In the vast combat of instincts
and aspirations about them they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians,
unserious and insignificant. Of the great questions that have agitated
the minds of men in Howells' time one gets no more than a faint and
far-away echo in his novels. His investigations, one may say, are
carried on _in vacuo_; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of
passion, but in terms of giggles.
In the followers of Howells and James one finds little save an empty
imitation of their emptiness, a somewhat puerile parodying of their
highly artful but essentially personal technique. To wade through the
books of such characteristic American fictioneers as Frances Hodgson
Burnett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice Brown, James
Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and
Sarah Orne Jewett is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible.
The flow of words is completely purged of ideas; in place of them one
finds no more than a romantic restatement of all the old platitudes and
formulae.
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