lpful. The problems of
literature are not often merely I literary; and, in so far as literature
is an honest attempt to express life,--as it always has been at the
moments of highest achievement,--the problems of literature must have an
intimate relation to the problems which confront us insistently in life.
If we turn from the disputations of the schools and look out on the
world, we may discover forces at work in society which are exerting also
a potent influence upon the future of literature.

Now that the century in which we were born and bred is receding swiftly
into the past, we can perceive in the perspective more clearly than ever
before its larger movements and its main endeavor. We are at last
beginning to be able to estimate the heritage it has left us, and to see
for ourselves what our portion is, what our possessions are, and what
our obligations. While it is for us to make the twentieth century, no
doubt, we need to remember that it was the nineteenth century which made
us; and we do not know ourselves if we fail to understand the years in
which we were molded to the work that lies before us. It is for us to
single out the salient characteristics of the nineteenth century. It is
for us to seize the significance of the striking advance in scientific
method, for example, and of the wide-spread acceptance of the scientific
attitude. It is for us, again, to recognize the meaning of that
extension of the democratic movement, which is the most obvious
characteristic of the past sixscore years. It is for us, once more, to
weigh the importance of the intensifying of national spirit and of the
sharpening of racial pride. And, finally, it is for us to take account
also of the growth of what must be called "cosmopolitanism," that
breaking down of the hostile barriers keeping one people apart from the
others, ignorant of them, and often contemptuous.

Here, then, are four legacies from the nineteenth century to the
twentieth:--first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of
democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that
stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no
more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism."

I

"The scientific spirit," so an acute American critic defined it recently
in an essay on Carlyle,--who was devoid of it and detested it,--"the
scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification,
between statement and proof, between appeara