Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/168

 XI

MRS. STODDARD'S NOVELS

LL lovers of true literature will consider it both just and fortunate that Mrs. Stoddard's books of fiction should now be reproduced in standard library form, as a recognition of their place among works of fascinating interest and permanent value. These tales, their scenes and period, antedate the younger generation. Yet they are essentially modern, and in keeping with the choicest types of recent fiction. To be before one's time, in authorship, is as trying as to be born too late. If The Morgesons, Two Men, and Temple House, had not been written until the tempest of the Civil War was more fully assuaged,—if in other respects the season had been ripe,—they would have been received by the many, as they were by the critical few, for what they verily were—the pioneers of something new and real in the novelist's art.

—Of something real, without doubt, for the keynote of Two Men is surely that saying of Emerson's which precedes it: "Let us treat the men and women [154]