Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/142

 124 Later Essayists boyhood. Here Warner rounds out a paragraph which begins with an expression of semi-comic awe, with a reference to the Greek conception of fate as that element in human affairs against which are hopeless the prescience of the wisest minds, the provisions of the most arduous hands. The most baffling and sombre of themes is lightly and delightfully touched, while the author instils in our attitude towards a pear tree that sense of human companionship which, elsewhere in his pages, makes peas and beans and the upspringing asparagus warm and living things. There are two other papers of Warner's from which a few lines may indicate how he influenced the thought of his times, and how he is directly related to other American essayists. One is The Relation of Literature to Life, an address introductory to a course of five lectures delivered at various universities. Warner differed from others of our critics in his belief that the development of American letters would be along lines diverging from, rather than continuing in, the channels of English literature, and his first precept, as a student and expositor of American literature, was "to study the people for whom it was produced." In the light of our national char- acter would thus be revealed the light of our works of author- ship ; and Warner clearly understood that in the first century of the United States the national character expressed itself most widely in those activities of invention, material production and construction, path-finding, and path-clearing, which have led to concrete prosperity — all of which Warner summarizes in the phrase "the ideal of Croesus. " But side by side with the more material tendencies, he perceived those finer currents which bear the rarer cargo of American idealism. Thus while Warner with frankness pointed out that the majority of people look upon literature as a decoration rather than as an essential element in their lives, and while he saw that culture had its own unfortunate arrogances, yet he showed how poetry (and all that poetry connotes) supplies the highest wants of a people : that literature is power as well as pleasure. In his Thoughts Suggested by Mr. Froude's Progress, Warner wrote : When we speak of progress we may mean men or things. We may mean the lifting of the race as a whole by reason of more