hauntings of pangs of yearning, and pangs for the strange fragility of it all.

The caressing closeness of Pre-Raphaelite vision.

Wondrously immediate actualization of certain place, movement, and mood, in all their color,-psychic, emotional, vital, motor fullness, touching the heart as with the side of a blade, shaking the blood with a ringing flower-strewn, fire-strewn waterfall. The lyric art is in a sort of magic mantle.

The delicately modulated peace and sounds and hues-the absolute virtue pervading.

A dominant, sensuously grateful atmosphere.

Withal here is a poet-his soul not only in the line of an ancient race, but unswerved from it-his eye for the kind of actuality always charming with its voluptuously grateful sights and sounds, crystal clear-his peasant love of place inextinguishable, yea, ever a poignant cry;—surely these appeal to our racial memory. Combined with these, are a fervor of gold and mellifluence of silver, both in a medium giving the life which his eye, ear, and heart were fashioned for, wholly and immediately, and in a pervasive halo of virtue, of universal spontaneous sympathy, and utter unfamiliarity with intentional pain,-appealing to fundamental ecstasies, to deep-seated adoration of the creative intellect, to instinctive ultimate preference for Nirvana or Arcady. And all these fascinations have been heightened with influx from the magic of Yeats, Rossetti, Morris, and other poets of like tone and vision.

Do We Need More Literature?

H. HOUSTON PECKHAM

Purdue University

Last summer on a crowded train between Syracuse and Albany, I shared my seat with an exceptionally interesting old gentleman. His flat-topped derby, his Rutherford B. Hayes beard, his wing collar with black ascot scarf, and his detachable cuffs, white, and worn cylindrically, stamped him as thoroughly of the old school. Many of the younger generation might have found him exasperatingly passé, but to me he was charmingly quaint. He proved to be, as I had suspected, Professor Emeritus of Old English in a college in Maine. After exchanging with me a few conventional pleasantries about York State weather and the present prohibitive cost of travelling in chair-cars, he drew from his alligator valise a “Modern Language Notes" and a "Harper's." The latter, he hastened to explain, was his light reading, and had sadly deteriorated in quality during the last generation. Alas! when I reached into my bag I blushingly pulled forth from under my change of linen a "Saturday Evening Post," a "New Republic," and a "Smart Set." To cover my confusion, I lost no time in informing the old gentleman that although I took the "Post" I did not take it seriously, and that although I found interest in the literay columns of "The New Republic" I was wholly out of sympathy with that journal politically, being a Tory and a standpatter to the core, and as safely for Harding as Pennsylvania or Vermont. These explanations seemed to please the old gentleman. But my apology for having a "Smart Set" in my possession proved to be less happy. When I pointed out that my sole reason for perusing that unwholesome periodical was an article by H. L. Mencken, the old gentleman exclaimed with more heat than I had supposed him capable of: "Mencken, sir, is an impudent, irreverent young ass-a man of wit, to be sure; but of no humor."

From Mencken to literature is a fairly easy transition, and forthwith my fatherly companion plunged into a discussion of the latter. "What we need," he declared, "is not more liter

ature, but a finer, truer, more penetrating appreciation of the literature we already have."

I do not know when I have heard a more plausible statement than this. The arguments that may be marshaled to support it are legion. In many ways our extant literature is abundant. Bulky anthologies and book-dealers' lists; innumerable discourses on "Classics You Ought to Know"; the constant multiplication of literature courses in schools, colleges, and universities; miles of crowded shelves in large librariessurely these are convincing proof of the amplitude of literature. Shakspere alone is worth knowing from cover to cover,and a full knowledge of Shakspere would require a long lifetime. Chaucer could hardly be exhausted in three score years and ten. And the English Bible, if we were to read it half as much as we might profitably do so, or one-fourth as much as evangelical ministers tell us we ought, would leave no time for any other reading.

