Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net INQUIRIES AND OPINIONS Copyright, 1907, by BRANDER MATTHEWS _Published September, 1907_ TO MY FRIEND AND FELLOW CRAFTSMAN HENRY ARTHUR JONES CONTENTS PAGE I _Literature in the New Century_ 1 II _The Supreme Leaders_ 27 III _An Apology for Technic_ 49 IV _Old Friends with New Faces_ 73 V _Invention and Imagination_ 95 VI _Poe and the Detective-story_ 111 VII _Mark Twain_ 137 VIII _A Note on Maupassant_ 167 IX _The Modern Novel and the Modern Play_ 179 X _The Literary Merit of our Latter-day Drama_ 205 XI _Ibsen the Playwright_ 227 XII _The Art of the Stage-manager_ 281 LITERATURE IN THE NEW CENTURY [This paper was read on September 24th, 1904, in the section of Belles-lettres of the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences, held at St. Louis.] There is no disguising the difficulty of any attempt to survey the whole field of literature as it is disclosed before us now at the opening of a new century; and there is no denying the danger of any effort to declare the outlook in the actual present and the prospect in the immediate future. How is it possible to project our vision, to foresee whither the current is bearing us, to anticipate the rocks ahead and the shallows whereon our bark may be beached? But one reflection is as obvious as it is helpful. The problems of literature are not often merely I literary; and, in so far as literature is an honest attempt to express life,--as it always has been at the moments of highest achievement,--the problems of literature must have an intimate relation to the problems which confront us insistently in life. If we turn from the disputations of the schools and look out on the world, we may discover forces at work in society which are exerting also a potent influence upon the future of literature.