Carl Van Doren

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The story, James said, proceeded directly from his habit of walking the streets of London and reflecting upon the possible lot of some person who should have been produced by this civilization and yet should be condemned, as James decidedly had not been, to witness it from outside—that is, from outside the world of fashion and intelligence. Would not such a humble hero, if sensitive enough, long for all the privileges of such a civilization, plot against them when denied them, fall in love with them when invited to share them even transiently? ”

“ At any rate, he let himself run almost without check among sixth-century scenes as he imagined them, ridiculing follies with a burlesque as riotous as that in The Innocents Abroad, and adding to it the more serious anger which had grown upon him. To appreciate the fun of the Yankee one must have been accustomed to the rowdy modes of American humor; to feel all its censure one must have at least a strain of the revolutionary. And yet persons equipped with neither may perceive the magnificent vigor of the narrative. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It lacks, indeed, any such mastering theme as that in The Scarlet Letter, or any such brocaded vestures as is worn by The House of the Seven Gables. Its particular excellence must be looked for in a touching charm that springs from the very tenuousness of its substance—a tenuousness greater than life's even when Hawthorne was writing about matters he had seen with his physical eye, because the entire action of the novel is represented through the medium of its narrator, Coverdale the minor poet, who daintily eyes the moving world without ever coming close to it. ”

“ No man can range so widely and still go deep. Crawford's success with the Roman novels only confirms this dogma. Although he always called himself an American, he knew Rome better than any other quarter of the globe; and where his knowledge was greatest he went deepest. In such a tour de force as Khaled or in such a romantic melodrama as The Cigarette-Maker's Romance he went far on the wings of an excited imagination, but not as far as profounder observations took him in Pietro Ghisleri or Saracinesca. Realism, like charity, must begin somewhere near home. ”

“ Whatever man of genius might appear, there was still the problem of reaching a public taught that fiction belonged to the Old World, fact to the New; taught to look for the pleasures of the imagination on the soil where they had long existed and to which even the most self-conscious and politically independent American had been accustomed to look back with admiration, with some vague nostalgia of the spirit. ”

“ But no other novel of the decade has been less dimmed by a half century of realism. Coldly truthful in its descriptions of battles and camps, crisp and pointed in its dialogue, penetrating, if not over-subtle, in its character analysis, sensible in its plot, and in its general temper alert and sophisticated, it is still almost as convincing as it was once precocious. De Forest wrote numerous other novels but none so notable. All of them suffered from the rivalry of local color in its romantic phases. ”

“ Only the masters of narrative can tell a story which, like this, is clear yet full, continuous yet unhurried, balanced yet as natural as the flow of water or the movement of clouds across a blue sky. If not a great novel The Kentons is still a perfect one.
It is to the difficult distinction between perfection and greatness that critical discussions of Howells always finally arrive. With few authors as eminent does it seem so hard to find the master conveniently distilled in a few masterpieces ready for transportation to posterity. ”

“ Priscilla, outwardly so visible because so closely studied from the little seamstress at Brook Farm, is never quite impressive; she has been refined to a point which brings her too near the bloodless decorum of her decade. It is' in Zenobia that the rather wintry senses of Coverdale—and readers of all degrees of vitality after him—detect the fullest flood of life, fire and color, passion and experience. Hester Prynne had been of this stature. Both of them come into Hawthorne's New England from other regions; both to be gorgeous have to be exotic. ”

“ No other American novel represents such a mingling of races: French and Spanish and German and Yankee, Creole and quadroon, Indian aborigines, and negro slaves who speak a strange jargon of French and English but who have the instincts of Africa in their blood. This New Orleans is a city of austere castes and almost incomprehensible customs, never too obviously explained, though hinted at with laughing dexterity. The central plot, which shows the houses of Grandissime and De Grapion at war and then reconciles and unites them by marriage, loses itself, unfortunately, in a maze of episodes. ”

