Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/188

 it has more bright spots, more sunlight and more apple blossoms, more spiritual variety. The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a litde river, now with "bright speed," and now with reluctance and fond lingerings, over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humors that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light.

But what is the distinctive feature of this new mass-movement of the essayists? Of course, we must recognize that there were American essayists of a sort before the advent of young Heywood Broun and young Robert Benchley. There were, for examples, Dr. Crothers and Dr. van Dyke; Professor Santayana, Professor James, Professor Matthews and Professor Woodberry; W. D. Howells, Henry James, P. E. More, and Mark Twain; Miss Repplier, Mrs. Gerould and others. Several of these elders also did some rather decent things in their day. But the special character of the new movement is not given by writers of their complexion. The piquant figures in it are no longer clergymen, professors, novelists and literary ladies, carefully excogitating smooth discourses in the calm intervals between sermons, lectures, novels and babies.

The new men, who give a quicker tempo to the movement, are a light-footed generation for whom