ii2 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES. 



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 sees nothing but the 

 tragedies of the gutter and the brothel. Ke 

 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^asse'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- 



