Carl Van Doren

“ How in this flickering universe shall man claim for himself the honors of any important antiquity or any important destiny? What, in this vast accident, does human dignity amount to?
For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be a dramatist or a novelist. If he is consistent the most portentous human tragedy must seem to him only a tiny gasp for breath, the most delightful human comedy only a tiny flutter of joy. ”

“ Strether's situation flawlessly fits James's idea. To get the largest value from them James had of course to make Strether another of his exquisite intelligences—rather too exquisite for his upbringing; he had, too, to make this abundant life into which Strether is initiated a life of lovely line and color, of gorgeous vesture and sweet, subtle, intoxicating atmosphere. All James's old powers came in upon hint, with his new freedom. The execution of The Ambassadors, which he thought his most perfectly constructed novel, is as richly imaginative as it is deliberate. ”

“ THEODORE DREISER Much concerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser is, he almost wholly lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in the age of O. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any one else to make up his mind for him regarding the significance and aims and obligations of mankind but he has never made up his mind himself. A large dubitancy colors all his reflections. "All we know is that we cannot know." The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle." ”

“ And yet these cosmic implications do not remove the story too far from actual existence in California. The canvas swarms with actualities—plowing, planting, harvesting, sheep-herding, merry-making, rabbit-killing, love, labor, birth, death. Intimately involved with the hard, sordid strife of daily affairs are fine, if not always quite realized, phases of poetry and faith. The style, though tending always to turgidity, is strong and full; the movement, though at times nervous, is rapid; the pictures, though perhaps excessively panoramic, are always richly alive. ”

“ For the brutal scrapes of eighteenth-century fiction the new romance had substituted deeds of chivalrous daring; it had supplanted blunt fleshliness by a chaste and courtly love, and had tended to cure amorous sentimentalism by placing love below valour in the scale of virtues. Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained. Cooper, like Scott, was more elevated than Fielding and Smollett, more realistic than the Gothic romancers, more humane than Godwin or Brown. ”

“ In that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece.
A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can provoke such conflagrations. ”

“ A Parisian never wrote more contemptuously of provincial life. And yet beneath this cold exterior, which will not let the narrative or the dialogue be flexible for one moment, lurks authentic power. No shallow mind could have conceived the blind, black, impossible passion of Joe Erring, who loves like a backwoods Othello; no tepid mind could have conducted such a passion through its catastrophe to the purgation and tranquillity which succeed. That Howe, though he wrote another novel or two, ended his career as a novelist almost where he began it, meant a grave loss to American fiction. ”

“ In the bleak life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in fiction—to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. ”

“ Like The Spy, his new tale made use of a Revolutionary setting; like The Pioneers, it was full of realistic detail based on Cooper’s own experience. The result was that he not only outdid Scott in sheer narrative, but he created a new literary type, the tale of adventure on the sea, in which, though he was to have many followers in almost every modern language, he remains unsurpassed for vigour and variety. Smollett had already discovered the racy humours of seamen, but it remained for Cooper to capture for fiction the mystery and beauty, the shock and thrill of the sea. ”

“ Though the style is sparer, sharper than James's style was to become, its texture is here firm with adroit allusions and observant wit, while the background of Paris abundantly though unobtrusively fills the picture. Vain as it must be to strive for all the perfections of Balzac, Flaubert, George Sand, and Turgenev at once, here still was something that looked toward a synthesis of their excellences—with a singular alloy from the older type of American romance which rejoiced to set the American hero patriotically up above the European crowd. ”

“ To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes the eyes to a multitude of charms. ”

“ Had Mark Twain undertaken to make another and a greater Gilded Age out of his matter, to portray the life of the river satirically on the largest scale, instead of in such dimensions as fit Huck's boyish limitations of knowledge, he might possibly have made a better book, but he would have had to be another man. Being the man he was, he touched his peak of imaginative creation not by taking thought how he could be a Balzac to the Mississippi but by yarning with all his gusto about an adventure he might have had in the dawn of his days. ”

“ Dell employed a style less masterly. As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and scrupulous for beauty. ”

“ The purest romance of the tale lies in Uncas, the forest's youngest son, gallant, skilful, courteous, a lover for whom there is no hope, the last of the proud race of the Mohicans. That Uncas was idealized Cooper then and always freely admitted; Homer, he suggested, had his heroes. And it is clear that upon Uncas were bestowed the standard virtues which the philosophers of the age had taught the world to find in a state of nature. Still, after a century many can smile upon the state of nature who are yet able to find in Uncas the perennial appeal of youth cut off in the flower. ”

“ Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of her sister's pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of dulness. ”

“ He is the creator of a world immensely beautiful in its own right: a world of international proportions, peopled by charming human beings who live graceful lives in settings lovely almost beyond description; a world which vibrates with the finest instincts and sentiments and trembles at vulgarity and ugliness; a world full of works of art and learning and intelligence, a world infinitely refined, a world perfectly civilized. In real life the danger to such a world is that it may be overwhelmed by some burly rush of actuality from without. ”

“ He, like the mountaineer of the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings—a modern Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro—into a stock figure who in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. ”

“ A man of genius, already a classic, nearly fifty years old when he left America, he had yet to make his acquaintance with architecture, music, painting, and sculpture on their native ground, had yet to study the remains of great antiquity or to encounter a brilliant society. Any such society he conspicuously missed; he met few men of letters of real distinction; and he never felt more at home than among the other American and British expatriates in Florence. With the eagerness of a very young American he tasted the delights of antiquity in the routine quarters. ”

“ It is, therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard, unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of self-preservation in a potent spirit. ”

“ Justice not partizanship, is Leather-Stocking's essential trait: justice as conceived, somewhat out of space and out of time, by the universal spirit of youth. Being so universal, Leather-Stocking has naturally too simple a soul to call for minute analysis, and needs no more than the opportunity, which Cooper gave him, to move through a long succession of events aimed to display his valor and test his virtues. There was thus produced the panorama of the American frontier which at once became and has remained the classic record of an heroic age. ”

“ And both romance and realism in Indiana have traditionally worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simple—not to say silly—faith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana; all's right with the world. George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements of the Indiana literary tradition. ”

“ Anglo-Saxons had recently been learning—through the critical pens of Stevenson and Howells and Henry James, to name no others—that fiction has an art which may be discussed; that a novel is not merely a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, to be boiled and swallowed and nothing more done about it. In answer to all these serious critics Crawford declared that novelists are "public amusers," who must always write largely about love and in Anglo-Saxon countries must write under the eyes of the ubiquitous young girl. ”