It is a hopeful sign that we now produce one or two, or maybe three,
good novels a year. The number is bound to increase as our young
writers of ambition realize that technic and facility are not the only
essentials of success, but that they must burrow into life--honeycomb
it until their explorations carry them to the core of it. There
are novels that are half good; some are disfigured by wabbly
characterizations; or the patience necessary to a proper development
of the theme is lacking. However, sincerity and an appreciation of the
highest function of the novel as a medium for interpreting life are not
so rare as the critics would have us believe.
I have never subscribed to the idea that the sun of American literature
rises in Indiana and sets in Kansas. We have had much provincial
fiction, and the monotony of our output would be happily varied by
attempts at something of national scope. It is not to disparage the
small picture that I suggest for experiment the broadly panoramic--“A
Hugo flare against the night”--but because the novel as we practise it
seems so pitifully small in contrast with the available material. I am
aware, of course, that a hundred pages are as good as a thousand if the
breath of life is in them. Flaubert, says Mr. James, _made_ things big.
We must escape from this carving of cherry stones, this contentment
with the day of littleness, this use of the novel as a plaything
where it pretends to be something else. And it occurs to me at this
juncture that I might have saved myself a considerable expenditure of
ink by stating in the first place that what the American novel really
needs is a Walt Whitman to fling a barbaric yawp from the crest of the
Alleghanies and proclaim a new freedom. For what I have been trying
to say comes down to this: that we shall not greatly serve ourselves
or the world’s literature by attempts to Russianize, or Gallicize,
or Anglicize our fiction, but that we must strive more earnestly to
Americanize it--to make it express with all the art we may command the
life we are living and that pretty tangible something that we call the
American spirit.
The bright angels of letters never appear in answer to prayer; they
come out of nowhere and knock at unwatched gates. But the wailing of
jeremiads before the high altar is not calculated to soften the hearts
of the gods who hand down genius from the skies. It is related that a
clerk in the patent office asked to be assigned to a post in some other
department on the ground that practically everything had been invented
and he wanted to change before he lost his job. That was in 1833.
Courage, comrade! The songs have not all been written nor the tales all
told.