It is evident at once that Chicago, Boston, and other leading American cities, herding a large impoverished population, have everything to learn from the experience of New York. The preponderant space allotted to the metropolis does not detract from the general interest of the book. It is true that Manhattan Island's tenement situation is unique; but the same tendencies are at work elsewhere. The city is useful especially as a warning. It is a horrible It is a horrible example of what a metropolis can become, once vested interests, with abundant opportunity for employment, are given free scope. In spite of the excellent results accomplished under the De Forest law, the tenement problem in New York is, to a considerable degree, insolvable. The mischief, in great sections of the city, has already been done. The East Side, the abiding place of not far from 600,000 Jews, 200,000 Italians, and scattering representations of other races, is almost entirely built up with the worst type of tenement. The same is true of other congested areas. These buildings are far more profitable than any that could replace them, because they hold at least one third more people. They will not be demolished except by municipal action, a contingency not immediately possible, and they must therefore continue to house the bulk of the city's poor. Such parcels of unimproved land as remain will, under the new law, be built up with sanitary tenements; and the future of the now vacant outlying sections is also assured. But

1 The Tenement House Problem. Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900. By Various Writ

as it is. It is an extreme evidence of the fathers' sins visited upon the children. In Manhattan Island to-day we see the results of a century's neglect. Had the repeated warnings of publicspirited citizens, philanthropic organizations, and state and municipal commissions been heeded, the poor people of New York, instead of being among the worst housed in the world, would have been among the best. The present volumes review the repeated attempts made to secure better ventilated and more sanitary tenements. As far back as 1842 Dr. John H. Griscom, the City Inspector of the Board of Health, attempted to rouse public interest in the subject, the evils he described being substantially those that exist to-day. those that exist to-day. The report of the first Tenement Commission, that of 1853, devoted much space to one of the city's most notorious tenements, tain Gotham Court on Cherry Street. This structure was not destroyed until 1896. Some gain resulted, of course, from the numerous agitations extending from 1842 to 1900; but real tenement reform begins at the latter date. That is, it was not until then that the builders were forced to abandon the old tenement type, and to begin the construction of large, well-ventilated, fire-protected, many-family dwellings.

- a cer

A distinction should be made between tenement evils and bad housing. London, for example, which has comparatively few tenements, is famous for its slums. The working people live for the most part in small two and three story dwellings. The chief problems are overcrowding in single rooms and lack of adequate sanitation. In New York, on the other hand, the poorer classes live almost exclusively in four, five, and six story tenements, usually built upon a 25-foot lot, each floor divided into four two and

three room apartments. The only rooms in these structures receiving direct light and air are those facing the street and the yard. Those in the interior are almost entirely without ventilation. Their occupants are thus deprived of the two gifts of nature which, perhaps above all, make for health and happiness, — fresh air and sunshine. Life in these buildings is practically one long Arctic twilight. The development of an entire city along these lines, and the consequent dwarfing of the physical and moral nature of at least one half its population, would seem a fearful reflection upon American twentieth-century civilization. This, however, is the tenement problem of New York. It is evident at once that it is difficult of solution. Insanitary two and three story dwellings can be destroyed, and replaced with model cottages. This is the favorite method of correcting bad housing in England. But the razing of whole tenement blocks, each populated by 2000 or 3000 people, is too drastic and expensive a process for this generation. The proper treatment evidently is not correction, but prevention.

Thus the experience of New York is of the utmost importance to other cities. It is true that tenement evils, as described above, have not developed elsewhere to the same alarming degree. Compared with Europe, housing in American cities is almost ideal. Mr. Veiller has investigated twenty-seven municipalities, and finds even the beginnings of a tenement house problem in only six. These, besides New York, are Boston, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Jersey City, and Hartford. Bad housing conditions are found occasionally elsewhere; but the wholesale erection of tenements, except in the cities mentioned, is unknown. This general immunity, however, is not likely to last. The poor of Chicago are housed mostly in one and two story dwellings. A few of the orthodox New York double-decker tenements, however, began recently to

