if I may suffer myself the figure,
the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied
shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was
imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the
New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it.
They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism
at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical
intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much
for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the
sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in
romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it,
they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and
those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness.
It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their
peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an
estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such
a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted
the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in
philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven,
and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the
vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do
not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,
which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which
has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work,
achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and
the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its
unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist,
because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to
an ideal of life rather than to life itself.

Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds
true. That is almost the greatest work of imaginati