Our fiction, in general, is marked by an
artificiality as marked as that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the
later Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set forms and stale
situations; the revelation, by such a book as "The Titan," that there
may be a glamour as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as in
the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated and exotic. We have no
first-rate political or religious novel; we have no first-rate war
story; despite all our national engrossment in commercial enterprise, we
have few second-rate tales of business. Romance, in American fiction,
still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality--the
love affairs of Paul and Virginia, or the pale adulteries of their
elders. And on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and
lack of veracity. The action of all the novels of the Howells school
goes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock once
they describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; they
never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities
to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the
great forces that circumscribe and condition personality.
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