Some Remarks on American and English Fiction

I

THE Editor of the Atlantic Monthly having invited me to speak with candor on the practice and prospects of English and American fiction,¹ I feel that it is best to direct my remarks to a few aspects which may possibly lead to some discussion among American novelists themselves.

I speak here as an English reviewer who has been interested for many years in the American attempt to evolve, in imaginative literature, a standard of fine quality, one which in Mr. W. D. Howells’s phrase ‘should be neither shamed nor vaunting.’ And first it may be of profit to inquire whether the artistic quality of English and American fiction is higher than was the case fifteen or twenty years ago. I believe that though the ordinary English novel is a mediocre affair, truly representative of our middle-class limitations, our dull but honest domesticity, our lack of wit and insensitiveness to form, our dislike of bitter truths, our preference for mild idealism and sentimental solutions, still the typical English novel to-day is less vulgar, less false, less melodramatic in its appeal than it was a generation ago.

Can the same be said of the American novel? My opinion is here set down in the hope of eliciting the views of other critics. But it appears to me that, of late, a certain intensification of the commercial ideal in America, with the increasing ‘hunt of the dollar,’ is more and more restricting the field of exercise of the finer and quieter talents in fiction, and that the rivalry of American publishers in flooding the country with inferior brands of novels must be tending to depress the public standard of taste. It must be, indeed, that there are fine and delicate talents emerging amid the raging spate of ‘best sellers’; but it is harder to distinguish their gleam amid the subfusk, swollen cataract of stories made to order.

In England, of course, as in America, there are bottomless depths in the insatiable appetite of the public for an art of sensational shocks and sentimental twaddle,² but the point is whether the market for the fine, conscientious piece of literary craftsmanship is a rising or a falling one? Various straws of tendency in the United States point in a depressing direction. Twenty years ago did not Mr. W. D. Howells’s splendid example in literature carry more weight with the intelligent public than to-day? It will be rejoined, perhaps, that there is no living novelist of the younger American school who can paint with such subtle flexibility of insight and such breadth of vision the portrait of his generation, as did the author of Silas Lapham. If so, the sign is not auspicious.

The fact that the influence wielded by your two ablest novelists, Edith Wharton and Anne Douglas Sedgwick, is so restricted in scope in proportion to their gift, suggests that the American mind is hostile to the artist in literature, whereas our English audience, at worst, is apathetic or indifferent. With us, though the fight against commercial Philistinism is perennial, the writers of rare imaginative gift do not seem to me so isolated, so hemmed in, and cut off from assistance of cultivated minds as in America.

II

Let us look back along the line some twenty years. From an undated cutting from the London Speaker, which must belong to 1894, or 1895 at latest, I find that I singled out Mr. Hamlin Garland, Miss Murfree, Miss Grace King, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, Miss Mary Wilkins, and Miss Katharine Smith as the most gifted literary artists in the younger rising school, Messrs. W. D. Howells’s, Henry James’s, and George W. Cable’s reputations having been of course long solidly established.

By some accident I did not come across Miss Sarah Orne Jewett’s incomparable short stories till several years later, when I recommended an English publisher to import an edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs. But the failure of American criticism to recognize that, by virtue of thirty little masterpieces in the short story, Miss Jewett ranks with the leading European masters, and its grudging, inadequate recognition of the most original genius it has produced in story-telling, Mr. Stephen Crane, showed me that it had not realized that real talent, æsthetic or literary, is individual in its structure, experience, outlook, and growth, and that it makes its appeal and survives to posterity by reason of its peculiar originality of tone and vision expressed in beauty and force of form, of atmosphere, and of style.

Every fresh native talent emerges by virtue of its revelation of fresh aspects and original points of view, which create fresh valuations in our comprehension of life and human nature. Now this very simple test, which is indeed self-evident, is the touchstone by which we separate the genuine metal of imaginative art from the sham or common alloy of the popular fabricated article. If we apply it in the cases of Frank R. Stockton and Joel Chandler Harris we perceive that the originality of those delightful humorists entitles them to seats not far removed from that of Mark Twain. Again, when Mr. Frank Norris appeared, his McTeague was no literary echo, or iteration or affirmation of current social ideas or ideals, whatever may have been the precise measure of his literary talent. The same may be said of Mr. Harold Frederick’s powerful novel Illumination. Later, when Mr. Dreiser came in sight with his Sister Carrie, the present writer had the honor of recommending it for English publication, while that admirable piece of realism was being cold-shouldered and boycotted for years by the body of American publishers.

