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 and
self-consciousness, in its devotion to details, in its disregard of the
ideal, in its selection as well as in its treatment of nature, is simply
of a piece with a good deal else that passes for genuine art. Much of it
is admirable in workmanship, and exhibits a cleverness in details and a
subtlety in the observation of traits which many great novels lack. But I
should be sorry to think that the historian will judge our social life by
it, and I doubt not that most of us are ready for a more ideal, that is
to say, a more artistic, view of our performances in this bright and
pathetic world.