Mr. Hamlin Garland, writing with the corn-fed enthusiasm of the prairies, “hails the dawn of a new era” in literature—an era which is to be distinguished by dominance of the Western man. That a great new literature is to “come out of the West” because of broad prairies and wide rivers and big mountains and infrequent boundary lines—that is a conviction dear indeed to the Western mind which has discovered that marks can be made on paper with a pen. A few years ago the Eastern mind was waiting wide-eyed to “hail the dawn” of a literature that was to be “distinctively American,” for the Eastern mind in those days claimed a share in the broad prairies, the wide rivers and the big mountains, with all the competencies, suggestions, inspirations and other appurtenances thereunto belonging—a heritage which now Mr. Garland austerely denies to any one born and “raised” on the morning side of the Alleghanies. The “distinctively American literature” has not materialized, excepting in the works of Americans distinctively illiterate; and there are no visible signs of a distinctively Western one. Even the Californian sort, so long heralded by prophets blushing with conscious modesty in the foretelling, seems loth to leave off its damnable faces and begin. The best Californian, the best Western, the best American books have the least of geographical “distinctiveness,” and most closely conform to the universal and immutable laws of the art, as known to Aristotle and Longinus. The effect of physical-geographical environment on literary production is mostly nil; racial and educational considerations only are of controlling importance. Despite Madame de Staël’s engaging dictum that “every Englishman is an island,” the natives of that scanty plot have produced a literature which in breadth of thought and largeness of method we sons of a continent, brothers to the broad prairies, wide rivers and big mountains, have not matched and give no promise of matching. It is all very fine to be a child o’ natur’ with a home in the settin’ sun, but when the child o’ natur’ with a knack at scribbling pays rent to Phœbus by renouncing the incomparable advantage of strict subjection to literary law he pays too dearly.