Du Bose Heyward - A Critical and Biographical Sketch

Synopsis

There was a fashion amongst a certain school of critics and literati of former years to go about the country with dark lanterns ready to flash their microscopic spot lights upon this or that author, as he emerged for a brief moment from the great North American obscurity, and to proclaim that he had or certainly would or could write the great American novel.

It was then the custom to say that in poem or story he had caught the essential verities of the great universal American type. For a while the little spotlights would play hopefully upon someone, and then be turned elsewhere. At last, like the gentleman from Athens who searched with a lantern for another equally mythical person, the critics, who were looking for the great American novelist and his novel, passed away with the hope which animated them, and were seen and heard no more.

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