The dismalness of serious writers, especially if humanity be their theme, is steeping us in gloom. The obsession of sorrow seems the most reasonable of all obsessions, because facts can be crowded upon facts (to the general exclusion of truth) by way of argument and illustration. And should facts fail, there are bitter generalizations which shroud us like a pall.

Behind all music we can hear
The insistent note of hunger-fear;
Beyond all beauty we can see
The land's defenseless misery.

Mr. Percy MacKaye in his preface to that treatise on eugenics which he has christened To-Morrow, and humorously designated as a play, makes this inspiriting statement: 'Our world is hideously unhappy, and the insufferable sense of that unhappiness is the consecration of modern leaders in art. Realism is splendidly their incentive.'

This opens up a cheering vista for the public. If the dramatists of the near future are to have no finer consecration than an insufferable sense of unhappiness, we must turn for amusement to lectures and organ recitals. If novelists and poets are to be hallowed by grief, there will be nothing left for light-hearted readers save the study of political economy, erstwhile called the dismal science, but now, by comparison, gay. No artist yet was ever born of an insufferable sense of unhappiness. No leader and helper of men was ever bedewed with tears. The world is old, and the world is wide. Of what use are we in its tumultuous life, if we do not know its joys, its griefs, its high emotions, its call to courage, and the echo of the laughter of the ages?

Perhaps the only literature of poverty (I use the word 'literature' in a purely courteous sense) which was ever written for the poor is that amazing issue of tracts, Village Politics, Tales for the Common People, and scores of similar productions, which a hundred years ago were let loose upon rural England. The moral in all of them is the same, and is expressed with engaging simplicity: 'Don't give trouble to people better off than yourself.' The fact that many of these tracts had a prodigious sale points to their distribution—by the rich—in quarters where it was thought that they would do most good. They were probably read in the same spirit as that in which a Sunday-school library was read by two small and unregenerate boys of my acquaintance, who worked through whole shelves at a fixed rate, ten cents for a short book, twenty-five cents for a long one,—the money paid by a pious grandmother, and a point of honor not to skip.

The smug complacency of Hannah More and her sisterhood was rudely disturbed by Ebenezer Elliott, who published his Corn-Law Rhymer, with its profound pity and its somewhat impotent wrath, in 1831. England woke up to the disturbing conviction that men and women were starving,—always a disagreeable thing to contemplate,—and the Corn Laws were repealed; but the 'Rhymes' were probably as little known to the laborer of 1831 as was Piers Plowman to the laborer of 1392. Langland—to whom partial critics have for five hundred years ascribed this great poem of discontent—was keenly alive to the value of husbandry as a theme; and his ploughman came in time to be recognized as the people's suffering representative; but the poet, after the fashion of poets, wrote for 'lettered clerks,' of which class he was a shining example, his praiseworthy purpose in life being to avoid 'common men's work.' In the last century, Les Misérables was called the 'Epic of the Poor'; but its readers were, for the most part, as comfortably remote from poverty as Victor Hugo himself, and as alive to the advantages of wealth.

In this age of print, the literature of poverty has swollen to an enormous bulk. Statistical books, explicit and contradictory. Hopeful books by social workers who see salvation in girls' clubs and refined dancing. Hopeless books by other social workers who believe—or, at least, who say—that the employed are enslaved by the employer, and that women and children are the prey of men. Highly colored books by adventurous young journalists who have masqueraded (for copy's sake) as mill and factory hands. Gray books by casual observers who are paralyzed by the mere sight of a slum. Furious books by rabid socialists who hold that the poor will never be uplifted while there is left in the world a man rich enough to pay them wages. Imaginative books by poets and novelists who deal in realism to the exclusion of reality. All this profusion and confusion of matter is thrust upon us month after month, while the working-man reads his newspaper, and the working-girl reads A Coronet of Shame, or Lost in Fate's Fearful Abyss.

It was Mr. George Gissing who, in his studies of the poor, first made popular the invective style; who hurled at London such epithets as 'pest-stricken,' 'city of the damned,' 'intimacies of abomination,' 'utmost limits of dread,'—phrases which have been faithfully copied by shuddering defamers of New York and Chicago. Mr. John Burns, for example, after a brief visit to the United States, said that Chicago was a pocket edition of hell; and subsequently, without, we hope, any personal experience to back him, said that hell was a pocket edition of Chicago.

Americans have borrowed these flowers of speech from England, and have invaded her territory. Was it because he could find no poverty at home worthy of his strenuous pen, that Mr. Jack London crossed the sea to write up the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, already so abundantly exploited by English authors? Was there anything he could add to the dark pictures of Mr. Gissing, or to the more convincing studies of Mr. Arthur Morrison, who has lit up the gloom with a grim humor, not very mirthful, but acutely and unimpeachably human? Mr. Gissing's poor have money for nothing but beer (it would be a bold writer who denied his starvelings beer); but Mr. Morrison sees his way occasionally to bacon, and tea, and tinned beef, and even, at rare intervals, to a pompous funeral, provided that the money for mutes can be saved from the sick man's diet. He is the legitimate successor of Dickens, and Dickens knew his field from experience rather than from observation. The lighthouse-keeper sees the storm, but the cabin boy feels it.

In the annals of poverty there are few pages more poignant than the one which describes the sick child, Charles Dickens, taken home from work by a kind-hearted lad, and his shame lest this boy should learn that 'home' for him meant the debtors' prison. In vain he tried to get rid of his conductor, Bob Fagin by name, protesting that he was well enough to walk alone. Bob knew he was not, and stuck to his side. Together they pushed along until little Charles was fainting with weakness and fatigue. Then in desperation he pretended that he lived in a decent house near Southwark bridge, and darted up the steps with a joyous air of being at last in haven, only to creep down again when Bob's back was turned, and drag his slow steps to the Marshalsea.