e national imagination was
undoubtedly of the most profound character; it coloured politics for
fifty years, and is today a dominating influence in the thought of whole
sections of the American people. But in all that stirring up there was
no upheaval of artistic consciousness, for the plain reason that there
was no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all we have in the
way of Civil War literature is a few conventional melodramas, a few
half-forgotten short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, and a
half dozen idiotic popular songs in the manner of Randall's "Maryland,
My Maryland."

In the seventies and eighties, with the appearance of such men as Henry
James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, a better day
seemed to be dawning. Here, after a full century of infantile
romanticizing, were four writers who at least deserved respectful
consideration as literary artists, and what is more, three of them
turned from the conventionalized themes of the past to the teeming and
colourful life that lay under their noses. But this promise of better
things was soon found to be no more than a promise. Mark Twain, after
"The Gilded Age," slipped back into romanticism tempered by
Philistinism, and was presently in the era before the Civil War, and
finally in the Middle Ages, and even beyond. Harte, a brilliant
technician, had displayed his whole stock when he had displayed his
technique: his stories were not even superficially true to the life they
presumed to depict; one searched them in vain for an interpretation of
it; they were simply idle tales. As for Howells and James, both quickly
showed that timorousness and reticence which are the distinguishing
marks of the Puritan, even in his most intellectual incarnations. The
American scene that they depicted with such meticulous care was chiefly
peopled with marionettes. They shrunk, characteristically, from those
larger, harsher clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all truly
first-rate literature. In particular, they shrunk from any
interpretation of life which grounded itself upon an acknowledgment of
its inexorable and inexplicable tragedy. 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,