Psychology, in 
 two volumes, The Will to Believe and Other Essays 
 in Popular Philosophy, Human Immortality, The Va- 
 rieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism, and 
 many other books and articles. It has recently been 
 asserted that Prussianism and Pragmatism are in the 
 long run convertible terms, and, while this judgment is 
 too harsh, it is true that great numbers of people have 
 too readily surrendered, without thought, to James's 
 way of thinking, — to the belief that the value of a 
 thing depends wholly upon its working efficiency. Yet 
 the books of William James are very modern, and 
 they are eminently readable. It still remains to bring 
 philosophy more closely down to earth than he has 
 brought it. 
 
22 
 
 American Universities have many able and original 
 thinkers and expounders of philosophy among their 
 professors. Whether they will take a place in the his- 
 tory of our literature does not yet appear. Perhaps 
 Santayana the work of George Santayana should not be passed 
 entirely by, especially his volumes upon The Sense of 
 Beauty and Reason in Art; but he belongs with greater 
 right to literature through his disclosing the "soul's 
 invincible surmise" in his sonnet sequence. These son- 
 nets are somewhat subdued in emotion, but are very 
 nearly perfect in their technique, and are filled with 
 thought, now elusive and again straightforwardly 
 simple and appealing. After all, philosophy and poetry 
 are not unallied. 
 
 Amid the multitude of authors who have attempted 
 description and interpretation of the life of nature 
 upon our west coast, John Muir is supreme. His The 
 Mountains of California is a book bright with the 
 beauty of the spirit of its author as well as with the 
 grandeur and charm of its subject. 
 
 A Literary 
 Naturalist 
 
II 
 
 WRITERS OF FICTION 
 
 The Short-Story. — The story-tellers in the prose 
 of our own time may be grouped as Short-story Writ- 
 ers, Writers of Novelettes, and Novelists. If at first 
 thought the classification of the novelette apart from 
 the other two types of prose fiction seems not justified, 
 perhaps it may not seem entirely so when its discus- 
 sion has been presented. 
 
 The leading short-story writers since 1890 have 
 been Henry Cuyler Bunner, Henry van Dyke, Ham- 
 lin Garland, Gertrude Atherton, Margaret Deland, 
 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, William Syd- JJjJJJStwi* 
 ney Porter (O. Henry), James Oppenheim, Thomas 
 Nelson Page, and James Lane Allen. Shall we in- 
 clude others? At what name should we then draw 
 the line? These, at least, are names of writers about 
 whose standing there can no longer be much contro- 
 versy ; but if we were to place with them Myra Kelly, 
 Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Bruno Lessing, Joseph 
 Lincoln, Lloyd Osbourne, or even Jack London, there 
 would be a definite demand from almost every reader 
 that this, or that, or another be added to the list of 
 names of the enchanters. Each of those we have 
 named as fairly certain of lasting fame has been imi- 
 tated, but each remains unequalled in his special field. 
 And yet no one of these has risen to equality with 
 their predecessors who dominated the short-story field 
 a generation ago, Bret Harte, Henry James, Thomas 
 Bailey Aldrich, and George Washington Cable. 
 
24 — 
 
 Bunner 
 
 H. C. Bunner was for years editor of Puck, and his 
 short-stories are, most of them, humorous in concep- 
 tion and in development of detail. He had the power 
 of perfectly focusing the interest upon one situation, — 
 which is the truly distinctive art of the modern short- 
 story. It is doubtful whether any writer of short- 
 stories ever has handled striking endings in a more 
 masterly fashion than did Bunner, unless it was the 
 French writer Maupassant. And Bunner knew how 
 few details were necessary to secure sufficient fixing 
 of attention upon the point of his story. His stories 
 are as American as any ever written. Possibly the 
 best of them are A Sisterly Scheme and Our Aromatic 
 Uncle. 
 
 Henry van Dyke has been a clergyman, a Princeton 
 professor, and a diplomat in the foreign service of the 
 
 van Dyke United States. His writings are varied in kind and in 
 subject-matter, ranging through lyric poetry, literary 
 drama, theology, and prose fiction. His publications 
 fill a rather large shelf, though many of them are de- 
 ficient in force and apparently careless or at least hasty 
 in phrasal construction. But the stories in The Blue 
 Flower and in The Unknown Quantity are quite 
 worthy of the praise that the public has accorded 
 them. The little Story of the Other Wise Man has, 
 as its title suggests, a Biblical background, and is told 
 with dignity and impressiveness. While the style of 
 van Dyke's prose is occasionally ruined with affecta- 
 tion, yet the content of his work is wholesome, and at 
 times has been found inspiring. 
 
 Garland Hamlin Garland has contended that one should write 
 
 of only what he knows, and his own practice has fol- 
 
— 25 — 
 
 lowed his requirement. Essays, novels, and short- 
 stories have poured from his pen ; but it is the short- 
 stories that best represent what he has seen and ac- 
 tively shared in. Hamlin Garland's early life was 
 spent upon what was then the frontier, — in Iowa, 
 Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Dakota. His stor- 
 ies are of frontier life in that region, though not en- 
 tirely of its poverty, its grimness, its dullness, its over- 
 work. Some critics have found Garland's work leaden- 
 hued and that alone ; but such critics cannot have read 
 him very far. His Main-Traveled Roads and Other 
 Main-Traveled Roads contain quite enough that rep- 
 resents emptiness of spirit, weariness of living, almost 
 hopeless melancholy, and ferocious toil, but there is 
 also in them much of homely humor, and much of en- 
 joyment of life. It is difficult to believe that one who 
 thinks of Hamlin Garland as always somber and de- 
 pressing can have read "Among the Corn-Rows," "The 
 Creamery Man," "William Bacon's Man," or "Elder 
 Pill, Preacher." Garland's work cannot be said to have 
 in high degree the quality of literary elegance, but it 
 has, in the short-stories, the quality of convincingness, 
 and much of it is very entertaining. 
 
 While Gertrude Atherton is best known for her Athert °n 
 journalistic work and for her novels, especially The 
 Conqueror, a story of Alexander Hamilton, yet her 
 short-stories of the life in the California of the days 
 before its acquisition by the United States deserve and 
 in time, it is not unsafe to predict, will secure a large 
 and interested audience. The most unique of these 
 short-stories are in the volume with the attractive title 
 The Splendid Idle Forties. Whether they accu- 
 
— 26 — 
 
 rately reflect the California (where their author was 
 born) of the old days does not matter, — Homer's 
 Iliad does not accurately reflect the old days of Greece 
 and the Troad, but it is none the less interesting and 
 valuable. Gertrude Atherton in 19 17 published a vol- 
 ume of essays entitled The Living Present, and ded- 
 icated "To Eternal France." 
 
 The short-stories (some consider them novelettes) 
 
 Deiand m Margaret Deland's Old Chester Tales, published in 
 1899, put their author upon a plane of favorable com- 
 parison with any writer of narrative of her time. Some 
 of the characters in these stories are among the most 
 attractive in American fiction. Amid so much contem- 
 porary literature leading to disquietude of mind and 
 heart, it is richly satisfying to read these wholesomely 
 . stimulating tales. 
 
 "I think the Lord must have thought a good deal of 
 common people," said President Lincoln, "he made so 
 many of them." There are many common people in the 
 
 Freeman tales of Mrs. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, nearly 
 all of them New England women. Whether they were 
 thought much of by their creator, it is not possible to 
 say, but they were thought much about. Mrs. Free- 
 man is one of the very few good writers who can do 
 their work without much revision, because she is so 
 careful to plan and think through to smallest detail her 
 stories before she pens them. In temperament Mrs. 
 Freeman resembles Hawthorne, gloomy, brooding, 
 though not quite morbid, more strongly affected even 
 than he by the sordidness, the pathos, and the tragedy 
 of the narrow, distorted life of the unintelligent New 
 England Puritans and their country-bred descendants. 
 
— 27 — 
 
 She is scrupulously exact in her workmanship, but 
 lacking in the sure stylistic touch of her master. Her 
 stories are distinctly New England in setting, and lim- 
 ited almost exclusively to the vainly struggling, des- 
 perately suffering, but, amid it all, unreasoning char- 
 acters of rural life. She does not display the bitter 
 hostility to the conditions of life surrounding her vil- 
 lage and country characters which is characteristic of 
 Hamlin Garland in his stories of the Middle-West 
 farming communities. Mrs. Freeman is more evenly 
 somber than Garland, less willing to break out in 
 flashes of genial humor than he, — a Hamlin Garland 
 in a Hawthorne environment, and, partly because of 
 the environment, perhaps, a greater writer. Her nov- 
 els, Pembroke (which is her best), The Portion of 
 Labor, The Shoulders of Atlas, and one or two others 
 of less note, are sufficient to illustrate her spirit and 
 her accomplishment in style and in delicately energetic, 
 almost profound, character-drawing. Her short-stories, 
 however, have brought her the larger audience, chiefly 
 because they do not require so long sustained a con- 
 centration of fascinated and yet often unwilling atten- 
 tion as the novels, and because they are somewhat more 
 ingenious in incident and plot than they. The short- 
 stories in A New England Nun and Other Stories, in 
 Silence and Other Stories (especially "The Little Maid 
 at the Door" and "Evelina's Garden"), and in The 
 Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Su- 
 pernatural are among the most artistic and the most 
 pathetically moving stories in American literature. 
 
 One of New England's most successful story writ- Brown 
 ers is Miss Alice Brown, — of Boston now, though 
 
— 28 — 
 
 her birthplace and childhood home was in New Hamp- 
 shire. She has written poetry, novels, travel glimpses, 
 a ten thousand dollar prize play, and at least two col- 
 lections of excellent short-stories, Meadow-Grass and 
 Vanishing Points. The first of these collections 
 brought the breath of country air to its readers, and 
 the second concerned itself chiefly with members of 
 over-cultivated city society. We could not spare the 
 first; and the second leaves us better informed and 
 soberly thoughtful. In Vanishing Points is the un- 
 mistakable influence of Henry James, with that analy- 
 sis which takes one step beyond that which before had 
 been the vanishing point. Even the phraseology of 
 James is present at times in the book, but this natur- 
 ally accompanies the method of psychological analysis. 
 
 Oppenheim P a y Envelopes, by James Oppenheim (not E. Phil- 
 lips Oppenheim, the Englishman, we always are care- 
 ful to insert), is one of the best books of short-stories 
 written in this country. Its scenes are laid in and about 
 a great eastern manufacturing center. The aspira- 
 tions, the impulses, the bitter struggles, the pleasures, 
 too, of the factory and mill employees are here better 
 related than in any other American fiction. James 
 Oppenheim has not done anything else so good, noth- 
 ing so unchangeably valuable, — but it is a constant 
 hope that he will "come back." 
 
 Page Thomas Nelson Page was born and lived while a 
 
 boy in the region of Virginia where much of General 
 Grant's terrible struggle for the breaking down of the 
 Southern Confederacy occurred. Page's father was a 
 major in the army of General Lee. Thomas Page 
 himself began his public life about ten years after the 
 
— 29 — 
 
 war, in the practice of law. Ten years of the law was 
 sufficient to give him part of the training which has 
 made him so excellent an ambassador to Italy during 
 the present war. 
 
 Page has written a large shelf-full of books, and is 
 considered one of the leading novelists of the South. 
 The novels, with but one exception, were published 
 after 1890. Red Rock (1891) has made it evident 
 that he has the power to write admirably this longer 
 form of fiction. But the novels have not found such 
 favor as have his short-stories. The short-stories pub- 
 lished in 1896, especially "Marse Chan," "Unc' Edin- 
 burgh and "Meh Lady," are among the masterpieces 
 of literature interpreting the negro. These tales take 
 us into the very heart of the war, not merely into 
 that of the old plantation days or that of the days of 
 reconstruction as do most of the stories of the life of 
 the South. In fine and subtle lines Page draws the 
 characters of plantation owners and soldiers and slaves 
 and freedmen. His attitude of mind toward slavery is 
 thoroughly. sound and perfectly well-balanced, yet over 
 the benevolent life of the plantations with which he 
 was vividly familiar he throws the softening air of 
 wistful and regretful memory. 
 
 It is not easy to speak in unrestrained terms of O. "The 
 
 Amazing 
 
 Henry, because he is, even now after his death, the Genius of 
 
 ■ " / O. Henry' 
 
 most popular of all short-story writers. Everybody, 
 from the school-boy to his "high-brow" professor, ap- 
 pears to be enamored of O. Henry. Ex-Premier 
 Asquith has asserted that O. Henry is his favorite, and 
 University librarians confess that no other writer's 
 books are so widely circulated. Stephen Leacock, the 
 
— 3 o — 
 
 Canadian humorist, can scarcely contain himself for 
 admiration when he writes of the Amazing Genius of 
 O. Henry. William Sydney Porter seems to have been 
 born at Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1867, though 
 several towns claim the honor of having been his birth- 
 place. He went to Texas and there worked upon a 
 ranch, as one should, and then in a newspaper office, 
 and soon owned a paper at Austin. The newspaper 
 which came under his control he called The Rolling 
 Stone. O. Henry also worked in a bank for a time, 
 and then drifted down into Central America. He 
 returned to Texas, to clerk (for two weeks) in a drug 
 store. Next we find him in New Orleans, writing for 
 the daily press. Later his permanent residence for the 
 nine years preceding his death was New York City. 
 Here he accomplished his finest work, such volumes of 
 short-stories as The Four Million, The Voice of the 
 City, and The Trimmed Lamp, — or, are Options, 
 Strictly Business, Whirligigs, and Roads of Destiny 
 the better books ? And yet many have maintained that 
 the stories in The Gentle Grafter are best of all ! 
 Central America, The South and West, and New 
 York City (which he loved to call Bagdad-on-the- Sub- 
 way) furnished the settings for most of his stories, — 
 two hundred and fifty-two in all; and perhaps the best 
 single story is the one in Strictly Business entitled "A 
 Municipal Report." 
 Why so Upon what does O. Henry's popularity rest? Upon 
 Popu ar ^ \ C a S t f our things : ( 1 ) His fearless revelations of 
 the pettiness of pretense in all life, high and low and 
 all that lies between; (2) his honest and open admira- 
 tion for the romantic elements in life; (3) his fresh- 
 
— 3i — 
 
 ness and directness in the use of language ; and (4) his 
 exaggeration of both the humorous and the pathetic. 
 Add to these his marvelous gift for plot and for sur- 
 prise, and we find him not merely popular alone, but 
 an excellent artist as well. Long may his books live ! 
 And yet they may not live very long, because they deal 
 almost exclusively with the transient in immediate set- 
 ting and in speech. 
 
 James Lane Allen is a native of Kentucky, born AUei * 
 there in 1849. He taught school and college classes for 
 several years; but since 1884 has given himself to lit- 
 erary work. "In so far as literature is concerned, expe- 
 rience has taught me and has always compelled me to 
 see human life as set in Nature ; finding its explanation 
 in soil, and sky, and season; merely one of the wild 
 growths that spring up on the surface of the earth 
 amid ten thousand of others." Thus he wrote, and his 
 stories of old and new Kentucky are illustrations of 
 this asserted belief of his, — except that he takes hu- 
 manity a little more seriously than to consider it merely 
 a "wild growth" with all the irresponsibility which such 
 a character would imply. Man in his setting of earth 
 and sky and season, yet man within society, is Mr. 
 Allen's object of interest. 
 
 Allen is a novelist as well as a short-story 
 writer, The Choir Invisible, The Reign of Law, and 
 The Mettle of the Pasture ranking high among the 
 productions of our southern novelists. Two little 
 books with the life of birds as starting-point have been 
 accorded strong public approval, A Kentucky Cardi- 
 nal (1894)' and The Kentucky Warbler (1918). Seek- 
 ers for sensations in fiction have expressed disappoint- 
 
— 32 — 
 
 ment with this latest of his writings, though he who 
 loves a classic style will find the book a thing of beauty. 
 But undoubtedly the volume entitled Flute and Violin, 
 and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances is that by 
 which he is chiefly to be remembered, for, if for no 
 other reason, within it is the inimitable story of the 
 "Two Gentlemen from Kentucky." This story should 
 not be described or outlined ; not one bit of its charm 
 and excitement and originality of incident and of char- 
 acter should be taken away from the reader by any tell- 
 ing beforehand of what is in the story. Another story 
 by Allen, "King Solomon of Kentucky," should be 
 read by every one who loves the heroic in life, wher- 
 ever found. 
 
