FICTION, AMERICAN. 



215 



most finished of French novelists, the artist who 

 has outlived Bourget M. Anatole France is etch- 

 ing pictures of the social life of his country in 

 the present day that probably will endure as mines 

 of information for the future student, and not 

 merely as masterpieces of style and method; but 

 to foreigners, especially to Americans, his books 

 have but little significance, unless they know the 

 country well. The German school, with Suder- 

 mann at its head, is intensely national in its ex- 

 pression of discontent with the conditions that 

 be, or in glorification of the empire founded by 

 blood and iron. The modern Scandinavians Fru 

 Hansen, Jonas Lie, and Selma Lagerlof prominent 

 among them are pessimistical psychologists, to 

 be sure, but deal strictly with a national tempera- 

 ment created by conditions unknown beyond their 

 borders. Italy's latest genius, D'Annunzio, is en- 

 tirely alien to our life and, happily, to our morals, 

 as is also Matilda Serao; while, finally, Russia 

 has not yet produced a genius to wear the mantle 

 of Turgeneff or Dostoievsky or Tolstoi. There, 

 too, the world has moved with rapid strides; na- 

 tional interests outweigh the wider universal ones 

 in an empire conscious at last of its great future. 

 The young Russian writers have felt the trend 

 of public thought and aspiration, Tolstoi himself 

 leading them, for his latest two books are de- 

 voted to what will be found, in the last analysis, 

 to be local conditions and abuses, even though 

 he attempts to found upon them, not always se- 

 curely, his gospel of universal humanity. Na- 

 tional, not human, life is evidently to the world's 

 novelists the inspiration of the hour. 



These foreign literatures were always alien to 

 us, but we did not realize this fully until the 

 recent revival of our national consciousness. We 

 ire young and optimistic and clear-minded ; we 

 lave no past of unspeakable abuses to sadden our 

 thought and views of life as has the empire which 

 is destined to share the future with us. Our past 

 is one of glory, our present one of prosperity and 

 "lope, our future full of promise; and all these 



hases of our existence are reflected in the novels 

 that have received our suffrages during the past 



years. 



David Harum came in the nick of time to in- 

 terpret to us the fundamental unity of our na- 

 tional character as it has come to be. In this 



an of central New York the people of New Eng- 



ind and the Middle States, and, through them, 

 the South, meet and mingle their character- 

 istics. From the East he draws his humor, in a 



icllowed form, but not the puritanical spirit; 



lis shrewdness in business largely comes from the 



ime source; his honesty, sensibility, generosity, 

 ind moral cleanliness can, happily, not be ascribed 

 any part of this country alone, nor, it should 

 added, can his hearty optimism and pagan 



laterialism. As John Oliver Hobbes has said, 

 there is a David Harum in every American family 

 that is American to the core. For this reason 

 lie was recognized at once, East and West and 



forth and South, and hailed with delight. He is 



m individual, to be sure thanks to his author's 



irt but, above all else, he is the type of the 



average American," ever fitting the circum- 



tances in which he happens to be placed, capable 

 rising to any height that fortune and Amer- 

 ican conditions may offer him. Spiritually he is 

 lacking somewhat, for our sharp struggle for exist- 

 ence has left its influence upon him. But at the 



jre he is sound ; a man to rely on in every emer- 



ency, a laughing philosopher who takes life as 

 finds it, and makes the best of it for himself 

 and for others a good man to know and to love. 

 It never has been observed yet, by the way, that 



there is a strong affinity between the wholesome, 

 common-sense philosophy of living preached by Mr. 

 Howells and David Harunvs practice. For the 

 author of The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard 

 of New Fortunes has long been the foremost of 

 our national novelists. 



The popularity of Mr. Irving Bachellers Eben 

 Holden is traceable, though to a smaller degree, 

 to the same source. Here, however, the provincial 

 element predominates: Eben Holden is but the 

 type of one of the factors that entered into the 

 ancestry which produced David Harum. 



The Redemption of David Corson presents 

 crudely, perhaps, and sensationally, but with un- 

 mistakable vigor the Puritan conscience dormant 

 in most of us, a blessed and invaluable inheritance 

 from the bleak Massachusetts Bay, rarely awak- 

 ened, happily, because, after all, the life of the 

 average American, like David Harum's, is free 

 from trespasses that are really black sins. This 

 type is not new to our fiction. The Scarlet Letter 

 immortalized it, and Julien Gordon realized it 

 dimly in her Puritan Pagan, modifying its stern- 

 ness, however, by cosmopolitan culture and ways 

 of doing and thinking. The Puritan heritage also 

 appears in one of the year's minor successes, Mr. 

 Edwin Asa Dix's Deacon Bradbury a splendid 

 character study, but a novel hampered by a weak 

 plot. 



The element of chance in the publishing of books 

 was strikingly illustrated in 1900 by the fate of 

 one of the closest studies of American character 

 in its development during the past quarter cen- 

 tury yet published, Judge Grant's Unleavened 

 Bread. The book received from the reviewers the 

 attention it deserved and continues to deserve, 

 but its popularity, expressed in the editions sold 

 (about 40,000 copies at the end of the year), fell 

 far short of what might well have been expected 

 for it. Women form unquestionably the over- 

 whelming majority of our novel readers, and many 

 women resented this mercilessly true picture of 

 a type of American woman, which has not yet 

 entirely died out, even though Judge Grant placed 

 his heroine in the early seventies. We have come 

 to regard foreign criticism with indifference, if 

 not with contempt; we are as sensitive as ever 

 to the domestic censor, though we no longer perse- 

 cute him. Judge Grant's novel has many short- 

 comings, but these it shares, curiously enough, with 

 nearly all the successes here under discussion. 

 David Harum, Eben Holden, Unleavened Bread, 

 and Deacon Bradbury are, however, character 

 studies pure and simple, and as such excusable 

 for faulty method. Not so with When Knighthood 

 was in Flower, that strange product of a pen 

 lacking all the essentials that go to the making of a 

 historical novel save one, a sense for the romantic. 



When Knighthood was in Flower is nothing but 

 a successful appeal to all the world that loves 

 a lover. This is, at least, the only theory by which 

 its popularity can be explained. Two beings, 

 young and supremely handsome, ardent lovers, be- 

 set by difficulties, among romantic surroundings, 

 will find sympathizers the world over, as they 

 have done since the art of fiction began, and will 

 do till the end of time. What of a diction that 

 lacks not only every element of style, but is even 

 disfigured by the slang of Cook County in the 

 closing years of the nineteenth century? What 

 of all absence of literary quality, of all distinc- 

 tion? The story's the thing here, and it is not 

 historical, notwithstanding its guise. Its success 

 was made among readers to whom Mr. James 

 Lane Allen's polished method is but wasted effort, 

 and it is not a hopeful sign of the times. 



No explanation need be sought for the reception 