appear. Had Chicago followed the example of New York, the portent would have been officially ignored; and, in a few years, a tenement system would have been deep-seated. The City Homes Association, however, made a thorough investigation, and secured the passage of a tenement act closely following that of New York. As a result, Chicago can never become a city of insanitary tenements. Other places, even those where the "tenementization" process has not begun, have thus forever forestalled it. Mr. Veiller finds fairly satisfactory housing conditions in Cleveland. About five per cent of the houses are occupied by more than one family. Yet the citizens of Cleveland are now framing a law based upon that of New York. Thus Cleveland again can never become a city of insanitary tenements. Here and elsewhere the same tendencies, unless checked in time, threaten to duplicate the New York conditions. All our large cities have poor and ignorant populations which must be housed. They all have rich and not over-scrupulous property owners and builders, eager to invest their money at profitable rates. The danger increases every day, with the growth of an especially benighted class of immigrants. These immigrants not only furnish the tenants, but the real estate speculators, the builders, and the landlords. Thus thousands of the tenements of New York are owned by Jews, Germans, and Italians, who fight hard whenever the system is attacked. Such antagonisms will not be aroused in cities in which the tenement has not developed. Land prices are not predicated upon the possible construction of many-storied dwellings ; and, in other ways, property interests are not greatly involved. The present is thus a favorable time for those cities that have no tenement laws to pass them. Reform in this particular case should properly begin before there is anything to reform.

Burton J. Hendrick.

1

THE series of essays which Mr. WoodAmerica in berry here assembles 1 constiLiterature. tutes a fairly complete though extremely compact summary of American literary activity and achievement. The activity has been considerable, he decides, the achievement in pure literature small. American readers who have been brought up to a theory of patriotism which holds that one can hardly be loyal to the flag without exaggerating, among other things, the feats of American authorship, will not be pleased with these papers. The writer does not scruple to assert that our production of work which possesses some absolute literary value begins with Irving. He professes no reverence for "the received tradition of our colonial literature which has so swelled in bulk by the labors of our literary historians." He has no mercy even upon those few colonial relics in which, many of us think, a true spark is to be discerned. "What of the Day of Doom, The New England Primer, and Poor Richard's Almanack, and the other wooden worthies of our Noah's Ark, survivors from the Flood, archaic idols? These are relics of a literary fetichism, together with Franklin's Autobiography and Edwards's On the Freedom of the Will, except that the great character of Franklin still pleads for one, and the great intellect of Edwards for the other, with a few. They do not belong with the books that become the classics of a nation." Here Mr. Woodberry is speaking of literature in the polite sense; elsewhere he more commonly uses the word to mean any utterance in print of any human activity. So in speaking of New York he says: "In no other city is the power of the printed word more impressive. The true literature of the city is, in reality, and long has been, its great dailies; they are for the later time what the sermons of the old clergy were in

1 America in Literature. By GEORGE E. WOODBERRY. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1903.

VOL. XCIII. NO. 557.

27

New England, — the mental sphere of the community; and in them are to be found all the elements of literature except the qualities that secure permanence."

The paper on the Knickerbocker Era is the most finished and adequate of the four chapters which deal with special periods. The power of Mr. Woodberry's style is in general cumulative rather than episodical; yet there are pithy phrases of his which stick in the memory: "It is hard in any case to localize Bryant.

. . That something Druidical which there is in his aspect sets him apart."

"Drake and Halleck stand for our boyish precocity; death nipped the one, trade sterilized the other; there is a mortuary suggestion in the memory of both." "Every metropolis, however, breeds its own race of local writers, like mites in a cheese, numerous and active, the literary coteries of the moment. To name one of them, there was Willis ; he was gigantic in his contemporaneous

Mr. Woodberry's treatment of the New England period, or, as he has it, the Literary Age of Boston, is far slighter; it reminds us that the present book is a collection of separately published essays, and not a composition of chapters. For the book, it is unfortunate that the scale of the Knickerbocker paper should not have been maintained. The material at the critic's disposal here (he includes the Cambridge and Concord writers and Whittier) would seem to be quite equal in importance to all the rest of his subject matter. His discussion of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, the three in whom "the genius of the people, working out in the place and among the things of its New England nativity, reached its height," is full and satisfying. But we are not quite prepared to find Thoreau disposed of with a bare mention, and Holmes, Whittier, and Lowell each hit off in a brief paragraph. We should have liked some qualification, or expansion of some of his judgments,

as this of Holmes: "Such a writer is seldom understood except by the generation with which he is in social touch; magnetism leaves him; he amuses his own time with a brilliant mental vivacity, but there it ends." There should end, by this same token, one reflects, your Horace, your Pepys, your Lamb, all your blessed provincials, whether rural or town-made, who have made shift to keep their audiences thus far.

He has much to say of Southern writers, and little to say for them. Simms composed "facile and feeble poems; Timrod had, "like the whippoorwill, a thin, pathetic, twilight note; " Hayne, "one would rather liken to the mockingbird, except that it does no kind of justice to the bird;" Lanier, with his "emotional phases seems like Ixion, embracing the cloud." Poe, finally, is “the one genius of the highest American rank who belongs to the South."