 James Lane Allen has much of the attitude of sci- 
 entist and of philosopher toward nature ; but above all 
 it is human life which is most appealing to him and 
 to those who take delight in following him. Perhaps 
 he is, at times, too ardently addicted to expressing his 
 teaching instinct, surviving from the earlier days, and 
 to much polishing of his style. But his work is strong, 
 and beautiful, and wholesome. 
 
 Our bede-roll would be deplorably deficient if men- 
 others tion were not made of Edwin Lefevre's "The Woman 
 and Her Bonds" in his Wall Street Stories, of Robert 
 Herrick's The Master of the Inn, and of F. Marion 
 Crawford's The Upper Berth. Nor is it possible to 
 refrain from commending the rather too academic but 
 none the less promising stories of Mrs. Anne C. E. 
 Allinson in her volume Roads from Rome. It is the 
 occasional ability of a writer or teacher to make the 
 characters of ancient days seem contemporary that 
 
 A Few 
 
— 33 — 
 
 keeps alive our faith in the large importance of so- 
 called classical studies. 
 
 Born into life ! — 'tis we, 
 
 And not the world, are new; 
 Our cry for bliss, our plea, 
 
 Others have urged it too — 
 
 Our wants have all been felt, our errors made be- 
 fore. 
 
 In Roads from Rome Mrs. Allinson has included six v? e r ^ ncicnt 
 stories, "sketches" she calls them, concerned with R evive d 
 characters from the time of Julius Caesar to that of 
 Hadrian. In these pages, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Mae- 
 cenas, Catullus, and other more and less known men 
 of classical antiquity truly live for us: There would 
 be more culture abroad in the land if more of litera- 
 ture of this quality were available to the aspiring stu- 
 dent. 
 
 The Novelette. — The novelette is an old form of 
 literature, reaching back to the Book of Esther, by an Ancient 
 unknown Hebrew author, to Daphnis and Chloe, by 
 Longus, a Greek, and to Cupid and Psyche, by Apu- 
 leius, a Latin. The form was continued in the middle Mediaeval 
 ages, its best example being Aucassin and Nicolette, 
 by an Old French author whose name is not known, 
 and containing almost the first breath of the Renais- 
 sance spirit in literature. Then came The Liberal 
 Lover, by Cervantes ; and in Eighteenth century Eng- 
 lish literature The Vicar of Wakefield, by Goldsmith, 
 and Rasselas, by Dr. Johnson. Novelettes were rather 
 frequent in English during the Nineteenth century, Modem 
 none of them better than Dickens's Christmas Carol, 
 
— 34 — 
 
 Mrs. Gaskell's Cousin Phyllis, and the three stories in 
 George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. This brings us 
 to the later days of literature in America, when the 
 novelette became a very important, though not, in ex- 
 cellent examples, a very frequent form of fiction. 
 The novelette has been difficult to define. Nearly 
 What it is a u w j 10 nave undertaken to say anything of it have 
 confined their descriptions and definitions to a discus- 
 sion of its comparative length or brevity. It is, they 
 all say, usually longer than the short-story and shorter 
 than the novel, — a thing, then, of middle magnitude, 
 a sort of middle sister to the other two forms of prose 
 fiction. But on the basis of such a distinction as that 
 of length or brevity, one might as well speak of the two 
 or three act play as a dramalette or dramolet, which no 
 \ one appears anxious to do. There are other and better 
 
 | distinctions ; such as that the novelette affords more 
 
 scope for the development of character than does the 
 short-story, though for the development of fewer char- 
 acters than the novel can compass. The novelette, too, 
 may divide itself into parts, thus resulting in a more 
 imposing structure than the short-story. It should be 
 more "taut and trim," however, than a novel, not in- 
 dulging at all in digressions or episodes. And per- 
 haps the nature of the purpose or of the theme or of 
 the experience from which the story grows deter- 
 mines that the novelette shall be what it is, — some- 
 thing not either short-story or novel. A biological 
 analogy which has been suggested as the basis of dis- 
 tinction is as good as any ; that the seed or germ from 
 which the novelette grows determines that it shall be 
 neither flower nor tree, but a shrub. 
 
— 35 — 
 In American literature there have been many popu- The 
 
 J r r American 
 
 lar novelettes during recent years, not the least popu- Novelette 
 lar of them being Eleanor Hallowell Abbott's The 
 Sick-a-bed Lady and The White Linen Nurse, and 
 Irving Bacheller's Keeping Up with Lizzie. But these 
 have been inferior to somewhat earlier successes, such 
 as Francis Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Car- 
 tersville, Henry James's The Lesson of the Master, 
 Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart's Napoleon Jackson, The 
 Gentleman of the Plush Rocker, Stephen Crane's The 
 Red Badge of Courage, Francis Marion Crawford's 
 A Cigarette-Maker's Romance, Herman K. Viele's 
 The Inn of the Silver Moon, Kate Douglas Wiggin's 
 The Old Peabody Pew, and Mrs. Edith Wharton's 
 Ethan Frome. In fact, the last of these has been 
 acclaimed the strongest bit of American authorship of 
 the present time. 
 
 F. Hopkinson Smith, a native of Baltimore, was a Snuth 
 painter and a lighthouse architect before he became a 
 writer of note. He has written several novels, one of 
 which, Caleb West, — Master Diver, will long be re- 
 membered. But his novelettes, Colonel Carter of Car- 
 tersville and Colonel Carter's Christmas, are his bid for 
 even longer fame. The first is a most attractive pic- 
 ture of the old regime in the South, and the second 
 only a little less attractive. Both are rather rambling 
 in structure, especially the second. It seems a little 
 surprising that a civil engineer could be satisfied with 
 a loose- jointed piece of building, even in a literary 
 structure; and it is the lack of carefully constructed 
 plot which makes these brief bits of fiction among the 
 
— 36 — 
 
 less artistic of American novelettes. But Colonel Car- 
 ter himself is beyond praise for charm. 
 
 The reader interested in the life of art instinctively 
 
 5JJ2JJ finds his way, at some time, into the work of Henry 
 
 James. Henry James belongs almost entirely to the 
 period immediately preceding ours, and yet we must 
 mention here those incomparable long-short-stories or 
 novelettes of his, The Lesson of the Master and The 
 Madonna of the Future. They are only for the thought- 
 ful lover of books, and they are not easy to read ; but to 
 some readers, lack of ease of interpretation is no bar to 
 pleasure, — they delight to be called upon to think. 
 
 Mrs. Stuart Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart is one of that immor- 
 tal company of American story-tellers who have at 
 times made their special study and delight the negro 
 and the general environment of the South, where the 
 negro is an outstanding figure. F. Hopkinson Smith, 
 Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, James 
 Lane Allen, Sarah Barnwell Elliot, George W. Cable, 
 O. Henry, Mrs. Sherwood Bonner MacDowell, Mrs. 
 Louise Clark Prynelle, Miss Martha Young, Harry 
 Stillwell Edwards, Richard Malcolm Johnston, Mrs. 
 Virginia Fraser Boyle, Paul Laurence Dunbar, — and 
 there are many more, — have found the negro finely 
 susceptible of literary treatment. Few of these au- 
 thors have been more highly amusing than Mrs. Stuart, 
 and few have dealt more thoughtfully with the humor 
 and pathos of the old plantations. 
 
 The negro in American literature has become well 
 worth the investigation of the student who desires en- 
 tertainment and the pleasure of pursuing something 
 unique in the field of art, for the treatment of the 
 
— 37 — 
 
 negro is one of the most distinctive features of our 
 literature in comparison with that of Europe, — in 
 any event, the American negro is not found abroad. 
 Mrs. Stuart's Napoleon Jackson and her Lamentations 
 of Jeremiah Johnson make an excellent introduction 
 to this province of literature. 
 
 The Great War has renewed an interest in the stor- 
 ies of Stephen Crane, especially his Red Badge of Stephen Crane 
 Courage. Crane's stories were nearly all highly col- 
 ored, and his heroes usually little less than mind- 
 less, or empty-minded, anyway, but in The Red Badge 
 of Courage he achieved one of the most remarkable of 
 all studies of the mind of the soldier in action. The 
 book was immensely popular immediately after its 
 publication in 1895, and has not yet been surpassed in 
 the handling of its peculiar subject-matter by any of 
 the writers of fiction of the present war. The battle 
 of Chancellorsville, during the war between the States, 
 is the scene of its action, and the psychological analy- 
 sis, in simplest terms, of the country boy who there 
 underwent his baptism of blood and iron and fire, will 
 be of lasting value. 
 
 Mrs. Edith Wharton would have come close to the Wharton 
 heart-interest of this generation if only for her self- 
 sacrificing devotion to the needs of fair shining France 
 when that suffering country was upon the brink of 
 destruction during the World War. She is a notable 
 figure in literature. She is one of the numerous au- 
 thors who have been taught much by Henry James 
 and have spread wide his influence. Perhaps those 
 authors would never have found out precisely how to 
 do some of the bits of almost miraculous presentation 
 
38 
 
 which so sharply sketch that which has come directly 
 within the angle of their vision, had it not been for 
 Henry James. Mrs. Wharton is easily, together with 
 Owen Wister in his later work, one of the first disci- 
 ples of the great master. She is a novelist, as well as 
 a writer of short-stories and of novelettes, and her 
 character of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth has been 
 compared with Thackeray's Becky Sharp and George 
 Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth, — a high compliment, in- 
 deed! And yet at least one of her novelettes is a 
 greater piece of work than this novel. That greater 
 work is Ethan Fromc, a stark and terrible story of a 
 New England love affair more hopeless and bitter than 
 a thousand deaths. It is wonderfully told. Another 
 novelette, Madame de Treymes, is a subtle tale of the 
 struggle of several, but especially two, Americans with 
 the unbreakable bonds of French society and family 
 tradition. 
 
 No example of this interesting type of fiction, the 
 
 Crawford novelette, easily finds a place above F. Marion Craw- 
 ford's A Cigarette-Maker's Romance, an alluringly 
 pathetic story of a Russian nobleman exiled to Munich, 
 Germany, and suffering from certain illusions which 
 alternately exalt and humiliate his sensitive, yet truly 
 noble, spirit. But Crawford must be reserved for the 
 pages upon the novelists of to-day. 
 
 Tarkington Booth Tarkington, also, is now a novelist of fame, 
 though the fine craftsmanship of an early story, a nov- 
 elette called Monsieur Beancaire, has not been equalled 
 in the later novels. The Turmoil is an absorbing 
 novel, but its style is careless, — busy, noisy, undisci- 
 plined. Penrod, too, amused a vast number, but it is 
 
— 39 — 
 
 only necessary to read a page of it and compare with 
 Aldrich, Howells, or even Charles Dudley Warner or 
 Charles D. Stewart to feel that Tarkington is doing 
 perishable work. But Monsieur Beaucaire, a romance 
 laid in the old city of Bath, England, excels the fine- 
 ness of workmanship of many British authors upon 
 their own ground. It is one of the books which time 
 cannot destroy. 
 
 The Novel. — No task is more difficult than to 
 choose the greater American novelists of this century. 
 One is "playing safe," however, when he selects Silas Our 
 
 1 J ° _- _ Novelists 
 
 Weir Mitchell, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Robert 
 Grant, Francis Marion Crawford, Margaretta Wade 
 Campbell Deland, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Owen Wis- 
 ter, David Graham Phillips, William Allen White, 
 Frank Norris, Winston Churchill, Anne Sedgwick, and 
 Ellen Glasgow. This is by no means an arrangement 
 in the order of climax, but in the order of birth, Weir 
 Mitchell being born in 1829 and Ellen Glasgow in 
 
 1874. 
 
 S. Weir Mitchell was a Philadelphia physician, a Weir 
 
 r , Mitchell 
 
 specialist in nerve disorders, who found relief from 
 his exacting professional life in writing several enter- 
 taining novels, among which Hugh Wynne, Free 
 Quaker stands foremost, and perhaps The Adventures 
 of Francois a close second. Hugh Wynne is a story 
 of the time of the War for Independence, and The 
 Adventures of Francois of the time of the French 
 Revolution. Mitchell's many books are sane and 
 wholesome, if not altogether beautiful in their grace- 
 ful style and optimistic tone. 
 
— 40 — 
 
 The great book of Mark Twain's later days was 
 A Serious the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. This is a 
 chronicle of the Maid of Orleans who saved France 
 at one of the most critical moments of that devoted 
 country's existence. While the book is based upon 
 old records and memoirs and is true to the historical 
 character of its heroine, yet it is in reality a historical 
 romance, thus belonging rather to fiction than to his- 
 tory. This book added much force to the easily ques- 
 tioned claim of those who maintain that Mark Twain 
 is the greatest of American men of letters. 
 •'The dean of William Dean Howells as well as Mark Twain be- 
 
 American 
 
 letters" longs to a generation ago, and he has not in this 
 
 day equalled the quality of his work before 1890, ex- 
 cepting in one point, — The World of Chance (1893) 
 contains the strongest and best portrait of a woman in 
 all of Howells's books. There is much autobiography 
 in this book. It should be read by every young man 
 ambitious to break into the world of publication. A 
 Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) is a characteristic 
 New York story, nearly in its author's best vein, and 
 The Flight of Pony Baker (1902) is a captivating 
 boys' story. In general, it may be said that Howells 
 is no better workman in these later books than in his 
 earlier, and some have thought that he has become 
 more seriously involved in social problems than his 
 talents for solving them warrant. Yet he remains the 
 most representative of American novelists of recent 
 time. 
 
 Robert Grant Among the many lawyers, or those who began their 
 careers as lawyers, who have found the profession of 
 literature more congenial or more insistently demand- 
 
— 41 — 
 
 ing their gifts, Judge Robert Grant of Boston is one 
 of the most distinguished. Another Bostonian whom 
 the law has "lent to literature" is F. J. Stimson, 
 widely known by his pseudonymn of "J. S. of Dale," 
 but Stimson belongs in his best work to the days be- 
 fore 1890. Robert Grant is a good essayist as well as 
 a powerful novelist. His essays, as in the Art of 
 Living, are refined, humorous, scholarly, attractively 
 written, and, in fact, about all that excellent essays 
 should be. His best known novel, Unleavened Bread, 
 is a most biting satire upon the social climbers of nine- 
 teenth century America. 
 
 Francis Marion Crawford was a "prince of story- 
 tellers." His purpose, as he put the matter in his The 
 Novel — What It Is, was to amuse and interest the 
 reader. He frankly asserted, too, that, as realism pro- 
 poses to show men what they are and romanticism to 
 show men what they should be, he would cast his lot 
 with the romanticists ; for "more good," he said, "can 
 be done by showing men what they may be, ought to 
 be, or can be than by describing their greatest weak- 
 nesses with the greatest art." Crawford early wrote 
 a story with setting in east India, — Mr. Isaacs, it 
 was called, — a crude but deeply interesting story. 
 Three Italian stories he also wrote, — Saricinesca, 
 (1887), Santf Ilario, and Don Orsino. These three 
 books constitute a trilogy (a single story made up of 
 three separate stories) ; in this case, the story of a 
 patrician family of modern Rome from 1865 to about 
 1888. The Three Fates (1891) should be read by 
 every young man and woman who desires to pursue 
 the life of authorship. These books come only short 
 
— 42 — 
 
 of being great books, and they have given their author 
 as high a reputation away from America as at home. 
 
