V
In our righteous awakening to the serious plight to which our fiction has come it is not necessary, nor is it becoming, to point the slow unmoving finger of scorn at those benighted but well-meaning folk who in times past did what they could toward fashioning an American literature. We all see their errors now; we deplore their stupidity, we wish they had been quite different; but why drag their bones from the grave for defilement? Cooper and Irving meant well; there are still misguided souls who find pleasure in them. It was not Hawthorne’s fault that he so bungled The Scarlet Letter, nor Poe’s that he frittered away his time inventing the detective story. Our deep contrition must not betray us into hardness of heart toward those unconscious sinners, who cooled their tea in the saucer and never heard of a samovar!
There are American novelists whose portraits I refuse to turn to the wall. Marion Crawford had very definite ideas, which he set forth in a most entertaining essay, as to what the novel should be, and he followed his formula with happy results. His Saracinesca still seems to me a fine romance. There was some marrow in the bones of E. W. Howe’s Story of a Country Town. I can remember when Miss Woolson was highly regarded as a writer, and when Miss Howard’s amusing One Summer seemed not an ignoble thing. F. J. Stimson, Thomas Nelson Page, Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Miss Murfree, Mary Hallock Foote, T. B. Aldrich, T. R. Sullivan, H. C. Bunner, Robert Grant, and Harold Frederic all labored sincerely for the cause of American fiction. F. Hopkinson Smith told a good story and told it like a gentleman. Mr. Cable’s right to a place in the front rank of American novelists is not, I believe, questioned in any survey; if The Grandissimes and Old Creole Days had been written in France, he would probably be pointed to as an author well worthy of American emulation.
No doubt this list might be considerably expanded, as I am drawing from memory, and merely suggesting writers whose performances in most instances synchronize with my first reading of American novels. I do not believe we are helping our case materially by ignoring these writers as though they were a lot of poor relations whenever a foreign critic turns his condescending gaze in our direction.