In forms other than fiction and poetry the period was also voluminous. The greater part of our historical writings has been produced since 1870 and the same is true of our biography. Literary quality, however, has suffered. Emphasis has been placed upon material rather than upon graces of style; upon matter, but little upon manner. Never before have historian and biographer been so tireless in their search for sources: the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War is a veritable library of materials; the Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay contains one million five hundred thousand words. It is as long as Bancroft's whole history of the United States, it is twice as long as Green's History of the English People, and it contains three hundred thousand words more than Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It has been a development from the spirit of the era: the demand for actuality. Never before such eagerness to uncover new facts, to present documents, to be realistically true, but it has been at the expense of literary style. A few books, like General Grant's Memoirs and Captain Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, have had the power of simplicity, the impelling force that comes from consciousness only of the message to be delivered. But all too often the material has been presented in a colorless, journalistic form that bars it forever from consideration as literature in the higher sense of that term. The most of it, even the life of Lincoln, is to be placed in the same category as scientific writings and all those other prose forms that are concerned only with the presenting of positive knowledge. Parkman seems to have been the last historian who was able to present his material with literary distinction.

The essay has been voluminous all through the period, but it too has changed its tone. More than any other literary form it has been the medium through which we may trace the transition from the old period to the new. American literature had begun with the essay, and we have seen how the form, designated by the name of sketch, grew in the hands of Irving and Hawthorne and Poe into what in the period of the seventies became recognized as a distinct literary form with the name of short story.

The literary essay is a classical form: to flourish, it needs the atmosphere of old culture and established social traditions; it must work in the materials of classic literature; it is leisurely in method, discursive, gently sentimental. It was the dominating form, it will be remembered, in the classical age of Addison, the age of manners and mind. It was peculiarly fitted, too, to be the literary vehicle of the later classical age in America, the Europe-centered period of Irving and Emerson and Willis and Holmes. The early pilgrims to the holy land of the Old World sent back their impressions and dreamings in the form of essays: Longfellow's Outre-Mer, for example, and Willis's Pencillings by the Way. On the same shelf with The Sketch Book belong Willis's Letters from Under a Bridge, Dana's The Idle Man, Donald G. Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, Curtis's Prue and I, and a great mass of similar work, enough indeed to give color and even name to its period. This shelf more than any other marks the extent of England's dominion over the literature of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century: it was the most distinctive product of our classical age. Until America has a rich background of her own with old culture and traditions, with venerable native classics from which to quote, and a long vista of romantic history down which to look, her contemplative and strictly literary essays must necessarily be redolent of the atmosphere of other lands.

I

The National Period, with its new breath of all-Americanism, its new romantic spirit, its youthful exuberance, and its self-realization, has been, therefore, not a period in which the essay of the old type could find congenial soil. Instead of the Irving sketch there has been the vivid, sharply cut short story; instead of the contemplative, dreamy study of personalities and institutions—Irving's "The Broken Heart," Longfellow's "PÈre la Chaise"—there have been incisive, analytical, clearly cut special studies, like Woodrow Wilson's Mere Literature and Other Essays; instead of the delightful, discursive personal tattle of a Charles Lamb and a Dr. Holmes there has been the colorless editorial essay, all force and facts, or the undistinctive, business-like special article, prosiest of all prose.

The transition figure in the history of the American essay was Charles Dudley Warner, the last of the contemplative Sketch Book essayists, and, with Higginson, Burroughs, Maurice Thompson, and others, a leading influence in the bringing in of the new freshness and naturalness and journalistic abandon that gave character to the prose of the later period. He was a New Englander, one of that small belated group born in the twenties—Mitchell, Hale, Higginson, Norton, for example—that found itself in a Janus-like position between the old school of Emerson and Longfellow and the new school of non-New Englanders—Harte, Hay, Howells, Mark Twain. Warner was peculiarly a transition figure. He could collaborate with Mark Twain on that most distinctively latter-day novel The Gilded Age, and be classed by his generation with the humorists of the Burdette, Josh Billings group, yet at the death of George William Curtis he could be chosen as without question the only logical heir to the Editor's Easy Chair department of Harper's Magazine.

Warner was born in 1829, the birth year of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and his birthplace was a farm in western Massachusetts, where his ancestors for generations had been sturdy Puritan yeomen. The atmosphere of this home and the round of its life he has described with autobiographic pen in Being a Boy, the most valuable of all his studies. Concerning the rest of his life one needs only to record that he was graduated from Hamilton College in 1851 and from the law department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1857, and that after four years of legal practice in Chicago he was invited by his classmate, Senator J.R. Hawley, to remove to Hartford, Connecticut, to become associate editor of the paper that was soon merged with the Hartford Courant. To this paper either as its editor or as a contributor he gave the best years of his life. He used his vacations for foreign travel, at one time spending a year and a half abroad, and in his later years he saw much of his own land, but always he traveled pen in hand, ready to embody every observation and sentiment in a letter for the readers at home. Travel letters of the older type they were, such as Taylor wrote home from Germany and Curtis sent from the Nile and the Levant, gently sentimental, humorous in a pervasive way, perfectly natural, unconscious of style.

