t wholly alien
to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned
historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a
proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant
and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in
parting with its ignorance.

That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois,
or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and
English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American
literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no
fixed classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no
exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of
laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known
sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired
laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions,
which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made,
no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed,
naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to
stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European
literature is so rich.

Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is
the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to
glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring
class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man
the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American
workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the
picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Grass_ was
published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the
glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy
Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine
idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went
enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or
who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That
glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as
well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of
America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of
the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear
America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the
cotton-m