 Crawford was a man of genius, seeing and painting 
 things as they are and making men see what they 
 should be. He was not quite a great artist, for he was 
 faulty in composition, building, construction. The rea- 
 son for this faultiness is that Crawford attempted the 
 writing of what is called the Epic Novel, the most dif- 
 ficult of all forms of prose literature to make a fine 
 artistic construction because of the multitude of de- 
 tails which clamor for inclusion in any structure which 
 attempts to be epic. The epic novel has been defined 
 by "Calvin Winter" as "the type wherein a great so- 
 cial movement, a moral or political revolution drawing 
 to a climax serves as the background of the story, 
 while the destiny of some special group, some single 
 family, some individual man or woman, closely inter- 
 woven with the progress of the general movement, 
 forms the central thread of the plot, the focus of in- 
 terest." Such an epic is Saracinesca, and its sequels. 
 A Cigarette-Maker 1 's Romance, a novelette already 
 mentioned, is much slighter in importance of subject 
 matter but more artistic in unity as it is also in charm. 
 It is his most perfect story, so far as form is con- 
 cerned, and most perfect also in its picturing of men 
 and women in both elemental and conventional situa- 
 tions in life. 
 
 While F. Marion Crawford lived much abroad, yet 
 he belongs to America, unqualifiedly, — as a nephew 
 of the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic 
 should. 
 
— 43 — 
 
 Margaret Deland is a native of Pennsylvania, but Margaret 
 has lived in Boston since 1880. It was about that 
 date Mrs. Deland began her career of authorship. 
 Verse was the form of her first attempts ; and then 
 came the remarkable novel John Ward, Preacher, a 
 book which thoughtfully, earnestly, and skillfully han- 
 dled subjects of the greatest religious importance. If 
 this book were still her best, her work might always 
 suffer in comparison with a similar novel, Robert Bis- 
 mere, by the English novelist, Mrs. Humphrey 
 Ward. But the short-stories in Old Chester Tales 
 published in 1899, an d the novels The Awakening of 
 Helena Richie and The Iron Woman lifted her above 
 any such flat comparison and placed her in the ranks 
 of those who must be considered upon the ground 
 of permanency. The two novels are bound to- 
 gether by the presence of some of the same characters 
 in each. The Iron Woman has justly been pronounced 
 to be the strongest in grasp upon the facts of life and 
 in narrative power of any novel produced by an Amer- 
 ican woman. It is a vigorous work, reflecting the in- 
 dustrial life of Pittsburgh, and incidentally carrying 
 with this a strong and beautiful love story. The book 
 is full of evidence of great gifts of observation and of 
 constructive imagination. Mrs. Deland is prevailingly 
 bright and cheerful in the atmosphere with which she 
 suffuses her work. She is capable of rich humor and 
 of deep sentiment and strong pathos. She is, no doubt, 
 at her best when the burning issues of modern life 
 face her and her characters, — then she writes with 
 an interest which has made her one of the most popu- 
 lar of living novelists, and with a directness of effect 
 
44 
 
 Kate Douglas 
 Wiggin 
 
 Wister 
 
 which carries conviction to those who are opposed to 
 her thought. In 191 8 Margaret Deland went to France 
 to work in a canteen, as have many other eminent 
 women of America. 
 
 Kate Douglas Wiggin was born in Philadelphia, 
 lived during girlhood in rural New England, and at 
 the age of eighteen removed for a period of resi- 
 dence to California. In youth, Kate Douglas Wig- 
 gin, according to her sister, was an assiduous reader, 
 her "literary passions" being the Arabian Nights, 
 Scottish Chiefs, Thaddens of Warsaw, Don Quixote, 
 Irving's Mahomet, Thackeray's Book of Snobs, Un- 
 dine, The Martyrs of Spain, Shakespeare, and Dick- 
 ens. She has always been interested in educational 
 affairs, and was above all others responsible for the or- 
 ganization in this country of free kindergartens for 
 poor children. But one needs now-a-days only to refer 
 to A Cathedral Courtship, The Birds' Christmas Carol, 
 Polly Oliver's Problem, Timothy's Quest, Penelope's 
 Experience (carried through three books), and Re- 
 becca of Sunnybrook Farm to be sure of delighted 
 attention from admiring readers. But The Old Pea- 
 body Pew is a story of more rare beauty than these. 
 
 Stories of college life seldom have merit. Students 
 themselves are not, as a rule, sufficiently matured in 
 the craft of writing to produce superior stylistic form, 
 though they are astonishingly fertile in fancy and in 
 strong, if crude, imagination. An occasional excep- 
 tion serves only to prove the rule. The practised 
 writer, on the other hand, has shunned the field, or has 
 been so smitten with the glamour of it within his mem- 
 ory that he does it the injustice of extravagant exag- 
 
— 45 — 
 
 geration, though college life has formed an impor- 
 tant feature of more than one successful novel, (as 
 Dorothy Canfield's The Bent Twig), when presented 
 as a lesser phase of the careers of their char- 
 acters. One writer, however, attained a distinct suc- 
 cess in his short-story of college life, Philosophy Four. 
 This was Owen Wister, who has written also a biog- 
 raphy of General Grant, and at least three well-known 
 novels, the most tantalizing of the novels being Lady 
 Baltimore, which, by the way, is the name of a kind of 
 cake, not of a woman, and was first found in a Wom- 
 an's Exchange ! Lady Baltimore is Owen Wister's trib- 
 ute to Henry James, for only a conscious disciple of 
 James could have written it; no other sort of person 
 could have done all this verbal skirmishing, — but the 
 verbal minuets are Wister's own. 
 
 Owen Wister during the greatest of wars has served 
 well his country by his Pentecost of Calamity. But 
 the one book which caught the popular favor most se- 
 curely is the story of a Wyoming cow-boy, told in his 
 novel of The Virginian. It is a delightful story, one 
 we would fain believe true. And it is a picture of life, 
 a life that has gone forever, but a life that was none 
 the less important and interesting because it was 
 doomed to go, standing, as it did, in the path of prog- 
 ress, — the life of the cow-puncher, "the last roman- 
 tic figure on our soil," as Wister himself has called 
 him. The center of this picture, or of this tale of sun- 
 dry adventures, is Cheyenne, Wyoming; but its soul 
 is the heaven-born imagination of its author. One 
 who has read chapters thirteen to sixteen will not 
 forget them. And one who is old enough and has. 
 
Phillips 
 
 -46- 
 
 wandered enough to have come into the company of 
 the cow-boys of the last century re-lives the entrancing 
 days which were passed in their presence. This is the 
 kind of story the author could not help telling, because 
 he saw its like in life itself. There remain few who 
 can record similar things ; and when the social history 
 of America shall be written this book will be counted 
 among the authentic documents. 
 
 Almost a score of novels is our heritage from David 
 Graham Phillips, who died before the full fruition of 
 his powers. His was pioneer work, pioneer work in 
 that it presents, with outspoken fearlessness, Ameri- 
 can life of to-day as seen directly by one whose ideal 
 was the truth about the liabilities, not the assets, of 
 the social life of the conventional "upper classes" of 
 this nation. No one since Emerson has taught so strik- 
 ingly that "It is as exact a truth as any in chemistry or 
 mechanics that Aristocracy is the natural, the inevita- 
 ble sequence of widespread ignorance, and Democracy 
 the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread in- 
 telligence. - * * * The story of history, rightly writ- 
 ten, would be the story of the march of Democracy, 
 now patiently wearing away obstacles, accelerated 
 there, now sweeping along upon the surface, again 
 flowing for centuries underground, but always in ac- 
 tion, always the one continuous, inevitable force. There 
 has never been any more danger of its defeat than 
 there has been danger that the human brain would be 
 smoothed of its thought-bearing convolutions and set 
 in retreat through the stages of evolution back to pro- 
 toplasm." . 
 
— 47 — 
 
 Phillips was a reporter for the New York Sun, then 
 London correspondent for the New York World. He 
 also devoted himself to what were termed "muck-rak- 
 ing" articles for magazines ; and then came his novels. 
 He was an untiring workman. He said, "Every one 
 of my books was written at least three times * * * 
 and when I say 'three times' it really means nine times, 
 on account of my system of copying and revision * * 
 * * I have writer's cramp every spring." He wrote 
 for hours at a time, standing at a desk, usually during 
 the night, turning out from six thousand to seven 
 thousand words between ten o'clock and daylight. His 
 nearly twenty novels averaged at least one hundred 
 thousand words. Back of this industry were his in- 
 tense moral earnestness, his eagerness for reform, and 
 his belief that "the matter of giving life to the pages 
 of a novel is the result of industrious study of human 
 beings." There is an important principle underlying 
 each one of his books, — such a principle as the bio- 
 logical one that man, as other animals, makes his best 
 records under handicaps, or the social principle that 
 the family is the unit of happiness. 
 
 His books are almost among the great books of the 
 time — The Great God Success, The Second Genera- 
 tion, Light-Fingered Gentry, Old Wives for New, The 
 Hungry Heart, The Husband's Story, and The Grain 
 of Dust, to name only the best of them. No man, not 
 even Carlyle, has ever shown more depth of hatred for 
 shams than did David Graham Phillips. The unmask- 
 ing of political and social shams was his mission, the 
 "showing up" especially of the life of the "yellow 
 rich;" and through all of his efforts to do this runs a 
 
- 4 8- 
 
 passionate advocacy of the Americanism which de- 
 mands a working belief that civilization does not mean 
 property but means men and women. Yet in all the 
 diseases of the American body politic and social, with 
 his characteristically American optimism he saw the 
 sign of vitality. He believed in the curative power of 
 illness. He was a "prophet of twentieth century un- 
 rest and reconstruction/' a radical prophet, one "out 
 for results." 
 
 All critics seem to agree that The Second Genera- 
 tion is the story with which to begin the reading of 
 Phillips, as it is less likely than any other to arouse 
 needless antagonism. This is a significant and inspiring 
 story, — all agree to that, too. Yet the character draw- 
 ing of Dorothy Hallowell in The Grain of Dust is the 
 most faithful to life of any of his portraits of the 
 women of to-day, accurate as they all are. One reading 
 the delineation of Dorothy Hallowell inevitably recurs 
 in his mind to the marvelous picturing done by Thack- 
 eray and by Balzac. And one knows the author as he 
 reads the book. If strongly energetic yet unconsciously 
 delicate revelation of the personality of the author con- 
 stitutes literature, then The Grain of Dust is literature, 
 and of a high order. 
 22SflSr The leadin g function of William Allen White, a 
 Kansas newspaper editor, has been the popular pre- 
 sentation of sound political principles through the me- 
 dium of magazine articles, but he has also written 
 many short-stories and one very remarkable novel. 
 A visit to France in 191 7 resulted in a volume 
 under the title of The Martial Adventures of 
 Henry and Me, giving an illuminating account of what 
 
 Kansas?' 
 
— 49 — 
 
 he saw and thought there. This book, with the excep- 
 tion of Dawson's Carry On, shows the hand of the 
 master of a literary style more than any of the numer- 
 ous war-books published before 19 18. The "eloquent 
 chronicler" of this history-making time does not ap- 
 pear as yet to have revealed himself. Among White's 
 ten or a dozen publications in book form, one at least 
 will be considered by the future historian of American 
 social life as a document of highest value. The story of 
 John Barclay in A Certain Rich Man is the story of 
 American life on the western plains beginning in 1857, 
 when Kansas was frontier, and ending in 1909 when 
 the frontier could be found nowhere unless perhaps 
 in our Asiatic islands. Strong types and sharply out- 
 lined individuals are in this great novel, as well as so- 
 cial and political and business background, and the 
 author writes as one who has much to say and all is 
 important. Few books are more persuasive. 
 
 Frank Norris, though born in Chicago, was taken by The man who 
 his emigrating family to California so early in his life "The Great 
 that the greater impressions which embodied them- Novel" 
 selves in his novels were derived from the life of the 
 west coast. Norris was trained in a newspaper office, 
 writing thus, he said, for the Plain People. In his 
 early fiction he showed the influence of Stevenson in 
 Moran of the Lady Letty (his one purely romantic 
 book) and the influence of Zola in McTeague (a study 
 in heredity and environment which took four years to 
 write). But Norris never in his work nor in his thought 
 about his work quite distinguished between the chief 
 methods of these two masters. "For my own part," he 
 said (and he wrote fiction accordingly), "I believe that 
 
— 50 — 
 
 the greatest realism is the greatest romanticism, and I 
 hope some day to prove it." Norris wrote realisti- 
 cally, though not because he wanted to be a realist, as 
 Zola did, but because he wanted to make evident to all 
 hL readers the significance of the real, for, said he, 1 
 "Literature is of all the arts the most democratic." 
 
 Like David Graham Phillips, Norris was a pioneer 
 in twentieth century literature, because, for one thing, 
 he believed that the novel is something essential to 
 modern civilization, — "Essential," he said, "because 
 it expresses modern life better than architecture, bet- 
 ter than painting, better than poetry, better than music. 
 It is as necessary to the civilization of the twentieth 
 century as the violin is to Kubelik, as the piano is to 
 Paderewski * * * * It is an instrument, a tool, a 
 weapon, a vehicle. It is that thing which in the hand 
 of a man makes him civilized and no longer a savage, 
 because it gives him a power of durable, permanent 
 expression." The effect of such ideas as these, and of 
 the work done in accordance with such ideas, partic- 
 ularly of the fine craftsmanship of that work, has 
 been almost immeasurably great, not only upon the 
 younger generation of novelists, but upon the older 
 workers who have survived him. 
 
 Norris maintained that the novel is a greater 
 moulder of public opinion and of public morals than 
 is the press. "The press is read with lightning haste, 
 and the morning news is waste paper by noon. But 
 the novel goes into the home to stay. It is read word 
 for word ; is talked about, discussed ; its influence pen- 
 etrates every chink and corner of the family." But 
 while Norris wrote for the people, he did not write for 
 
— 5i — 
 
 popularity. He never truckled ; never took off his hat 
 to fashion and held it out for pennies. He was a real- 
 ist for the sole reason that he believed it essential that 
 people, "the People," hear, not a lie, but the truth, and 
 that they should understand that truth. 
 
 Norris's aim was to write in prose fiction form the 
 epic of our present national life. He planned three 
 volumes for this purpose : The Octopus; The Pit; and 
 a third, which was to have been named The Wolf, 
 but which never saw the light, for he died at the 
 age of thirty-seven, before he was able to put his plan 
 into form. Wheat is the symbol of American life h 
 these two volumes, as gold is in McTeague. The Octo- 
 pus is the epic tale of the early western railroad, the 
 road that brooked no competition, that fed upon the la- 
 bor of men, destroying them, and yet feeding the world 
 with the Titan wheat harvests of California valleys. 
 All the "baseness and the grandeur, the sensuality and 
 the spirituality" which accompany these gigantic ope- 
 rations is almost brutally set forth. Through "the in- 
 iquitous burden of extortionate freight rates, imposed 
 like a yoke of iron" the railroad prevailed. "Men — 
 motes in the sunshine perished * * * * But the 
 wheat remained'' The Pit is the story of Chicago 
 wheat traders and trading, inferior in "strength and 
 brilliancy and lyric quality," as it is inferior in subject 
 matter, to The Octopus, yet it has been more widely 
 read, for the obvious if not very commendable reason 
 that in The Pit men and women are more every-day 
 and like unto our too conventional selves. As a great 
 allegory The Octopus, though not worthy of being 
 
— 52 — 
 
 styled the great American novel, is yet a landmark, a 
 sign-post, on the way to that yearned-for achievement. 
 One of the most conscientious and assiduous of 
 Churchill workers in the realm of the novel is Winston Church- 
 ill. He has spent three or four years upon almost 
 every one of his books. Thackeray is his model ; ap- 
 parently his ambition has been to rise to the mid-Vic- 
 torian height, though he is not at all likely now to 
 reach it. His books in most instances are panoramic 
 in scope, attempting surveys of large phases of Amer- \ 
 ican life. Richard Carvel, The Crossing, The Crisis, 
 Coniston, The Inside of the Cup, are cases in point. 
 The first three are historical novels, dealing, the first 
 with the period of the War for Independence, the 
 second with the period of the settling of the Middle 
 West, and the third with the period of the Civil War, 
 or shall we call it "the war for Southern independ- 
 ence?" The Crisis has been praised for its sketch of 
 Lincoln, but surviving friends of the g^eat President 
 have asserted that the picture is very inadequate. The 
 Inside of the Cup aroused much interest in its fear- 
 less arraignment of modern ecclesiastical religion, and 
 for the moment gave its author undeserved reputation 
 for profound religious insight. But the thought of the 
 book was not constructed upon any new lines at all, 
 and, as this fact became evident, interest soon waned. 
 The best, the most graphically vigorous narrative of 
 them all, is Coniston, the story of Jethro Bass, a New 
 Hampshire political boss. If it has been less popular 
 than The Crisis, this is the fault of the public and not 
 of the author nor of his book. Mr. Churchill has been 
 
— 53 — 
 
 more rapid in production of late, and his quality has 
 fallen away correspondingly. 
 
