apply our tape measure to Miller and to Bierce, who, it is likely, have reached the height of their powers, and to Sterling and the others that have already been mentioned and who are still growing. On this figurative journey through the Land of Literature there are to be observed on all sides a horde of industrious pigmies, many of them extremely clever. Some of them have rolled logs down from the Great Commercial Mountains out of which they have made stilts on which they strut about, affecting the appearance and the manner of real giants. The deception is very often successful.
But, who knows, there may be giants as yet unfound in the demesne of English letters, and even in the West; giants who dwell in hidden places, but whose heads are in the clouds. Then, too, some of those we have cited—Sterling, London, Hopper, Austin, Atherton—may grow into gianthood. Let us watch them.
It is within the bounds of possibility that when critics, in years as yet remote, shall write of the literature of our time, they may bear out contemporary opinion, that, here in the West, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were evidences of a literary vitality from which grew a group of writers of world-importance. Do the facts, observed at close range, support the belief? Literature in the West, up to the present time, has been sporadic, and, viewed largely, it has been negligible. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller have left their impress on their time, but, aside from these, there is no one of whom the world has taken cognizance. But the West is spoken of and thought of as a cradle of art. Here the conditions of climate, the beauty of the earth, the freedom and vigor of living, unworn traditions, and the stimulus of a growing civilization are all hospitable to creative work and to the nourishment of the imagination. So, in truth, it may be that, here, in this far-off corner of the world, there may be some upon whose brows Fame shall yet press down the crown of immortality.
This is the optimistic view quite in the spirit of our naive Western hopefulness. But the critic has to deal, nol with dreams, but with facts as he finds them and as he sees them. We may have potentialities even though we have not performances. It is well to be a little modest about such things. America has produced one author of the first class and only one (it is perhaps superfluous to say that this one is Poe). It has produced and is producing a goodly number of the second class, but the Pacific Coast will be doing very well if it adds, in the present generation, one more name in the upper middle class of literature to those of Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller. The likeliest candidate is George Sterling, whose noble poem, "The Testimony of the Suns," is a prop to the tottering edifice of English song.
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There is a tendency gaining strength among Western writers to draw their material from historical sources and for this purpose the archives, in which the Pacific Coast is peculiarly rich, are being studied with considerable diligence. The result will doubtless be that a body of fiction will be produced which will reflect something of the unique and interesting development of Western civilization. Gertrude Atherton, among recent writers, has taken the lead in this line of endeavor, while Frank Norris and some others have given us more or less literal pictures of Western life during our own time and of the period immediately antedating the present.
Among writers who are transmuting our history and traditions into literature, Mary Austin is the most notable artistically. Her latest book, The Flock (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), should be greeted with delight by such as prize the best traditions of English prose-writing. It is welcome for the very reason that so little that is being written today has grace of form and style. Form, which is so much an essential of French literature—the birthright of every French homme de lettres great and small—is elusive and rare in our less plastic language. The stylist in English is scarce because his medium is refractory. When we find, as we do once in a while, a writer who has not only the sensitiveness and taste to discern the refinements of literary art, but the alchemy to express them in the written word, we should, indeed, be grateful. Such an one is Mary Austin.
The Flock is not fiction. It is a series of descriptive discourses on the history, traditions, manners and customs of the shepherds on the California ranges. It is an exposition comprehensive, detailed and thorough, under-
