Significant Tendencies in Current Fiction

To come in touch with the tendency of new novels, both English and American, I have lately read with care no less than sixty volumes fresh from the press, chosen without regard to previous conviction or personal prejudice. A diary of this — I am tempted to say — exploit, containing notes and comments, now affords a hint of something which these novels may collectively indicate, suggestions of a certain definable motion where, at a glance, all seemed cross-current, eddy, and purposeless back-water, defying orderly classification.

The first self-evident division is purely geographical, England from America. America again presents infinite subdivisions, East, West, North, South, with a fragment of unadulterated New England left over from a brilliant past. This speciously simple arrangement, however, is rendered highly complex by so mechanical a factor as, to state it baldly, cheap flats in New York. Yet we must no more suppose that paying a poll-tax in Manhattan transforms your Western man into a New Yorker, than that myriads of Southern romancers are changed into Yankees by living in the vicinity of Washington Square. Nevertheless there is one significant effect from this steady tide of immigration, namely the tendency of many young Eastern writers to detach themselves from their own geographical group, and drift over to the larger and livelier body now crystallizing into a recognizable Western school. This, needless to say, does not apply to those men hailing from the East who choose Western subjects. Mr. Owen Wister, treating of cowboys and biscuit-shooters, frankly does so from his own point of view as a sympathetic and impressionable outsider, who no more belongs in the West than Mr. Thompson-Seton in a menagerie. The influence lies far deeper, so deep that much contemporary fiction bearing every hall-mark of the Western school, proves on inquiry to be written in the East, by an Easterner. It is an unexpected phase of assimilation! The Southern school, on the contrary, like the Jewish faith, preserves its own characteristics but makes no converts, leaving the West to absorb into its ranks many waverers whose tendencies and convictions do not bind them firmly to another standard.

Here we at once come upon a vital difference between England and America. The average colonial writer, moving to London, is apt to keep his own flavor but seldom acquires an influence over accepted standards. The average! Genius here as ever defies all rules, but it is hard to imagine a body of Australians or Afrikanders wielding such power as now belongs to companies of able young Westerners pitching their tents in New York. Of course the cause is not far to seek, it may even be a by-product of our famous national humor. Having achieved no definite standard of our own, the majority of us are open to every passing impression. This has its good side. We are highly alive, inapt to fall into ruts. It is not conceivable that an American should print so paltry and hackneyed an ineptitude as The Little Vanities of Mrs Whittaker.¹ Such books have always existed in England, therefore they will always find toleration, being inferior along timehonored lines. On the other hand, that very conservatism which makes it possible to be stupid a thousand times in the same way, also goes to enforce the demand that in books a certain medium shall be respected, a language used not altogether that of the street and the market-place. It is because we have not aimed at establishing such a standard, because there was more sense of it in Hawthorne’s day than now, that the Hoosier actually exerts more influence upon New York than New York upon the Hoosier. Lacking vigor and conviction, the representatives of conservatism lie at the mercy of every untrammeled young free lance who comes out of the West, to rescue American fiction from the unpopular and unAmerican superstition that literature should strive to be literary.

Consequently, while geographical classification may be necessary, superficially it presents inconsistencies. And these inconsistencies are intensified by another division, choice of theme. Here we come to easily recognizable classes. The historical novel obviously needs neither definition nor illustration, since, being always coexistent with certain other forms of fiction, it holds a peculiar place as the direct offspring of intensely personal taste or gift. Sir Walter wrote his great romances simply because he could not have done otherwise. He straightway set a fashion followed by the entire world for more than a generation, waaning with his imitators, falling into disrepute, practically vanishing till Mr. Stevenson chanced one day to find how much at ease he felt in his ancestors’ small-clothes. Then again the mode flourished, with what results, excellent and deplorable, we have lately witnessed. The historical novel therefore need not be considered here as an influence, because it is at all times a side issue, in fact represents rather a mode than a tendency; also because it, like the Wetterhorn in Tartarin, “pcriclitait depuis quelque temps.”

