XI _Ibsen the Playwright_ 227

XII _The Art of the Stage-manager_ 281






LITERATURE IN THE NEW CENTURY

[This paper was read on September 24th, 1904, in the section of
Belles-lettres of the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences,
held at St. Louis.]


There is no disguising the difficulty of any attempt to survey the whole
field of literature as it is disclosed before us now at the opening of a
new century; and there is no denying the danger of any effort to declare
the outlook in the actual present and the prospect in the immediate
future. How is it possible to project our vision, to foresee whither the
current is bearing us, to anticipate the rocks ahead and the shallows
whereon our bark may be beached?

But one reflection is as obvious as it is helpful. The problems of
literature are not often merely I literary; and, in so far as literature
is an honest attempt to express life,--as it always has been at the
moments of highest achievement,--the problems of literature must have an
intimate relation to the problems which confront us insistently in life.
If we turn from the disputations of the schools and look out on the