English science and industries then the Royal Institution. The total cost of a century of scientific work in the laboratories of the Royal Institution amounts to £119,800, or an average of £1200 per annum. The Carnegie Institute in Washington will dispose in a year of as much money as the members of the Royal Institution have expended in a century.

All this may bear great fruit; but in the mean time the national unsympathetic attitude towards scientists must alter if the best men are to devote their lives to the public in a field not always the most lucrative.

England, France, and Germany honour their men of science in the most marked way, but, as Professor Newcomb is obliged to confess, it is "significant of America's inferior place in science that the idea of such celebrations in honour of science and scientific men is so foreign to our notions that it is hardly likely to present itself for generations to come."1

1 America undoubtedly boasts some eminent physicians and surgeons, and in dentistry she leads the world. As a further illustration of the tendency of the times we see the medical profession now in process of combination on the English model.

The following extract from the new constitution of the American Medical Association gives a clear idea of the purpose of the medical professsion in reorganizing its societies:

"The object of this Association shall be to federate into one compact organization, the medical profession of the United States, for the purpose of fostering the growth and diffusion of medical knowledge, of promoting friendly intercourse among American physicians, of safeguarding the material interests of the medical profession, of elevating the standard of medical education, of securing the enactment and enforcement of medical laws, of enlightening and directing public opinion in regard to the broad problems of State medicine, and of representing to the world the practical accomplishment of scientific medicine."

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW LITERATURE

SINCE the American Copyright Act of 1892, the literature of America-at least, in the department of fiction-has taken an upward bound which is astounding. To the protection afforded by that Act to American authors must be ascribed the sudden rise of a whole flood of native talent, which, passing the literary borders of the country, has inundated Europe. Prior to that time America may be said to have been dependent on Britain for her fiction, although it is true that there existed a number of native writers whose work was esteemed, but whose following in the country was comparatively small. The universal vogue enjoyed by British authors had for a century been fostered by the system of piracy, which made it feasible to put on the market a novel often at a fifth and sometimes at a tenth of the price such a book would command in England, or that a book by an American author would sell for in America.

The result of this has been to keep America provincial as far as literature is concerned, a relationship which has not been without its advantages, in that it constantly held high ideals of thinking, conduct, and speech before people who would otherwise have lapsed

to a level more purely Boeotian than was reached by the Westerners of Jackson's day.

When this unfair condition of things became abolished, an indigenous school of fiction sprang up like a mushroom in the night. Patronized by national sentiment, and perhaps also by national vanity and prejudice, authors who had long languished for a publisher and a public now disposed of their wares by the tens and even the hundreds of thousands. But there was another reason for this vogue. Whatever their literary shortcomings, they delineated, or sought to delineate, a life familiar and attractive to Americans at large. Most of the denizens of the large cities migrated thither from the villages and the farms of the country-often at an early age-carrying with them tender recollections of the old home, and the simple rustic characters they knew in their childhood. Amidst the high pressure, moral, mental, and physical, of the workaday cities, men and women turned with delight to whatever recalled to them those homely and pathetic scenes. Americans are at heart a simple people-a nation of children-when the cunning and greed and the worldliness have been scaled away, and "Grandfather's Clock," "The Old Red Barn," "The Old Oaken Bucket" are achievements which move them strangely.

The play that enjoyed the greatest successive run of any on the American boards was The Old Homestead. It was not a drama-you could not call it a drama-it was a mere presentation of rustic character, in all its lovableness and uncouthness, surrounded by other rustic characters and rustic scenery. It ran for years; it evoked numberless imitators, who all succeeded.

It was the forerunner of such books as "David Harum" and "Eben Holden," which sell more and are read more than Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, and Thackeray put together. These works are not masterpieces-the two mentioned were written by men who were not professional authors-they are merely transcripts of the sayings, reports of the doings, of actual people-professedly so-distinctive Americans creatures known on the other side of the Atlantic-and therefore making their first bow in literature. All this amply justifies their existence, all this explains their huge popularity. There is none of the artistic genius here of the great school of American novelists, of Hawthorne, of Holmes, of Howells, of Cable, of Bret Harte, of Miss Wilkins. It was perhaps "a new graft on the tree of English literature," although of this I am a little doubtful. I should rather call it a purely American growth. The authors occasionally, it is true, lapse into English; but the body of their works is written in, their characters adopt exclusively, the American language.

We turn now to regard a consequence of their success. They set a fashion; they stimulate the public into reading American books by American authors. The demand created, we see, to our amazement, within twenty-four months, men and women rushing from the church, journalism, the college, the business office, to become authors. It is not necessary to have art, insight into character, judgment, knowledge of the world : a little aptitude for scribbling, and a clever publisher will soon push the aspirant into renown. The presses of America groan with the printing of novels, and yet

there is scarce a duodecimo which will outlast a single lustre. The quondam barrenness is overspread with verdure, but it is all, or nearly all, weeds. I do not wish or intend to disparage the great writers-they would have written had there been no "boom "boom" in American fiction. But even these are specialists; and by no means specialists of the magnitude of George Moore, let us say. It is needless to proclaim that there are no writers of the depth as well as breadth of Thomas Hardy or Mrs. Ward. Perhaps Mr. Howells puts it squarely when he says—

1

"Our life is too large for our Art to be broad. In despair at the immense variety of the material offered to it by American civilization, American fiction must specialize, and, turning from the superabundance of character, it must burrow far down in a soul or two."

The new school has done something. It has shown that America's beginnings are not unromantic and unattractive. Time is now shedding his mellow rays upon the Colonial era, although Thackeray in "The Virginians" had showed its worth. The early history of Greece, Germany, France, Italy, and England were rich in poetry and romance; but it was not supposed that America had anything to offer to the native author comparable in richness, or worthy to engage the pen of poet and romancers. But since (to quote one cultured American ") "we have come to understand our own

1 American literature has always suffered from the narrowness of American national experience. "One cannot undertake a study of the literature of America," remarks Mr. Sheffield Clapham," without some longing for a greater warmth, brighter colours, more fervid imagination."

2 Professor Hamilton W. Mabie.