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Carl Van Doren (1885–1950). The American Novel. 1921.

Page 249

Duke of Stockbridge (1900), and Cable in The Cavalier (1901), and Miss Jewett in The Tory Lover (1901), and Frank R. Stockton in Kate Bonnet (1902). After 1902 the type began rapidly to decline, both in energy and popularity. Mary Johnston persisted in romance for several years, but her contemporaries, Winston Churchill, Ellen Glasgow, Booth Tarkington, moved on toward realism with the times. The older writers who had been drawn aside by episode nearly all went back to their earlier methods. Even Churchill’s The Crossing in 1904 seemed belated, and Weir Mitchell’s The Red City in 1908 decidedly so; in The Slim Princess (1907) George Adeparodied the “Ruritanian” romance popularized by Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and still continued by George Barr McCutcheon in Beverly of Graustark (1904) and later inanities; Frederick Jesup Stimson’s My Story (1917), an ostensible autobiography of Benedict Arnold, seemed almost prehistoric; and Irving Bacheller’s A Man for the Ages (1919) had to depend for its vogue upon the recent great increase of interest in Lincoln.

Such of these narratives as dealt in any way with the present generally took their slashing, skylarking, and robustly Yankee heroes, as in Soldiers of Fortune or Graustark, off to more or less imaginary regions for deeds of haughty daring and exotic wooing. Elsewhere, even in the romances with a foreign scene, taste ran to the past: to the whirling Paris of the French Revolution as in François or to the frilled and powdered Bath of the eighteenth century as in Monsieur Beaucaire; or still further to the Tudor sixteenth century of When Knighthood Was in

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