The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that friend or neighbor. Of the various novels—from Winston Churchill's The Crisis to Irving Bacheller's A Man for the Ages—which have sought to mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity, no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme. They have followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint.
Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon "Nature" till the soft heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts appetites uncounted? Popularity has its arts no less than excellence; and so has it its own kind of seriousness. Much as the advertiser and the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright, they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write. They throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift—which is really rare not common—of calling the multitude's attention to their books in which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty features of banality.
How shall the patient critic dispose of Robert W. Chambers, who, possessing in a high degree the qualities of narrative, of costume, of dramatic effectiveness, of satire even (as witness Iole), has drifted with the fashions for a generation and has latterly allowed himself to decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate critic dispose of Frank Harris, who was born in Ireland and who had the most conspicuous part of his career in England, but who is a naturalized American citizen and who has written in The Bomb a vivid and intelligent novel dealing with the Chicago "anarchists" of 1886? How shall the conscientious critic dispose of the Owen Johnsons and the Rupert Hugheses and the Gouverneur Morrises and the George Barr McCutcheons with all their energy and information and good intentions and yet with their fatal lack of true distinction?
How shall the tolerant critic dispose of the writers of detective stories whose name is legion and whose art is to fine fiction as arithmetic to calculus—particularly Arthur Reeve, inventor of that Craig Kennedy who with endless ingenuity solves problem after problem by the introduction of scientific and pseudoscientific novelties? How shall the puzzled critic dispose of Alice Duer Miller and her light, bright stories of fashionable life; of Edward Lucas White and his vast panoramas of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner, master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade, easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist?
Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some account of the school of fiction just now predominant.
CHAPTER II
ARGUMENT
1. HAMLIN GARLAND
The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent, arrogant grand march.
The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade from his benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles against human inequality however constituted; had—to end the list of instances without going outside the literary class—Hamlin Garland for its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race.