They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism at the beginning of the century,but,as if their heterodoxy were conscience-stricken,they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did;some pointed it more directly,some less directly;but they all pointed it.I should be far from blaming them for their ethical intention,though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much for their good as poets.Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon,though not always,nor nearly always.It was in poetry and in romance that they excelled;in the novel,so far as they attempted it,they failed.I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group,and those they influenced,in mind,and with a full sense of their greatness.
It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their peculiar greatness;but it would be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had none to bequeath.One cannot take account of such a fantasy as Judd's Margaret.The only New-Englander who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy,in poetry,in romance,is Mr.De Forest,who is of New Haven,and not of Boston.I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes,or the vivid inventions of Doctor Hale,but I do not call them novels;and I do not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group,but which has hardly the novelists's scope.New England,in Hawthorne's work,achieved supremacy in romance;but the romance is always an allegory,and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct;and New England yet lacks her novelist,because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself.
Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule,even to such a signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin',I think that what I say holds true.That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have produced in prose,and it is the work of a New England woman,writing from all the inspirations and traditions of New England.It is like begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel,however;but really,is it a novel,in the sense that 'War and Peace'is a novel,or 'Madame Flaubert',or 'L'Assommoir',or 'Phineas Finn',or 'Dona Perfecta',or 'Esther Waters',or 'Marta y Maria',or 'The Return of the Native',or 'Virgin Soil',or 'David Grieve'?In a certain way it is greater than any of these except the first;but its chief virtue,or its prime virtue,is in its address to the conscience,and not its address to the taste;to the ethical sense,not the aesthetical sense.
This does not quite say the thing,but it suggests it,and I should be sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight;for I believe no one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in literature.The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never seemed to me accurate or adequate,and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem to be of the past.Certainly New York is yet no London in literature,and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever was,at least in quality.The Scotch literature of the palmy days was not wholly Scotch,and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered in the air of an alien speech.But the New England literature of the great day was the blossom of a New England root;and the language which the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs of those who had brought the learning of the universities to Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before,and was of as pure a lineage as the English of the mother-country.
