It is constantly said that the conditions in America are unfavorable to the higher fiction; that our society is unformed, without centre, without the definition of classes, which give the light and shade that Heine speaks of in “Don Quixote”; that it lacks types and customs that can be widely recognized and accepted as national and characteristic; that we have no past; that we want both romantic and historic background; that we are in a shifting, flowing, forming period which fiction cannot seize on; that we are in diversity and confusion that baffle artistic treatment; in short, that American life is too vast, varied, and crude for the purpose of the novelist.

These excuses might be accepted as fully accounting for our failure—­or shall we say our delay?—­if it were not for two or three of our literary performances.  It is true that no novel has been written, and we dare say no novel will be written, that is, or will be, an epitome of the manifold diversities of American life, unless it be in the form of one of Walt Whitman’s catalogues.  But we are not without peculiar types; not without characters, not without incidents, stories, heroisms, inequalities; not without the charms of nature in infinite variety; and human nature is the same here that it is in Spain, France, and England.  Out of these materials Cooper wrote romances, narratives stamped with the distinct characteristics of American life and scenery, that were and are eagerly read by all civilized peoples, and which secured the universal verdict which only breadth of treatment commands.  Out of these materials, also, Hawthorne, child-endowed with a creative imagination, wove those tragedies of interior life, those novels of our provincial New England, which rank among the great masterpieces of the novelist’s art.  The master artist can idealize even our crude material, and make it serve.  These exceptions to a rule do not go to prove the general assertion of a poverty of material for fiction here; the simple truth probably is that, for reasons incident to the development of a new region of the earth, creative genius has been turned in other directions than that of fictitious literature.  Nor do I think that we need to take shelter behind the wellworn and convenient observation, the truth of which stands in much doubt, that literature is the final flower of a nation’s civilization.

However, this is somewhat a digression.  We are speaking of the tendency of recent fiction, very much the same everywhere that novels are written, which we have imperfectly sketched.  It is probably of no more use to protest against it than it is to protest against the vulgar realism in pictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in equal esteem; or against aestheticism gone to seed in languid affectations; or against the enthusiasm of a social life which wreaks its religion on the color of a vestment, or sighs out its divine soul over an ancient pewter mug.  Most of our fiction, in its extreme analysis, introspection