t12 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
soon as a people have grown beyond the study 
and the love of out-door nature, their literature 
begins to be what French literature now is— 
a literature without any true poetry. Daudet, 
for instance, is a poet, but he cannot make 
poetry. His novels are spiced with intrigues 
and immoralities, instead of with the flavor of 
out-door life. Zola sces nothing but the 
tragedies of the gutter and the brothel. He 
never dreams of green fields and melodious 
woods ; he finds nothing worthy of his art in 
rural scenes or in honest, earnest life. He 
never goes into solitude with Nature. The lit- 
erature of England, from Chaucer down to 
Dickens and William Black, is full of the fra- 
grance, so to speak, of out-door life, and it will 
be so as long as the English man and the 
English woman remain true to their love of 
all kinds of open-air pastimes. ‘The deer, the 
pheasant, the blackcock, the trout, and the 
fox, have done much to fence the poetry and 
fiction or our mother-country against the 
French tendencies and influences. 
But American literature is beginning to 
feel, in a certain way; the effect of much love 
of Parisian manners. Henry James, Jr., who 
just now leads our novelists, is much more 
French than American or English in his liter- 
ary methods. His theory is, that the aim of 
the novelist is to represent life ; but he no- 
where recognizes “ out-doors ” or out-of-doors 
things as a part of life. Life to him means 
fashionable, social life—nothing more. The 
life of which Hawthorne wrote is fassé to him. 
From his stand-point he is right. If realism, 
as the critics now define it, is a genuine revo- 
lution in literature, it may be a long while be- 