Next to be examined and dismissed as lacking positive significance (negatively it means much) is the specialized sketch. This applies to Miss Kelly’s admirable East Side stories, to Mr. John Fox’s depressing mountaineers,² or to any of the countless thumb-nail portraits, co-related short stories, or lengthy volumes describing special coteries of thieves, policemen, expatriated Greeks and Syrians, railroad men and journalists, with which our magazines abound. As a mere form, however, the co-related short story undoubtedly does exercise a new influence, and one, in spite of its charm, rather to be guarded against than honored. Not forgetting Bret Harte or Kipling, we may still doubt if this facile compromise between the short story and the novel be not more of a snare than a benefit. Take, for example, The Search for the Unknown.³ Mr. Chambers here shows a real comedy gift, a clever invention and style of unusual excellence. He is also the victim of his own cleverness and of the co-related habit. No one could fail to smile over one of his extravaganzas, over his mild satire upon other ingenious writers who take their own ingenuity a trifle seriously, over his trim turn of phrase and pleasantly irresponsible vein. But a book of such stories reveals his method, wearies you with that trim turn of phrase. To go back to the co-related form, an author has in mind a set of characters, a series of scenes. By giving these episodically he is spared any effort of elimination and does away with tiresome explanations, with all the handicaps of a long novel. A vertebrate plot becomes unnecessary. Any large composition worked out, balanced, harmonized, is a far more arduous task than so stringing together a number of episodes that each, in a measure, prepares for the next. Also there need be none of the concentration and finish called for by a complete short story. Having already met your hero, your reader feels pleased to come across an old acquaintance without making the mental exertion of realizing a new personage. All this is tempting, it sometimes produces results as flawless as Miss Kelly’s Little Citizens.⁴ Yet this form has the drawbacks of every quick and easy method. It does not force a writer to develop the skill essential to sustained creative work ; it is also a potent factor in minimizing to atrophy the general reader’s power of attention.

Having disposed of this form, we may consider the special local story in its many aspects. Tales of wild life, whether by land or sea, afford now as ever an outlet for the literary gift lodged in men of certain tastes and experiences. These tales differ little from generation to generation, always incarnating a few decided types, seldom giving us a new picture of a new man. Special in another fashion are innumerable stories, long and short, depending largely for interest upon dialect, local characteristics, and picturesque setting. However useful these may prove in time to come (not as literature, but as such records as those Babylonian bricks from which we learn how vanished peoples conducted daily life), relying upon oddity and staging rather than upon profound sympathy with human nature, they have exactly the value of a cleverly snapped kodak, so much, no more! To be convinced of this, one need only recall Mr. Edwards’s inimitable Two Runaways. There you have your old plantation house, your humorous, predatory, devoted darkey, your hog and hominy, clear as a kodak. But likewise you have, in the negro’s master, that universal longing for youth, spring and holiday, that temporary suspension of conscience and responsibility, for which the most prosaic of us must occasionally yearn. It is not merely a picture of two blissful deserters from life reveling in hoecakes and freedom. It is you and I, or our matter-of-fact neighbor, as we may never be, alas! but as even the dullest mortals have sometimes pictured themselves, sloughing all trouble and for a brief moment living idly in the sun. That story might have been told in a thousand fashions, it is a real story revealed in the setting with which its writer chanced to be familiar. Although in criticism no mechanical device can be invariably trusted, a fair test for distinguishing the special story of permanent human interest from a clever ephemeral sketch is to imagine plot and people in other surroundings. We may safely assume that situation and characters hardy enough to survive transplanting are probably truer to universal human nature than equally brilliant pictures depending entirely upon one special environment. Huckleberry Finn, itching in “upwards of a thousand places” while old Jim hunts for him everywhere but behind the door, is elemental boy, a universal creation. So is Ariadne. She happened to be a Princess of Crete, but her whole adventure could occur in Fall River to-day, with Minos for the mill owner and Theseus as a triumphant labor leader. The special vein then may be dismissed as an influence, not because its exponents lack ability, but because, being superficial, their tendency seems rather negative than active.

