And how absurd to patronize, to treat with indifferent superiority
just because they are members of the novel family, books such as
these men have left us, books such as both men and women are
writing in America to-day! Is there finer workmanship in American
painting or American music or American architecture than can be
found in American novels by the reader willing to search and
discriminate? A contemporary poet confessed that he would have
rather written a certain sonnet (which accompanied the confession)
than have built Brooklyn Bridge. One may doubt the special case,
yet uphold the principle. Because a novel is meant to give
pleasure, because it deals with imagination rather than with facts
and appeals to the generality rather than to the merely literary
man or the specialist, because, in short, a novel is a novel, and
a modern American novel, is no excuse for priggish reserves in our
praise or blame. If there is anything worth criticizing in
contemporary American literature it is our fiction.
Absurd as it may seem in theory, we have patronized and do
patronize our novels, even the best of them, following too surely,
though with a bias of our own, the Anglo-Saxon prejudice
traditional to the race.
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