 Anne Douglas Sedgwick (since 1908 Mrs. de Selin- Sedgwick 
 court) has published at least seven volumes, one of 
 which, Tante, has been widely circulated. Her latest 
 volume is The Encounter, and is worthy of a larger 
 audience than it has secured. It is of especial interest 
 because, and perhaps solely because, it contains an in- 
 timate study of the personal side of the life of the 
 German philosopher, Nietzsche. The picture here 
 drawn of the much condemned thinker is not a repul- 
 sive one, but rather belittling. There are other char- 
 acters in The Encounter who are well delineated, and 
 the intricacies of the story are unforgetable. The book 
 is not designed to attract a large number of readers. 
 Its crudeness of structure, especially in details, makes 
 it somewhat difficult to the average book-lover, and 
 annoying to the more trained one. Still, that Mrs. de 
 Selincourt fails to write, or refuses to write, after the 
 manner of the general pattern of those who write fic- 
 tion, does not by any means offset the usefulness of 
 the attempt to induct the novel-reading public into the 
 intimacies of the life of the world-troubling philoso- 
 pher of world-banned Prussia. 
 
 The woman novelist of the South is Miss Ellen Glas- Glas e°* 
 gow, who was born at Richmond, Virginia, in 1874. 
 With one exception her novels depict, by the epic 
 method, the scenes and characters of the region with 
 which life has made her familiar. That exception is 
 The Wheel of Life, whose scene is in New York, 
 and is practically a failure. Her other books fall 
 into three groups, all of the groups held together as 
 
— 54 — 
 
 one, however, by a common theme, that of marriage 
 among different social "classes." The first group com- 
 prises two books, The Battle-Ground and The Deliver- 
 ance; the second, also two, The Voice of the People 
 and The Romance of a Plain Man, and in the third 
 group one volume stands thus far alone, and is by far 
 the best of the results of her masterly labors, — The 
 Miller of Old Church. 
 
 These books are epical, like most of those of Norris 
 and of Phillips, for they present as background and 
 leading element of their content the life of a large com- 
 munity (of Virginia, or, at most, the "New South"), 
 and then proceed to delineate the history of one or 
 more families, and within these families the intimate 
 personal careers of one or more individuals who are the 
 most typical or symbolic of some aspects of the life 
 of the large community involved. The Battle-Ground 
 and The Deliverance are concerned respectively with 
 the life of Virginia during the Civil War and the 
 period of Reconstruction. The Voice of the People 
 and The Romance of a Plain Man offer pictures of the 
 rise, after the war, of the former white tillers of the 
 soil, if not, indeed, the "poor white trash," and their 
 assimilation or amalgamation with the impoverished 
 "aristocrats" who in the time of distress find the 
 noble qualities of the lower class not latent only but 
 afire with ambition and with recognized achievement 
 now that opportunity has ceased to pass them by. Next 
 to The Miller of Old Church, Miss Glasgow's most 
 lasting triumph is The Romance of a Plain Man. It is 
 a closer and finer and stronger study of the inner de- 
 velopment of individual character through a process 
 
— 55 — 
 
 of self-education than any found in the two books of 
 the first group or in the first book of the second ; and 
 it is a superb piece of story-building. However, it is 
 not so likely to be closely examined by the social stu- 
 dents of the future as are the books portraying the life 
 of War and Reconstruction days. Those "novels of 
 manners," as also The Voice of the People, bring for- 
 ward more fully the circumstances of a society that is 
 passing or has passed permanently away. Mr. Frederic 
 Cooper is right in giving Ellen Glasgow the distinc- 
 tion of being the second American woman to succeed 
 in writing a genuine epic novel, the first being, of 
 course, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
 
 * The literary principle of illustrating the universal 
 through the particular is admirably exemplified by The 
 Miller of Old Church, even though the setting is but 
 the neighborhood of a little country community, old- 
 fashionedly named Old Church. In the theme lies the 
 universal element of this novel, — the struggle of the 
 "lower classes" to forge upward, as they everywhere 
 have done and continue to do. Yet the author also well 
 meets in this book the demand of Frank Norris that, 
 while the theme or purpose of a novel is to the story 
 as the key-note is to a sonata, yet with the author of the 
 novel as with the musician the leading interest must not 
 be the theme, not the key-note, but the story. And it is 
 the human story, the sheer story content and sequence, 
 rather than the working of a great theme in human 
 life, that makes this book to us, as it doubtless was to 
 its author, her chief contribution to our literature. 
 
 There have been many other novelists since 1890, — 
 Harold Frederic, with his Damnation of Theron Ware, 
 
- 5 6- 
 
 Who Now 
 Gives the 
 Greatest 
 Promise ? 
 
 Edward Noyes Westcott, author of David Harum, 
 Stewart Edward White, entertaining writer of the 
 north woods and of Arizona deserts, and of Alaska 
 and Africa, too, Paul Leicester Ford, Richard Hard- 
 ing Davis, Dorothy Canfield, Mary Johnston, Arthur 
 Train, Henry Sydnor Harrison, Ernest Poole, and 
 almost numberless others, some of whom should, 
 possibly, not be nameless here. According to George 
 Barr McCutcheon, John Fox, Jr., has written the novel 
 with the best title in all American fiction, — The Lit- 
 tle Shepherd of Kingdom Come. The promise of Ern- 
 est Poole appears greater than that of any others of the 
 younger authors of fiction at this date (1918), but 
 there also appears the old danger that he will dissipate 
 his gifts in over-production. Or is it Henry Sydnor 
 Harrison who gives the greater promise? His Queed 
 is a good story; one can hardly wait for the apparent 
 tragedy to develop into comedy, so absorbing is the 
 tale. He has a finer hand than has Poole, and carries 
 on the more obvious literary traditions; there is, in 
 fact, a touch of Dickens in the story. Yet we may 
 not be amiss if we fix our faith upon neither of these, 
 but upon Dorothy Canfield (Mrs. J. R. Fisher). She 
 is a better writer than Poole, both in detail and in 
 plot-construction, and she probes more deeply into the 
 souls of her characters than does Harrison, — is much 
 less superficial than he. The Bent Twig is a notable 
 success. The social student cannot afford to pass by 
 Ernest Poole; the student of the "New South" (and of 
 the newspaper for that matter) cannot afford to leave 
 Harrison unread; and in Dorothy Canfield we at last 
 appear to have an author who understands the Col- 
 
— 57 — 
 
 lege community, though that is, perhaps, the least im- 
 portant feature of her interesting book. The most im- 
 portant thing said in The Bent Tzvig is in Chapter 
 XXXI and relates to elementary education. — "Per- 
 haps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'so- 
 cial conscience' or 'civic responsibility,' isn't a result 
 of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for 
 beauty." And who has better stated the actual func- 
 tion of our public school than Dorothy Canfield (Chap- 
 ter VII)? — thus: "Those devouringly active little 
 minds did not spend six hours a day in school without 
 learning something incessantly. The few rags and 
 tatters of book-information they acquired were but the 
 merest fringes on the great garment of learning ac- 
 quired by these public school children, which was to 
 wrap them about all their lives. What they learned 
 during those eight yeais of sitting still and not whis- 
 pering had nothing to do with the books in their desks 
 or the lore in their teachers' brains. The great im- 
 pression stamped upon the wax of their minds, which 
 became iron in after years, was democracy — " 
 
 Our sketch would be sadly more incomplete than it 
 now is, if we did not mention two other works of fic- 
 tion. H. K. Viele's The Inn of the Silver Moon is 
 one of the most charming of foolish stories, high ro- 
 mance walking in the midst of familiar matter of to- 
 day, a miracle of rare device; its author certainly on 
 honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise ! 
 The Inn of the Silver Moon is only a novelette, per- 
 haps ; but this cannot be -said of Charles D. Stewart's 
 Partners of Providence, a real novel, rich with humor, 
 astonishing for the keenness and breadth of its insight 
 
-58- 
 
 and understanding, such a book as the world has 
 waited for ever since Mark Twain's stories of river 
 life. The book has come, and it is better than the 
 world expected, for it is not an imitation of Mark 
 Twain. It is an independent book, intensely interest- 
 ing, immensely entertaining, — the kind of book that 
 makes one feel that he knows man and the world bet- 
 ter, and that acquiring the knowledge has been tre- 
 mendously worth while. 
 
Is it 
 
 III 
 
 THE DRAMATISTS 
 
 The American Stage. — It takes the critic to his 
 wits' end to be sure that he is placing an unprejudiced 
 estimate upon the printed plays of America. In brief, American? 
 such an estimate would probably be that, from the 
 point of view of the box office American drama has 
 been a matchless success, but that as literature it has 
 been embarrassingly inconsiderable. We have had 
 many excellent playwrights, men who have known how 
 to lay out thrilling and yet consistent plots and who 
 have been able to manage the tactical details of play 
 presentation. almost to perfection. Bronson Howard, 
 Clyde Fitch, William Gillette, Charles Klein, George 
 H. Broadhurst, Augustus Thomas, Langdon Mitchell, 
 David Belasco, George M. Cohan, — and there have 
 been and are more. Among them Mr. Cohan is con- 
 sidered foremost as a maker of plays for the stage; 
 but how far from the kingdom of letters ! It is, in 
 fact, doubtful whether a single play from the hand of 
 any one of these men will be appraised as literature a 
 . half century hence, the doubt arising only because 
 Fitch's Beau Brummel, Thomas's The Witching Hour, 
 and Mitchell's The New York Idea are still read, 
 even after the likelihood of their frequent revival in 
 the theater, has vanished. The first of these three 
 plays is a good picture of an historical character who is 
 still of interest ; the second is a plea for a semi-popular 
 psychic creed which features mental telepathy as one 
 of its strongest points ; and the third is our best comedy 
 
— 6o — 
 
 of manners. The reason for so little real drama from 
 this group of playwrights is that they have not studied 
 American life and brought it before the American peo- 
 ple, but have given their attention to a small phase of 
 that life, the metropolitan phase, and have presented 
 it to cosmopolitans only. To be more specific, they 
 have studied only the life of Broadway and its vicinity 
 and have staged that for New Yorkers of all nationali- 
 ties. Even though Clyde Fitch wrote about sixty-six 
 plays and Augustus Thomas began a series of plays 
 each to be entitled after some one of the Common- 
 wealths of the Union (but getting no further than 
 Colorado), yet their characters talk and live as the 
 inhabitants of Manhattan Island alone talk and live. 
 
 Literary Prose Drama. — There are a few other 
 playwrights who have been more successful with the 
 with Acts library-table play; Mary Austin, William Vaughn 
 Many Moody, Edward Sheldon, Edward Knoblauch, Charles 
 
 Kenyon, Alice Brown, Percy Mackaye, George Mid- 
 dleton, and we might now include Charles Rann Ken- 
 nedy, as he has taken steps toward naturalization since 
 the entrance of our country upon the duties of the 
 Great War. David Pinski, also, a Russian dramatist, 
 author of The Treasure, appears to have begun the 
 process of Americanization, and, if he continues it, 
 will be eagerly claimed by us. All these have written 
 plays of undoubted power and sincerity, not only in 
 subject matter but also in manner of treatment, — 
 and it is by treatment of his material, of course, that 
 the artist stands or falls. And then we cannot over- 
 look at least four writers of poetic drama, Josephine 
 Preston Peabody (Mrs. Lionel Marks), Mrs. Olive 
 
— 61 — 
 
 Til ford Dargan, Richard Hovey, and William Vaughn 
 Moody. 
 
 Mary Austin, William Vaughn Moody, and Edward 
 Sheldon have done with the drama what many of our 
 short-stories have excelled in doing, namely, created a 
 literature "of the soil." Mary Austin's The Arrow 
 Maker is a play with a setting of western mountains 
 and the tribal vicissitudes of the native Indians. It is 
 true that the play does reveal the universal longing of 
 Woman to have and to serve, but that it is a play dis- 
 tinctively American is, in this instance, more impor- 
 tant. Plays a-plenty with material immensely vary- 
 ing from the material of this one have exhibited the 
 same universal quality ; but this material could have 
 been found only upon our soil. Moody's The Great Di- 
 vide and Sheldon's The Nigger are far more of the 
 United States than is Zangwill's much praised The 
 Melting-Pot. Moody's play represents setting and 
 events in the Southwest, though there is much of New 
 England in it, too, and Sheldon's represents setting and 
 events in the Southeast, and all impossible elsewhere. 
 But another prose play by Moody, The Faith-Healer, 
 though less read because of its minimum of purely 
 sensational appeal, is much superior to The Great Di- 
 vide. Mr. William Archer, the distinguished English 
 dramatic critic, has spoken of The Faith-Healer as the 
 only American play of real psychological importance. 
 
 Edward Knoblauch's most successful experiment has 
 been done in collaboration with Arnold Bennett, Eng- 
 lish playwright, essayist, and novelist, upon the drama 
 entitled Milestones. This drama is famous as a unique 
 experiment in technique, the authors carrying one 
 
— 62 — 
 
 theme through the action and character revealment of 
 three generations of one family, and doing it success- 
 fully, to the final confusion of the ancient dogma of 
 the unity of time. The theme of this play could hardly 
 be older, that human nature is the same yesterday, to- 
 day, and tomorrow. Charles Kenyon's Kindling has 
 excited great interest among students of social condi- 
 tions. It is an over-idealized bit of work in its 
 characterization, and is lacking in symmetry and 
 proper emphasis of detail; yet it is strongly to be com- 
 mended for its restraint in sentiment. Miss -Alice 
 Brown's Children of the Barth, a ten thousand dollar 
 prize play, is an extraordinary study in many things 
 that may be found in our national life if one will but 
 turn his mind and eyes away from the great cities. The 
 play has not been convincing to many readers of pres- 
 ent-day drama, only because it is difficult for them to 
 understand, much less to see for themselves, that there 
 can be so great and so profound complexity of life in 
 "the provinces." Some parts of this play are among 
 the most ethereally beautiful passages in our litera- 
 ture, as we might expect from so accomplished a 
 writer as Miss Brown. 
 
