VI
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.