For the same reason the Southern school, in spite of its occasional fine quality, will scarcely deflect the course of literature. Here for illustration I will quote bodily my notes upon The House of Fulfilment.⁵ Theme the power of love, so heralded by advertisements, rather appetizing after sixteen stories in which this agent is hardly allowed any authority. The advertisements may be right, but I should never have recognized that power in the warm, bland fluid, sweetish and penetrating everywhere (except into the treizième arrondissement, a locality practically unexploited by American fiction). A domestic tale, beneficent, clean, — my adjectives clamor to be heard. Not very dull. It contains edifying recipes for perfect happiness. Not real, not unpleasant. Then it is common, so hopelessly steeped in commonness as to lie outside the pale of criticism. But then again, why should it not be common ? (This question appears in almost every previous set of notes.) What has commonness to do with literature ? Nothing, less than nothing! Neither has The House of Fulfilment. Only, glancing over the past, it may be coincidence, but no fiction tainted with commonness has survived its own generation.

The Law of the Land,⁶ however, contains such ornamental writing in chapters one and two that, till oriented by a backward reference to the Civil War, I mistook it for a colonial romance. This is a novel of plot rather than character, and by some malign influence the plot unfolds with such rapidity that the page you are reading always explains what you have entirely learned for yourself in the preceding chapter. The villains make their entrance carefully hall-marked, all business and properties needed for later development are introduced like labeled exhibits. Also, as in most Southern books, genuine emotion arises from one cause only, the old historic quarrel. Emotional quality as understood by Rousseau is no more frequent here than in that Northern school devoted to social research, whose ablest exponents are Mrs. Edith Wharton and Judge Grant. Not that this pair should be classed together, except as presenting pictures of contemporary society from the angle of mature experience. Judge Grant makes his attack with broad grasp, fearlessness, and syntax. Mrs. Wharton dwells upon the same conditions with delightful finish and subtlety, a cultivated style; above all, she sees through the medium of a supremely literary temperament. Likewise this pair differ in yet another item from three dozen preceding writers upon my list. Both write from the standpoint of their own sex so definitely as to leave no doubt which is the man’s and which the woman’s hand. Mrs. Wharton may be read for pleasure as well as instruction, Judge Grant for instruction and for the bitter comfort of seeing ratified your own least hopeful observations.

The Undercurrent⁷ is a valuable human document, a contribution to the world’s records, a real study of motive, incentive, existing conditions. From beginning to end no note rings false. Why then is this not a great book ? Solely because you realize that with all his knowledge, insight, and appreciation, Judge Grant has merely collected precious evidence for some future novelist or satirist to digest and use. The author resembles a perfectly intelligent talker who should step to the footlights and go through an interesting scene exactly as such a scene might take place in a drawing-room. Literalness, in other words, is mistaken for realism. To prove the difference, compare the Undercurrent with the late Mr. Harold Frederic’s Damnation of Theron Ware. Mr. Frederic laid his story in a setting, if anything, cruder than Judge Grant’s, but he could not introduce a scene or passing character without impressing your imagination. His way of telling enabled you at once to visualize his people in their surroundings. Judge Grant,on the other hand, is obliged to inform you laboriously of everything. You know that he represents truly, your intelligence is entirely satisfied, as it would also be in reading a census report or any clear, unpretending record of facts. He conjures up no vision. It is, in fact, less a story than a masterly abstract by an able scientist, with nothing cheap or trivial, no compromises. Yet with all the respect due him, in company with countless chroniclers of rustic life, worthy inland villages and vicious big cities, Judge Grant does not reach that combination of craft, vigor, and imagination which goes to make staying power.

Miss Sedgwick narrowly misses it, since she writes in the tongue of civilization, with charm,and above all, with feeling. Noting this quality for the first time in all my weary search through acres of arid cleverness, I am tempted to rate her book too high, in sheer gratitude for the pleasure of reading it. Neither treatment nor matter shows a taint of the secondrate. A little stronger vitality, a greater sturdiness, and Paths of Judgment⁸ would do far more than perform the important function of keeping alive faith and hope that good fiction may still lie in the lap of a somewhat discouraging future.