I do not know whether the late O. Henry’s marvelous powers of language, gayety, creative fecundity, and imaginative power in handling a situation have yet received their due in America, but the point I wish to make clear is that between the writers above enumerated, namely between Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Murfree, Miss Mary Wilkins, Miss Grace King, Mrs. Wharton, Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Mr. Frank R. Stockton, Mr. J. C. Harris, Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Stephen Crane, Mr. Frank Norris, O. Henry,³ and such clever popular favorites as Mr. Winston Churchill, Miss Mary Johnston, Mr. Robert W. Chambers, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, Mr. John Fox, Jr., Mr. Owen Johnson, it would be waste of time to institute comparisons in respect of artistic gifts and originality of temperament. The work of the first class of writers, unequal as are their achievements in point of individual genius, is of a grade artistically far beyond the reach of the second class enumerated.

In saying that the work of the latter — represented by the six authors I have cited — is obviously deficient in ‘temperamental value,’ I do not mean that these authors are indistinguishable one from another, but that in tone, in insight, in style, each is little more than a popular sounding-board for the reverberation of current tones and moods of the mass of minds. Take Mr. R. H. Davis’s story, The Man who could not Lose, Mr. R. W. Chambers’s The Business of Life, Mr. Owen Johnson’s The Salamander, and ask what measure of creative originality informs them. None. None at all, or next to none. These stories no doubt may amuse or interest or instruct their audience, but the first is worthless, the second mediocre, the third meretricious as an artistic achievement. They are destined for the rubbish heap, if indeed they have not been deposited there already. And the works, all told, of Mr. Winston Churchill, Miss Mary Johnston, and Mr. John Fox, Jr., despite the amazing energy and industry of their authors, kick the beam when weighed against a single little masterpiece by Miss Sarah Orne Jewett or Stephen Crane. This of course is an obvious truth to any critical intelligence, but I do not know how far it is now accepted in America.

III

At this point of the inquiry my reader may ask, Do not you possess in England this same class of popular favorites whose novels and tales are also destitute of real creative originality, æsthetic interest, and individual insight? We do. But the work of industrious talents such as Sir Gilbert Parker, Mr. A. E. W. Mason, Mr. W. J. Locke, Mr. H. A. Vachell, ‘Richard Dehan,’ Miss E. T. Fowler, and others, is not ranked by any critic worth his salt with that of writers of creative originality, like Messrs. Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett.

I must admit that the vast majority of our English audience is uncritical in its taste, and that many of our ‘ best sellers’ are also the most povertystricken and mediocre in point of vision, form, atmosphere, and style. But the chief advantage we possess which leads to the fostering of literary talent, giving it liberty to grow and a certain if small measure of favoring recognition, springs, I believe, from the fact that the Englishman is so individual in his instincts that the unorthodox novelist of real talent, will always find some backer to publish and support him, and reviewers to criticize him with insight and fairness, without deferring to the opinion of the majority. However dull or mediocre an ordinary English novelist may be, I do not think that he deliberately echoes the orthodox shibboleths, moral or social, of the public at large, or that he makes a fetish of ‘recognized opinion.’ I cannot help connecting the strange timidity (I had almost written cowardice) of the American publishers in backing work of original individuality with the great superstition of the good American in his present stage of culture, namely, that he ought to be thinking and feeling and reiterating what he imagines everybody round him is thinking and feeling and reiterating. Everybody is busy copying everybody else! — an absurd state of things which is not only destructive of true individuality, but directly inimical to the creation of fine art.

The dogma persistently put forward in America under innumerable guises, that the thinker and the literary artist must cater to the tastes, ideas, and sentiments, moral and emotional, of the great majority, under pain of being ignored⁴ or ostracized, was noted by De Tocqueville three generations ago; but this dogma bred in the American bone seems to have been reinforced by the latter-day tyranny of the commercial ideal. The commercial man who says, ‘ Read this book because it is the best seller,’ is seeking to hypnotize the individual’s judgment and taste. If there be a noticeable dearth of originality of feeling and outlook in latter-day American fiction, it must be because the individual is subjected from the start to the insistent pressure of social ideals of conformity which paralyze or crush out the finer, rarer, more sensitive individual talents. I do not say that English writers are not vexed in a minor degree by Mrs. Grundy’s attempts to boycott or crush novels that offend the taste of ‘the villa public,’ but I believe that our social atmosphere favors the writer of true individuality; and in proof of this statement I set down here a list of over sixty novelists of genuine original talent, many of whom are literary craftsmen of high artistic quality; and these are in addition to the six I have already named: —

