It is easy to criticize Whitman. He who will may speak with some truth of his crudity, his frequent lack of artistic sense, the peculiarities of his vocabulary, his lapses into quite ordinary prose, his startling glorification of the animal appetites. Yet how much on the positive side remains to be said! Let the reader take Whitman's volume in hand and turn the pages with sympathy and a desire to understand, as is Whitman's due. What does he discover? A great, virile, large-hearted man, with an almost unparalleled sense of comradeship and good will. He makes no claim to excellence, as he says, "in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry." His plea is that "the profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for their reader is to fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit." He states it as his conviction that "the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth-or even to call attention to it, or the need of it-is the beginning, middle, and final purpose of the poems" (that is, of "Leaves of Grass"). Whitman's best work ranks with the best that has been done in American literature; and he may well be regarded as voicing the spirit of the modern world, facing forward, rejecting traditional forms, and accepting the whole of life as the domain of art.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1870-1900)

The third generation of our national life saw a rapid recovery from the effects of a devastating war, and a revival of the impulse to expansion that had characterized the pre-war period. Pioneer conditions in the West and Pacific Northwest gave way to settled agricultural and industrial life. Our acquisition of the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands brought us into contact with world problems and policies. Business enterprise, engineering science, and the development of our natural resources combined to make us a very wealthy and very prosperous people, as these terms are commonly understood. Most significant of all was the definite emergence of the inherent conflict between capital and labor, revealing itself in

the organization of vast business corporations on the one hand and widely federated labor unions on the other. Under these conditions our literature became broadly dispersed. Boston was no longer the hub of the literary universe. The short story was rapidly developed as a literary diet for a very much occupied people. The period has relatively few great names to its credit, but a multitude of lesser writers whose work is a graphic picture of the hopeful as well as the sinister aspects of the times.

The East continued for some years to hold its place as the principal field of literary production, but its great prestige was gone. Thomas Bailey Aldrich produced narrative and lyric poetry in considerable quantity and often of real poetic effectiveness. The bankerpoet Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote a number of spirited lyrics, among the best being his "Pan in Wall Street," and produced some valuable work in literary criticism, notably his "Victorian Poets." The exquisite little poetic fancies of Emily Dickinson-whimsical, sensitive, and fleeting in quality-have a distinctive charm; as, for example, the following delicate little poem entitled "Autumn":

"The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

"The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.

Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on."1

Somewhat similar, but without the elflike grace of Miss Dickinson's poems, are the brief, thoughtful, artistically finished lyrics of Richard Watson Gilder.

Among the novelists one of the most significant names is that of William Dean Howells (1837-1920). Though born in Ohio, he passed most of his life in Boston and New York, where he served respectively as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and associate editor of Harper's Magazine. He is remarkable for two things: he is the

1 Copyright by Little, Brown and Company.

greatest of our later novelists, representing the emphasis upon fiction, and more particularly Realistic fiction, that characterized his period; and he is among the first of our notable writers to concentrate his thought in an unobtrusive but insistent way upon the theme of social justice. His earlier novels, for example "The Rise of Silas Lapham" and "A Modern Instance," are remarkable for their careful technique and

for their prevailing choice of the "pale gray" types of common, unromantic experience as his favorite material. His "conversion," or awakening, came with the profound influence exerted upon him by the works of Tolstoy and his consequent realization of the essential tragedy inherent in our social and economic maladjustments. This later experience is presented with a finely developed artistic Iskill and with a delicate undertone of irony in such novels as "A Hazard of New Fortunes," "The Quality of Mercy," "The Kentons," and "The Leatherwood God" (to mention only a few of his more important novels), and in the fictitious bit of socialist propaganda "A Traveler from Altruria." Howells was never sensational, wrote no "thrillers" or "best sellers," and had a quality of reserve and understatement which attracts the thoughtful reader rather than a wider public.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Henry James (1843-1916) resided during the greater part of his life in Europe, chiefly in England, and in the year before his death became a British subject. His early environment was one of cul

ture and of leisure, and his inherent nature made him a keen observer of character with a view to its utilization in fiction. He has produced a remarkable series of so-called "international novels" -studies chiefly of the American in a European environment. In his earlier novels-such, for example, as "Roderick Hudson," "The American," and "The Portrait of a Lady"-he employs a relatively large canvas, fullness of incident, and broadness of theme. In his later work-"The Ambassadors," "The Awkward Age," "The Golden Bowl," and "The Wings of a Dove”—we find a much greater limitation of field, a closeness of texture, a studied minuteness of detail, and an exactness of psychological observation that place him in the company of George Eliot, Flaubert, and Turgenev. James's method led him to the adoption of an extremely complex sentence form,-overelaborate, urbane, fastidious, and scrupulously unemphatic,-the exasperation of the uncritical reader and the delight of an inner circle of devoted admirers. His short stories, which have a deservedly high reputation, deal with much the same subject matter and motives as his novels, but with somewhat less of psychological and stylistic subtlety. "Daisy Miller" is a good example of the "long short-story," or novelette, in which James was particularly successful.

Among the essayists and miscellaneous prose writers of the period Charles Dudley Warner and George William Curtis deserve special mention. Two notable writers on nature were John Burroughs and John Muir. Charles Eliot Norton, in his literary criticism and in his admirable prose translation of Dante, shows fine scholarship and high literary ability. Among the exponents of the "new history" movement—a movement which emphasizes scrupulous accuracy, severe impartiality, and logical judgment—a conspicuous place is occupied by John Fiske (1842-1901). His earlier work was in the field of evolutionary philosophy, his most important volumes being "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," "The Idea of God," and "The Origin of Evil." His volume on "American Political Ideals," published in 1885, proved to be the turning-point from which is dated his later work in American history. His historical studies extend from the discoverers of America to the inauguration