If any such promise exist in the array of financial novels, which I have purposely kept to the last, as collectively the most significant, its fulfillment can come about only through the troubled waters of reaction. These books of the marketplace signal the opening of new territory to fiction. Finance, the personal finance of heroes and heroines, has of course always been a legitimate and popular theme. Dick Whittington, dear Amelia and her Fletcher, Martin Chuzzlewit, the victim of Ten Thousand a Year, Mr. Gissing’s people, the people in The Way we Live Now, all have to do with money. But money formerly, even in Balzac, occupied a place in relation to character and event, not itself coming to the front and monopolizing the stage. We have heard the expression, but never before have we actually heard “money talk ” ! In The Common Lot⁹ Mr. Herrick, while dealing with this factor,yet manages to keep some balance between it and his people. Also he is obviously aware of their vulgarity and writes of them in a tongue which places him in the sparse ranks of the civilized.

As a rule, however, the whole “ output ” of this school is as typically American, as speciously and negatively virtuous, as chewing gum! This vulgar word ill becomes these pages, but no other so precisely condenses an atmosphere reeking of hotel lobbies, office buildings, parlor cars, distracting with tickers, typewriters, telephones, all the paraphernalia of modern luxury as interpreted by successful bagmen. Undeniably, these volumes carry conviction of being written from “ the ground floor,” bewilderingly so, in fact, since it is true that no man standing chin high in grain can ripely paint a wheatfield. It must be seen from some elevation, or at least from a distance. Failing that, distance must be artificially created, not by the Lady of Shalott’s mirror, morbidly, unreally, but with the cheerful truth and accuracy of a Claude Lorraine glass. Now the entire group of which Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis is representative has lost, or let us hope only mislaid, its Lorraine glass. The President¹⁰ is full of talent. To its credit lay superficial observation, considerable vitality, and a clear stroke in describing politics and finance as expressed in deals, also a brisk, cheap imagination for incident. Beyond this, there is lack of depth; no inner picture has been drawn of men and minds ; and as for frank melodrama! Imagine the result of collaboration between Judge Grant and Henry Seton Merriman, with finishing touches by Colonel Archibald Ciavering Gunter, and a style compounded of George Ade and an old-fashioned romantic shilling shocker. To make this more exasperating, Mr. Lewis occasionally lapses into sound sense and wise epigram in clear, manly language. It is these pithy bits which prevent your being able simply to ignore him. Who could describe a certain type more neatly than this ? “Indeed he had as an individual, the best characteristics of a canal. He was even, currentless, with a mental fall of two feet to the mile.” And again, “There are men reckoned shrewd in business whose shrewdness can be overcome by ciphers. It is as though they were wise up to seven figures.” Mr. Lewis abounds in passages so good that you would cheerfully concede certain homelinesses of diction naturally pertaining to this homely American wit. But toleration is strained when he, in narrative, states that “Mrs. Hanway Harley would have Storri to the library ” (the italics are mine), also when “Storri was every day to see her.” A large amount of native wit will hardly atone for these eccentricities, but such slips become hanging matter when the author changes his key with never a modulation, and goes on shortly, “Thus did Storri rear his sinful castles in the air, and as he brooded his black designs,” . . . Or when the hero with the “Pict arms” (bodily, not heraldic arms) remarks to the friend with whom he is playfully employed in “trustbusting,” “Thus was I demon-haunted of my gold, I was galled of money.” And then, the commonness! Not the conscious commonness of his classic onslaught upon Kansas, but the innocent, elegant commonness of Mr. George Barr McCutcheon. When Count Storri was to the drawing-room, only wings of angels and archangels could palliate that horror. Poor Mr. Lewis! No choir invisible has taken him in charge. No higher guardianship protects him from himself than a shrewd and knowing printer’s devil.

