THE MAKING OF AMERICAN LITERATURE By T. H. Dickinson
Only the most determined student of The Making American Literature (The Century Co., New York : D. Appleton and Co., 12s. 6d.) will find Mr. Dickinson's book helpful or indeed readable. Its manner is forbidding in the extreme. The author has such a passion for the analytical method, such a love of charts, maps, divisions and subdivisions into schools and periods, that the ordinary reader in search of information retires discouraged. He plunges, too, from heavy type into small type and back again in a manner apparently irrespun. sible and entirely irritating. In his determination, moreover, to overlook no writer who has produced even a magazine story in the American tongue he clogs up his pages with names quite unworthy to be included even under such a heading as " minor literature." The major figures suffer accordingly ; they are jostled and all but crowded out, while such a feat as the addi- tion of the word " goop " to the language is solemnly recorded. In his desire to be comprehensive Mr. Dickinson, in fact, recalls a local dramatic critic at an amateur performance who is anxious to offend none by the omission of his or her name. It is a pity, if he wishes-his book to reach any but an academic public, that Mr. Dickinson has adopted this formidable tech- nique. For the persevering reader, who is undismayed by charts and diagrams, will discover often enough passages of shrewd comment. His estimate of Henry James and others is just and temperate. But it is to be feared that the casual reader, mildly anxious to know how American Literature was made, will not so persevere.
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