“ Certain of them come directly from the life, notably the vagabond Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly and Becky Thatcher, the Gang, and Tom Sawyer himself, who, though compounded of numerous elements, essentially reproduces the youthful figure of his creator. Such a mixture of rich humor and serious observation had never before been devoted to the study of a boy in fiction. Mark Twain smiles constantly at the absurd in Tom's character, but he portrays him in the dignity of full length; he does not laugh him into insignificance or lecture him into the semblance of a puppet. ”

“ And finally, the typical heroes of Mark Twain's imagined universe are of the sort considered typical in America. They walk the world, like the Yankee in medieval England, the Innocents in the Holy Land, Captain Stormfield in Heaven itself, erect and confident, neither cultivated nor colonial enough to be embarrassed, testing and measuring all things by the simplest standards. They are as clannish as provincials and as cocksure as pioneers. Occasionally obsessed by the Puritan conscience, they lack the eccentric ideals of holiness, mysticism, poetry. ”

“ If he seems unusually imaginative, still he is imagined without too much subtlety. He speaks a convincing boyish dialect. His sensations are limited to something like his spiritual capacity. And the narrative as a whole Crane holds firmly in hand, pointing his prose with clean touches, heightening it here and there with poetry, warming it with an emotion which still leaves him critical. The Red Badge of Courage is a genuine feat of the imagination.
Crane's later novels and short stories, though some are vivid, add nothing to these two novels, and his early death truncated his career. ”

“ Like The Spy, his new novel made use of the Revolutionary matter; like The Pioneers, it was full of realistic detail from his own experience. Not only did he outdo Scott in sheer accuracy, 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 has not been seriously surpassed for vigor and swift rush of narrative. Smollett had already discovered the racy humors of seamen, but it remained for Cooper to capture for fiction the mystery and beauty, the shock and thrill of the sea. ”

“ From every port of the New England coast, and to a less degree from the Atlantic coast generally, ships went out to every corner of the world, particularly to the mysterious Pacific, with its strange calms and rich pastures for fishermen, and to the exotic countries beyond, but also to the crowded Mediterranean, the banks of Newfoundland, the neighborly West Indies. The new nation was setting out in every direction to become acquainted with its own immense domain and to establish communications between it and all the rest of the world, real or imaginative. ”

“ American patriotism, little less since the Civil War than before, has steadily contended that America does as well as Europe as a background for fiction, pointing to the epic dimensions and the epic hopes of existence on this continent. Less expansive critical dispositions have continued to feel that the human past of the country has not been large enough to match the landscape; that the present at any given moment has lacked the stability, the solidarity, which alone might afford the novelist a firm texture of reality in his representations ”

“ He built, with some limitations, on what he saw before him, not unconscious of Europe but aware that the way to a body of American fiction was action as well as argument and that in the production of a national literature imagination begets imagination. Mark Twain, without much reflection but with powerful instincts in the matter, wrought in the fashion of all great autochthons—as if his native land were the center of the world. Henry James, at the other extreme, never ceased to regard America as essentially an outlying region of European, more specifically of Anglo-Saxon, civilization. ”

“ To call the Hazard the best novel of New York, as it has been called, is still to admit that the whole of that vast picture has yet not been drawn. Howells wrote from the point of view of the older America which in 1889 was mystified at labor unrest and horrified at a strike; the America in which the country had been one with the towns, and the villages had ruled them both; the America which knew the thunder and smoke of the industrial nation less as realities in themselves than as new problems crowding in upon the older order of Americans. ”

“ In its costumes and gestures the novel is not as heroic as The Spy. Indian John, the last of his proud race, is old and broken, corrupted by the settlements; only his death dignifies him. Natty Bumppo, a composite from many Cooperstown suggestions but in his main outlines undoubtedly suggested by Daniel Boone, is nobler than Indian John because he has not yielded but carries into the deeper forest his virtues, which even in Cooper's boyhood were becoming archaic along the New York frontier, and now in 1823 had become a legend. ”