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Show H American Literature MR. George F. Parker lectured before the literary society of the Washington and Lee H university at Lexington, Va., recently, his M theme being "America's Literary Needs." 1 He said we made a real start about 1820 in M Washington Irving in sketch and history. James B Fenimore Cooper in the novel and Daniel H Webster through whom the fourth orator was B added to the world's list. He noted failures and m successes in historical fields, but finds nothing B real and enduring in biography, other than the B patient and pathetic record written on Mt. Mc- B Gregor. He declared that the real Lincoln is B buried under a ten-volume book; that there is H no true history of Seward, Stanton, Johnson, H Stevens, McClellan and Sumner; that fiction has m more sorely degenerated during the past H twenty-five years than anything else, except M poetry; that literary people are much to blame VMVj In not setting a higher pace, and asks what we H know of John Adams, Hamilton, Washington and H John Marshall, or Emerson, Prmcott, Motley, H Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and if we do not lean more readily to the pathetic madness of Poe. From the meagre synopsis of Mr. Parker's lecture, we do not know that we have caught hfe real meaning, whether it is want of accuracy in history, or the absence of the needed intuitive knowledge, to be able from a statement of fat. 3 to, from those facts, trace out and put in proper language such a biographical sketch as ;will portray por-tray the real character of the man treated of, or lack of dramatic portrayal in fiction, or all these combined, but it seems to us it is easy to see why there are so many unsatisfactory publications. The first thing Is the absence of overshadowing talents. The world waited long. At length Shakespeare came, and out of his brain he made pictures which are now accepted as real history and biography. We can find the names of the men he portrayed in history, but the impressions of them, in our minds, are the ones Shakespeare made. It is so of Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Cleopatra, Cleo-patra, Macbeth and many more, tyhile his fictitious fic-titious characters are just as vivid, Julia, Portia, Rosalind, Romeo and the others all move before us instinct with life and grace. What has caused thousands of people to visit Scotland? Would they have ever gone there, except ex-cept for Scott and Burns? It is hard to find anything to portc&y in our country, because thousands of peopfjare yet alive who helped subdue the frontier and drive back barbarism, and romance has little field, following fol-lowing their path. Then partisan prejudices stand forever in the way. Suppose the real life of John Adams could be presented? How would it read to an educated man whose idea of greatness centers cen-ters in Jefferson? And is not the one thought that dominates all others in reading what Grant wrote on Mt. McGregor, that while the author was writing with his right hand, in order to make an inheritance for wife and children, with his left hand he was holding shut the door, at which Death was impatiently knocking? As to Lincoln, it may be five hundred years before his full character can be set to words; before the writer can find why, when unknown to fame and in some ways the scorn of the leadors of American Amer-ican scholarship, there was something about him that caused the people to demand that the presidency of the republic should be given him. Then most authors are poor, and write, if they can, what publishers will accept. Then who are the men and women who pass upon what shall and shall. not be published? In many cases a point in snytax is more to them than would be "the organ roll of Homer's verse." Then many of them are educated fools and think vastly more of the frame of a picture than of the picture itself. Many of the works most esteemed by cultivated cul-tivated readers were rejected by publishers; who knows of those that never saw the light? But Mr. Parker should remember how old the world is, and how few are the books that interest in-terest the world's bright minds, and then have hope. He, too, should not forget that this is a metallic age, that the struggle now is for money and to be able to make ostentatious displays. An oil well would outsell the very fountain of knowl-. edge. |