The American Novel

by Carl Van Doren. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1921. 8vo, ix+295 pp. $2.00.

THIS excellent survey,’which the author describes in his Preface as ‘a chapter in the history of the American imagination,’ makes lamentably clear the paucity and thinness of America’s contribution to the novelist’s art. For when Mr. Van Doren has discussed the work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Frank Norris, he has covered pretty completely all that is significant in American fiction — excluding the works of living novelists. (Poe, being a writer of short stories, does not figure in the history of the American novel.)

Mr. Van Doren’s analysis of these outstanding authors is not merely the most interesting part of his book; it forms two thirds of his book. The chapters on early American fiction, on the halfbaked romances of adventure and sentiment that preceded the Civil War, and even the one on the novels of the eighteen-eighties,—which he regards as the golden decade of the American novel, — present interesting brief characterizations of forgotten, or soon-to-be-forgotten works; they do not cause the reader to feel that any of the authors thus hastily glanced at has been unjustly slighted.

Mr. Van Doren brings to his task as historian an unbiased intelligence, a capacity for generous yet discriminating appreciation, and an exceptional gift of expression. Although his work is largely expository, it is touched throughout with imagination, and is almost always happy in phrasing. Indeed, he writes so well that it is a shock to find him using ‘sanguinary’ in the sense of ‘sanguine’; and he is so scrupulously comprehensive in his mention of novels of a certain distinction, that his failure to give any place to Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware is mystifying.

Of the protagonists of the American novel he is a most satisfying interpreter. Within the space that he has set for himself, it is hard to see how exposition of their aims or appraisal of their achievements could be more thorough or adequate. When he approaches the works of contemporary writers, he is less satisfactory. Inasmuch as his treatment of these works is for the most part restricted to mere mention of title and theme, it is not very valuable; when he does deliver an opinion, it is likely to be oracular. The Virginian receives much less than its due when it is styled ‘an older dime novel somewhat glorified’; and the suggestion that other records of the phase that it treats have been ‘racier and crisper’ should not be permitted to remain vague. A reader may ask why Robert Grant’s documentation of the age should be overlooked if Theodore Dreiser’s cannot be; or why Upton Sinclair’s earnestness and skill in controversy, which ‘deserve the high praise that they recall Thomas Paine,’ should deserve that praise in a volume on the American novel. But let us call attention to no more flaws in a work of unusual and, almost to the end, sustained excellence.

ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER.