9. The Romance of the Clash of Races

The world has expanded faster in the last thirty years than in any
previous age since "the spacious days of great Elizabeth." And with its
expansion, of course, our ideas have widened. I believe Europe is now in
the midst of just such an outburst of thought and invention as that
which followed the discovery of America, and of the new route to India
by the Cape of Good Hope. But I don't want to insist too strongly upon
that point, because I know a great many of my contemporaries are deeply
hurt by the base and spiteful suggestion that they and their fellows are
really quite as good as any fish that ever came out of the sea before
them. I only desire now to call attention for a moment to one curious
result entailed by this widening of the world upon our literary
productivity--a result which, though obvious enough when one comes to
look at it, seems to me hitherto to have strangely escaped deliberate
notice.

In one word, the point of which I speak is the comparative
cosmopolitanisation of letters, and especially the introduction into
literary art of the phenomena due to the Clash of Races.

This Clash itself is the one picturesque and novel feature of our
otherwise somewhat prosaic and machine-made epoch; and, therefore, it
has been eagerly seized upon, with one accord, by all the chief
purveyors of recent literature, and especially of fiction. They have
espied in it, with technical instinct, the best chance for obtaining
that fresh interest which is essential to the success of a work of art.
We were all getting somewhat tired, it must be confessed, of the old
places and the old themes. The insipid loves of Anthony Trollope's
blameless young people were beginning to pall upon us. The jaded palate
of the Anglo-Celtic race pined for something hot, with a touch of fresh
spice in it. It demanded curried fowl and Jamaica peppers. Hence, on the
one hand, the sudden vogue of the novelists of the younger
countries--Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, Ibsen and Bjornson, Mary Wilkins and
Howells--who transplanted us at once into fresh scenes, new people:
hence, on the other hand, the tendency on the part of our own latest
writers--the Stevensons, the Hall Caines, the Marion Crawfords, the
Rider Haggards--to go far afield among the lower races or the later
civilisations for the themes of their romances.

Alas, alas, I see breakers before me! Must I pause for a moment in the
flowing current of a paragraph to explain, as in an aside, that I
include Marion Crawford of set purpose among "our own" late writers,
while I count Mary Wilkins and Howells as Transatlantic aliens?
Experience teaches me that I must; else shall I have that annoying
animalcule, the microscopic critic, coming down upon me in print