if this were the end of the
matter.

The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may
soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo.
Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite revelations
of natural beauty, and, in volumes like "North of Boston" and "A Spoon
River Anthology," judgments of life that run very deep.

American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking time and
not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown ten years ago
have won wide recognition in the domain of the novel. The short story
has made little technical advance since the first successes of "O.
Henry," though the talent of many observers has dealt with new material
offered by the racial characteristics of European immigrants and by new
phases of commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the
five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized patterns
has resulted too often in a substitution of stencil-plate generalized
types instead of delicately and powerfully imagined individual
characters. Short stories have been assembled, like Ford cars, with
amazing mechanical expertness, but with little artistic advance in
design. The same temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France
and England, however, where different causes have been at work. No one
can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary garden wither
at the same moment that others are outgrowing their borders.

There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing state
will be denied by nobody--namely, that kind of nature-writing identified
with Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Starr King,
John Burroughs, John Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore
Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and
many others. Their books represent, Professor Canby * believes, the
adventures of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten
memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and hence
one of the most genuinely American traits of our literature.

* "Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, "Yale Review," July,
1917.

Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation
less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical
and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a
whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Rep