Warner was forty and a confirmed journalist before he published anything in book form, and even this first volume was not written with book intent. He had contributed a rambling series of papers to the Courant, a sort of humorous echo of Greeley's What I Know about Farming, careless, newspapery, funny in a chuckling sort of way, and perfectly unconventional and free from effort. Naturalness was its main charm. The period was ready for out-of-doors themes simply presented, and it found an enthusiastic circle of readers who demanded its publication in book form. Henry Ward Beecher was among them and as an inducement he promised an introductory letter. The result was My Summer in a Garden, 1870, a book that sprang into wide popularity and that undoubtedly was one of the formative influences of the new period. He followed it with Backlog Studies, a series of sketches of the Donald G. Mitchell variety, and then with various travel books like Saunterings and My Winter on the Nile. Late in life he published novels, A Little Journey in the World, The Golden House, and others dealing with phases of life in New York City, and he served as editor of several important series of books, notably The American Men of Letters Series of biographies, to which he himself contributed the life of Irving.

Time enough has elapsed to enable us to consider the work of Warner apart from the charm of his personal presence, and it is seen now that his generation overestimated his work. He was in no sense an inspired soul; he had little to offer that was really new. He wrote like the practical editor of a daily paper, fluently, copiously, unhesitatingly. The style is that of the practised worker who dictates to his stenographer. There is lack of incisiveness, sharpness of outline, cohesion of thought. He lacks revision, flashes of insight, creative moments when the pen is forgotten. He wrote on many topics, but there are no passages that one is compelled to quote. He was a classicist who wrote with perfect coolness, just as others had written before him. His gentle spirit, his sentiment, his Puritan conscience, and a certain serenity of view that whispered of high character and perfect breeding, endeared him to his first readers. But his style of humor belonged only to his own generation—it was not embodied at all in a humorous character; and his ethical teachings seem trite now and conventional. His influence at a critical period of American literature entitles him to serious consideration, but he won for himself no permanent place. He will live longest, perhaps, in a few of his shorter pieces: Being a Boy, "How Spring Came in New England," "A-Hunting the Deer," and "Old Mountain Phelps."

There are those who would rate his novels above his essays, those indeed who would rate them even with the work of Howells. Not many, however. That his fiction has about it a certain power can not be denied. Its author had the journalistic sense of the value of contemporary events, as well as the journalistic faculty for gathering interesting facts. He had, too, what so many novelists lack, the power to trace by almost imperceptible processes the gradual growth of a character. A Little Journey in the World, for instance, is a study of degeneration, skilfully done. A woman who has been reared among humble yet ennobling surroundings removes to New York and marries a very rich man and we are shown how little by little all that is really fine at the heart of her life is eaten away though the surface remains as beautiful as ever. There is a naturalness about it that is charming, and there is evident everywhere an honesty of purpose and a depth of experience that are unusual, but one may not say more. The novels came from the critical impulse rather than from the creative. They are humanitarian documents rather than creations breathing the breath of life. They do not move us. To realize where they fail one has but to compare his chapters in The Gilded Age with Mark Twain's. It is like looking from a still-life picture on a parlor wall out upon an actual steamboat pulling showily up to a Mississippi wharf.

The opposite of Warner in every respect was Lafcadio Hearn, a figure more picturesque even than Joaquin Miller and more puzzling than Whitman. Instead of serene classicism, genius; instead of Puritan inflexibility and reverence for the respectable, tumultuous wanderings—a man without a country, without a religion, without anything fixed save a restless love of the beautiful—emotional, a bundle of nerves, moody, sudden, the gorgeous Gallic at eternal odds with the florid, beauty-loving Hellenic; a man forever homeless, yet forever pathetic with a nostalgia that finally broke his heart. His personality was a strangely elusive one, and his biography, especially in its earlier years, is as full of romantic conjecture as De Quincey's early life or Byron's. His very name was romantic. His father, member of an ancient Irish family, had accompanied his regiment as surgeon-major into the East, and while stationed at Corfu had become infatuated with a beautiful Grecian girl, Rosa Cerigote, and had married her. Lafcadio they named their son from the island where he was born, his mother's home, Leucadia, in modern Greek Lefcadia, the Ionian island of Sappho. Here he spent his babyhood, how much of it we do not know. Of his father, he has said nothing, and of his mother, only this hint in a later bit of impressionism—elusive, suggestive, characteristic:

I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before, I can not tell, but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world—almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into the equatorial summer.... Each day there were new wonders and new pleasures for me, and all that country and time were softly ruled by one who thought only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done and there fell the great hush of the light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.

