After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill’s successive studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances.  He possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic—­almost a true epic—­instinct.  Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and reverberation of stirring days.  Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question or rejection into his broad tapestry.  A naturalistic generation is tempted to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too truly to good traditions of literature to be overlooked.

A national past has many uses, and different dispositions find in it instruction or warning, depression or exaltation.  Mr. Churchill has found in the American past a cause for exaltation chiefly; after his ugliest chapters the light breaks and he closes always upon the note of high confidence which resounds in the epics of robust, successful nations.  If in this respect he has too regularly flattered his countrymen, he has also enriched the national consciousness by the colors which he has brought back from his impassioned forays.  Only now and then, it must be remembered, do historical novels pass in their original form from one generation to another; more frequently they suffer a decomposition due to their lack of essential truth and descend to the function of compost for succeeding harvests of romance.  Though probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill’s books—­perhaps not even one—­can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country in one real way if not in another.

3.  ROBERT HERRICK

If the novels of Robert Herrick were nothing else they would still be indispensable documents upon that first and second decade of the twentieth century in America, when a minority unconvinced by either romance or Roosevelt set out to scrutinize the exuberant complacence which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national character.  Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense potentiality in it.

Small wonder then that the prevailing literature gave itself generally to large proclamations about the future or to spacious recollections of the past in which the note was hope unmodified.  Small wonder either—­be it said to the credit of literature—­that the same period caused and saw the development of the most emphatic protest which has come from native pens since the abolition of slavery—­not excepting even the literary rebels of the eighties.  Much of that protest naturally expressed itself in fiction, of many orders of intelligence and competence and intention.  Various voices have been louder or shriller or sweeter or in some cases more thoroughgoing than Mr. Herrick’s; but his is the voice which, in fiction, has best represented the scholar’s conscience disturbed by the spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are too much undisturbed.