wish to bring a "blush
to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in
one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a
man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like
English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and
compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct;
and this fact has cooperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps
physiological causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our
books. They are graceful, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool
whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like
certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We
have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical
gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and
romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences,
has this animal life which tingles upon every page. We must confess
that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly
suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation.
Emerson's thin high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk;
Lanier is playing his reproachful flute; Longfellow reads Fremont's
Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the
discomforts!"; Irving's _Astoria_, superb as were the possibilities of
its physical background, tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's
_Before the Mast_ and Parkman's _Oregon Trail_, transcripts of robust
actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical
paleness compared with Turgenieff's _Notes of a Sportsman_ and
Tolstoi's _Sketches_ of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard
undergraduate writing, after all!

These facts illustrate anew that standing temptation of the critic of
American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that
we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant
idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax
upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance
of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very
well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be:
Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces
more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan
restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventio