decline. That it was inevitable you will feel if you compare "Ethiopia Saluting the Colours" or "My Captain" with the unchecked perversities of Whitman's verse in general. The "Song of Myself," or "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which we may take as generally representative of his work, are so recklessly misshapen that you cannot tell whether their author was able to write with amenity. When you find him, however, as in those lesser pieces, attempting technical form, you at once feel that his eccentricity is a misfortune, for which he is no more to blame than a lame man for limping, or a deaf and dumb for expressing emotion by inarticulate cries. The alternative would have been silence; and Whitman was enough of a man to make one glad that he never dreamed of it.

In this decadent eccentricity of Whitman's style there is again something foreign to the spirit of this country. American men of letters have generally had deep artistic conscience. This trait has resulted, for one thing, in making the short story, an essentially organic form of composition, as characteristic of American literature as the straggling, inorganic threevolume novel is of English. Now and again, to be sure, American men of letters have chosen to express themselves in quite another manner. They have tried to reproduce the native dialects of the American people. This impulse has resulted in at least one masterpiece, that amazing Odyssey of the Mississippi to which Mark Twain gave the fantastic name of "Huckleberry Finn." As we remarked of the "Biglow Papers," however, this "dialect" literature of America often proves on analysis more elaborately studied than orthodox work by the same writers. Neither the "Biglow Papers nor "Huckleberry Finn" could have been produced without an artistic conscience as strenuous as Irving's, or Poe's, or Hawthorne's. The vagaries of Walt Whitman, on the other hand, are as far from literary conscience as the animals which he somewhere celebrates are from unhappiness or respectability. Whitman's style, then, is as little characteristic of

America as his temper is of traditional American democracy. One can see why the decadent taste of modern Europe has welcomed him so much more ardently than he has ever been welcomed at home; in temper and in style he was an exotic member of that sterile brotherhood which eagerly greeted him abroad. In America his oddities were more eccentric than they would have been anywhere else.

On the other hand, there is an aspect in which he seems not only native but even promising. During the years when his observation was keenest, and his temper most alert, he lived in the environment from which our future America seems most likely to spring. He was born and grew up, he worked and lived, where on either side of the East River the old American towns of New York and Brooklyn were developing into the metropolis which is still too young to possess ripe traditions. In full maturity he devoted himself to ariny nursing, the least picturesque or glorious, and the most humanely heroic, service which he could have rendered his country during its agony of civil war. In that Civil War the elder America perished; the new America which then arose is not yet mature enough for artistic record. Whitman's earthly experience, then, came throughout in chaotic times, when our past had faded and our future had not yet sprung into being. Bewildering confusion, fused by the accident of his lifetime. into the seeming unity of a momentary whole, was the only aspect of human existence which could be afforded him by the native country which he so truly loved. For want of other surroundings he was content to seek the meaning of life amid New York slums and dingy suburban country, in the crossing of Brooklyn Ferry, or in the hospitals which strove to alleviate the drums and tramplings of civil war. His lifelong eagerness to find in life the stuff of which poetry is made has brought him, after all, the reward he would most have cared for. In one aspect he is thoroughly American. The spirit of his work is that of world-old anarchy; its form has all the perverse

oddity of world-old abortive decadence; but the substance of which his poems are made their imagery as distinguished from their form or their spirit comes wholly from our native country.

In this aspect, then, though probably in no other, he may, after all, throw light on the future of literature in America. As has been said before, "He is uncouth, inarticulate, whatever you please that is least orthodox; yet, after all, he can make you feel for the moment how even the ferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's eternities. Those of us who love the past are far from sharing his confidence in the future. Surely, however, that is no reason for denying the miracle that he has wrought by idealising the East River. The man who has done this is the only one who points out the stuff of which perhaps the new American literature of the future may in time be made."

III

LITERATURE IN THE SOUTH

THE Middle States and New England, after certain literary achievements, seem now in a stage either of decline or at best of preparation for some literature of the future. The other parts of the country, at which we have now to glance, will not detain us long. However copious their production, it has not yet afforded us much of permanent value.

Professor Trent, formerly of the University of the South, and now of Columbia, promises a book concerning Southern literature which will be welcome to every American student. Meanwhile, the best authority on the subject is his admirable monograph on William Gilmore Simms, in the American Men of Letters Series. The impression produced by reading this work is confirmed by an interesting manuscript lately prepared by another Southern gentleman. In the winter of 1898, Mr. George Stockton Wills, a graduate both of the University of North Carolina and of Harvard, made an elaborate study of the literature produced in the South before the Civil War. A thoroughly trained student, he brought to light and clearly defined a number of literary figures whose very names have generally been forgotten. The more you consider these figures, however, the more inevitable seems the neglect into which they have fallen. They were simple, sincere, enthusiastic writers, mostly of verse; but their work, even compared only with the less important Northern work of their time, seems surprisingly imitative. Up to the Civil War, the South had produced hardly any writing which expressed more than a pleasant sense that standard models are excellent.

A ripe example of this may be found in Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature." The most gifted and accomplished of Southern poets was Sidney Lanier; and among his more impressive poems Stedman and Hutchinson select one entitled "The Revenge of Hamish." Lanier, a native of Georgia, never strayed much farther from his birthplace than Baltimore; yet this "Revenge of Hamish" is a passionate account of how the cruelly abused retainer of a Highland chieftain murders his master's son after fiercely humiliating the father. In other words, the substance of this characteristic production of our most powerful Southern poet comes straight from the romantic mountains brought into literature by Walter Scott. Not a line of the poem suggests that it proceeds from our own Southern States. Unlike the "Revenge of Hamish," itself admirable, the imitative poetry of the South is generally commonplace and conventional.

For this comparative literary lifelessness there is obvious. historical reason. The difference between the Southern climate and the Northern has often been dwelt on; so has the difference between the social systems of the two parts of the country. It has often been remarked, too, that the oligarchic system of the South developed powerful politicians. At the time of the Revolution, for example, our most eminent statesmen were from Virginia; and when the Civil War came, though the economic superiority of the North was bound to win, the political ability of the South seemed generally superior. One plain cause of these facts has not been much emphasised.

From the beginning, the North was politically free and essentially democratic; its social distinctions were nothing like so rigid as those which have generally diversified civilised society. There was no mob; the lower class of New England produced Whittier. In a decent Yankee village, to this day, you need not lock your doors at night; and when crime turns up in the North, as it does with increasing frequency,