We desire no resurrection of
the Ann Radclyffe type of romance: but the true alternative to this is not
such a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter as Emile
Zola offers us. So far as Zola is conscientious, let him live; but, in so
far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly
and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part
of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as
such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred
obligation, to show us the complete curve only,--never the undeveloped
fragments.
But were the firmament of England still illuminated with her Dickenses,
her Thackerays, and her Brontes, I should still hold our state to be
fuller of promise than hers. It may be admitted that almost everything was
against our producing anything good in literature. Our men, in the first
place, had to write for nothing; because the publisher, who can steal a
readable English novel, will not pay for an American novel, for the mere
patriotic gratification of enabling its American author to write it. In
the second place, they had nothing to write about, for the national life
was too crude and heterogeneous for ordinary artistic purposes.
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