The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure,
the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied
shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was
imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the
New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it.
They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism
at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical
intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much
for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the
sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in
romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it,
they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and
those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness.
It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their
peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an
estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such
a fantasy as Judd’s Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted
the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in
philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven,
and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the
vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do
not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,
which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which
has hardly the novelists’s scope. New England, in Hawthorne’s work,
achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and
the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its
unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist,
because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to
an ideal of life rather than to life itself.
Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
signal exception as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, I think that what I say holds
true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing
from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like
begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
really, is it a novel, in the sense that ‘War and Peace’ is a novel, or
‘Madame Flaubert’, or ‘L’Assommoir’, or ‘Phineas Finn’, or ‘Dona
Perfecta’, or ‘Esther Waters’, or ‘Marta y Maria’, or ‘The Return of the
Native’, or ‘Virgin Soil’, or ‘David Grieve’? In a certain way it is
greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its
prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to
the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.
This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no
one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in
literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the
literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never
seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that
both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in
literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever
was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was
not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered
in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the
great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which
the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs
of those who had brought the learning of the universities to
Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage
as the English of the mother-country.