This whole aspect of contemporary fiction can be found in essence in Mr. Lorimer’s Old Gorgon Graham,¹¹ a series of letters blending the wisdom of those two great ethical teachers, Benjamin Franklin and Lord Chesterfield. A Chicago Chesterfield, in the pork trade! Could any advice be sounder ? That honesty is the best policy stands proved on every page, through the illumining medium of hog. In fact, it is impossible to imagine an atmosphere more thoroughly basted with clean, wholesome, American lard. Old Graham uses a direct style, his anecdotes are apt and laughter-provoking. He represents the fine flower of our honest American merchant with his own wit, his own standards, and his own fathoming of heaven,earth, and hell by the length of his own pocket foot-rule. You read every letter with zest, respecting the ability with which it has been conceived and carried out, to feel in the end infinitely debased by tolerance of an odious and unreverent materialism. The young man who follows old Graham’s advice will live cleanly, work indomitably, will avoid all pretense, and be a just, appreciative master. But if this world be only as old Graham sees it, why should our young man take such pains to deny himself ? True, that advice will make him richer, but might he not reasonably prefer a few millions less and — a good time ? Perhaps, after all, the old-fashioned wallowing stye pig had quite as much comfort as the prophylactic article of modern commerce. If all of life be mere balancing profit and loss, why not count so many points of the game to the pleasures of self-indulgence ? Such a book forms an inestimable piece of evidence in the history of second generations, and these are at present a dominant note in our national life. Apparently without intention, Mr. Lorimer exposes the source of their unspeakable, contagious vulgarity and materialism. A taste for frenzied application is rarely transmitted, and Graham’s philosophy, leaving the soul without guidance or nourishment, produces complete atrophy of a member grown useless,and therefore cumbersome. This philosophy is all the more dangerous, since old Graham has every domestic virtue and a set of morals entirely tallying with the police code and the ten commandments.

Such criticism, it may be objected, is purely ethical, but Mr. Lorimer’s ethics suggest a plausible theory as to why, in spite of their talents, many of our younger writers continually fail to produce books of serious, lasting worth. May it not be that we have reached a new plane ? Does not all this point to a really new drift, an elimination of the personal element from fiction, and a substituting of aspects of human life illustrated by clever marionettes ? Do not all these fields, — the historical, animal, fisher folk, horticultural romance, the stock market,— which are undoubtedly absorbing our best writers, at bottom form part of a tremendous scramble of an entire generation to escape from fundamental emotion—not merely an aversion to any manifestation, but from the smallest harboring of so alien and unallowed a sensation ? Whether this hostility will eventually become a national trait, or whether it be a temporary phase, time alone can show. At present, undeniably, our novels as a whole truthfully depict a condition of which we hardlyrealize the force, until, thrown suddenly among people and literature of another race, we see with how much freer rein they treat their emotions. Hence, when our young writers dwell upon situation rather than people, instead of empirically classing this predilection as the sequela of too much Zola, should we not believe it the result neither of direct influence nor similar conditions, but a queer outcome of our national life, with an occasional and confusing likeness to the French realists ? If Mr. Georg Brandes be right in saying “Knowledge of the manner in which it” (the emotion of love) “is apprehended and represented by any age is an important factor in any real understanding of the spirit of an age,” then the significance of this tendency to conventionalize or ignore can hardly be overrated. Are we perhaps drifting towards an almost Japanese standard of impersonality, without even a glimpse at Japan’s standard of finish, in which as a guide to behavior, sheer exquisiteness supplants primary human impulse ? A crude Japanese is inconceivable,would be intolerable. Crudeness can be excused only by the presence of purifying heat and passion. As music calls for instruments and the plastic arts can find substance only through certain mechanical devices, so fiction has hitherto been held to rely upon intense realization of people in the most intimately personal sense. Consequently, apart from style, a less fundamental question, the most striking feature of our fiction to-day proves to be an almost universal avoidance of personal quality (even to the point that one man’s work frequently cannot be distinguished from another’s) and a steady ignoring of that discredited element in human affairs, purely human and personal emotion. That this avoidance leaves on the whole meagre sustenance for ordinary appetites is constantly suggested by the disproportioned popularity of such cheap appeals to sentimentality as David Harum, Mrs. Wiggs, and Emmy Lou.

