Eated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency. The analogy
holds in literature. Certain expressions of American sentiment or
conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the spirit of the
nation. The authors of these productions have frequently won the
recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of prose and
verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical standards.
Neither Longfellow's "Excelsior" nor Poe's "Bells" nor Whittier's "Maud
Muller" is among the best poems of the three writers in question, yet
there was something in each of these productions which caught the fancy
of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of the national
mind in a given historical period. The historian of literature is bound
to take account of this question of literary vogue, as it is highly
significant of the temper of successive generations in any country. But
it is of peculiar interest to the student of the literature produced in
the United States. Is this literature "American," or is it "English
literature in America," as Professor Wendell and other scholars have
preferred to call it? I should be one of the last to minimize the
enormous influence of England upon the mind and the writing of all the
English-speaking countries of the globe. Yet it wi
Rs were known and respected in days gone by, suh,' he says. 'Ah owe it
to the public who reposed confidence in the puhple and white, to fly ma
old flag when Ah once moh take the field. Yes, suh.' "'Purple 'n'
white!' I says. 'Them's the colors of the McVay stable!' "'Ah was
breeding stake hawsses, suh,' says ole man Sanford, 'when his mothah's
milk was not yet dry upon the lips of young McVay.' "When the silks
come, I picks out a real soft spot for Trampfast. It's a six furlong
ramble fur has-beens 'n' there's sure a bunch of kioodles in it! Most of
'em ought to be on crutches. My hoss has showed me the distance in
fourteen, 'n' that's about where this gang'll stagger home. With the hop
in him the Trampfast hoss'll give me two seconds better. He ought to be
a swell bet. But the hop puts all the heart in him there is--he ain't
got one of his own. If he runs empty he'll lay down sure. I can't hop
him, so I won't be
man as fired and pervaded by the idea of evolution. Man in
evolution--that is the subject in its full reach. Anthropology studies
man as he occurs at all known times. It studies him as he occurs in all
known parts of the world. It studies him body and soul together--as a
bodily organism, subject to conditions operating in time and space,
which bodily organism is in intimate relation with a soul-life, also
subject to those same conditions. Having an eye to such conditions from
first to last, it seeks to plot out the general series of the changes,
bodily and mental together, undergone by man in the course of his
history. Its business is simply to describe. But, without exceeding the
limits of its scope, it can and must proceed from the particular to the
general; aiming at nothing less than a descriptive formula that shall
sum up the whole series of changes