George Moore, Hilaire Belloc, Cunninghame Graham, W. H. Hudson, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Foster, William De Morgan, Leonard Merrick, Maurice Hewlett, John Masefield, Sir A. Quiller-Couch, Robert Hichens, Stephen Reynolds, A. F. Wedgwood, David W. Bone, Barry Pain, C. E. Montague, Oliver Onions, J. C. Snaith, James Stephens, Frank Harris, Neil Lyons, Perceval Gibbon, Walter De La Mare, Charles Marriott, Ford Hueffer, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Neil Munro, Morley Roberts, Vincent O’Sullivan, Marmaduke Pickthall, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, E. V. Lucas, Frank Swinnerton, W. L. George, Edwin Pugh, Gilbert Cannan, Archibald Marshall, Grant Richards, Algernon Blackwood, Gerald O’Donovan, Shan Bullock, Eden Phillpotts, George Birmingham, Richard Pryce, E. F. Benson, Percy White, Temple Thurston, Sir Conan Doyle, James Prior, Mrs. Mary E. Mann, Miss May Sinclair, Miss Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Steel, Mrs. Dudeney, Mrs. Gertrude Bone, Miss Macnaughtan, Miss Violet Hunt, Mrs. Ada Leverson, Mrs. C. Dawson Scott, Miss Amber Reeves, Miss Silberrad, ‘Lucas Malet,’ Mrs. Margaret Woods, and Miss Marjorie Bowen.

It would be interesting to know how far the above list — which could be extended — can be paralleled by a similar list of living American novelists of artistic rank. I have counted up to twenty myself, in addition to those already cited; but I cannot claim to have explored or examined thoroughly the field of American fiction for several years past, and I must remind my readers that in touching on certain aspects in the outlook for fiction I am hoping to elicit information and discussion.

Now it may perhaps help the inquiry if I quote some passages from a criticism of Mr. Jack London’s Burning Daylight, a criticism styled ‘Made in America,’which I contributed to a London newspaper three years back: —

‘Why is it that the work of so many highly intelligent American novelists is so deficient in artistic quality when we come to compare it with European fiction on the same intellectual level? Writers of genius America can of course show us . . . but I am speaking with reference to scores of the clever popular novelists whose artistic instincts seem to be affected, indeed largely stultified, by an insidious force, omnipresent in the American social atmosphere, which dictates such absurd observances as “the happy ending.” While nearly every society wishes its governing ideas to be paramount, and is distrustful of the artist who subjects them to an unfaltering analysis, it is only in America that the commercial instinct seems to have succeeded in erecting the mediocrity of the ordinary man, in matters artistic, into an imperative standard of tastelessness. . . .

‘ Now, in modern art what matters perhaps most is the temperament of the artist, that individual essence which creates a new spiritual quality and atmosphere out of the life and forms and patterns of society. . . . An essential in creative art is the artist’s temperamental absorption in his own work. Art in that respect is essentially aristocratic, however democratic its appeal may be. That is what Meredith meant when he said, “ Do not democratize literature.” Beer or blankets or biscuits or braces may be manufactured to please the taste of the average man, but art cannot be so dealt with under penalty of losing its quality as art. The business people do not, of course, understand this. They cry aloud for novels that sell in hundreds of thousands, — those novels which are “graded,” cleverly or not, to a standard of mediocre taste. And temperamental quality, being unadaptable and self-regarding, is apt to be a stumbling-block in the way of those popular achievements. Americans, however charming and intelligent they may be, always seem nervously anxious to appear orthodox in their artistic tastes and appreciations. And this of course means keeping to the high road of mediocrity, for genuine taste implies again the expression of an individual temperament. . . .

‘ Mr. Jack London’s Burning Daylight hasmore individuality than most American novels — as a work of picturesque information on Yukon pioneering, and as a smashing criticism of American business ideals, it is indeed quite valuable. The story is a “ live” book, as his countrymen say, broad in outlook, manly in its standpoint, and one written with literary skill and conviction. Yet this same curious absence of temperament is to be remarked, and the novel has something of the effect of a composite photograph. Mr. Jack London does not echo other writers, or conform to the opinion of the majority, so his case is worth investigating. The hero, Harnish, is an American superman. His physical feats are almost superhuman. He out-runs, out-walks, out-distances, out-drinks, out-gambles, out-fights, and so forth, every other man in the Yukon territory, including the Indian Karna, “the pick of his barbaric race.”