Was it the Ægean island of his birth or was it the West Indian island to which his father later was ordered with his regiment? We do not know. We know, however, that the mother lived for a time in Ireland, that another son was born, and then when the elder boy was seven she went away to Smyrna never to return. The rest is conjecture, save for the significant fact that both parents soon afterward married again. The boy, unwelcome, forlorn, out of sympathy with his surroundings, was sent to live with his aunt in Ireland, then later was put to school in France in preparation for the priesthood. Two years in France, formative years in which he learned among a myriad of other things the fluent use of French, then in 1865 we find him in the Roman Catholic college at Durham, England, where came to him the first great tragedy of his life: an accident at play that left him blinded in one eye and partly blinded in the other. Soon afterwards came the break with his aunt—father and mother had passed out of his life—he refused to become a priest, refused to live longer in any paths save his own, and for the rest of his life he was a wanderer.

There is much in his life and temperament to suggest De Quincey. Hearn, too, for a vague period—two or three years it may have been—wandered in the lower strata of London, half dead with hunger and sickness, aflame with imagination, restless, ambitious. At nineteen we find him in New York, reading in the public library, eagerly, omnivorously, despite his feeble vision, then suddenly, how we do not know, he is in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he makes the whole city gasp with horror at the story he writes of a murder in one of their narrow streets, and secures a position on the Enquirer. In 1877 he has wandered as far south as New Orleans, where for the first time in his life he finds congenial atmosphere and where he supports himself by reporting for the Times-Democrat.

Now it was that his French schooling had its effect. The Creole patois delighted him; he compiled a book of Creole proverbs, Gombo ZhÊbes he fantastically called it; and he fed his imagination with the old French past of the city, wandering as Cable had done among its ancient buildings, and, like Cable again, devouring its romantic old chronicles. French novels he read interminably, eagerly, especially the romantics—Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire. How richly he read them we learn from his letters, most of all from those written in his later life to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain and preserved in Elizabeth Bisland's third volume. Few have read more discerningly or have voiced their findings more brilliantly. This of Loti:

There is not much heart in Loti, but there is a fine brain.—To me Loti seems for a space to have looked into Nature's whole splendid burning fulgurant soul, and to have written under her very deepest and strongest inspiration. He was young. Then the color and the light faded, and only the worn-out blasÉ nerves remained; and the poet became—a little morbid modern affected Frenchman.

Strange self-revealment. It was of himself he was speaking, had he but realized it. He too began with power under the deepest and strongest inspiration; he too had caught a vision, splendid, burning, fulgurant. If there was an undoubted genius in our national period it was Hearn. He poured his eager dreamings at first into the New Orleans papers: "Fantastics," they have been called, by the editor who of late has hunted them from their forgotten columns. Then came Chita, written after a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico and published first in the Times-Democrat with the title Torn Letters, and then in Harper's Magazine, April, 1888.

Here for the first time we get the measure of the man, his Celtic imagination, fervor and intensity, his Greek passion for beauty. It is not English at all: it is the dream of a Celtic Greek, who has saturated himself with the French romantics and the color and the profusion of the tropic gulf lands. It is not, as the magazine termed it, a novelette; it is a loosely gathered bundle of fictional sketches, lurid patches, "torn letters," indeed, written with torrential power and blazing with color. Everywhere landscapes intense, drawn with fewest strokes, impressions, suggestions. He would make you feel the desolate shore on the gulf side of the island, but he selects only a single detail:

The trees—where there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and even of bright hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed—for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry.

Always is he a colorist, and always does he use his colors daintily, effectively, distinctively—one feels rather than sees:

The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles—a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring.

It describes his own style; one need say no more.

When he would describe action there is in him a Byronic power that lays hold on one and chokes and stifles. Who outside of Don Juan has made us feel so fearfully a tropic hurricane?

Then arose a frightful cry—the hoarse, hideous, indescribable cry of hopeless fear—the despairing animal-cry man utters when suddenly brought face to face with Nothingness, without preparation, without consolation, without possibility of respite. Sauve qui peut! Some wrenched down the doors; some clung to the heavy banquet tables, to the sofas, to the billiard tables—during one terrible instant—against fruitless heroisms, against futile generosities—raged all the frenzy of selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then—then came, thundering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom on boom!—One crash!—the huge frame building rocks like a cradle, seesaws, crackles. What are human shrieks now?—the tornado is shrieking! Another!—chandeliers splinter; lights are dashed out; a sweeping cataract hurls in: the immense hall rises—oscillates—twirls as upon a pivot—crepitates—crumbles into ruin. Crash again!—the swirling wreck dissolves into the wallowing of another monster billow; and a hundred cottages overturn, spin on sudden eddies, quiver, disjoint, and melt into the seething.

So the Hurricane passed.

Chita, like all the rest of Hearn's work, is a thing of fragments. It leaps and bounds, it chokes with tropic heat, it blazes with the sunsets of the Mexican gulf, it stagnates with torrid siestas, it is raucous with the voices of tropic insects and birds. It is incoherent, rhapsodic, half picture, half suggestion—materials rather than final structure. The style is wholly Gallic, like Cable's early style—sudden breaks—dashes—sentences stripped to the bare nouns and adjectives, swift shiftings of scenes, interjected exclamations, prayers:

Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken all mythology dumb—thou most wrinkled living Sea, etc.