 The work of Percy Mackaye and of George Middle- 
 ton takes us into the purlieus of that fine body of litera- 
 The One-act ture composed of one-act plays, so popular upon the Eu- 
 Play ropean stage and so unfailingly attractive to the reader 
 
 everywhere because of the perfection of dialogue and 
 of structure from the hands of the greatest of the old- 
 world dramatists of the past forty years. An occa- 
 sional one-act play can be found here and there in the 
 history of literature for many a year before the pres- 
 
— 6 3 - 
 
 ent time, but it was not deemed specially important 
 until the remarkable work of August Strindberg, the 
 Swedish dramatist, gave it vogue in his thirteen di- 
 minutive dramas, or one-act plays. Strindberg was 
 quickly followed in this relatively new literary form 
 by Sudermann, Hofmansthal, and Maeterlinck upon 
 the continent of Europe, and by William Sharp, Bern- 
 ard Shaw, Stephen Phillips, James M. Barrie, Lord 
 Dunsany, Lady Gregory, Yeats, Synge, Robinson, 
 Masefield, Gibson, Phillpotts, and many others in the 
 British Isles, and the one-act play, neither a drama- 
 tized short-story nor a compressed drama of the older 
 type, but a distinct literary type, had come to remain. 
 Numberless one-act plays have been written in 
 America of late years, and to select two or three au- 
 thors as representative of the many who have writ- 
 ten them is to be almost certain to reject others as 
 worthy. Miss Marguerite Merington and Mrs. Evelyn 
 Greenleaf Sutherland have won high reputation by 
 their volumes of one-act plays. The Picture-Plays of 
 Miss Merington make one of the cleverest of volumes 
 of recent days. But Percy Mackaye and George Mid- 
 dleton are more worthy of notice, and not of that 
 alone, but of careful study, though Mr. Mackaye does 
 insist that it takes less effort to write ten one-act plays 
 than one longer drama, — ■ which is extremely doubt- 
 ful, if the one-act play be as good as the best. Percy 
 Mackaye's one-act plays in Yankee Fantasies are as 
 likely, if not more than likely, to last as long as his 
 loosely constructed and over-ornamented longer plays. 
 Mackaye has a wide vocabulary and is a past master 
 at phrasing, but he has not a great deal of dramatic 
 
-6 4 - 
 
 power. But The Yankee Fantasies are good in char- 
 acter presentation, really convincing as New England 
 types, strictly and peculiarly American, almost actual 
 individuals, though of rather eccentric sorts. They 
 are not at all over-done, as his ambitious interpreta- 
 tion of early New England character in The Scare- 
 crow certainly is over-done ; and to one unacquainted 
 with the real literature in the form of the one-act play 
 they afford a delightful open door to such pleasing 
 and important acquaintanceship. 
 
 George Middleton is our most accomplished writer 
 in this particular form. His Embers, and Other 
 One- Act Plays contains his ablest work. They are 
 serious plays, "studies in consequences and readjust- 
 ments," he has called them, further expressions of 
 some preceding situations. They suggest that other 
 dramatic situations have come before them and have 
 led up to them, and that further dramatic, even tragic, 
 situations would follow, if these playlets were actual 
 life, as they seem almost to be. And this is the true 
 art of the one-act play, that it is unitary in its effect, 
 but, like conditions and situations in life, suggestive of 
 what is never told. 
 
 Another successful writer of one-act plays is Per- 
 cival Wilde. He has published three volumes of brief 
 dramatic pieces, the most read of them being Dawn 
 and Other One-Act Plays of Life To-day and The 
 Unseen Host and Other War Plays. The title piece 
 in the second of these volumes is based upon the inci- 
 dent of the Angels of Mons. More of Mr. Wilde's 
 one-act plays are said to have been produced in "Lit- 
 tle Theatres" than those of any other American author. 
 
II 
 
 POETRY 
 
II 
 
 POETRY 
 
 Poetic Drama. — There has been considerable hos- 
 tile criticism of the poetic drama; usually, though, by The Poetic 
 authors who cannot produce anything poetic or by drama 
 critics who know neither poetry nor the drama. The 
 criticism has nearly always taken the form of saying 
 that the poetic drama is not realistic and cannot be. 
 But there is no essential difference between realistic 
 and poetic drama. If poetry has been correctly de- 
 fined when defined as passion of the soul, then many 
 a realistic drama, whether written in prose or in verse, 
 is packed with poetry; and, on the other hand, if the 
 abiding characteristics of the human mind and heart 
 abide because they are real, then many a poetic play 
 is realistic. Many a poetic play contains world-old 
 aspects of our frail yet strong, failing yet aspiring and 
 achieving, human nature. There is much of this uni- 
 versally and abidingly real content of human life in 
 Josephine Preston Peabody's The Piper and in her ^'^j 18 
 Marlowe. Marlowe is an attempt to rehabilitate the Peabody 
 life of the Shakespeareans, and centers about Christo- 
 pher Marlowe's song beginning "Come live with me, 
 and be my Love." It is for the reader who is 
 already equipped with a sense for the historic and 
 for the force of allusion; it is not, perhaps, read- 
 ily "understanded of the people." But The Piper is 
 
— 68 — 
 
 for everybody, a simple and beautiful and world-wide 
 application of the theme underlying the folk tale al- 
 ready so well told by Browning, the theme that not 
 gold but love will purchase the precious things that we 
 have once driven away from us by base selfishness and 
 false promises. This author has written other books 
 and dramas, but The Piper placed her high among 
 American poets and among playwrights of every- 
 where. We shall elsewhere have occasion to discuss 
 her as poet. 
 Dargan 1 ° r Mrs. Olive Tilford Dargan, another author of poetic 
 drama, appears, as George Eliot did, to crave to live in 
 her mind a universal life. She has made her knowl- 
 edge almost engirdle the world, and has reflected this 
 unusual breadth of learning in her dramas. The ancient 
 life of Mesopotamia; the life of Greece in the days of 
 her struggles with the Persian, in her colonial era, and 
 during the Crusades of mediaeval days; life in Cen- 
 tral America, in Spain, in Russia, in middle-age Eng- 
 land, in the United States, and in idealized times and 
 places ; — all these have yielded settings, background, 
 atmosphere, and content for her numerous plays. All 
 her plays are good, with the exception of the one 
 prose play called The Poet, which is so poor that it 
 should never have been printed. The strongest among 
 them in point of mystery of life and of her art are 
 Semiramis, Lords and Lovers, The Siege, The Mor- 
 tal Gods, and The Shepherd. Mrs. Dargan imitates 
 the Elizabethan dramatists, a most daring thing to do. 
 But she has excellent historical insight and imagina- 
 tion, is a good story-teller, and, at times, writes poetry 
 of very nearly transcendent merit. 
 
-6g- 
 
 Richard Hovey was the most ably and finely equip- Richard 
 ped of all recent Americans who have attempted the 
 dramatic form. His aim was frankly to create poetry 
 rather than stage plays. The delicately wrought dia- 
 logue of his four Arthurian dramas (he had planned 
 nine) is beyond the mouthing of the stage. In these 
 dramas Hovey played upon an instrument of many 
 strings, and this instrument speaks best to one who 
 listens with the inner ear of the soul. "All music is 
 what awakes from you when you are reminded by the 
 instruments," — true to the last word this is when 
 one reads the dramas of Hovey, for one forgets au- 
 thor, subject, story, and the incomparable technique of 
 verse while the music of many of their passages takes 
 swift and complete possession of the spirit of the 
 reader. But we shall revert in the following pages 
 to this series of dramas, to which Hovey gave the gen- 
 eral title of Launcclot and Guenevere. 
 
 William Vaughn Moody's three poetic dramas, The ^ a illi t m 
 Firebringer, The Death of Bve, and The Masque of Moody 
 Judgment, must not be over-looked by the student of 
 our literary drama. The last named of these is lofty 
 poetry. While one will not venture upon a compari- 
 son with the poetry of Milton, yet The Masque of 
 Judgment inevitably suggests the tone, the thought, 
 and the imaginative vision of, not Milton's Comus, but 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
 Chiefly Lyrical. — If we admit to the company all A Goodly 
 
 / J , , . Fellowship 
 
 who write verse, there are in the elect body of poets in 
 this country more than four hundred, — a good many 
 more. The number who sit at the banquet tables of 
 the Poetry Society is, — not quite legion. Yet a few 
 
— 70 — 
 
 only are feasting far up the slopes of Parnassus. But 
 to offer a selection of the arrived or nearly arrived few- 
 is to invite denunciation and harangue. 
 
 However, no one will be disposed to quarrel if we 
 say there should be included in such a selection the 
 Com?iny ioUS f ollowin g : Eugene Field, John Banister Tabb, James 
 Whitcomb Riley, Edwin Markham, George Edward 
 Woodberry, Richard Hovey, Madison J. Cawein, Fred- 
 eric Lawrence Knowles, Cale Young Rice, Paul Laur- 
 ence Dunbar, Frank Dempster Sherman, Lloyd Mifflin, 
 Alan Seeger, Edith M. Thomas, Lizette Woodworth 
 Reese, Olive Til ford Dargan, Josephine Preston Pea- 
 body, Anna Hempstead Branch, William Vaughn 
 Moody, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, and Gertrude Hall. 
 
 There are others whose work was so nearly com- 
 plete before 1890 that we omit them save by name, — ■ 
 Joaquin Miller, Phillips Brooks, Henry Cuyler Bun- 
 ner; and here rather than in the list above belongs 
 James Whitcomb Riley, too, excepting for a. very few 
 of his better poems. The life of John Greenleaf Whit- 
 tier did not come to an end until September 7, 1892, 
 and between 1890 and a few weeks before his death 
 a dozen or more poems of merit came from his still 
 singing spirit. His last poem, written "at sundown," 
 is the verses to Oliver Wendell Holmes ending, in the 
 last two stanzas, thus beautifully and in harmony with 
 the entire life of their author, — 
 
 The hour draws near, howe'er delayed and late, 
 When at the Eternal Gate 
 
 We leave the words and works we call our own, 
 And lift void hands alone 
 
— 71 — 
 
 For love to fill. Our nakedness of soul 
 Brings to that Gate no toll; 
 Giftless we come to Him, who all things gives, 
 And live because He lives. 
 
 And there are still others who give or have given 
 promise rather than, as yet, fulfillment, among them 
 Clinton Scollard, Sara Teasdale, Louise Imogen 
 Guiney, Helen Gray Cone, Florence Earle Coates, 
 George Sterling, John G. Neihardt, Harriet Monroe, 
 Arthur Guiterman, Angela Morgan, and others who, 
 along with some of these, think they possess new theo- 
 ries about poetry, but who after all are- quite conven- 
 tional "practitioners" of poetry, — in their best work. 
 These last "others" are Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel ° thers 
 Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Edward Arling- 
 ton Robinson, and John Gould Fletcher. If one will 
 turn to page 239 of Miss Amy Lowell's Tendencies of 
 Modern American Poetry, he will find there, in the 
 chapter on "Imagists," the creed of those who write 
 the "New Poetry," as they term it. But to a student 
 of literary criticism that creed is strangely old, its 
 chief features having been most notably set forth by 
 Wordsworth at the time he and Coleridge published 
 their Lyrical Ballads. Those who know nothing 
 about poetry and those who know much about it do 
 not consider the "new poets" as of much importance 
 excepting, as we have said, in their more "conven- 
 tional" work. It is only those who know a little, but 
 not much, about poetry who exalt their humdrum ef- 
 forts. 
 
 Field 
 
 A distinctively western poet was Eugene Field; so 
 much so that though eastern editors tried hard to en- 
 
— 72 — 
 
 tice him even to New York city, he felt that Chicago 
 was as far east as he could go for fear that residence 
 farther east would, as he said, squeeze out of what he 
 wrote much of the genuine literary flavor. There was 
 not, however, a great deal of literary flavor in most of 
 his work. It was nearly all mere day to day filling for 
 newspaper columns. His verse is chiefly of the hu- 
 morous column type, but it was the very best of that 
 type. It is only for a few poems that we can agree 
 with the biographical note in Stedman's American An- 
 thology that "this rare and original minstrel of the 
 West was the Yorick of American poetry, childhood's 
 born laureate, and no less a scholar by nature than a 
 man of infinite humor, and of inimitable, if sometimes 
 too eccentric, jest." 
 
 Eugene Field was a native of St. Louis, Missouri, 
 born there in 1850. He was educated in New Eng- 
 land, Illinois, and Missouri schools, and engaged in 
 newspaper work at St. Louis, St. Joseph, and Kansas 
 City, Missouri, and at Denver, and finally, until his 
 death in 1895, on the Chicago Daily News. His least 
 sophisticated, least conventional, and therefore most 
 distinctive verse was written before 1890, — the ever 
 popular Little Boy Blue, for example, in 1887, though 
 this is more self-conscious and sophisticated than the 
 verses written for the Denver Tribune before 1882. A 
 Little Book of Western Verse, so delightfully Fieldian, 
 appeared in 1889, as did also a book of prose entitled 
 A Little Book of Profitable Tales. 
 
 The immediate demands of those whose reading is 
 almost exclusively of the daily journals was what Field 
 wrote to satisfy. This is not to say that therefore his 
 
— 73 — 
 
 poetry is poor, for the newspaper audience is a very 
 respectable audience not only in size but in general 
 intelligence. Still, nearly all that he supplied for this 
 demand was light literature. In his later years Field 
 appealed a little more directly to more "cultured" 
 readers by the poems which reflected his studies in 
 Old English ballads and in Latin literature. But it is 
 the sentimental, though wholesomely sentimental, 
 poems such as Little Boy Blue, and such unfailingly 
 charming fairy-child poems as Wynken, Blynken, and 
 Nod that make him live on for us. The Sugar-Plum 
 Tree, too, and Pittypat and Tippytoe, Little Blue Pig- 
 eon, The Rock-a-By Lady, The Ride to Bumpville, and 
 The Shut-Bye Train will, without doubt, delight chil- 
 dren, little and large, always. Many of Field's chil- 
 dren's poems have been set to music, and their per- 
 petuation thus further insured. / 
 
 John Banister Tabb, who died in 1900, was an edu- FatherTabb 
 cator in Maryland, and wrote brief lyrics which have 
 been keenly admired by lovers of thoughtful directness 
 and exquisite finish in verse. A volume published in 
 1894 and another in 1897 contain his most artistic pro- 
 duction. The Water Lily, To Shelley, and The Druid 
 are often quoted from these volumes. Moral and re- 
 ligious devotion, and yet freedom of the spirit to ex- 
 press itself in its individual rightness, distinguish the 
 poems of this careful and earnest devotee of both re- 
 ligion and art. 
 
 James Whitcomb Riley is, as we have said, a sur- Rile y 
 vivor of earlier days, though a few later poems, such as 
 the sonnet to Longfellow which was published in 1892 
 ( an earlier one was written with the same title), sur- 
 
74 — 
 
 From 
 Pedagogue 
 to Poet 
 
 Markham 
 
 pass most of his verses which we so trippingly recite 
 from our childhood memories. 
 
 The schoolmaster's profession has supplied to litera- 
 ture almost as many recruits within the past few dec- 
 ades as the law supplied during the period of national 
 expansion before 1890. Of those who have been grad- 
 uated from chair at desk to book upon its top, Edwin 
 Markham is one with the greater reputation. A de- 
 scendant of the Penn family, and directly sprung from 
 pioneers emigrating from Michigan to Oregon, he be- 
 came a hard-working teacher, principal, and superin- 
 tendent in the schools of California. The financial suc- 
 cess of The Man with the Hoe made it possible for him 
 to take up the profession of letters and give to it exclu- 
 sive attention. This poem, suggested by a painting by 
 J. F. Millet, is not accorded by its author the first place 
 among his many poems. That distinction belongs to 
 his "Lincoln," published in Lincoln and Other Poems 
 in 1900. Yet George Hamlin Fitch" in Great Spiritual 
 Writers of America makes the high claim for The 
 Man with the Hoe that it is "the finest thing that has 
 been produced in American literature since the Civil 
 War." A third book, The Shoes of Happiness and 
 Other Poems, appeared in 1915. The title poem is 
 a fascinating tale of Constantinople and the East, but 
 too obviously indebted to John Hay's The Enchanted 
 Shirt to be in any sense original as a story. Its de- 
 scriptive passages, however, are vivid and colorful. 
 "Virgilia," in the same volume, is a poem of much 
 greater merit. Markham has been acclaimed "the 
 greatest poet of the social passion." This estimate, as 
 that of George Fitch, just quoted, is an exaggerated 
 
— 75 — 
 
 one ; but that a tonic pleasure, even a life-transforming , 
 
 power, has been derived by many from some of the 
 poems of Mr. Markham is beyond question; and, 
 though he was born in 1852, his latest volume gives no 
 sign that his natural strength has abated. 
 