The tone of these judgments would seem less severe if it did not chance that in the ensuing essay on the West, the author places much stress upon the agreeable wild notes of Joaquin Miller, and upon the "pietistic romancer, Lew Wallace. The moods of the two essays seem to be somewhat different. The Southern writers are attacked upon the stern ground of literary merit; the Western writers are forgiven much because they seem to embody the Western spirit. The volume is, we may repeat, a collection of essays, not a treatise. The final chapter, in which the discussion of general "results and conditions" is no longer hampered by the necessity for personal estimates, conveys an impression of entire consistency. In it the author's mysticism, his profound faith, are seen to mellow and ennoble the sobriety of his attitude toward what has been and what is: "Special cultures arise. . . and mingle with currents from above and under, and with crossing circles in the present; and the best that man has found in any quarter, nationalized in many peoples,

takes the race and shapes it to itself after its own image, and especially with power in those who live the soul's life. . . . But now in our own time, and in this halt of our literary genius, it is plain that our nobler literature, with its little Western afterglow, belonged to an heredity and environment, and a spirit of local culture whose place, in the East, was before the great passion of the Civil War, and, in the West, has also passed away. It all lies a generation, and more, behind us. The field is open, and calls loudly for new champions." H. W. B.

There is no question of Mr. Mabie's competency for commenting upon the natural and social surroundings which have affected the work of these seven well-known, although quite unrelated authors. He is a man of wide reading, of swift and sympathetic observation. A long row of popular books already bears witness to his facility of expression. In the present volume, the easiest task was to describe the Lorna Doone country, and the most difficult was to analyze the American spirit in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Both papers are extraordinarily well done. The constructive criticism of Whitman is quite as skillful in its complex workmanship as is the essentially slight but pleasing record of the obvious emotions of a sentimental tourist in

1 Backgrounds of Literature. By HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE. New York: The Outlook Co. 1903.

the Doone valley. Goethe, Scott, Wordsworth, Irving, and Emerson are the subjects of the other papers. That they are graceful and well-informed goes without saying. The better one knows Weimar and Edinburgh and Concord the better one realizes how admirable these essays are up to a certain point; but the great er also is one's regret that Mr. Mabie so rarely chooses to go beyond the bounds. which he has set for himself.

An author's choice of company is of course his own affair; as far as conscious election plays a part in it he may write for posterity or for "antiquity" as he prefers. Mr. Mabie early chose the modest and useful part of preaching the gospel of culture to the half-cultivated. He has talked long and well to the Christian Endeavorers of literature. He has earned the right of addressing himself more directly to the saints. No American writer of our day has done more "good," in the simple sense of that word; but he has been gradually educating the more thoughtful portion of his large audience away from those mellifluous commonplaces in which he seems to think that the greatest good for the greatest number is still to be found. Many excellent missionaries have, through long and fluent preaching in a foreign tongue, forgotten how to use English. Danger lurks in Mr. Mabie's hierophantic manner of chanting the eternal truths of literature. Those rich cadences may please the ear without leaving any trace upon the memory. His is not, in its characteristic features, a style that "bites," but rather one of smoothly woven periods, produced by words thrown deftly back and forth upon a welloiled shuttle, reversing automatically at every "but or "yet," and then, as the arithmetics used to say, "proceeding as before."

Our quarrel, it will be perceived, is not with one of the most genial and gifted of our writers, but with that missionary 1 A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. By Father LOUIS HENNEPIN. Ed

spirit which keeps him so frequently in Macedonia when he ought to be preaching to the Athenians on Mars' hill. No man reasons more persuasively concerning righteousness and temperance in letters, yet he might, we think, say more than he does about the judgment sure to come upon faulty theory and slovenly practice. Mr. Mabie uses every word in a critic's vocabulary except that one indispensable word "damn." His public does not like this expression, and all publishers unite in thinking it very bad form. Mr. Mabie courteously refrains from its use. This is a pity, for we have few men who care more sincerely for excellence, and who might say with greater authority to our generation :

"Thou ailest here, and here!"

If any proof of this were needed, it may be found in the essay on America in Whitman's Poetry in the present vol

UNIFORM with their excellent reprint Father Hen- of the Expedition of Lewis nepin. and Clark, issued a year or more ago, Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Company have now published, under the editorship of Reuben Gold Thwaites, Father Hennepin's famous New Discovery. The text is that of the second London issue of 1698, and there are facsimiles of original title-pages, maps, and illustrations, together with a breezy introduction by Mr. Thwaites, and a bibliography of Hennepin's works by Mr. Victor Paltsits of the Lenox Library. Father Hennepin was one of the most entertaining liars who ever journeyed into a far country. His account of Niagara, of "the incomparable River Meschaited by REUBEN GOLD THWAITES. Chicago; A. C. McClurg & Co. 1903.