thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to the
world. The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social

entertainment,' the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor
Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty

per cent. of the things they say--no more--are good enough to remain
after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. But that half is

excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance--
the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour of it

has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth. Like
Mr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro,

but American; and it made New England aware of her comedy. Until
then she had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at.

'Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman,' says Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes. Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes

the average spiritual woman: as seriously as that woman takes
herself when she makes a novel. And in a like mood Nature made New

England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities,
with long views, with energetic provincialism.

If we remember best The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, we do so in spite
of the religious and patheticmotive of the greater part of Dr.

Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as
conspicuous as his humour. It is fancy rather than imagination; but

it is more perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of
imagery, which is apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and

adult. No grown man makes quite so definitemental images as does a
child; when the mind ages it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer

pictures. The young mind of Dr. Holmes has less intellectual
imagination than intelligent fancy. For example: 'If you ever saw

a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull
speaker and a livelylistener. The bird in sable plumage flaps

heavily along his straightforward course, while the other sails
round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks

out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of
him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow

does;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length,
with explanations. Again: 'That blessed clairvoyance which sees

into things without opening them: that gloriouslicence which,
having shut the door and driven the reporter from the keyhole, calls

upon Truth, majestic Virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop
her academic POSES.' And this, of the Landlady: 'She told me her

story once; it was as if a grain that had been ground and bolted had
tried to individualise itself by a special narrative.' 'The riotous

tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
features.' 'Think of the Old World--that part of it which is the

seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help marching in
step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.' 'Young folk

look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given
little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.' And

that exquisitely" target="_blank" title="ad.精巧地，优美地">exquisitelysensitive passage on the nervousoutward movement
and the inward tranquillity of the woods. Such things are the best

this good author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be
bare thoughts shapely with their own truth.

Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase
wherein he secures it, arises from his singularvigilance. He has

unpreoccupied and alert eyes. Strangely enough, by the way, this
watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly

observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's
gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall

trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have
taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at

a gallop than at a walk. But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to
somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life.

Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of
Elsie Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the

routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing
household industry, the shrillness, the unrest, the best-parlour

emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the country-side
and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by

undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by
demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion

by candour.
As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility

which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in Elsie Venner, it is
strange that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present

it--not in its own insolubility but--in caricature. As though the
secrets of the inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a

bit of burlesque physiology! It is in spite of our protest against
the invention of Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention

which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially
frivolous--that the serpent-maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good

night,' and by the gentle phrase that tells us 'Elsie wept.' But
now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in proposing the question of

separate responsibility so as to convince every civilised mind of
his doubts, there will be curiously little change wroughtthereby in

the discipline of the world. For Dr. Holmes incidentally lets us
know that he cherishes and values the instinct of intolerance and

destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the self-loving, and the
false. Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that

negation is tempered by a workinginstinct of intolerance and
destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in

the manner achieved by the present prevalentjudicialness,
unscientific though it may be. And to say this is to confess that

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to
futile purpose. His books are justified by something quite apart

from his purpose.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names
not the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or

three names of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world
more than one man of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested,

patient, happy, temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the
'painful' divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the

experimental period of ambition and attempts at a literature that
should be young as the soil and much younger than the race; the

civil-war years, with a literature that matched the self-conscious
and inexpert heroism of the army;--none of these periods of the

national life could fitly be represented by a man of letters. And
though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the

'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South
seceded, and though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be

discerned through the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and
the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the other side, yet he was

virtually the child of national leisure, of moderation and
education, an American of the seventies and onwards. He represented

the little-recognised fact that in ripeness, not in rawness,
consists the excellence of Americans -an excellence they must be

content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost
them to abandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have

never succeeded in definitely describing in words. Mr. Lowell was a
refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American

enough. He ranked with the students and the critics among all
nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except,

perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not
seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem

composed; he makes his allusions tread closely one upon another, and
there is an assumed carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as

to the effect their number and their erudition will produce upon the
reader. The American sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest

of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of the loveable
weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again,

'Well, what do you think of my country?'
Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in

the thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can
hardly know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase,

in its antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor
authentic--I recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of

proportion and a delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical
work of this critical century. Those small volumes, Among My Books

and My Study Windows, are all pure literature. A fault in criticism
is the rarest thing in them. I call none to mind except the strange

judgment on Dr. Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is
chiefly a literary one. . . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The

Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art,'
and so forth. One wonders how Lowell read the passage on Iona, and