 We are on safe literary ground when we open the 
 pages upon which appear the poems of George Edward 
 Woodberry. Professor Woodberry is bold enough to £ n , oth 1 er 
 attempt to express much which he himself has termed 
 "inexpressible ;" hence his verse, while intellectually in- 
 vigorating, is not often of absorbing interest to the 
 casual reader. Poems of love, poems of nature, poems 
 for music's own sake, he has written; but it is the 
 poems purely in worship of the spiritually ideal that 
 have claimed his rarer hours and have given him in- 
 ternational fame and vogue. Woodberry has been Woodberry 
 compared with Shelley in temperament and with Ten- 
 nyson in technique. He does show the passion in 
 quest of the ideal which so strongly characterized 
 Shelley and made him the superior poet of his day, but 
 it is only a touch of Shelley's genius that possesses 
 the American poet ; far inferior in power he is. Wood- 
 berry's indebtedness to Tennyson may be an uncon- 
 scious one, but it is obtrusive in his work. Yet if he is 
 at all an imitator we may be grateful that his model 
 is an exalted one in art, for the uncritical and the 
 critic who really knows have never questioned the ar- 
 tistically fine character of the skill of Tennyson. It is 
 only the parvenu with little sense for the aesthetically 
 winning who has girded at that art. 
 
 Woodberry's threnody, The North Shore Watch, is 
 usually considered the most sincere and sympathetic 
 
7 6 
 
 of all this poet's verse. It is spiritually satisfying. 
 Nevertheless, to-day when the English speaking na- 
 tions are fraternizing as never before in their history, 
 his two sonnets entitled At Gibraltar, and a third 
 America to England, the country whom he hails as 
 
 Mother of nations, of them eldest we — 
 Mother of our faith, our law, our lore, 
 
 are even more appealing, especially when the note 
 struck at the end of the last-named sonnet is 
 
 Still another 
 Teacher 
 
 Hovey 
 
 Justice we love, and next to justice peace! 
 
 Among other professors of literature in American 
 colleges who have become makers of literature, Rich- 
 ard Hovey is not one of the least. He has been called 
 "a later Lanier." Undoubtedly his The Laurel: an 
 Ode, published in 1889, was greatly influenced by La- 
 nier. And later volumes, Songs from Vagabondia, 
 written by Hovey and the Canadian poet Bliss Car- 
 man, and More Songs from Vagabondia, and, again, 
 Last Songs from Vagabondia, are over-done in their 
 zestful imitation of the vagrom spirit of Walt Whit- 
 man. But his Seazvard, an elegy, is a poem of great 
 beauty and exquisite point and finish ; and his poetic 
 dramas, already mentioned under the general title of 
 Launcelot and Guenevere (1891-1898), planned as a 
 cycle of nine dramas, but completed only through the 
 fourth, are among the best of American poems. The 
 Arthurian legends are here re-written with a bold and 
 daring hand. The treatment is fresh and vital, though 
 not so elevated in its imagination as that of the Tenny- 
 sonian Idylls of the King. Hovey chose to re-tell the 
 
— 77 — 
 
 more virile stories of Sir Thomas Malory, not those of 
 Tennyson. Few critics hesitate to say that the fourth 
 and last of these Arthurian dramas, Taliesin: A 
 Masque, is not only the best of the group but is also 
 one of the most inviting and engaging of literary dra- 
 mas of this day. It is a story of the quest of the Grail 
 by Percival, but, as George Meredith would say, "the 
 narrative is nothing;" the profound thought of the 
 poem and the excellent verse are the elements of it 
 which stir and thrill him who is willing to follow in the 
 path of metaphysics set to music. There is much of 
 Swinburnian melody in the lines of this great poem, 
 but the lift of them as they come, wave after wave, 
 unto the end, makes one forget anything derivative, 
 and breathlessly to rise with the author to the 
 heights of 
 
 Joy like the joy of a multitude thrilled into one. 
 
 In 1898 Hovey published a volume, Along the Trail, 
 containing battle-hymns suggested by the Spanish- 
 American war. The hymn that stands by itself and 
 foremost is "Unmanifest Destiny," a poem hopeful, 
 comforting, and inspiring. In its last stanza the poem 
 inevitably suggests Whittier's Eternal Goodness. This 
 is to commend, however, and not to condemn, when 
 one reads from Hovey 
 
 I do not know beneath what sky 
 Nor on what seas shall be thy fate ; 
 
 I only know it shall be high, 
 I only know it shall be great. 
 
 The early death of Hovey (in February, 1900) was 
 a nation's tragic loss, for he gave promise almost be- 
 
- 7 8- 
 
 yond expectation. As the success of Frank Norris in 
 fiction lay partly in his failure, so the failures of Hovey 
 in poetry only emphasized the greatness of his gifts. 
 Th* poet of The relation of literature to life is closely exempli- 
 
 the Southern J r 
 
 Landscape fied in the poetry of Madison Cawein. Cawein was 
 born, was educated, and resided at Louisville, Ken- 
 tucky. He took to himself the heart of nature (or did 
 she take him to her heart?) in that region; and the 
 glory of the slumbrous landscape of the South, the 
 loveliness of its detail in tree, and cloud, and flower, 
 and in the life of man and of animal, are reflected in 
 his books. The very titles of individual poems, 
 "Wild Iris," "Heat," "Before the Rain," "To the Lo- 
 cust," "The Twilight Moth," "The Rain-Crow," "The 
 Whippoorwill," "The Tree-Toad," "Feud," "Dead 
 Man's Run," "Ku Klux," "The Moonshiner," "The 
 Quest," "Old Homes," and the titles of his books, 
 Weeds by the Wall, Kentucky Poems, Myth and Ro- 
 mance, Undertones, The Garden of Dreams, Red 
 Leaves and Roses, more than suggest the sensitiveness 
 of Cawein to his environment. 
 
 Story, and picture, and fanciful thought, and grace- 
 ful lyric rhythm are his to use as he wills, — this lyrist 
 of the seasons; and one who reads his poems knows 
 that in his soul he has been in the fair southland, for 
 here 
 
 Of honey and heat and weed and wheat 
 The day has made perfume, 
 
 and then 
 
 It's — Oh, for the gate and the locust lane 
 And dusk and dew and home again ! 
 
— 79 — 
 Frederick Lawrence Knowles has for several years A reviewer 
 
 * who is 
 
 been literary adviser of various Boston publishing Poet » t( x> 
 houses. Despite his occupation as reviewer he is an 
 optimistic writer; not so optimistic of the present as 
 of the future, yet believing firmly that the forward 
 flowing tide of time holds in trust much to be given 
 into our hands in days not now fir distant. Mr. 
 Knowles, obedient to an aesthetic conscience, has 
 edited an excellent Golden Treasury of American Lyr- 
 ics, and has published two volumes of original poems, 
 Love Triumphant and On Life's Stairway. No 
 poems in these volumes are better than the sonnet "If 
 Love Were Jester at the Court of Death;" but we are 
 especially grateful to him for his insistence in another 
 poem that in poetry we need 
 
 that cosmic stuff 
 Whence primitive feeling glows, 
 
 and even more grateful for the added insistence that 
 this cosmic stuff shall have 
 
 Grown, organized to the needs of rhyme 
 
 Through the old instinctive lazvs, 
 With a meaning as broad as the boughs of time 
 
 And deep as the roots of cause. 
 
 Much of the "new Poetry" highly vaunted by those 
 who know only a little of what poetry is and can do is 
 void of meaning as it is void of organization, and void 
 of organization so often because there is nothing to or- 
 ganize; all such poetry would seem, in the light of this 
 demand, to be unacceptable to Mr. Knowles, even 
 
— 8o — 
 
 though collections of "new poetry" have included some 
 of his verse within their pages. 
 
 One of the writers who of late have come rapidly 
 
 Rice forward in public esteem is Cale Young Rice, whose 
 
 wife, Alice Hegan Rice, is also a popular writer, 
 though in prose fiction. Mr. Rice's latest volume, 
 Earth and New Earth, came from the press after the 
 outbreak of the War, and is of immediate interest be- 
 cause it voices, among other notes, the author's strong 
 loathing of the militarism which has plunged the 
 world into this frightful holocaust and voices also his 
 aspiration toward a world citizenship after the war. 
 The title poem, "Earth and New Earth," the group of 
 poems entitled "Winds of War," and a one-act play 
 called "Gerhard of Ryle," are born of artistic ideals 
 and are of more than temporary value. 
 
 The foremost man of letters given to the world by 
 
 Dunbar the negro race of America is Paul Laurence Dunbar. 
 The short-stories of negro life included in Old Plan- 
 tation Days are admirable for their fresh excellence, 
 and his better poems, as those in Lyrics of Lowly 
 Life, are attractive wholly apart from the influence 
 of a reader's sympathy with his race. Whether the ad- 
 mixture of white blood accounts for the success of the 
 French mulatto Dumas and of the Russian mulatto 
 Pushkin, one cannot tell ; but in Dunbar, a man of pure 
 African blood, there was the power to produce lyric 
 literature commanding the respect of all his contem- 
 poraries in England and America. Not every one who 
 reads Dunbar agrees with W. D. Howells that the most 
 commendable of his poems are those which study the 
 
— 8i — 
 
 moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our 
 English. Some decidedly prefer the lyrics "Ere sleep 
 comes down to soothe the weary eyes," "A Summer's 
 Night," and the sonnet "To Harriet Beecher Stowe." 
 Dunbar died in 1906. His successor, as most prom- 
 inent man of his race in literature, is William Stanley 
 Braithwaite, editor, anthologist, critic, and poet. He 
 has published two volumes of verse, Lyrics of Life and 
 Love and The House of Falling Leaves, and many 
 poems in magazines. By virtue of his Anthology of 
 Mazazine Verse for each year since 191 3, he is recog- 
 nized as chief sponsor for current American poetry. 
 There is authentic poetry, even if not much of new 
 quality, in the verse of Frank Dempster Sherman, a Frank 
 teacher of architecture in Columbia University and a Sherman 
 literary reviewer, as well as a poet of distinction. His 
 metrical efforts hardly rise to the heights of the per- 
 fection assigned them by recent notices of his col- 
 lected poems, but many are endowed with the gift of 
 nobility. The Little Folk Lyrics of 1892 and 1897 have 
 not been excelled among his own lines in appeal to 
 the average lover of modern verse. They are thought- 
 ful as well as entertaining. 
 
 All up and down in shadow-town 
 
 The Shadow children go ; 
 In every street you're sure to meet 
 
 Them running to and fro, 
 
 has, for both children and adults, the authentic ring of 
 child life and imagination. 
 
 In Lloyd Mifflin's eleven little volumes of verse, Lloyd 
 
 J . Mifflin 
 
 over five hundred sonnets have been published, to- 
 
Alan Seeger 
 
 — 82 — 
 
 gether with other poems. Mifflin was first a painter, 
 but later devoted himself chiefly to the study and cre- 
 ation of the sonnet. His passions have been youth, 
 love, spirituality, and poetry. His last volume, As 
 Twilight Falls, finds its author an aged man, yet it in- 
 cludes many of his best sonnets and lyrics. 
 
 Had Alan Seeger supervised the bringing out of the 
 beautiful volume of Poems which were written by him, 
 some of the poems included would have been elimin- 
 ated. His almost enviable death, as he, a member of 
 the Foreign Legion of France, was charging enemy 
 trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, July 4, 
 1916, made impossible his editing of his own work. 
 But some of the poems in this volume the world could 
 not afford to lose. 
 
 One crowded hour of glorious life 
 Is worth an age without a name, — 
 
 one cannot refrain from quoting when he thinks 
 of the brief but brilliant career of this young student, 
 traveler, poet, and soldier. His great achievement, 
 after all, was his singing a marching-song to his com- 
 rades as he lay dying and they were charging to vic- 
 tory, — yet not that alone, for two poems, the Ode in 
 Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for 
 France and / Have a Rendezvous with Death, are in- 
 spired poetry. We could dispense with the Juvenilia, 
 though some of its Mexican verses are vivid in their 
 imaginative touches ; we could dispense with the thirty 
 Sonnets and with the Translations ; but the Ode and 
 the Rendezvous with Death will be vital forever with 
 
-8 3 - 
 
 their echo of war "in its actual stress and under its 
 haunting menace." The last lines of the Ode and all 
 of the other poem were as nearly prophecy as mortal 
 lips have uttered. 
 
 The spirit of Elizabethan poetry has not entirely EiSabetiaS' 
 vanished from the earth. Proof of this is furnished 
 by the verse of Mrs. Olive Tilford Dargan and by that 
 of Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese. To be sure, as 
 one star differs from another in glory, so these poets 
 differ in great measure of glory from the Elizabethans 
 in both the gift of noble thought and of lofty 
 speech; and they two differ from each other in lyric 
 power. The talent of Mrs. Dargan tends to the ga r V g a ™ ord 
 drama, as we have already indicated, though in her 
 dramas there are fine bursts of personal feeling em- 
 bodied in choicely melodious lyric strains. She has 
 made many contributions of lyric verse to magazines, 
 and a recent volume, Path Flower, is filled with flashes 
 of beauty. A reading of "To a Hermit Thrush" and 
 "There's Rosemary" will introduce one to poetry in 
 which, especially in the second of these, the old mas- 
 tery of vowel music lives again. 
 
 The representative work of Miss Reese, a Maryland 
 woman, is in A Handful of Lavender and A Quiet Woodworth 
 
 '■•'•* » Reese 
 
 Road. As a lyric poet she is superior to Mrs. Dargan, 
 though the lyric power, while more full, is more quiet. 
 There is not in American literature much poetry like 
 that of Miss Reese. It belongs to the elder classic 
 world of English literature. There is much of Ameri- 
 can prose that belongs in style and spirit to earlier 
 days, yet our verse rarely assumes the body or the 
 
-8 4 - 
 
 robe of an earlier date. But Lizette Woodworth Reese 
 might well have lived in the golden days of Herrick 
 and Lovelace. Not that she is an imitator of an earlier 
 time; her poetry has the flavor rather of a dateless age, 
 but in seventeenth century England there chanced or 
 were ordained to be more poets of her type than be- 
 fore or since. Greece has had them, too, and Italy, 
 yes, and France. "Late Elizabethans" and "Caroline 
 poets" have always been, and have always subtly 
 thought and curiously wrought. Miss Reese loves 
 beauty for its own sake, but the expression of beauty 
 is with her the expression of truth, — the beautiful is 
 the good made perfect, too. Into her verse comes the 
 truth of her experience, and it is good and useful be- 
 cause it is beautiful. "To a White Lilac," "Love Came 
 Back at Fall O' Dew," "Keats," "Thomas a Kempis," 
 and "To a Town Poet," such poems as these are net 
 many amid the flood of verse that fills our anthologies. 
 One wonders, after all, if the aptest characterization 
 of Miss Reese would not be that she is a wanderer 
 from a Grecian shore. 
 Edith Thomas Miss Edith Thomas, born in Ohio in 1854, is one of 
 the foremost singers of the World War. Her themes 
 are salient ones, and the verses expressing those themes 
 are not written for verse's sake only, but for the sake 
 also of inspiration, and of comfort. She had, how- 
 ever, for many years before the war pleased the public 
 with her emotional verse, and pleased the intellectuals 
 with other verse not lacking in emotion but primarily 
 philosophical in its content. She writes nothing that 
 is not next to super-perfect in finish. It is all poetry. 
 
-8s- 
 
 true poetry, in feeling, in form, and in power to 
 lift the mind from the particular to the universal, or, 
 when she chooses, to drive the mind from its refuge 
 in generalizations back to the particular, the concrete, 
 the daily real. Her style is varied, yet never straying 
 from the grace and taste of the poets of the more 
 classic days, not even in her most passionate mo- 
 ments. Her more intellectual poems will probably 
 survive those which are primarily of feeling, unusual 
 as this may seem. There may be "thoughts beyond the 
 thrall of words," but Miss Thomas dares to put into 
 her energetic verse thoughts to give form to which 
 has puzzled the philosophers from the Greeks down. 
 Single poems, "The Compass," "They Said," "Palin- 
 genesis," "The Soul of the Violet," "The Inverted 
 Torch," "A Far Cry to Heaven," and others are among 
 the treasured gems of our literature. An excursion 
 through her many little volumes which have come 
 from the press from time to time all the way from 
 1885 until very recently, will reward with new and 
 added beauty the truer poetic memories of one who 
 will adventure among these little masterpieces of art 
 and thought. 
 