Then swiftly following:

Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;—midsummer in the pest-smitten city of New Orleans.

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;—the lukewarm river yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. The nights began with a black heat;—there were hours when the acrid air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the bronchial tubing;—then, toward morning it would grow chill with venomous vapors, with morbific dews—till the sun came up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-heat. And the interminable procession of mourners and hearses and carriages again began to circulate between the centers of life and death;—and long trains of steamships rushed from the port with heavy burden of fugitives.

Then terror that lays cold hands on the heart: Julian dying of fever.

From New Orleans he went in 1887 to the Windward Islands for new sensation, new color, new barbaric areas of human life. Two Years in the French West Indies is the literary result of it, a chaotic book, flashlights, impressions, but no single completed impression, no totality, but the soul of the West Indies none the less, revealed with a rare, queer art that was individual. But no place, not even those Circe islands which he paints as the dream and the ultimate of human desire, could detain him long. Fickleness was in his blood, wandering was his birthright. Again he is in New York, and then with a commission from the Harpers he sails to Japan, where, in the rush and tumult of new sensation, he forgets his commission and loses himself completely in the new delicious world of impression.

For Hearn was as unpractical as Shelley and he was without Shelley's ideals and altruistic dreams. He lived in a vague world of vision, of sensation, of intangible beauty. He could say of himself:

Always having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical matters that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden. Nothing about what a man ought to do under any possible circumstances. I know nothing but sensation and books.

Though he was now forty, he entered this new world as one new born into it. He adopted its costume, he slept with his head on a wooden pillow, he acquired citizenship, he married a Japanese wife and established a Japanese home, and he even went over completely to the Buddhist religion.

The book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894, marks the beginning of his second literary period. Henceforth his writings center about Japan. He wrote no treatise, no serious study of actual conditions; he wrote impressions, fragmentary suggestions of the Japan that was passing away, the romantic Japan of the ideal old rÉgime, survivals of which he found everywhere. Japanese art and Japanese romance found in him a curious affinity. They mellowed and soothed the tumultuous spirit of his first art period. His impressionism became more subtly suggestive, more magically vague, more daintily colored. There had always been within him a strong element of mysticism, legacy of his Irish ancestry, and the subtly mystical side of Buddhism appealed to it strongly. He was able to interpret it for occidental comprehension, and he was able to make more comprehensible the subtle connotation of Japanese art, and to catch the subtler inner consciousness of Japan as no other of the Western world has ever caught it. In his first enthusiasm he wrote:

This is a land where one can really enjoy the Inner Life. Every one has an inner life of his own—which no other life can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, though occasionally when we create something beautiful we betray a faint glimpse of it.

But the newness of this new world he had entered wore away at length. He was a creature of enthusiastic moments and he needed swift changes of sensation. He had reveled in the old, ideal Japan, but he found himself unable to live in it. A new rÉgime had begun. He was filled with contempt at what he called "the frank selfishness, the apathetic vanity, the shallow, vulgar skepticism of the new Japan that prates its contempt about Tempo times, and ridicules the dear old men of the premeiji era." His last years were bitter with financial embarrassment, and full of feverish literary creation for the sake of his growing family. The glow and fervor and genius of his first period faded more and more from his work;—he himself faded out. He felt the gulf that he had erected between himself and his race. To his sister he wrote: "I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me homesick for English life." He died of his own vehemence, worn out by oversensation, unnerved by restlessness and nostalgia and longing for he knew not what.

The likeness of Hearn to De Quincey is almost complete. He had De Quincey's irresoluteness, his jangling nerves, his dominating fancy, his discursiveness, his gorgeous imagination, his oriental soul hampered with the fetters of occidental science. He too was essentially fragmentary in his literary output, a man of intense moods intensely painted, a man of books but of no single, unified, compelling book. One may not read essays like "Gothic Horror" or "The Nightmare Touch," or a passage like this from "Vespertina Cognitio," and not think of the great English opium-eater:

It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first vague uneasiness—the suspicion—that precedes a nightmare. I was half-conscious, dream-conscious of the actual—knew myself in that very room—wanted to get up. Immediately the uneasiness grew into terror, because I found that I could not move. Something unutterable in the air was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort resulted only in a whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultaneously I became aware of a Step ascending the stair—a muffled heaviness; and the real nightmare began—the horror of the ghastly magnetism that held voice and limb—the hopeless will-struggle against dumbness and impotence. The stealthy Step approached—but with lentor malevolently measured—slowly, slowly, as if the stairs were miles deep. It gained the threshold—waited. Gradually then, and without sound, the locked door opened; and the Thing entered, bending as it came—a thing robed—feminine—reaching to the roof, not to be looked at! A floor-plank creaked as It neared the bed;—and then—with a frantic effort—I woke, bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it were going to burst. The shrine-light had died: in the blackness I could see nothing; but I thought I heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard the plank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of striking a match occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise. Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new wave of black fear passed through me; for I heard moanings—long nightmare moanings—moanings that seemed to be answering each other from two different rooms below. And then close to me my guide began to moan—hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him:—

"Louis!—Louis!"