Well, why do we go to literature at all? Is it for graphic pictures of all sorts and conditions of human beings? Then Shakspere and Chaucer and Balzac, Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, should satisfy us. Is it for a romantic escape from this sordid, humdrum life? Then Homer, Bandello, Spenser, Keats, the Brothers Grimm, and Stevenson offer widely divergent avenues. Is it that we may drown our sorrows in laughter? Then in Aristophanes, Plautus, Moliere, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Irving, and Mark Twain we have a complete deck of jokers. Is it for consolation in discouragement and bereavement? Then we should find satisfaction in Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," Clough's "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth," Henley's "Invictus," or Malone's "Opportunity." Is it, perhaps, for confirmation of our unbelief? Then Swinburne and Hardy have assured us, with unmistakable finality, that this misfit life on a blighted star, this cruel joke of the President of the Immortals, ends in eternal night.

Why more literature? We do not begin to read the significant literature we already possess. We could not if we would, and many of us would not if we could. In this age when students demand less about Homer and more about sales

manship, less about Pindar and more about turbine engines, less about the Renaissance and more about scientific hog-breeding this age when nothing is considered practical unless it can be measured with a tape or weighed on scales-shall we not do well if we forego producing any more literature and teach our youth to appreciate an infinitesimal portion of the rich and ample literature which now lies about us so sadly neglected?

All this, as I have indicated, is extremely plausible. But it is less than half the story. Abundant-yes, superabundantas our literature is, we need more. And we shall continue to need more till Gabriel sounds the last reveille. Let us see why.

Literature at its best, I suppose we shall agree, is concentrated humanism. Shakspere is greater than Milton because he is more humanistic. Chaucer surpasses Burns because he interprets more kinds of people. Pope is second-rate, partly at least because he deals too little with concrete life, real or fanciful. Howells, stripped of his realistic humanism, would not be worth the paper he is printed on. Dickens is perennial not because of suspense and rapid movement-Mayne Reid and Mrs. Southworth have plenty of that—but because the portraits . in his gallery, whether likenesses or caricatures, are so varied and so striking.

"Well," you demand, "is not this impressive list in itself an inadvertent argument in favor of the original premise that we have quite enough literature already?" Not at all. Shakspere alone may have presented every kind of human being worth presenting. Human nature may be fundamentally the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. But settings change. Suppose there had never been a Jane Austen or a George Eliot or a Hardy. Suppose Mark Twain had been shipwrecked and drowned during his Mississippi pilot days. Suppose Mary E. Wilkins Freeman had been born and reared in Chicago. Where should we or posterity find vivid and living pictures of nineteenth-century village life in various parts of the Englishspeaking world? And if literature were to cease functioning to-night or to-morrow morning, and only the unengaging pen of the ever increasingly "scientific" historian be left in its place, how could future generations ever know, except in the

most coldly unimaginative way, the life of the world between this year of grace, 1921, and their own age?

Settings can no more be permanently stereotyped than can fashions. And even if they could be, there is another reason why we need more and more literature. If George Eliot had said the last word about Warwickshire, Dickens drawn the ultimate picture of London, and Mark Twain depicted the Mississippi Valley in a way which would apply as truthfully to the year 2500 as to the year 1885, the fact would still remain that some of our richest territory has not yet been explored, some of our choicest settings have not been used. Take, for instance, the Lake Erie basin, that peculiar little strip which the East calls West and the West calls East. Settled for considerably more than a hundred years, rivaling the Middle Atlantic seaboard in density of population, and showing in the last decade the overwhelming bulk of our large city growth, this region has strangely escaped the eye of the author. Howells once lived there, but he thought he had to go east for true inspiration. John Hay laid the scene of The Breadwinners in one of its two leading cities, but he saw fit to hide the identity of the town under a fictitious name. Theodore Dreiser has portrayed the same city, but in a very sketchy manner. Edward Rowland Sill and Edith M. Thomas spent some of their best years in this section, but their writings are as remote from the Lake Erie basin as Keats's Grecian Urn is from his native Moorfields. Detroit and Cleveland, now bigger than St. Louis or Boston, and evincing-each in a more distinctive way than the uninitiated realize—many of the characteristics of the Chicago of the early nineties, await the genius of some Frank Norris or Henry B. Fuller or Robert Herrick. Rubber-tired Akron, punctured through overinflation-punctured, but by no means blown out-must surely find a worthier, truer chronicler than the propagandist of the advertising columns. And the surprisingly sluggish hinterland of these breathless cities, geographically and spiritually midway between Massachusetts and Iowa, must be sung too. Think of a village which has two "Who's Whos" but nary a bank, garage, drug-store, lodge, or Methodist church-I know of one such village in the Lake