NOVELISTS. 353 CHAPTER XI. RECENT AMERICAN NOVELISTS. "SAINTE BEUVE," says the most popular living American novelist, "wrote upon Balzac two or three times, but always with striking and inexplicable inadequacy." Considering that Sainte Beuve was the most subtle French critic of our generation, the remark is discouraging. In matters of literature, Americans are like crustaceans1 deprived of their shells : they shrink from the slightest touch: to satisfy them is impossible. The physical construction of most novelists is similar. They have much of the imagination, all the sensitivity, of the poet, without the elevation, the confidence delusive or real, which makes him rely on his audience, "fit though few," and on a retributive posterity. Like the actor or the orator, if the novelist fails to enlist the sympathies, or to secure the approbation, of the men around him, he falls, seldom to rise again. His or her we must accentuate the distinction in a department which women have made peculiarly their own, and in which they have achieved their greatest literary triumphs-his or her primary 1 "It is," says Mr. James, "I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference of the circle of civilisation, etc."-Memoir of Hawthorne, p. 153. purpose is to amuse the leisure or stir the passions of contemporaries to edify or to instruct is secondary. The novelists of the day are the successors and heirs of the dramatists: their works are the abstracts and chronicles of the time: they aspire to hold up the mirror to nature: they compete with the occupants of the pulpit, in being the ministers of morals; with the artist, in exhibiting models of manners, or of dress. Finally, their Art is comparatively new. The latest and most portentous literary birth, it threatens, like Aaron's rod, to swallow up the rest. A good or successful novelist has a thousand readers for the historian's hundred, for the metaphysician's one. He is the millionaire of literature, with something of the democratic intolerance for the halfoutlawed, more ancient, owners of the land. His jealousy is intensified by the uneasy feeling of being often found in questionable company, and having his fame liable to contemptuous travesty. He is an essentially popular writer in an age when popular writing is being run to ridicule; and no greatness of masterdom is security that, after his death, his best works may not be boiled down, emasculated, deformed, and sold in pots for a penny.1 The germs of the English novel have been found in the Elizabethan age, in Sidney's Arcadia, or Lilly's Euphues; in the Norman-French fabliaux and chivalrous tales: they have even been traced back to the ecclesiastical anecdotes of the Middle Age, or the yet older romances of declining Latinity; but the real birth of our modern novel is in the eighteenth century; when, first, in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, it became a real power and secured a distinct status. When a branch of art is late, sound criticism about it is sure to be much later: the canons have still to be fixed by which to measure the new lines, and try the new spirits. 1 I, of course, refer especially to the late disgraceful mutilation of Sir Walter Scott by Miss Braddon. DIFFICULTY OF JUDGING NOVELS. 355 Scientific or rational criticism of landscape painting almost dates from the publication of the Modern Painters; for the Ruskin of novelists we have to wait; and the ultimate appeal between the works of Henry Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe, of "George Eliot" and Mrs. Craik, of "George Sand" and Eugene Sue, of Nathaniel Hawthorne and "Mark Twain," seems, by the bookseller's register, still to be the appeal to the palate, on the choice of a dish. "I like this, I do not like that, but why I can never tell; because I shall never know." The difficulty of dealing, philosophically, with a comparatively recent development of literature is intensified when we leave our own country for another, where, as yet, comparatively few standards of Art are universally recognised. The still somewhat chaotic conditions of a new society impose a special restraint on the critic, who endeavours to gauge the accuracy with which the portrait-painters of the people have drawn their portraits; nor, as we intimated at starting, is the difficulty removed by the brief experience alone attainable by most visitors. The mere traveller is offended on the ground of political or social discrepancies; or he is flattered by the graces of a hospitality nowhere surpassed: he sees men and things en deuil, or he sees them in rose; and is in neither case a reliable judge. In venturing to estimate the imaginative products of a country dominated by the descendants of our race, we have to bear in mind that the United States are yet far from being wholly English: they are also German and Irish; in a minor degree, French, Spanish, and Italian; and, for good or ill in policy and art, more continental, i.e. less insular than we are. The subjects which their authors have undertaken to illustrate have a wider range than ours, and their manner of treatment is less trammelled by authority. This element of variety, conspicuous in the novelists of the West, makes an exhaustive classifica tion impossible: we can only with proximate accuracy formulate their characteristics; but in the later, as in the earlier, period, some general features are manifest. The influence of external Nature, paramount in the prose and verse of the first quarter of the century, is still notable in the third. With few exceptions, in the American romances of the last thirty years, too much space is allotted to the comparatively commonplace incidents of the railroad, the steamboat, or the phaton (the Wedding Tour of Mr. Howells consists of little else): too many words are given to sunset and sunrise, to river reach and mid-Atlantic storm, to Venetian lagoon and Alpine ridge. The multitude of modern books of travel is aggravating. In a few cases they are justified by freshness of incident or remoteness of scene: in the majority, they are products of people to whom everything new seems marvellous, or who are so incontinent that they cannot breathe the fresh air on a lake or a hill, or visit a ruin, without endeavouring to communicate what is incommunicable. The delight of the country consists in great measure in its comparatively vestal repose: we do not want to have our fresh. sensations disturbed or debased by commonplace, or our chance of rest in some discovered nook undone by popular advertisement. But a professed book of travel is at least honest. What we may complain of is a series of second rate dissolving views, under pretence of a novel; which should be an imaginary history or biography, intensified to a prose drama by rapidity of action and exposition of interesting character. Ordinary description or sketching is so easy that the facility deludes half-competent persons into the belief that they can write or draw. Their remedy is to study Turner, or Wordsworth, or Ruskin, or Scott, or Hawthorne, in whose masterpieces, of brush or pen, outlines of strictest accuracy are bathed in a transfiguring light. Description is like a pony on which children learn to HOLMES" ELSIE VENNER." 357 ride: unfortunately it is in danger of being ridden to death by full-grown Americans at Rome, and by adult Scotchmen among the Hebrides. The first era of imaginative writing in the West, is, as we have seen, further characterised by the love of adventure: the second is no less distinctly marked by the love of analysis. On most of the products of the latter period, not purely narrative, we find the stamp of the Transcendental movement: they are introspective to excess, and frequently pathological. This influence is apparent in Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom we have referred as a poet, and to whom we shall have to return as a humorist. Born in 1809, this accomplished wit and physician made his literary début in a series of miscellaneous papers published in 1830; and, after a residence abroad, preceded Emerson by a year in delivering the annual essay to the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society. In 1847 he was appointed to the Professorship of Anatomy at Harvard in 1852, he gave a celebrated course of lectures on the modern English poets: in 1859 he contributed to the Atlantic Monthly the psychological romance of Elsie Venner. This, on the whole his masterpiece, is certainly his most original work; though the heroine has been inevitably compared to the Lamia of tradition and of Keats; but it has the inequality of execution apt to attach to all the performances of an adventurer, however brilliant, in so many fields. The artistic effect of Holmes's depth of insight and genuine sympathy is impaired by an almost tiresome, frequently flippant, smartness; and the range of his characters, those at least of more than mere local interest, is limited. Exception has been taken to the somewhat obtrusive manner in which, at starting, the hero, Bernard Langdon, is vaunted as a type of the "Brahmin caste" of New England.1 But there is no 1 This is enlarged upon in the able but over-severe review in the "National," Oct. 1861. |