We both sat up at once.

Like De Quincey, he lingers over the flavor of words, gathering them everywhere he may and gloating over them, tasting them with half-closed eyes like an epicure, and using them ever delicately, suggestively, inevitably.

For me words have color, form, character: they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humors, eccentricities;—they have tints, tones, personalities.... Surely I have never yet made, and never expect to make any money. Neither do I expect to write ever for the multitude. I write for beloved friends who can see color in words, can smell the perfume of syllables in blossom, can be shocked with the fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by the people.

His essays, therefore, even as he has intimated, are for the few who are attuned to them, who have sense for delicate suggestion, for "the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness, the hardness, the dryness or juiciness of words." Aside from his vision of beauty, his intensity, his suggestiveness of style, he has brought not much. The romancers of the period, a few of them, like Grace King, for example, have felt his influence, but it has not been a large one. He stands almost an isolated figure in his period, an intensely individual soul, a solitary genius like Poe. His place is a secure one. His circle of readers will never be large, but it will always be constant.

III

Another phase of French influence one finds in the work of Agnes Repplier, perhaps the leading writer of "the light essay"—the term is her own—in the later years of the period. Born of French parentage in Philadelphia, educated at a convent where prevailed French language and ideals, she was Gallic both by temperament and training. She was not influenced as Cable undoubtedly was influenced and Hearn: there is small trace in her essays of French style echoed consciously or unconsciously. The influence was deeper, it was temperamental and racial, manifesting itself spontaneously in the display of those literary qualities that we associate with the word "French." Her favorite reading was largely in the English. She read enormously and she read note-book in hand. She added, moreover, culture and impressions by much residence abroad, and when she began to write it was with rich store of material. She began deliberately and she worked like a true classicist, leisurely, with no genius, and no message to urge her on. Her delight it was to talk about her reading, to add entertaining episodes, to embroider with witty observation and pithy quotation or epigram. Save for the autobiographical study "In Our Convent Days," her writings mostly deal with the world of books. Miss Repplier first came into notice in 1886 when one of her essays came to Aldrich, who was delighted with it and who made haste to introduce her to the Atlantic circle. Two years later came her first book, Books and Men, and since that time her essays, goodly in number and scattered through many magazines, have become a well-known feature of the times. Themes she takes to suit her fancy, apparently at random, though more often phases of her beloved "happy half century": "A Short Defense of Villains," "Benefits of Superstition," "The Deathless Diary," "The Accursed Annual," "Marriage in Fiction," and all other topics pertinent to Dr. Johnson's little world. She adds not much to our knowledge, and she comes not often to any new conclusions, but she is so companionable, so sparkling and witty, that we can but read on with delight to the end. We are in an atmosphere somehow of old culture and patrician grace, of courtliness and charm:

A little of feminine contrariness there may be, perhaps, at times. A thing has been generally disparaged: she will defend it. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison may be mentioned: "I think, myself, that poor Sir Charles has been unfairly handled," she will retort. "He is not half such a prig as Daniel Deronda; but he develops his priggishness with such ample detail through so many leisurely volumes." And her protest becomes almost acrimonious if anything of the new be flippantly boasted of as superior to the old:

"We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the English say of us," writes Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. "We have recovered our balance. We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to Knickerbocker's New York; that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the Biglow Papers."

Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers Washington Irving to be the equal of Jonathan Swift; that he places the gentle satire of the American alongside of those trenchant and masterly pages which constitute the landmarks of literature? "Swift," says Dr. Johnson, with reluctant truthfulness, "must be allowed for a time to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation." He is a writer whom we may be permitted to detest, but not to undervalue. His star, red as Mars, still flames fiercely in the horizon, while the genial luster of Washington Irving grows dimmer year by year. We can never hope to "recover our balance" by confounding values, a process of self-deception which misleads no one but ourselves.

Realism, the new smartness of Western veritism, the cry that romance is dead, and that Walter Scott is outworn, found in her no sympathy. Her heart was in the eighteenth century rather than in what she has called "this overestimated century of progress." And so thoroughly convinced is she, it is impossible not to agree with her:

Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of Old Mortality, answered indignantly: "Opinion? We did not one of us go to bed last night! Nothing slept but my gout." Yet Rokeby and Childe Harold are both in sad disgrace with modern critics and Old Mortality stands gathering dust on our book-shelves.... We read The Bostonians and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due appreciation of their minute perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual hour, and are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume them. Could Daisy Miller charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us awake till morning?

