Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/143

 Hamilton Wright Mabie 125 power over the material world, by reason of what we call the conquest of nature; or we may mean a higher development of the individual man, so that he shall he better and happier. In progress of both these kinds Warner had faith. He never forsook the American birthright of optimism, while the ethical note in his writings, continuing the New England tradition, was uttered with so much grace and fine whimsicality of style that it lost didactic harshness. There can be no doubt that American literature has con- siderably suffered from the platitudinous didactic note. It is for this reason that, with sentiments of utmost civic respect, with full appreciation for the fluent diction of the most prolific of our later essay writers, we must regard Hamilton Wright Mabie (1845-1916) as a teacher of sweetness and sanity, as a fair-minded expositor of literature, as a friendly observer of nature, but not as an important man of letters. Lacking colour, sharpness of outline, light and shade, — all those quali- ties which the great stylists have as effectually at their com- mand as have the greatest painters, — he represents perhaps more convincingly than any other of our essayists both the possibilities and limitations inherent in writers seeking to bring "sweetness and light" to a generation of readers whose early education comes from the public schools, and who, for later enlightenment, turn to innumerable magazines. As the editor of The Independent, as a lecturer, as an indefatigable author of volumes of essays, Mabie was a useful teacher in his own day, but there is little in his writings that those who are conversant with his European and American contemporaries cannot find expressed elsewhere with more force and originality. Mabie was a voluminous writer on literary topics, but two keener students of literature, among the American writ- ers in the second half of the nineteenth century, were Edwin Percy Whipple (1819-86) and Edmund Clarence Stedman ( 1 833-1 908). Whipple is a critic whose attainments have been neglected by later readers, yet whose works have force and clarity of expression, sharp insight, frequent wit. He was bom in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the very year that Wash- ington Irving's Sketch Book marked the commencement of American belles-lettres; but his first book, Essays and Reviews