Literary Evolution Of America

We are passing through the same stage of literary evolution as the French, only that with them the habit of literary criticism and self criticism makes the tendency more marked and more easily studied. Here, as there, it migbt seera that for the time the minds of men had overleaped themselves, as though in this strange fin du siècle we were pausing in our letters and art, unoertain of the onward way, and seeking in more acute apprehension deeper penetration and keener analysis of what has been and is au answer to our perplexity of what ehall be. Here, as there, originality, never absent, manifests itself too ofteu in a studied eccentricity and wastes its energy in a search for the novel and bizarre - a search that is most futile when most succeesful. But as one reviews the field of American letters onemay take heart of brace to say that our development in no way lags behind that of England, that it has in it the promise of an evolution as brilliant, as varied and perhaps more critically sound. Above all, it is independent, and so is contributing an important, perhaps an essential, part to the growth of a distinctly national