Page:America Today, Observations and Reflections.djvu/190

 Americans living abroad have made noteworthy contributions to this sociological survey of their native land: the late Mr. Harold Frederic, who has dealt mainly with country life in New York State, and Miss Elizabeth Robins, whose picture, in The Open Question, of a Southern family impoverished by the war, is exceedingly vivid and bears all the marks of the utmost fidelity. Nor must I omit to mention that the stage has borne a modest but not insignificant part in this movement of national self-portraiture. Mr. Augustus Thomas's Alabama is a delightful picture of Southern life, while Mr. James A. Herne's Shore Acres takes a distinct place in the literature of New England, his Griffith Davenport in the literature of Virginia.

There must, of course, be many gaps in this summary enumeration. It is very probable that many novelists of distinction have altogether escaped my notice; and I have made no attempt to include in my list the writers of short magazine stories, many of them artists of high accomplishment. One omission, however, I must at once repair. "Mark Twain's" contributions to the work of self-realisation have been in the main retrospective, but nevertheless of the first importance. He is the "sacred poet " of the Mississippi. If any work of incontestable genius, and plainly predestined to immortality, has been issued in the English language during the past quarter of a century, it is that