The Sun.
London, England, 1870-07-26 00:00:00

AMEBIC kN NOVELS.

The London Saturday Review, in summing up the field
work covered by Dickens, complacently remarks :
" Martin Chuzzlewit ' left no characters in America un-
described which are susceptible of embodiment in fiction."
Surely the critic has forgotten our typical young lady,
well known to all Englishmen, who always prefaces her
remarks with " Du tell ! " and who, when known to Mr.
Anthony Trollope in a foreign Court where her father
was Minister, habitually saluted her friends as "You
ass ;" but who afterward, so Mr. Trollope tells us, with a
deal of naïveté, " married into the highest ranks of the
British peerage, and adorned her position by her man-
ners." We assure the critic also that Jefferson Brick did
not exhaust the types of American editors ; but the
" New York Key-hole Reporter" and " Back-door
Listener " have lately appeared under new forms, better
fitted for circulation in the higher classes. The " Mother
of the Gracchi," too, since Dickens was here, has for-
saken her natural babes, and adopted her sex. " For it,"
she tells us, " she suffers, she toils, she is crucified." She
no longer pours forth her deep truths in a snuffle at the
hotel table, but in the rostrum, or in a broker's or
lawyer's office. Seriously, nothing has cramped
our writers so much as such ludicrous criticism
as that of The Review, which only echoes that of this
country. We are perpetually told by our own critics that
an American novel is impossible. That field of literature
is closed to us, until our social condition can be happily
brought into a mould more nearly approximating to the
settled forms of the English. Now, the truth is, there is
no country in the world where individual character is
developed as freely among circumstances as varying or
dramatic as our own. We have every nationality under
heaven interfused or repelling each other, every variety
of religious creed, every possible background of scenery,
from Arctic snows to tropical sands. Whether the work
of the novel-writer be simply to amuse or to present
human nature in new and effective forms, embodying
vital truths, he can hardly want for dramatis personce in
this great plain, stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific
where savages and saints, Pagans and Presbyterians,
Digger Indians and women, enlightened and fashioned to
Brahmanism, are all at home together. Specimens of
what a novel should be in character and scenery are per-
petually placed before us from the other side of the water.
We are bidden to watch the dilemmas, both social and
housekeeping, of gentlemen who have married below
them into commercial circles. We are kept by the
aforesaid Mr. Trollope on the tenterhooks of anxiety
for a year, while Miss Rowley makes up her mind
whether or not she Is in love or not with Mr. John-
son, and six months longer while she finds a chaperon to
guard the proprieties. But do these works of High Art
exhaust all the springs of human action ? We confess we
are growing a little weary of pictures of British society
which are precisely the gossip we hear at tea-tables or the
club, in print with change of name. We want to hear
how Passion and Virtue, God and the Devil, shew them-
selves through the stronger, fresher natures of a new
world. Can none of our writers go out, as Dickens did,
and paint what lies about them ? One hint we
will give them. In out-of-the-way corners of
the older States there is fast dying out
now a race which has never yet, except in
New-England, been photographed or chronicled—the
" old settlers "—men and women sometimes of great
native strength and large culture, whose natures are
broadened and hardened into queer idiosyncracies by dint
of wrestling with a crude, unsubdued soil, and a solitary
half-civilised life. They form an invaluable portrait
gallery for the artist who knows his opportunity, posses-
sing strong, acrid individuality in themselves, and repre-
senting a phase of American history which, once suffered
to fade from the canvass, can never be restorrd. Let us
have no more talk of the impossibility of American
novels. If we have any genuine writers of fiction among
us, let them go to work.—Tribune.