The silent drama may therefore exercise a beneficent influence, if it shall prove to have shunted into a new channel of publication great numbers of stories whose justification between covers was always debatable. Already many novels of this type have been resurrected by the industrious screen producers. If, after the long list has been exhausted, we shall be spared the “novelization” of screen scenarios in the fashion of the novelized play, we shall be rid of some of the débris that has handicapped the novelists who have meekly asked to be taken seriously.
The fiction magazines also have cut into the sale of ephemeral novels. For the price of one novel the uncritical reader may fortify himself with enough reading matter to keep him diverted for a month. Nowadays the hurrying citizen approaches the magazine counter in much the same spirit in which he attacks the help-yourself lunch-trough—grabs what he likes and retires for hurried consumption. It must, however, be said for the much-execrated magazine editors that with all their faults and defaults they are at least alive to the importance and value of American material. They discovered O. Henry, now recognized as a writer of significance. I should like to scribble a marginal note at this point to the effect that writers who are praised for style, those who are able to employ otiose, meticulous, and ineluctable with awe-inspiring inadvertence in tales of morbid introspection, are not usually those who are deeply learned in the ways and manners of that considerable body of our people who are obliged to work for a living. We must avoid snobbishness in our speculations as to the available ingredients from which American fiction must be made. Baseball players, vaudeville and motion-picture performers, ladies employed as commercial travellers, and Potash and Perlmutter, are all legitimate subjects for the fictionist, and our millions undoubtedly prefer just now to view them humorously or romantically.
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.
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.