of Bryant, Emerson, and Longfellow? Our literature is practically about eighty years old; any study of it is a study of living writers, in large measure. This necessity is simply to be accepted at the outset. We must read and study books by authors living as well as by authors dead; by those whose best works may be in the future, by those whose methods and achievements may be modified hereafter. We must also recognize the fact that contemporary opinion is sadly fallible, that celebrities are dethroned in the passage of years, and that obscurities are brought into clear and lasting light. Between these two duties it is by no means easy to go. "Incidis in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim." The Scylla of American literary criticism is the temptation to be prematurely confident that a writer is for all time; the Charybdis is the refusal to praise Lowell and Whittier, where they deserve praise, because they are still alive. Between these rocks the critic too often goes to ruin. Poe struck on both of them; he attacked Longfellow, derided Lowell, and patronized Hawthorne, reserving his praises for writers possessing the prime merit, in his view, of being Southerners or sentimentalists. And yet Poe honestly tried, in his day, to write criticisms which should be unbiased by current verdicts, and should be based on his own investigations. He failed because he lacked the wide learning, the clear insight, and the just temper which the true critic must have.

Applying well-known laws of criticism to the subject in hand, the critic of an American book or author, whether that critic be an American or a

foreigner, and whether he be considering past writings or contemporary ones, should try to answer these questions: What did the author aim to do? what method did he adopt? under what conditions did he work? what were his relations to previous writers on this side of the Atlantic? what his debt to English literature? what his obligations to, and his influence upon, his fellow-authors? what his intrinsic success? what his probable rank in the future? In the case of writers no longer living, or in advanced life, he can also ask concerning their influence upon literature here and elsewhere, and the effect of time upon their reputations.

Acting honestly upon this obvious method, and remembering the special environment of American men of letters, and also their heritage in English literature, the critic can properly venture to express an opinion concerning his predecessors and his contemporaries. That he will sometimes fail is unquestionable; but critics of Hebrew or Greek or Roman literature have failed after twenty centuries of accumulated wisdom. Critical failure depends, after all, upon lacks in the critic's standpoint and intellectual equipment, quite as much as upon his place in time, as regards the subjects of his criticism. By him who studiously sets before himself the questions mentioned, conclusions may be reached in an author's lifetime as truly, if not as confidently, as after that author's death. Foolish "patriotism," local pride, the influence of popular enthusiasm and prejudice, resentment of foreign blame, delight at foreign praise, these things cannot endure in the clear light of true criticism.

It seems necessary to illustrate by examples. Thirty years ago, Washington Irving was still living, honored and read by all, and often placed at the head of our literature. But it was as evident then as now that Irving could do some things and could not do others; that as an essayist he was master of a clear and beautiful style, fairly to be compared with Lamb's, or even with Addison's; that the "SketchBook" was not likely to lose its place among classic English works; that Irving was a genuine humorist, though sometimes coarse or tiresome; that he could. tell a story gracefully; that the "Life of Washing ton" was not likely to be superseded, but might be; and that, as biographer and historian, Irving failed because he lacked familiarity with the sounder and deeper method. The critic in 1854, then, might safely say, as he does to-day, that Irving stands in the fore-front of American literature, but not at the head of our prose-writers. The debt of American literature to the man who first gave us a European reputation in letters was as binding and as apparent then as now. Turning to others composing what the late J. R. Dennett called the "Knickerbocker School," could not a discerning student perceive, fifty years ago, that Paulding's writings bore no promise of lasting renown; that Drake, a poet clearly of a third-rate order, had, nevertheless, proved that poetry pure and simple could be written here; and that Halleck's two lyrics would always give him a good place in the anthologies, while his doggerel humor and his "fine writing" would go the way of all similar productions?

The same foresight could have been applied to our early poetry. It was Bryant's good fortune, which he sometimes resented, to write his most popular poem in early youth. I think his sagest readers felt it in 1817, as they do now, that " Thanatopsis" is one of the best modern pieces in blank verse the most difficult of metres; that its tone and expression are high, and true so far as they go; and that its defects are of a negative order. When Bryant was fifty years old he had proved that he was sometimes as good a poet as Wordsworth, but that he could by no means attain to Wordsworth's serenest heights. To have claimed for Bryant the highest place in our poetry would have been idle; for he lacked fire, breadth of view, wide sympathy with human nature, and what Hawthorne, speaking of Jones Very, called "a sense of the ludicrous." What could have been claimed for him, is now paid him as his due the rank of a poet of lofty thought, austere mind, and commanding expression in his own field. Longfellow came, in his early life, to that position which he is not likely to lose,-the place of the poet of sympathy and feeling. Careful readers knew, in the days of "Souvenirs" and "Keepsakes," as they know now, that Longfellow's poems would endure, while time would bury the writings of N. P. Willis, and Mrs. Osgood, and " Maria del Occidente," and the rest who tried to succeed in the same work. When Longfellow showed what could be done in hexameter and trochaic tetrameter, gave us our nearest approach to an American epic, and chronicled old Acadian and New England days in fit verse, he proved that the

spirit of poetry could find native themes, and could put them into new forms on this side the water. There has been no time since Longfellow began to write when his position has not been secure; and it is not now, as it has not been in the past, jeopardized by his occasional flatness, prosiness, and prolixity. Emerson, in old age, said that he could not read all Longfellow wrote,-he "wrote too much"; but the same Emerson, at Longfellow's funeral, remembered him as a "sweet and noble soul," though the dying sage had forgotten the very name of the dead singer. The critic may admit Longfellow's faults; but many an orphic, or intense, or cosmic, or Browningesque poet may well envy Longfellow's fame. It needs no future century to point out both the faults and the fame. The same may be said of Poe. If we go to Poe for what he cannot furnish, we shall be disappointed. He has no answer to life's problems, no help for life's struggle, no strong conception of ethics or faith; he merely gives us weird fancies and sweetly melodious music, at times rising, as in "Annabel Lee" and "To One in Paradise," to half-religious heights. He is not the "prince of American literature," for princes govern as well as dazzle; but he is one of the world's men of genius. Will all this be more evident, or less, a century hence?

It seems to me that the value and the substantial accuracy of contemporary criticism of the higher order have been illustrated in the case of Emerson. There was not a little that was extravagant, or ephemeral, or valueless, or broadly farcical, in the Transcendental movement of 1840. But even in the