‘And the consequence is that one does not believe in Harnish as one believes, say, in the existence of the heroes of the Icelandic Sagas. He is a monster, not a man. The American tendency to exaggeration has in fact annihilated all the finer lines and traits of human personality. And, after all, art is a matter of precise shades and particular lines. So with Dede Mason, the heroine of the tale, Harnish’s “ ninety-dollar-a-month stenographer,” who refuses to marry him when he is a millionaire because she dislikes the fevered life he is leading. Dede Mason is generalized, not individualized. She talks not like any girl in particular, but like a syndicate of American women as reported by a news agency. Harnish’s courtship and Dede’s replies give one the sensation of love-making by human machinery, very smooth-running and effective in working, but without individual power or charm or flavor. . . . May we not draw the conclusion that it is the pressure of “standardized” ideas in the mental interchange of American society that is so destructive of the finer shades of “ temperamental ” valuation?’

I quote the above criticism the more readily since it lays stress on the two characteristics of popular latter-day American fiction which are destructive of its appeal to rank as fine art: that is, (a) exaggeration, (b) the presentation and glorification of ‘standardized’ morals, manners, emotions, and of stereotyped social ambitions and ethical valuations.

Let us take Mr. Owen Johnson’s The Salamander for an illustration of charge (a). Mr. Johnson has chosen a promising subject, for the‘salamander’ girl, Doré, is a significant product of her feverish and artificial New York environment. But the author exhausts us with a surfeit of flimsy and violent sensationalism, he plays with the loud pedal down, and is continually throwing in all kinds of flashy effects. He commences with exaggerated emphasis, and after t he first seventy pages he can only offer us a repetition of the old shocks. The men characters — Massingale, Lindaberry, Sassoon, and Harrigan Blood — are merely coarsely modeled types, not individual men in any sense of the word. The girl characters are little better. We soon sicken of the erotic sentimentalities that Massingale and Doré exchange, and all the latter scenes between them are vamped up, shockingly surcharged with false rhetoric and theatrical overemphasis.

The above criticism of The Salamander may seem a little harsh, but I make it deliberately, on the ground that it would be absurd to style the novel ‘a work of art.’ If we compare it, say, with Mr. W. D. Howells’s recent novel, New Leaf Mills, with its classic balance, exquisite restraint, and gracious clarity of vision, we shall refuse to dignify The Salamander with the name of ‘literature.’ The fact that it sells one hundred thousand copies or a quarter of a million copies, or a million copies, is no mitigation of the fact that The Salamander violates almost every canon of good art. It may be added that a vital reason for the discouragement of crude, violent, and noisy art is that an audience which is habituated to being ‘thrilled’ will require coarser and coarser stimulants to excite its jaded mental palate. Sensational art is art in which everybody seems to be talking at the top of his voice to attract attention, till at last the hubbub becomes so deafening that the people still resolved on being heard begin to howl and scream. So it is with ‘best sellers’ that are ‘all outside and no inside,’ and with ‘the New Fiction that People are Reading’; the publishers and the authors seem to be conspiring to force the note of exaggeration till the typical ‘ best seller ’ works with automatic prevision in producing scenes of sweet sentimentalism or shock after shock of melodramatic incident. If I am in error in thinking that twenty years ago the American novel of sensation was a far soberer and more human affair than it is to-day, I should welcome evidence on the point.

IV

As regards my second criticism, (b), that the modern American novelist seems to delight in the presentation of ‘standardized’ morals, manners, and emotions, and the glorification of stereotyped aspirations and ethical valuations, I may illustrate it by saying that his unconscious habit seems to be to swim with the current, to swim not across the stream, but down it. He would appear to be carried along by the force of the social stream at such a pace that his swimming, that is, his work, does not show any appreciable resistance to the way that the tide of popular ideas and ideals happens to be setting. I except of course the work of a score or more of novelists, such as Booth Tarkington, Robert Herrick, Owen Wister, Miss Dewing, and Neith Boyce, whose criticism of character is accompanied by a criticism of society; but the weakness of the ordinary well-written American novel lies, if I may say so, in its sentimental and ethical conventionality. Even the novelists who set out to create ‘ fresh valuations’ in social propaganda seem to me to deal in ‘stock’ sizes of manly emotions. Let me illustrate my meaning by a quotation written a few years ago of Mr. Winston Churchill’s Mr. Crewe’s Career: —

‘The naïveté of the author’s artistic method is shown in the idyllic contrast that he draws between the two men who control the fortunes of the NorthEastern Railroad, — Mr. Flint, the President, and his legal adviser, the Hon. Hilary Vane, and their pure and upright children, Victoria Flint and Austen Vane, who, of course, fall in love and run counter to their parents’ crooked policy.

