We could not suffer the
confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the
former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson
or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the
past--they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and
Reade are not of the present. The new school derives from
Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others; but it studies
human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds its
ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not
really less vital motives. The moving accident is certainly not
its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire
catastrophes. it is largely influenced by French fiction in
form; but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of
Zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is
above the business of recording the rather brutish pursuit of a
woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the French
novelist. This school, which is so largely of the future as well
as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James; it is he
who is shaping and directing American fiction, at least. It is
the ambition of the younger contributors to write like him; he
has his following more distinctly recognizable than that of any
other English-writing novelist. Whether he will so far control
this following as to decide the nature of the novel with us
remains to be seen.
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