 Gertrude Hall was born in Boston, educated in Gertrude Hail 
 Florence, Italy, and now resides in New York City. 
 She is an excellent translator, accomplishing consum- 
 mate work in her rendering into English from the 
 French of Paul Verlaine and of Edmond Rostand. In 
 her original verse she is our present-day poet of the 
 quaint, the fanciful, the wistful. Far from To-day, 
 Allegretto, and The Age of Fairy gold are titles of 
 
— 86 — 
 
 three of her books, and in themselves the titles illus- 
 trate the contents of the books. Many of her poems, 
 are of nature and many of human love, and are as ir- 
 resistible as the things they celebrate. 
 
 Hempstead Some of the most reflective, if not profound, and 
 
 most artistic poems of recent days are included in the 
 three volumes by Anna Hempstead Branch, The Shoes 
 That Danced and Other Poems, The Heart of the 
 Road and Other Poems, and Rose of the Wind. They 
 are written only for lovers of poetry ; they will not 
 compel the attention of the unwilling. The long poem 
 'Nimrod" in Rose of the Wind is, as its title suggests, 
 a treatment of a very ancient tradition. It is a subtly 
 ingenious piece of work. 
 
 Marks^again ^ n tne P oetr y of Josephine Preston Peabody there is 
 much of mystery, much of subtle guessing about the 
 riddle of our life, much pursuing of elusive thought. 
 Yet all is handled, not in fanci fulness, but with 
 strongly imaginative power. - Her best dramas, Mar- 
 lowe and The Piper, we have already briefly dis- 
 cussed. The lyric verse, together with some dramatic 
 dialogue, is contained in the volumes entitled fortune 
 and Men's Byes, The Wayfarers, Singing Leaves, and 
 The Harvest Moon, the last being dedicated "To the 
 Women of Europe." We have learned to expect only 
 the true, the beautiful, and the pure in her delicate 
 yet energetic verse. 
 
 Alice Brown Alice Brown's unwearied labors as dramatist, nov- 
 elist, and short-story writer have left little time for 
 poetry, though one volume, The Road to Castaly, has 
 attracted world-wide attention. William Vaughn 
 
-8 7 - 
 
 Moody's untimely death deprived us of one who prom- Mo °dy 
 ised greatness in poetry as in drama. The Departure, 
 Heart O' Wild Flower, and many others reveal the 
 nature-seer, the psychologist, and the musician that 
 Moody was. His poems call one back to them, for the 
 melodies are haunting, the thought fascinating; one 
 feels that here more is said than meets the eye, more 
 that one wants to hear, and to hear again and again. 
 We have lately come to the appreciation of. Japanese 
 art, helped to it partly by the verse of Mrs. Mary Mary McNeil 
 McNeil Fenollosa, who resided in Japan for eight eno osa 
 years, and whose lovely lilting lyrics are a constant 
 source of delight to all who know them, as are the 
 descriptive poems, with their picturesqueness seem- 
 ingly both fanciful and real. Some of the phi- 
 losophy of the Orient has crept into her verse, but the 
 verse is chiefly lyrical. "To a Japanese Nightingale" 
 and "An Eastern Cry" will give a hint of the quality of 
 the fashioning of her pictures as they are drawn in her 
 Oriental poems, a quality vital, impulsive, fully musi- 
 cal and faintly melancholy. 
 
 Our better magazines and weekly periodicals are 
 frequently kept in the path of a fine tradition by the 
 fugitive poetry which poets whom we have discussed 
 and others, minor ones, and even masters of prose, 
 occasionally contribute. An anthology of verse from 
 magazines of the past thirty years, though it were of 
 verse as yet unpublished in any book form, would fill 
 a large volume, however exacting of quality the anthol- 
 ogist might be. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF 
 CANADA 
 
Ill 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF 
 
 CANADA 
 
 The Writers of Fiction. — The first native-born 
 Canadian to make real and permanent a native litera- 
 ture in Canada was Charles G. D. Roberts, who is 
 now a captain training cadets in England and Wales. 
 Although philosophers, scientists, and historians, such 
 as Grant Allen, George John Romanes, and Goldwin 
 Smith had been giving Canada a world reputation in 
 research and in thought, yet literature inseparable 
 from the soil did not appear in our neighbor country 
 until about 1887, when Roberts's volume of verse en- 
 titled In Divers Tones was first published. This and 
 other poetic works of his are more important than his 
 imaginative prose, but will be reserved for discussion 
 in the treatment of the Canadian poets. Roberts has 
 written several novels and other prose works, the chief The eider 
 
 r Roberts 
 
 of all of them being a book of short stories and 
 sketches dealing with the life of the wild and with 
 human life and entitled Earth's Enigmas. The title 
 means precisely what it says. Another distinctive and 
 absorbingly interesting work is The Watchers of the 
 Trails. Roberts was born in New Brunswick, but it 
 was while he was professor of English and French lit- 
 
— 92 — 
 
 erature in King's College at Windsor, Nova Scotia, 
 that he gained his impressions of the beauty of the 
 earth and his intimate knowledge of creatures of field, 
 forest, and stream and the greater waters, and that the 
 impulse to romantic story-telling and to lyricism came 
 to him. It is in that same earthly paradise that most 
 of the best literature of Canada found its inception. 
 
 Parker Sir Gilbert Parker is a citizen of the British Empire 
 
 rather than of Canada alone, not merely because he 
 has lived in Australia and now lives in London, but 
 because the characters and the thought in his novels, 
 even those within Canadian setting, are characters who 
 might live and thoughts which might be inspired else- 
 where within imperial limits. Pierre and His People, 
 The Seats of the Mighty, and The Right of Way are 
 his most read novels. He is the author also of many 
 short-stories, those of northern life, as in Northern 
 Lights, not disappointing the expectation of any who 
 " have been entertained by his other work. 
 
 "Ralph Ralph Connor, whose real name is Charles William 
 
 Connor" x 
 
 Gordon, can hardly be said to have written from purely 
 artistic inspiration or purpose. He has not depicted 
 life because he was compelled to do so by the intensity 
 of a desire to see life as it may be re-presented in the 
 magic mirror of art, but because he wanted to preach. 
 His sole aim seems to have been an ethical one ; in 
 fact, the ethical purpose is obtrusively apparent. The 
 effect of art may be a moralistic effect, but if that is 
 its aim, the aim should be concealed. Gordon's work 
 fails to be artistic in another respect, also. While the 
 true artist forms his characters from broadly general 
 
— 93 — 
 
 elements in human life, in doing so he makes us think 
 he is really depicting particular characters, whose 
 traits are peculiarly individual; the true artist is an 
 historian of human nature, though he seems to be a 
 writer of actual biographies. But Gordon quite obvi- 
 ously has failed to individualize his characters. Yet 
 The Sky Pilot and a better book The Man from Glen- 
 garry have excited immense interest and have received 
 high praise. They are interesting and praiseworthy, but, 
 as we have said, for their moral teaching rather than 
 for their artistic value. Yet this is not quite all, for 
 these books have brought to the uninformed much ac- 
 curate knowledge of the types of life lived in the moun- 
 tains and forests of Canada. 
 
 Better creative writers, even if less popular, than 
 Gordon, are Margaret Marshall Saunders, Sara 
 Jeannette Duncan, and Lucy M. Montgomery (now 
 Mrs. Ewan McDonald). Lucy M. Montgomery has 
 captivated the youth of all America with her Anne of QreenGabie 
 Green Gables. 
 
 Our neighbor to the north has one author who has 
 been dubbed, in an exaggerated fashion, the Mark "The 
 
 m • r ^ « , Mark Twain 
 
 Twain of Canada, — Stephen Leacock, of Montreal. In of Canada" 
 reality, he is more American than Canadian, and for 
 two reasons : his work is written mainly for readers on 
 this side the border, as most of its facts and its allu- 
 sions show, and the sort of humor he is given to is the 
 American brand, with its burlesque, its exaggeration, 
 and its consciously deliberate mingling of the serious 
 with the comic. Leacock was born in England, and 
 perhaps this may account for his apparent failure to 
 
— 94 — 
 
 become acclimatized to the intellectual atmosphere of 
 Canada and for his keeping an eye constantly looking 
 southward and even across seas. Two or three of his 
 volumes are worthless, such as Behind the Beyond and 
 Frenzied Fiction and Further Foolishness, but Non- 
 sense Novels, Sunshine Sketches, Literary Lapses, 
 Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, and Literary 
 Essays and Studies command respect for their au- 
 thor's wisdom and versatility as well as convulse his 
 readers with their humor and wit. 
 
 ofPoet Uy ^^ e P° ets - — We have mentioned the poetry of 
 Charles G. D. Roberts. His son, Lloyd Roberts, is 
 not much less than second to the father in nature paint- 
 ing and in melodious phrasing, as even he who runs may 
 readily discover in the 1914 volume entitled England 
 Overseas. In lyrical movement and in love of the 
 lighter phases of the life of nature, Lloyd Roberts is 
 more akin to Bliss Carman, his father's cousin. The 
 influence of the elder Roberts upon both these poets 
 and upon every other one who has written in Canada 
 since 1887 demands more than the passing mention of 
 his work. 
 
 Roberts Charles G. D. Roberts was not only the first but the 
 most original and versatile, and has still done the best 
 technical artistic work, of all Canadian authors. We 
 have a special claim upon him, too, as his residence now 
 is New York City. After some experiments, resulting in 
 a volume published in 1880, and entitled Orion and 
 Other Poems, Roberts removed from Toronto to Nova 
 Scotia and fell under the spell of the beauty of the Old 
 Acadian land. In 1887 In Divers Tones was pub- 
 
— 95 — 
 
 fished, and all discerning readers saw that a new star 
 had arisen in the east. Songs of the Common Day and 
 The Book of the Native came in 1893 and in 1896 re- 
 spectively, and gained their author recognition in Eu- 
 rope as well as upon this continent. It was noted 
 abroad that a new force had entered literature, a force 
 native to North America, but questioning the enigmas 
 and mysteries of nature and of the human soul every- 
 where. Other volumes followed, among them New 
 York Nocturnes and The Book of the Rose. Not all 
 of the verse in the first of these two books is good; 
 much of it is obvious and mechanical. Possibly the 
 author does not feel at home away from Canada, and, 
 living artificially, perforce must write artificially. His 
 best single poem is Ave : An Ode for the Shelley Cen- 
 tenary, 1892. The wild life of field and woodland and 
 air, the colorful and changeful life, animate and still, 
 of marsh and stream and lake, the insoluble mysteries 
 of spirit, human and divine, fill these books of verse. 
 Yet it is doubtful if his poetry will be as influential in 
 the future as his psychological animal stories written 
 in imaginative prose. Roberts is more Canadian, less 
 American, in prose than in verse; and since he is in 
 prose more true to the actual in the local, he will prob- 
 ably live longer for his prose than for his verse. 
 
 Bliss Carman lived during his most receptive and Bliss Carman 
 formative years in the home of his uncle, C. G. D. 
 Roberts. Under this influence, Nova Scotia became 
 his early inspiration, and the poet spirit and skill of 
 the older man so built up and impelled the younger that 
 the pupil is now thought by many to be superior to his 
 
-96- 
 
 master, — as the pupil should be, else progress would 
 cease in the world. Bliss Carman is better known in this 
 country than Roberts is, due to his association with 
 Richard Hovey in the writing of the three little vol- 
 umes of Songs from Vagabondia. He also resides in 
 New York. But it is the strictly Canadian poem, Low 
 Tide on Grand Pre, that takes rank as his leading 
 poem. It is always the mysterious lure of the sea that 
 elicits the most devoted service of Bliss Carman's 
 muse. He is never far from the 
 
 Dream-like, plangent, and eternal 
 Memories of the plunging sea. 
 
 His poems are not altogether free from monotony 
 and many are over-elaborate in word and phrase ; yet 
 in most of them sound and form are consonant with 
 sense. Bliss Carman has become less wandering in 
 heart as he has grown in years, and more and more he 
 has turned away from personal impressions of detail 
 in the world to the development of the thought of the 
 organic unity of man and nature. Lightness of spirit, 
 though, is not absent from the later poems, in the 
 three small volumes of Pipes of Pan and in The Word 
 at Saint Kavin's. 
 
 Two brothers of Charles G. D. Roberts as well as 
 his son and his cousin are poets. Theodore Roberts and 
 William Carman Roberts, both now residing at Fred- 
 ericton, New Brunswick, engaged at an earlier date in 
 journalism in New York City, and have written com- 
 mendable verse for magazines and literary periodicals. 
 But of this family it would seem to be only Charles 
 
— 97 — 
 
 Roberts, Lloyd Roberts, and Bliss Carman who will 
 not be overlooked by the historian of literature in Eng- 
 lish. 
 
 Canadian verse writers are numerous. The salient Many 
 
 singers 
 
 names besides those considered above are Gilbert Par- 
 ker, Lucy M. Montgomery, Eric Mackay Yeoman, 
 Robert Norwood, Hugh John Maclean, W. E. Mar- 
 shall, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, 
 Isabella Valancy Crawford (who died in 1887), Kath- 
 erine Hale (Mrs. J. W. Garvin), Dr. J. B. Dollard, 
 Arthur S. Bourinot, and Douglas Durkin, and per- 
 haps Robert Service and Dr. W. H. Drummond 
 of the "Vaudeville School of Canadian Poetry." 
 Drummond's The Voyageur and The Habitant are 
 very popular, but hardly "English verse." Service ap- 
 parently is not acceptable to all at home, for Sergeant 
 J. D. Logan, a Canadian, writing from a camp in Eng- 
 land after the publication of Service's Rhymes of a 
 Red Cross Man, describes the content of the book as 
 "versified brutalities." But, however much one may 
 agree that nearly all of the verses in the earlier vol- 
 umes by Service are of the ten-twenty- thirty variety, 
 it is difficult to agree with the Canadian critic that all 
 in this latest volume is "illegitimate verse." 
 
 The Rosalie, a sonnet sequence by Eric Mackay Yeo- 
 man, Love's Diary, another sonnet sequence, by Gil- 
 bert Parker, and You and Memory Pictures by Lucy 
 M. Montgomery are among the noble and beautiful 
 lyrics of the last thirty years. Archibald Lampman is 
 celebrated above most of his fellow versifiers of Can- 
 ada, with the exception of Roberts and Carman, for his 
 nature poems. He has a philosophic insight and vision 
 
- 9 8- 
 
 that is strong and, to many readers, comforting. His 
 sonnet Outlook completely recognizes the burden of 
 our life, yet has the quietly optimistic uplift which 
 characterizes all the saner hours of the greater poets. 
 
 Hugh J. Maclean's A Masque is a praiseworthy bit 
 of original invention destined to make many a reader 
 alert to the rising importance of the poets across the 
 border. It is one of many attempts to place the artist 
 in his rightful position relative to the soldier and the 
 priest, and, brief as it is, may not be passed by in 
 the literature of the life of art. It may not have the 
 scope of the dramatic poems in the same field by 
 Hauptman, Hirschfeld, Hofmansthal, and Yeats, but, 
 as the diminutive proportions of a Corot are some- 
 times superior in quality to the mammoth canvas of a 
 Raphael cartoon, so this very diminutive dramatic 
 poem is at least not inferior because of its brevity. The 
 reader will find it upon pages 223 and 224 of the Ca- 
 nadian Magazine for January, 191 7. 
 
 When W. E. Marshall's Brookfield, an elegiac poem, 
 appeared in 1914, the Boston Transcript compared its 
 workmanship and compelling expression with that of 
 the famous elegies of Milton, Arnold, Emerson, and 
 Whitman, — and the Transcript is a very conservative 
 paper. Isabella Valancy Crawford's Love's Land, or, 
 as it is often called, The Master Builder, is typical of 
 the poetry of Canadian women, in its joyousness, its 
 unselfish eagerness for revealing the spirit of service, 
 and its spirituality. 
 
 Among the great number of poems inspired by the 
 War, in which Canada has revealed herself as in spirit 
 
— 99 — 
 
 as much a part of the British Empire as England her- 
 self, the most read have been Dollard's sonnet upon 
 the death of Rupert Brooke, Durkin's The Fighting 
 Men of Canada, Duncan Campbell Scott's To a Cana- 
 dian Lad Killed in the War, and Katherine Hale's long 
 poem The White Comrade and her briefer poems in 
 Grey Knitting and Other Poems, though some of these 
 are not so sure of immortality as others that are more 
 immediately appealing to the popular heart. 
 
 The series of sonnets in Robert W. Norwood's His 
 Lady of the Sonnets (1915), for tone color, for mel- 
 ody, and for loftiness of conception of the "refining 
 redemptive, transmuting power" of love that is spir- 
 itual, is unsurpassed in the work of this group of 
 poets. The American reader who may yet need in- 
 troduction to the fact that Canada has a literature may 
 well begin with the sonnets of Norwood. There may 
 be less of artistry in them, but there is no less of in- 
 tellectual sincerity, of authentic emotion, of genuine 
 breadth of conception than in the poetry of the pre- 
 Raphaelites of nineteenth century England. 
 
 Altogether, it would not have been difficult in 19 13 g£jy Chie! 
 to have disagreed with the opinion of Mr. T. G. Mar- 
 quis in his English-Canadian Literature that "the chief 
 glory of Canadian literature is in its poetry ;" but since 
 the beginning of the Great War, while the value of 
 Canada's imaginative prose has not decreased, that of 
 its poetry has so appreciably advanced that serious 
 disagreement as to the relative rank of the prose and 
 the poetry of this Celtic or Gaelic country would seem 
 no longer possible. 
 
IV 
 
 TABLE OF AMERICAN 
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PROBLEMS 
 
PROBLEMS 
 
 Essays 
 
 1. Select a dozen of the best editorials from six of 
 the best metropolitan newspapers of the country, pub- 
 lished during any recent week. Project your mind 
 twenty-five years into the future, and from that point 
 of view in time estimate the lasting values of those 
 editorials. 
 
 2. Make an anthology of essays from magazines of 
 the year 19 18. 
 
 3. Find all the books of essays published in Eng- 
 lish during the years 1917-1918, and write a critical 
 comparative estimate of them. 
 
 4. Compare the American essay of the first two 
 decades of the twentieth century with that of a cen- 
 tury earlier. 
 
 5. Locate the following sentences from President 
 Wilson's State Papers and Addresses, and point out 
 their bearing: 
 
 a. The world must be made safe for democracy. 
 
 b. It is clear that nations must in the future be 
 governed by the same high code of honor that we de- 
 mand of individuals. 
 
 c. I believe in the ordinary man. 
 
 d. It is not an army that we must shape and train 
 for war ; it is a nation. 
 
 e. The day has come to conquer or submit. 
 
112 
 
 f. There is, therefore, but one response possible 
 from us : Force, Force to the utmost, Force without 
 stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force 
 which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast 
 every selfish dominion down in the dust. 
 
 g. There is something very fine in the spirit of the 
 volunteer, but deeper than the volunteer spirit is the 
 spirit of obligation. 
 
 h. Once more we shall make good with our lives 
 and fortunes the great faith to which we were born. 
 
 i. The eyes of all the world will be upon you be- 
 cause you are in some special sense the soldiers of free- 
 dom. 
 
 j. The great duties of a new day awaken a new 
 and greater national spirit in us. 
 
 k. Our present and immediate task is to win the 
 war, and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is 
 accomplished. . 
 
 1. What we seek is the reign of law, based upon 
 the consent of the governed, and sustained by the or- 
 ganization of mankind. 
 
 Fiction 
 
 i. Does the short-story writer of the present time 
 employ artistic unity for the sake of the effect of his 
 story, or employ his story for the sake of artistic 
 unity ? Be concrete. 
 
 2. Study the author in Bl'ix, and in The Three 
 Fates, and in Main-Travelled Roads. 
 
— H3 — 
 
 3- What sets apart British from American novel- 
 ists of the present, — verbal power, constructive abil- 
 ity, or selection of material? 
 
 4. Compare the leading woman characters of How- 
 ells, Grant, Phillips, and Frank Norris. 
 
 5. Study the earlier works of Frank Norris, — 
 Moran of the Lady Letty, McTeague, Blix, and A 
 Man's Woman, — for the descriptive material and 
 qualities. 
 
 6. Search for the primeval, the elemental, in Amer- 
 ican fiction of to-day. 
 
 7. Trace the symbolic character of the leading 
 personages in Ellen Glasgow's The Miller of Old 
 Church. 
 
 8. Owen Wister says, "It is significant to note 
 how this master (Henry James) seems to be teach- 
 ing a numerous young generation. Often do I pick 
 up some popular magazine and read a story (one even 
 of murder, it may be, in tropic seas or city slums), 
 where some canny bit of foreshortening, of presenta- 
 tion, reveals the spreading influence, and I say, 'Ah, 
 my friend, never would you have found out how to do 
 that if Henry James hadn't set you thinking!'" Find 
 examples of the influence of Henry James in stories 
 published in current numbers of magazines. 
 
 9. Make an anthology of "Best Short-Stories of 
 the War," omitting text, but supplying title-page, pref- 
 ace (add an "Introduction," if needed), and what- 
 ever notes and bibliography are necessary to make 
 the volume one for "study," and not for reading only. 
 
— ii4 — 
 
 io. Study the North American Indian in recent 
 fiction. 
 
 ii. John Galsworthy's definition of a plot is, "That 
 sure edifice which slowly rises out of the inter-play of 
 circumstances on temperament, and temperament on 
 circumstance, within the enclosing 1 atmosphere of an 
 idea." With this definition as a starting-point, write 
 an essay upon the plot of novel and of drama. 
 
 12. Discuss the function of conversation in drama. 
 
 13. Compare magazine illustration of short stories 
 of the present-day with those of forty years ago. 
 
 Poetry 
 
 1. Study the humor of the poetry of Robert Burns 
 and of Thomas Hood. Do you find anything like their 
 work in American verse? 
 
 2. Read the Odes mentioned in the preceding 
 pages, and compare with Coleridge's France. 
 
 3. Read the article upon "The Significance of Nova 
 Scotia" by J. D. Logan in The Canadian Magazine for 
 November, 1916, and pursue in further detail the 
 study of the writers of Novia Scotia. 
 
 4. Is the literature of Canada more or less similar 
 to that of Scotland than to that of England? 
 
 5. Study carefully The Lotos-Eaters by Tennyson. 
 Compare with it, simply as poetry, your favorite 
 American poem. 
 
 6. Make two lists by titles of the verses of the "new 
 poets," futurists, imagists, and the like, of America, 
 one list containing the poems unmistakably innovations 
 
— n5 — 
 
 in form and the other of those following already em- 
 ployed patterns. 
 
 7. Make a list of the fifty best poems in American 
 literature. How many of these were written since 
 1890? 
 
 8. Upon which is the finest artistic work being ex- 
 erted in America to-day, novel, short-story, essay, or 
 poem? 
 
 9. Is the following true ? — 
 
 Things of deep sense we may in prose unfold, 
 But they move more in lofty numbers told. 
 
 10. Find the three best Canadian and the three 
 best American poems of the War. 
 
 11. Make a study of story-telling poems in Amer- 
 can poetry. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 F. T. Cooper, — Some American Story-Tellers. 
 
 J. C. Underwood, — Literature and Insurgency. 
 
 Theodore Stanton, — A Manual of American Lit- 
 erature. 
 
 Henry C. Vedder, — American Writers of To-day. 
 
 H. A. Toulmin, — Social Historians. 
 
 A. N. Marquis, — Who's Who in America. 
 
 Jessie B. Rittenhouse, — The Younger American 
 Poets. 
 
 Edmund Clarence Stedman, — An American Anth- 
 ology. 
 
 Amy Lowell, — Tendencies in Modern American 
 Poetry. 
 
 Theodore H. Rand, — A Treasury of Canadian 
 Verse. 
 
 John W. Garvin, — Canadian Poets and Poetry. 
 
 Fred Lewis Pattee, — A History of American Lit- 
 erature since 1870. 
 
 James B. Smiley, — A Manual of American Liter- 
 ature. 
 
 R. L. Paget, — The Poetry of American Wit and 
 Humor. 
 
 Helen M. Winslow, — Literary Boston of To-Day. 
 
V 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell, 35, 105 
 
 Adams, Henry, 11 
 
 Allen, Grant, 91 
 
 Allen, James Lane, 23, 31, 36, 103 
 
 Allinson, Mrs. Anne C. E., 32 
 
 Atherton, Gertrude, 23, 25, 104 
 
 Austin, Mary, 60, 61, 104 
 
 Bacheller, Irving, 35 
 BelascOj^avid^ 59 
 Timmnot, Arthur S., 97, 107 
 Bowne, Borden Parker, 20 
 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 81 
 Branch, Anna Hempstead, 70, 86, 106 
 Broadhurst, George, 59 
 Brooks, Phillips, 70 
 
 Brown, Alice, 23, 27, 60, 62, 86, 104, 106 
 Bunner, Henry Cuyler, 23, 24, 70, 104 
 Burroughs, John, 15, 103 
 
 Cable, George Washington, 23, 36 
 
 Canfield, Dorothy, 45, 56, 57, 105 
 
 Carman, Bliss, 76, 94, 95, 96, 107 
 
 Cawein, Madison, 70, 78, 106 
 
 Channing, Edward, 11 
 
 Churchill, Winston, 39, 52, 105 
 
 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 39, 40, 58, 93, 103 
 
 Coates, Florence Earle, 71 
 
 Cohan, George M., 59 
 
 Cone, Helen Gray, 71 
 
— ii8 — 
 
 Crane, Stephen, 35, 37, 105 
 
 Crawford, Francis Marion, 15, 16, 32, 35, 38, 39, 41, 103 
 
 Crothers, Samuel McChord, 15, 16, 104 
 
 Dargan, Olive Tilford, 61, 68, 70, 83, 106 
 Davis, Richard Harding, 56 
 Deland, Margaret, 23, 26, 39, 43, 104 
 Dewey, John, 20 
 Dollard, J. B., 97, 99 
 Drummond, William Henry, 97 
 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 36, 70, 80, 106 
 Duncan, Sara Jeanette, 93 
 Durkin, Douglas, 97, 99 
 
 Fenollosa, Mary McNeil, 70, 87, 106 
 l ( Field, Eugene, 70, 71, 106 
 
 Fiske, John, II, 12, 103 
 
 Fitch, Clyde, 59, 60, 104 
 
 Fletcher, John Gould, 71 
 
 Ford, Paul Leicester, 56 
 
 Fox, John, Jr., 56 
 
 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 23, 26, 104 
 
 Frederic, Harold, 55 
 ^ _Frost, Robert, 71 
 
 Garland, Hamlin, 23, 24, 27, 104 
 Gerould, Katherine Fullerton, 23 
 Gillette, William, 59 
 Glasgow, Ellen, 39, 53, 105 
 Gordon, Charles William, 92, 107 
 Grant, Robert, 39, 40, 103 
 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 71 
 Guiterman, Arthur, 71 
 
 Hale, Katherine, 97, 99, 107 
 Hall, Gertrude, 70, 85, 106 
 Harrison, Henry Sydnor, 56, 105 
 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 11 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 15, 17, 103 
 Herrick, Robert, 32, 105 
 
— ii9 — 
 
 Howard, Bronson, 59 
 
 Howells, William Dean, 15, 39, 40, 80, 103 
 
 Hovey, Richard, 61, 69, 70, 76, 96, 106 
 
 James, Henry, 23, 28, 35, 36, 38, 45, 103 
 James, William, 20, 21, 103 
 Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 36 
 Johnston, Mary, 56 
 
 Kelly, Myra, 23 
 Kennedy, Charles Rann, 60 
 Kenyon, Charles, 60, 62 
 Kilmer, Joyce, 106 
 Klein, Charles, 59 
 Knowles, Frederick, 70, 106 
 Knoblauch, Edward, 60, 61 
 
 Lampman, Archibald, 97, 107 
 
 Leacock, Stephen, 29, 93, 107 
 
 Lefevre, Edwin, 32 
 
 Lessing, Bruno, 23 
 
 Lincoln, Joseph, 23 
 
 Lindsay, Vachel, 71 J~~ 
 
 Logan, John D., 97, 107 
 
 London, Jack, 23 
 
 Lowell, Amy, 71 
 
 Mackaye, Percy, 60, 62, 63 
 Maclean, Hugh, J., 97, 98, 107 
 McMaster, John Bach, 11 
 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 11, 103 
 Markham, Edwin, 70, 74, 106 
 Marshall, W. E., 97, 98, 107 
 Masters, Edgar Lee, 71 
 Merington, Marguerite, 63 
 Middleton, George, 60, 62, 63, 64 
 Mifflin, Lloyd, 70, 81, 105 
 Miller, Joaquin, 70 *f 
 
 Mitchell, Langdon, 59 
 
120 
 
 Mitchell, S. Weir, 39, 103 
 Monroe, Harriet, 71 
 Montgomery, Lucy M., 93, 97, 107 
 Moody, William Vaughn, 60, 61, 69, 70, 87, 105, 106 
 More, Paul Elmer, 15, 16, 104 
 Morgan, Angela, 71 
 / Muir, John, 22, 103 
 
 Neihardt, John G., 71 
 // __Norris, Frank, 15, 16, 39, 49, 54, 55, 105 
 Norwood, Robert W., 97, 99, 107 
 
 Oppenheim, James, 23, 28, 105 
 Osbourne, Lloyd, 23 
 
 Page, Thomas Nelson, 23, 28, 36, 103 
 
 Parker, Horatio Gilbert, 92, 97, 107 
 
 Peabody, Josephine Preston, 60, 67, 70, 86, ic6 
 
 Phillips, David Graham, 39, 46, 50, 104 
 
 Pinski, David, 60 
 
 Poole, Ernest, 56, 105 
 
 Porter, William Sydney, 23, 29, 36, 104 
 
 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 70, 83, 106 
 
 Repplier, Agnes, 15, 16, 104 
 
 Rhodes, J. F., 11 
 
 Rice, Alice Hegan, 80 
 
 Rice, Cale Young, 70, 80, 106 
 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 70, 73, 105 
 
 Roberts, Charles G. D., 91, 94, 96, 107 
 
 Roberts, Lloyd, 94, 107 
 
 Roberts, Theodore, 96 
 
 Roberts, William Carman, g6 
 
 Robinson, Edward Arlington, 71 
 
 Romanes, George John, 91 
 
 Royce, Josiah, 20, 103 
 
 Santayana, George, 22 
 
 Saunders, Margaret Marshall, 93, 107 
 
121 
 
 Schouler, James, n 
 Scollard, Clinton, 71, 106 
 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 97, 99, 107 
 Sedgwick, Anne, 39, 53, 105 
 Seeger, Alan, 70, 82, 106 
 Service, Robert W., 97, 107 
 Sheldon, Edward, 60, 61 
 Sherman, Frank Dempster, 70, 81, 106 
 Smith, F. Hopkinson, 35, 36, 103 
 Smith, Goldwin, 91 
 ^Sterling, George, 71 
 Stewart, Charles D., 39.. $7, 104 
 Stimson, F. J., 41 
 
 Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 35, 36, 37, 104 
 Sutherland, Evelyn Greenleaf, 63 
 
 Tabb, John Banister, 70, 73, 105 
 Tarkington, Booth, 38, 105 
 Teasdale, Sara, 71 
 Thomas, Augustus, 59, 60 
 Thomas, Edith M., 70, 84, 106 
 Train, Arthur, 56 
 
 van Dyke, Henry, 23, 24, 103 
 
 Viele, Herman K., 35, 37. 104 
 
 Westcott, Edward N., 56 
 Wharton, Edith, 35, 37, 104 
 White, William Allen, 39, 48,. 104 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 70, 105 
 Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 35, 39, 44, 104 
 Wilde, Percival, 64, 105 
 Wilson, Woodrow, 11, 12, 104 
 V Wister, Owen, 39, 45, 104 
 
 Woodberry, George Edward, 70, 75, 106 
 
 Yeoman, Eric Mackay, 97 
 
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