At this juncture my geographical classification halted at four writers whimsically joined by the one tie of severed citizenship. Mrs. Craigie has to all intents become British. She might be Mrs. Clifford, with a hint of that manner which Mr. Mallock now humorously reserves for first chapters (one could wish for space to treat this tantalizing gentleman as a practical joker, writing such engaging beginnings as the ball scene in The Veil of the Temple,¹² only to plunge his reader into abysmal, fruitless controversies, usually abutting upon a wellinformed young lady in a flowing cloak). Mr. Marion Crawford has long since become the accomplished, cosmopolitan manufacturer, with a bias towards Italy. No one could attribute any influence to Whosoever Shall Offend,¹³ except as a shining instance of moderate, sustained industry. Mr. Henry Harland is too exotic upon any portion of this globe to be rated as other than an amiable lavender orchid; and as for Mr. Henry James! Here we come upon one more proof of the peril of dogmatizing. As a rule it is the personal quality which makes for influence, but in Mr. James this quality has grown so exclusive as to be available only for Mr. James (and with him even one sometimes suspects auto-infection). The Golden Bowl,¹⁴ then, should be read, savored, reread. Indeed, this advice is superfluous. Once taken up, it pursues you. Mr. Verver with his horrible little convex waistcoat, the impeccable Maggie, her Prince, the Principino, poor peccant Charlotte—you think of nothing else for days. They even grow more alive after you flatter yourself you have done with them than while you are officially in their company. Bob and Fanny, the bric-àbrac dealers, the complaisant hostess of Matcham, forget them if you can ! With all this, nevertheless, Mr. James is a marvelous hermit on a lonely isle; you must row out of the current to visit him. He is less cosmopolitan than utterly denationalized. More, even! He has deserted the earth and hovers in a wonderful, labyrinthine dimension of his own. He is a precious, morbid phenomenon, too exceptional for healthy discipleship.

Turning to England, we at once come upon a sharp contrast. Notwithstanding the occasional vogue of second-rate books, the ideas of the few do lead the many. (Have not Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith more legitimate followers than either Mr. Hall Caine or Miss Marie Corelli ?) Thus there is no enlightenment in dwelling upon numbers of more or less readable novels, since they merely carry on a respectable circulating-library standard, fairly workmanlike, but of no special promise or significance. Such is The Truants,¹⁵ with its piquant opening and subsequent collapse; also The Reaper,¹⁶ an excellent example of narrative pitched in a key harmonizing with dialect, but not unduly affected by it. Even Mrs. Thurston’s brilliant story The Masqueraders¹⁷ belongs here, likewise Olive Latham,¹⁸ with its poignant object lesson of how ineffective the most stirring fact may be in fiction, and Baccarat,¹⁹ which only embodies what many British hearts conceive to be the French novel. One runs through many of these rapidly; they mean little except that a steady, accepted fashion of making books still prevails in England. Mrs. Humphry Ward likewise cannot be discussed here since, with all her ripeness and capacity to fill (if not animate) a large canvas, her place seems already fixed as an invaluable link in keeping the chain of fine traditions unbroken and ready to be adorned with gems by more spontaneous spirits.

Differing from all of these come two men in process of development, but still in that borderland between excellence and mediocrity. Mr. Houseman undoubtedly recalls Thomas Hardy, but rather as a mind built upon somewhat the same pattern than as an imitator. Sabrina Warham²⁰ distinctly belongs to the class of books which may be read without drugging three fourths of an average intelligence, in order to keep the fourth quarter comfortably busy.

Rachel Marr²¹ shows positive advance over Mr. Morley Roberts’s former work. There is repetition, Anthony is impossible, most of the characters are, to say the least, highly improbable. Granted this! Granted too much philosophizing, too much insistence upon a remarkably premature philoprogenitiveness in the heroine, nevertheless, on laying down the book, you retain a vivid impression. The style fits the theme, highly colored, exalted, keyed to cracking point. Passion and emotion are reckoned prime factors; men and women may be more to each other than a set of bridge partners. The senses in their fundamental relation to life are not denied. Only because, seriously and without coarseness, this is recognized, Rachel Marr comes as a blessed relief, lifting the sordidness from ordinary existence, pointing out that some natures derive flame from life, that tears scald, that blood is red. You see the gloomy old house, the scented nights, the wood, the gardens, that road along which passion and fear come riding. There are faults in plenty, but you feel lenient towards them, being taken up by sensations, and one ounce of sensation is worth a library of arid, journalistic truth. Yet it is well to remember that the power to express these things implies at least a certain measure of literary craft.

