The San Francisco call., 1896-09-13

in human experience without direct re-
sulting benefit. This explains somewhat
why the makers of our modern literature
are but obeying the genius of the age
when they put that which they would
have us under stand in the garb of fiction.
Consciously or unconsciously, we best get
sight and knowledge through this me-
dunn and come thus to our best under
standing of any sympathy with our kind.
1t is true in literature as in painting, that
which Browning makes Fra Lippo Lippi
say:
We're so made that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have
passed
Perhaps hundred times, nor cared to see.
Art was gwen for that
God uses US to help each other So
Lending minds out
Nothing, for instance, is doing more to
bring about National unity and recog-
milton of race ties in this country than
what is called the local fiction which so
many American writer's are producing to-
day. There is not at present in this coun-
try the field from which to draw material
for great novel. Our problems are not
yet formulated. Our deepest questions
are still individual rather than National,
and we have no types" in the true sense
of the word. 1t would not be possible, in
the present stage of our development, to
write story of American life with any
very wide range of application.
I here are among US no crystallized forms
that any great number of people would
repard as typical. What we are wont to
call types are really characteristics, not
having sufficient coherency for sustained
purpose in fiction. This fact is in itself
exceedingly interesting. The character
study that is such pronounced feature
OF American fiction is worthy to rank as
phase OF art. It is, in fact, the most dis
tinctive phase of our literary art, and finds
its best exposition IN the short story, of
which American writers are masters. It
cannot be called characteristically Ameri-
can, this character-study fiction of New
England, of the South of the Middle
West and of the Pacific Slope. Nor has it,
thus, far, given US anything really great
or lasting. Through it, however, it is very
largely that a characteristic National
literature is to be accom- plished. 1t Is
unifying our Nationa. life by deepening
and unifying the National interest and
sympathy. 1t is painting US pictures that
cannot but enlarge our understanding of
and quicken our sympathies with the COM
posite factors of this Nation.
The hard, barren tragedies of New
England rural life; the fervid, yearning,
hungry lives of the Southern mountain
eers; the simple, sunny, helpless archaism
of lie among the Louisiana creoles, the
bitter, sordid toll, the intellectual and
spiritual aspirations rounding existence's
span on the great prairies, the strange,
fascinating, vivid characteristics of the
Pacific Coast, have come to seem very real
to us and we have been brought into a
realization of a common life, q common
aim, though the local literature that has
touched us into fellowship with it all. 1t
is not the knowledge of external condi-
ton, the hardness, the toll, the bitterness,
the helplessness, that has done this, but
the tracing of the common hope, the COM
mon striving and the common need,
through it all, shared by our National
brotherhood.
What appears to an alien merely as
picturesque or interesting is to US vitally
moving, quickening US to love and ra-
procbement with our own blood kin. In
its vital humanity il is full of hope and
promise for that coming American itera-
ture of which it is the forerunner.