There are American novelists whose portraits I refuse to turn to the wall. Marion Crawford had very definite ideas, which he set forth in a most entertaining essay, as to what the novel should be, and he followed his formula with happy results. His _Saracinesca_ still seems to me a fine romance. There was some marrow in the bones of E. W. Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_. I can remember when Miss Woolson was highly regarded as a writer, and when Miss Howard’s amusing _One Summer_ seemed not an ignoble thing. F. J. Stimson, Thomas Nelson Page, Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Miss Murfree, Mary Hallock Foote, T. B. Aldrich, T. R. Sullivan, H. C. Bunner, Robert Grant, and Harold Frederic all labored sincerely for the cause of American fiction. F. Hopkinson Smith told a good story and told it like a gentleman. Mr. Cable’s right to a place in the front rank of American novelists is not, I believe, questioned in any survey; if _The Grandissimes_ and _Old Creole Days_ had been written in France, he would probably be pointed to as an author well worthy of American emulation. No doubt this list might be considerably expanded, as I am drawing from memory, and merely suggesting writers whose performances in most instances synchronize with my first reading of American novels. I do not believe we are helping our case materially by ignoring these writers as though they were a lot of poor relations whenever a foreign critic turns his condescending gaze in our direction. VI It is a hopeful sign that we now produce one or two, or maybe three, good novels a year. The number is bound to increase as our young writers of ambition realize that technic and facility are not the only essentials of success, but that they must burrow into life--honeycomb it until their explorations carry them to the core of it. There are novels that are half good; some are disfigured by wabbly characterizations; or the patience necessary to a proper development of the theme is lacking. However, sincerity and an appreciation of the highest function of the novel as a medium for interpreting life are not so rare as the critics would have us believe. I have never subscribed to the idea that the sun of American literature rises in Indiana and sets in Kansas. We have had much provincial fiction, and the monotony of our output would be happily varied by attempts at something of national scope. It is not to disparage the small picture that I suggest for experiment the broadly panoramic--“A Hugo flare against the night”--but because the novel as we practise it seems so pitifully small in contrast with the available material. I am aware, of course, that a hundred pages are as good as a thousand if the breath of life is in them. Flaubert, says Mr. James, _made_ things big.