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 verdicts on the other writers of prose fiction are notably consistent and in accordance with reason. George Eliot receives her qualified diploma with special mention for truth and high seriousness: "No other novelist gives one such a poignant, sometimes such an insupportable sense that life is immensely serious, and no other, in consequence, is surer of being read, and read indefinitely, by serious readers." Cooper, as we have seen, receives a certificate for "truth of substance." Hawthorne, on the other hand, is drastically, and, I think, a bit harshly, reduced as a classic of American letters on the ground of his romantic insubstantiality and his fatalistic confidence in an indolent "genius," resulting in an inadequate culture. Poe is likewise reduced on the same charge and with the additional charge of moral vacuity.

The two novelists whose gravely dubious awards best attest Mr. Brownell's critical integrity are George Meredith and Henry James—both dedicated to truth, as it was given them to see the truth; both highly active intelligences; both distinguished representatives of the Party of Culture, and both eminently refined and adequately serious. Mr. Brownell himself has so many qualities in common with them, he impresses me as so much of a Jamesian and Meredithian character that I could well have understood and indeed have condoned a little more leniency toward them. I explain the ultimate hardening of his heart in their regard primarily by the fact that he is by conviction, if not by instinct, a Thackerayan,