A paragraph like this may be said to contain all the various elements of her style:

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a phrase—employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping into the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature—is the "new woman." It has furnished inexhaustible jests to Life and Punch, and it has been received with all seriousness by those who read the present with no light from the past, and so fail to perceive that all femininity is as old as Lilith, and that the variations of the type began when Eve arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute the claims of her predecessor. "If the fifteenth century discovered America," says a vehement advocate of female progress, "it was reserved for the nineteenth century to discover woman"; and this remarkable statement has been gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten all about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de Medici, Saint Theresa and Jeanne d'Arc, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England, who played parts of some importance, for good and ill, in the fortunes of the world.

Here is the note of dissent from the widely accepted; the appeal to antiquity; the pithy quotation; the allusion that takes for granted a cultivated reader; the sprightly tripping of sentences; the witty turn; and the atmosphere of feminine vivacity and brilliance. Apt quotations sparkle from every paragraph. Often she opens breezily with a quotation; she illustrates at every point with epigrams and witty sayings from all known and unknown sources; and she ends smartly by snapping the whip of a quotation in the final sentence or paragraph.

The bent of her work, taking it all in all, is critical, and often in her criticism, especially her criticism of literature, she rises to the point of distinction. One may quote paragraphs here and there that are as illuminating as anything in American criticism. She is quick to see fallacies and to press an absurd deduction to its ridiculous end. She illumines a whole subject with a paragraph. This for example on Hamlin Garland:

Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called—I think unfairly—Main-Traveled Roads have deprived most of us of some cheerful hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life in which ennui sits enthroned. It is not the poverty of his Western farmers that oppresses us. Real biting poverty, which withers lesser evils with its deadly breath, is not known to these people at all. They have roofs, fire, food, and clothing. It is not the ceaseless labor, the rough fare, the gray skies, the muddy barn-yards, which stand for the trouble in their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of living. It is the burden of a dull existence, clogged at every pore, and the hopeless melancholy of which they have sufficient intelligence to understand. Theirs is the ennui of emptiness, and the implied reproach on every page is that a portion, and only a portion, of mankind is doomed to walk along these shaded paths; while happier mortals who abide in New York, or perhaps in Paris, spend their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual and artistic excitation.

And few have put their criticism into more attractive form. It is penetrating and true and in addition it has a sparkle and wit about it that makes it anything but dry reading. Who has written more sympathetically, more understandingly, more delightfully about Charles Lamb than she if one takes her work all together. Here is a glimpse, yet how illuminating:

Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other humorist, more than any other man of letters, belongs exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the finest prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs—"the nicest little delicate things—rabbity-flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit." Germany was little or nothing, and America was less. The child of London streets,

"Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,"

rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save the frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without a peer.

But critic in the sense that Paul Elmer More is a critic, she certainly is not. She is temperamental rather than scientific. She makes brilliant observations, but she has no system, no patient analytical processes. She is, like Henry James, a critic by flashes, but those flashes often illuminate the whole landscape.

She is a suggestive writer, a writer who makes her reader think, who restores him as the dynamo restores the battery. Her world is a small one and it is not necessarily American, but it is intensely alive. In her own "happy half century," quoting Dr. Johnson, discoursing of Fanny Burney or Hannah More, or when telling of her cat or of the mystic lore of cats quoting Montaigne and Loti, or of those still more feminine topics: mirrors, spinsters, letters, the eternal feminine, she induces "electrical tingles of hit after hit." Her work must be classed with that of Lamb, of Loti, of Hearn, as work peculiarly personal, work that makes its appeal largely on account of the surcharged individuality behind it.

With Miss Repplier's essays may be classed those of Samuel McChord Crothers (1857——), Edward S. Martin (1856——) and Louise Imogen Guiney, who wrote for cultured people on topics for the most part drawn from the world of books. The work of Dr. Crothers is the most distinctive of the three. His wisdom, his delicate humor, his unfailing sense of values have made his papers, the most of them published in the Atlantic, a source of real delight and profit to an increasing circle. His books, like those of Miss Repplier, may be safely placed in the trunk when one starts on his summer's vacation and can take but few. They are wise, still books that one may live with.

IV

The period has abounded in critics from the first. The best of Lowell's prose came in the years following the war, and all of Stedman's was written after 1870. The great multiplication of newspapers and the increasing number of magazines led more and more to the production of book reviews. The North American Review no longer said the last word about a book or an author. In 1865 Edwin L. Godkin (1831–1902) founded the New York Nation and contributed to it some of the most fearless and discriminating work of the period; in 1880 Francis F. Browne (1843–1913) founded the Chicago Dial and made its reviews among the best in America; and in 1881 Jeannette L. Gilder (1849–1916) and her brother, Joseph B. Gilder (1858——), established the New York Critic, a journal that for two decades exerted a formative influence upon the period.