‘We do not believe in the candid innocence of the fascinating Victoria. She is a stock tradition of the AngloSaxon theatre, this pure and trusting heroine who, lapped in luxury, never dreams of questioning her hard father’s methods and business code of ethics, till the moment comes when, enlightened by her lover, she is “satisfied with nothing less than the truth,” and her “ life-long faith ” in him is broken thereby. We fear that in real life Victoria would have been quite prepared to speculate for the fall in North-Eastern securities.

‘Nor can we accept the high-souled Austen Vane as a figure representative in any sense. He has the moral tone of an Emerson, the brains of a Lincoln, and the purity of a Sir Galahad. He is obviously constructed to flatter the idealism always strong in the great community of hard-headed business citizens of the United States. His career is improbable: after a wild youth, he has gone West and shot his man, and then returned to the home of his fathers, where by turns he patronizes, and is filled with a dumb sorrow and compassion for the erring ways of the Hon. Hilary. He takes up and wins a suit for a suffering farmer against the tyrannical North-Eastern Railroad, but he is too magnanimous in his filial affection to accept a nomination for the governorship of the state, when all the honest citizens come thronging round, entreating him to be the “people’s man.”

‘It is a very touching conception, but we may say candidly that we distrust the bona fides of these idealized figures. There is an unpleasant flavor of moral bunkum, moreover, in some of the situations, as in the scene where the Hon. Hilary, bowed and broken by his uneasy sense of a life misspent, defies his old friend the President of the North-Eastern Railroad, and says, “I’m glad to have found out what my life has been worth before I die.” The radiant and unselfish Victoria, who, by the by, is wearing “a simple but exquisite gown, the creation of which aroused the artist in a celebrated Parisian dressmaker,” with an “illuminating smile” pierces “the hard layers of the Hon. Hilary’s outer shell, and hears the imprisoned spirit crying with a small, persistent voice — a spirit stifled for many years and starved.” Then the Hon. Hilary has a stroke. It is a little simple, this “triumph of the right,” as is also the ethical flavoring of the love-making between the spotless Austen and his bride, who has a “fierce faith that it was his destiny to make the world better and hers to help him.” When, however, we leave the sentimental trimmings on one side, and get to the real “business politics,” we may congratulate Mr. Winston Churchill on having got his knife well into the corporations.’

Even in novels of a superior order, which may be marked by genuine psychological insight, atmospheric truth, and a highly conscientious exposition of character and motive, we find that the didactic touch often robs the story of the qualities of flexible grace and naturalness which are essential to fine craftsmanship. A former criticism of Mr. James Lane Allen’s The Bride of the Mistletoe may serve as an illustration : —

‘ Conscientious is the term that best describes the spirit and the workmanship of The Bride of the Mistletoe, as of so much of the work of the best American novelists. Perhaps one of the drawbacks of addressing a democracy is that the conscientious writer is led to take his responsibilities overseriously, and is careful to enunciate nothing that is not sanctioned by severe ethical standards or upheld by common sense. This underlying correctness of mental and moral tone is apt to be destructive of artistic grace, spontaneity, and intensity; and even in the most unstudied moments of Mr. Allen’s story he never lets the significant detail speak for itself, but swathes it with commentary, didactic or sentimental. When Maupassant advises the young writer not to reason overmuch, he implies that the force of the thing in itself and of its atmosphere, which art conveys, is impaired by any obtrusive desire of a writer to play Providence to his readers. Mr. James Lane Allen is too accomplished a writer to err by gross didactic underlining, but a multitude of subtle touches betray that he, like his hero, is conscious of a “task,” of a “message,” which may “kindle in American homes some new light of truth, with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable children of the future the better for its shining. . . .”

