The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-03-04


 the celebrated literary critic and divine
 was greeted last night in United churcE by an audience which overtaxed its
 seating capacity. The subject of his
 address was Life and Literature In the
 Nineteenth Century"
 In opening Dr. Van Dyke disclaimed
 any intention of criticising all the life
 and all the books of the last century
 and limited his subject to some of the aspects of life as 1t has been manifested
 in the literature of England and Amer ica This literature, he said, was iden- | tical In either country, being branched from the same root, language and spirit. Shakespeare and Milton," said he,
 "wrote while we in the person of our
 ancestors still lived in the old country. 1 Bryant, Emerson and Lowell are sim ply. transplanted writers; and English
 writers, such as Kipling, have been found to do quite as well while living
 in America as in England. Indeed, they don't seem to do quite as well now they
 are back
 "The cry for 'Americanism in litera-
 ture, q cry which implies the idea of red shirt, high boots and barbarlc yawp, seems to me the height of liter
 ary futilty. You might as well ask for
 Americanism in bread America is
 English. We have no mother country;
 we have an elder sister, whom we are now generously repaying, and the sheer of Sydney Smith, Who reads American
 books?' has been courteously answered by Longfellow and Poe and Lowell and
 Emerson and Whittier and Bryant and many others.
 Let me say that English literature has been the power that has done more to unite in sympathy and brotherhood and mutual comprehension the two peo- ples than any other. would need no further evidence to prove the thesis upon which I set out, that in no field of art has achievement attained such closeness and vitality in its relations to human life IS In literature"
 The speaker then defined the three fold function of literature: First, to reveal life in the secret consciousness of man, which is realism; second, to cheer and console life, which Is the ele- ment of romanticism; and, third, to guide and direct life, which is idealism. English literature has fulfilled these three functions in the past century very largely, not with Dante or Milton or a Shakespeare, but a multitude of lesser stars which illuminate and cheer our progress.
 He then enumerated some of our great novelists, such as Scott and Thackeray and Dickens, Cooper and Hawthorne, who have helped to broad en human sympathy for lives and times which would otherwise lie outside our narrow existence
 The first object of fiction is obviously pleasure, and in this connection Dr. Van Dyke said: If we read novels solely for pleasure there are a great many books pessinistic and gloomy, with the odor of the gutter and the hospital, which we would no longer read for the sake of keeping up with the times To people who decry novel-reading he said that many of these books have given US fipn ideals of manhood ard womanhood, and thus inspiring us to noble effort. Not only upon the indi- vidual, but upon social bodies, is thls far -renching, as witness "Un- cle Toms Cabin" and similar literature of reform.
 The fields of religion and philosophy and science were too extended to be 1welt on, but the speaker said that no one can understand the spiral move nent of the nineteenth century without | an intimate acquaintance with It's sci- | sntific writer's These gre nHi read uni | yersally, but are great s4cmiial forces. |
 It was in third class of writers, who | nave the power of inspiring mutitudes # their fellow-men, who are our preachers without pulpits and intimate ,ritics of human life, that the speaker lwelt upon the work of Carlyle and | Emerson and Ruskin. Through the life # Carlyle rings the clear and definite ;ospel of work; to produce something; 0 do the duty that lies next. From Emerson came the gospel of the indi- 'idual. Respect myself, be true to thy elf, the present Is as noble as the past; o-day Is the momement here Is the ,lace and you are the man, was his message to the multitudes, nuskin anges through wider region, md his ospel is an appeal that brought the deals of the race back from the do- 1inion of mechanism to Quickening l. nd deepening appreciation of life--life ! and for itself. The influence of all hree of these men has been to light gainst shams and conventions; and hey have done much to save the An lo-Saxon race from dying under the eight of it's material prosperity
 In poetry, which the speaker charac- erized as "the fairest flower on the tree human life" the greatest influence the age Is apparent. It was it's poet 7 which made Greece great, and is the leasure of the character of any race. o mere knowledge of physical facts m compare with this beautiful appli- ation of lofty and imaginative ideals ( life. Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson 'e the great successful opponents of |. oetry in the nineteenth century By m and Shelley failed one by his in- ncerity and immortality, the other be- use his life was cut short. The three < eat poets were alike in their high oral sense of poetry, in interpreting f e spiritual significance of the uni rse in men and in life; but they diff red in expression, Joy Is the vital 'te in Wordsworth, the recovery Of ace and quiet, rapturous contentment. le message of Browning is that of Q glory of the imperfect He sings e ba+t1a ennp that lifa ia tha pIaoo +o