A few of the great numbers of book reviewers have done worthy work, some of them even distinctive work, though most of it lies buried now in the great ephemeral mass. Howells and Aldrich, Horace E. Scudder (1838–1902) and Bliss Perry (1860——) in the Atlantic, Henry M. Alden (1836——) in Harper's, Maurice Thompson (1844–1901) in the Independent, and Hamilton W. Mabie (1846–1916) in the Outlook, all did work that undoubtedly helped to shape the period, but not much of it may rank as permanent literature. It has been too often journalistic: hastily prepared, a thing of the day's work.

Much fine criticism has come sporadically from pens consecrated to other literary tasks. Nearly all of the major poets of the period as well as the novelists and essayists have at one time or another made excursions into the field, sometimes producing only a brilliant bit of temperamental impressionism, sometimes working out studies that are systematic and complete. James, Howells, Whitman, Burroughs, Lanier, Crawford, Torrey, John Fiske, Maurice F. Egan, Henry Van Dyke, George E. Woodberry, James Brander Matthews have all added brilliant chapters to the sum of American criticism, but none may be called a critic in the sense Sainte-Beuve was a critic. Their work has been avocational, fitful excursions rather than systematic exploration.

During the later years of the period there has been but one who may be called a critic in the broader sense of the term—scholarly, leisurely of method, systematic, detached, literary in style and finish—a critic and only a critic, Paul Elmer More, whose Shelburne Essays are our nearest approach to those Causeries du Lundi of an earlier age. His birth and education in the West, in St. Louis, was an advantage at the start: it took from his later criticism that New England-centered point of view that is so evident in the work of critics like Richardson and Barrett Wendell. The New England culture he got in due time at Harvard, where he took two advanced degrees, and he broadened his outlook still further by pursuing his studies in European universities, returning at length to teach Sanscrit at Harvard and later at Bryn Mawr. Oriental language was his specialty. One catches the spirit of his earlier period by examining his first publications, among them A Century of Indian Epigram, "Translations or paraphrases in English verse of a hundred epigrams and precepts ascribed to a Hindu sage." This early enthusiasm for things oriental gave him a singularly valuable equipment for criticism. It broadened his view: it put into his hands the two opposite poles of human thought. His essay on Lafcadio Hearn is illuminating, not only of Hearn but of More himself. We can illustrate only lamely with fragments:

Into the study of these by-ways of Oriental literature he has carried a third element, the dominant idea of Occidental science; and this element he has blended with Hindu religion and Japanese Æstheticism in a combination as bewildering as it is voluptuous. In this triple union lies his real claim to high originality....

Beauty itself, which forms the essence of Mr. Hearn's art, receives a new content from this union of the East and the West....

Is it not proper to say, after reading such passages as these, that Mr. Hearn has introduced a new element of psychology into literature? We are indeed living in the past, we who foolishly cry out that the past is dead. In one remarkable study of the emotions awakened by the baying of a gaunt white hound, Mr. Hearn shows how even the very beasts whom we despise as unreasoning and unremembering are filled with an articulate sense of this dark backward and abysm of time, whose shadow falls on their sensitive souls with the chill of a vague dread—dread, I say, for it must begin to be evident that this new psychology is fraught with meanings that may well trouble and awe the student.

In the ghostly residuum of these psychological meditations we may perceive a vision dimly foreshadowing itself which mankind for centuries, nay, for thousands of years, has striven half unwittingly to keep veiled. I do not know, but it seems to me that the foreboding of this dreaded disclosure may account for many things in the obscure history of the race, for the long struggle of religion against the observations of science which to-day we are wont to slur over as only a superficial struggle after all. In the haunting fear of this disclosure I seem to see an explanation, if not a justification, of the obscurantism of the early church, of the bitter feud of Galileo and the burning of Giordano Bruno, of the recent hostility to Darwinism, and even of the present-day attempt to invalidate the significance of this long contest.[164]

In another and a far more unusual way he qualified himself for his high office of critic: he immured himself for two years in solitude, with books as his chief companions, and it was in this wilderness that the Shelburne Essays—Shelburne was the name of the town of his hermitage—were born. His own account is illuminating:

In a secluded spot in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit, after a mild Epicurean fashion of my own. Three maiden aunts wagged their heads ominously; my nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there was any taint of insanity in the family; an old gray-haired lady, a veritable saint, who had not been soured by her many deeds of charity, admonished me on the utter selfishness and godlessness of such a proceeding.... As for the hermit ... having found it impossible to educe any meaning from the tangled habits of mankind while he himself was whirled about in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the efficiency of undisturbed meditation at a distance. So deficient had been his education that he was actually better acquainted with the aspirations and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than with those of the modern toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac. He had been deafened by the "Indistinguishable roar" of the streets, and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of the market place.[165]

The period gave him time to read, leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the product of that reading was to be marketable. When he wrote his first papers he wrote with no press of need upon him. He had evolved his own notion of the function of literature and of the critic. This was what he evolved: and it is worthy of study:

There is a kind of criticism that limits itself to looking at the thing in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they successively strike the mind. This is properly the way of sympathy, and those who choose this way are right in saying that it is absurd or merely ill-tempered to dwell on what is ugly in a work of art, or false, or incomplete. But there is a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so much directed to the individual thing as to its relation with other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies. No criticism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of these methods exclusively, as no product of art can ever be entirely isolated in its genesis or altogether merged in the current of the day. The highest criticism would contrive to balance these methods in such manner that neither the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence would be unduly subordinated, and in so far as these essays fail to strike such a balance—I wish this were their only failure—they err sadly from the best model.[166]

In the eight volumes now issued there are eighty-five essays on topics as varied as George Crabbe, Hawthorne, Swinburne, Walt Whitman, The Bhagavad Gita, Pascal, Plato, Nietzsche. Nearly two-thirds of them all deal with representative English writers; some fifteen have to do with Americans. In the criticizing of them he has held steadfastly to the contention that men of letters are to be viewed not alone as individuals but as voices and as spiritual leaders in their generations. The soul of literature is not art and it is not alone beauty. For decadents like Swinburne he has small sympathy and he can even rebuke Charles Lamb for "his persistent refusal to face, in words at least, the graver issues of life." He takes his stand at a point so elevated that only the great masters who have been the original voices of the race are audible. He dares even to speak of "the jaunty optimism of Emerson," and to suggest that his confidence and serenity were all too often taken by his generation for original wisdom.

The foundation of his work is religious—religious in the fundamental, the oriental, sense of the word. He has been consistent and he has been courageous. That America has a critic with standards of criticism, an official critic in the sense that Sainte-Beuve was official, and that as editor of the leading critical review of America this critic has a dominating clientele and a leader's authority, is one of the most promising signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles Dudley Warner. (1829–1900.) My Summer in a Garden, 1870; Saunterings, 1872; Backlog Studies, 1872; The Gilded Age [with Mark Twain], 1873; Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing, 1874; My Winter on the Nile Among the Mummies and Moslems, 1876; In the Levant, 1877; Being a Boy, 1877; In the Wilderness, 1878; Washington Irving, 1881; Captain John Smith, 1881; A Roundabout Journey, 1884; Their Pilgrimage, 1887; On Horseback: a Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California, 1888; Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada, 1889; A Little Journey in the World: a Novel, 1889; Our Italy, 1891; As We Were Saying, 1891; As We Go, 1894; The Golden House, 1895; The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote, 1897; The Relation of Literature to Life, 1897; That Fortune: a Novel, 1899; Fashions in Literature and Other Essays, 1902; Complete works, 15 vols. Edited by T.R. Lounsbury, 1904; Charles Dudley Warner, by Mrs. James T. Fields, 1904.

Lafcadio Hearn. (1850–1904.) Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures: Stories from the Anvari-Soheili, BaitÁl-Packisi, Mahabharata, etc., 1884; Gombo ZhÊbes, 1885; Some Chinese Ghosts, 1887; Chita: a Memory of Last Island, 1889; Two Years in the French West Indies, 1890; Youma: the Story of a West Indian Slave, 1890; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894; Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan, 1895; Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, 1896; Gleanings in Buddha-fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East, 1897; Exotics and Retrospectives, 1899; In Ghostly Japan, 1899; Shadowings, 1900; Japanese Miscellany, 1901; Kotto: Being Japanese Curios with Sundry Cobwebs, 1902; Japanese Fairy Tales, 1903; Kwaidan, 1904; Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, 1904; The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies, 1905; Letters from the Raven: the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn with Henry Watkin, 1905, 1907; Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 vols., by Elizabeth Bisland, 1906; Concerning Lafcadio Hearn, with a Bibliography by Laura Stedman, by G.M. Gould, 1908; Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Elizabeth Bisland, 1910; Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist: Early Writings; with an Introduction by Ferris Greenslet, 1911; Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, by Y. Noguchi, 1911; Lafcadio Hearn, by N.H. Kennard, 1912; Lafcadio Hearn, by E. Thomas, 1912; Fantastics and Other Fancies, with an Introduction by Dr. Charles W. Hutson, 1914.

Agnes Repplier. (1857——.) Books and Men, 1888; Points of View, 1891; Essays in Miniature, 1892; Essays in Idleness, 1893; In the Dozy Hours and Other Papers, 1894; Varia, 1897; Philadelphia, the Place and the People, 1898; The Fireside Sphinx, 1901; Compromises, 1904; In Our Convent Days, 1905; A Happy Half Century, 1908; Americans and Others, 1912; The Cat, 1912.

Paul Elmer More. (1864——.) Helena, and Occasional Poems, 1890; The Great Refusal: Letters of a Dreamer in Gotham, 1894; A Century of Indian Epigrams; Chiefly from the Sanscrit of Bhartrihari, 1898; Shelburne Essays, First series, 1904; Second and Third series, 1905; Fourth series, 1906; Fifth series, 1908; Sixth series, 1909; Seventh series, 1910; Eighth series, 1913; Nietzsche, 1912.

---