H2 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. 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 &quot; out-doors &quot; 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 isflasseto 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- 



