stretch thus far. But it is condescension that has made the
trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all of us, even the tense
ones, do patronize that creative instinct playing upon life as it
is which in all times and everywhere is the very essence of
fiction.

How absurd that here in America we should condescend toward our
fiction! How ridiculous in a country even yet so weak and poor and
crude in the arts, which has contributed so little to the world's
store of all that makes fine living for the mind! What a laughable
parallel of the cock and the gem he found and left upon the dung-
heap, if we could be proved not to be proud of American fiction!
For if the novel and the short story should be left out of
America's slender contribution to world literature, the offering
would be a small one. Some poetry of Whitman's and of Poe's, some
essays of Emerson, a little Thoreau, and what important besides?
Hawthorne would be left from the count, the best exemplar of the
fine art of moral narrative in any language; Henry James would be
left out, the master of them all in psychological character
analysis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art of
the modern short story, which in English sterns from him; Cooper
would be lost from our accounting, for all his crudities the best
historical novelist after Scott; Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte,
Irving! The attempt to exalt American literature is grateful if
one begins upon fiction.

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