‘We could enlarge on the striking absence of economy of line in Mr. Allen’s method, on its deliberate impressiveness, to which are sacrificed grace, ease, and the flash of the unforeseen. But, passing much artificiality in the literary style, as in the description of a brook which is likened to “a band of jewelled samite,” or as in the phrase “gray-eyed querist of actuality,” when the husband addresses his wife, we may point out that the story loses all illusion of actuality in passages of conversation such as the following: —

‘“Frederick,” she said, “for many years we have been happy together, so happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us, except the loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our years, lifted above life’s storms. But, of course, I have realized that, sooner or later, our lot must become the common one: if we did not go down to sorrow, sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the heights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night what I shall: I think fate’s hour has struck for me; I am ready to bear it. Its sorrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open my heart to receive it. This is as I had always wished. I have said that if life had any greatest tragedy for me, I hoped it would come when I was happiest; thus I should not know it all. I have never drunk half of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; I must go equally to the depth of any suffering. Worse than the suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some of it, had stepped aside or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myself a cowardly soul,”—and so on.

‘It does not need much insight to perceive that every sentence here of Josephine’s speech is false to nature, and quite impossible for a woman in her situation. The imagery and the carefully balanced periods smell of the lamp, of the highly literary endeavor of the conscientious writer, whose strength lies in meditation and not in catching or conveying to us the movement and interchange of living things.’

v

It seems as if even a slight dose of ‘ethical intention’ may be as fatal to the creation of a perfect illusion or mirage of life in an artist’s picture as is the bias of diffused sentimentalism. American novelists in general might ponder the acute saying of Joubert: ‘In painting the moral side of Nature, what the artist has most to beware of is exaggeration; while in painting its physical side what he has to fear most is weakness.’ Latter-day American storytellers, most of them, seem to be in a conspiracy to ‘make the world better,’ to ‘touch the heart,’ to ‘make you forget all your troubles,’ to ‘exalt life and love,’ to be ‘a sunshine-maker.’ These intentions are so unfaltering, and the stress laid on ‘clean living’ is so insistent, that one is forced to ask one’s self whether the practice and theory of living in America are not antagonistic? whether the exaggerated sentimental appeal may not denote a thinness of real emotion, and the persistent absorption with the moral issue an uneasy self-distrust? It would be as ridiculous to charge the great American people with being less honest with themselves than are those of other nations, as it would be to doubt that in ‘the land of freedom,’there is less inner freedom than elsewhere. But the latter-day American novel often leaves one with an uneasy idea that the weight and momentum of American civilization are rolling out the paste of human nature very flat, and are stamping it with machine-made patterns of too common an order.

Another simile that obtrudes itself in reading many American novels is that of a visit from kindly folk who have come to a gathering in Sunday clothes and with Sunday manners. The people’s week-day spontaneity is replaced by a cautious preoccupation with their deportment, as to how they are expected to behave, and everything that they say is a little forced. Even in the admirable novels of Mrs. Wharton and Anne Douglas Sedgwick the conflict so often depicted beween the idealism of the characters and their ordinary earthly motives gives one an odd feeling that both their morals and their manners are like tightly cut clothes in which people cannot be quite at ease. What seems odd is that this persistently active ‘conscience’ apparently forces the American novelist to dodge and evade any real examination of the cleavage between his socalled ‘higher nature’ and the claims of the senses. The blinking of facts concerning the appetite of love was marvelous indeed in the Victorian novel; but the effect of the conspiracy of silence in the American novel concerning the sexual passion is seen in the alarming featurelessness of its portraits of women. But this aspect of the subject requires an essay to itself.

To bring my remarks to a head I will conclude by saying that, whereas the limited horizon of modern English fiction, its lack of national breadth, its tameness and lack of sympathy with the democracy, are due to its restricted middle-class outlook, the American novel fails by virtue of its idealistic bias and psychological timidity. The novelist should put human nature under the lens and scrutinize its motives and conduct with the most searching and exacting interest. His æsthetic pleasure in the rich spectacle of life should be backed by a remorseless instinct for telling the truth. But it is impossible to combine these qualities with the commercial, ethical, and sentimental ideals that seem to make up American ‘optimism.’ ‘America is strong in the uplift,’ said a publisher of ‘Sunshine-Makers’ and ‘Best Sellers’ to the present writer, who, rejoicing at these synonymous terms, wandered back to the shelf of his prized American classics, Walt Whitman and Poe, Mr. W. D. Howells, Thoreau, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, O. Henry, and Stephen Crane.