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. And if the curious frame of mind that
many reserve for fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there
will be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud and
humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit their share.
Nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired by the situation shall
not draw us into that dangerous and humorless thing, a general
indictment. There are readers aplenty who, to quote Painter once
more, find their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a
Winters night and length of Sommers day," and are duly
appreciative of that service. With such honest, if un-exacting,
readers I have no quarrel; nor with many more critical who
respect, while they criticize, the art of fiction. But with the
scholars who slight fiction, the critics who play with it, the
general reader who likes it contemptuously, and the social