With all Mr. Hope’s undoubted mastery of craft, however, Double Harness²² suggests that, like apple orchards, the author of Father Stafford and Tristram of Blent must be allowed an occasional off year. It resembles a lamentable quadrille of discontented husbands and wives (with understudies) who, while lacking any marked preference for other people’s partners, still manage to dislocate their ladies’ chain till it almost reaches the divorce court. Upon this, in every case but one, while there is yet time, they all experience a change of heart, and the book ends in a tidal wave of connubial bliss. Double Harness painfully suggests a French novel trimmed for traditional British tea tables; as if, after choosing a distinctly modern theme, when it came to breaking the eggs for his omelette, Mr. Hope had fallen into a very panic of discretion. Being therefore forced to modify every high light, to meet every climax without sincerity, for all his skill, he cannot make Double Harness either convincing or pleasant.

Lack of sincerity can never be laid to Mr. Kipling’s score. Traffics and Discoveries²³ is even distressingly free with smells,dirt, and recondite slang. Here we have the co-related story at its rankest (the saga of Mr. Pyecroft repels dainty adjectives), with one passable tale, The Sahib’s War, in the author’s early manner, and one of surpassing excellence. They simply comes as one of those flashes of genius by which this extraordinary man routs criticism. Suddenly he is all reverent sense of beauty, restrained and poignant emotion. Lumbering along the very brink of bathos, his big motor car sweeps you into a region of untold grace and tenderness. You can only draw breath and reflect that his genius is chained to his energy, and that his energy frequently lacks discretion. His genius wakes up occasionally, his energy works double shifts. But They contains the supreme expression of that high emotion which pierces the heart without clumsy bruising, which almost reveals, even to the childless, the quality of a parent’s bereavement.

If Mr. Hichens’ latest book, The Garden of Allah,²⁴ in brilliancy falls short of The Woman with the Fan, on the other hand, the intensity with which he reproduces an atmosphere of beauty creates an almost physical sense of well-being. To be quite frank, his story hardly “comes off.” You are by no means ready to accept. Androvsky, or the girl with the queer name. For all her gypsy ancestress, even under the sun of Africa, would Domini Enfilden, either before or after, have acted — as she did ? To betray what happens would be all the baser, as Mr. Hitchens has been entirely successful in baffling forecast. You do not see until he is willing that you should, and this probably comes about because, in addition to a very genuine gift of imagination, he has learned how to tell his story. Also, in telling he is never hampered with inappropriate timidity. Having chosen his road, he travels it, neither grossly nor indecorously, but deliberately taking any risk demanded by his choice. He even risks gratifying his invincible taste for the fantastic, a danger also faced in The Grey World,²⁵ by Evelyn Underhill. This lady embarks upon her story with a device which may easily bar lukewarm readers from an unusually interesting study of double consciousness. After an admirable sketch of a street Arab in a London hospital, the child dies, and you are asked not only to accompany his terrified spirit on a doleful trip through space, but to countenance its reincarnation as well. The pity is that by chapter three Miss Underhill has her method well in hand. The struggles of a half - conscious soul in comfortably bourgeois surroundings are treated with sympathy and undeniable imagination. Her style has crispness with an agreeably tart flavor, she is full of observation. My copy of The Grey World bears many marks at apt description of scene and character. The descriptions, moreover, are not merely external; even minor personages have been thoroughly realized. Although he appears only in business hours, I am quite sure that Evelyn Underhill knows how her old bookbinder spent his leisure, and that she could point out the restaurant where Mr. Hopkinson, senior, lunched in the city, and tell of what dishes that carefully chosen meal consisted. She also knows beyond doubt how either of them will feel towards the next change of ministry. Herbook, then, is not only readable, but gives rise to that intelligent form of gratitude which has been defined as a lively sense of favors to come.

By some unaccountable mental freak, the title Broke of Covenden²⁶ filled me with forebodings of a tale laid in some grim period preceding the Restoration. I looked for a repellent mixture of physical discomfort and fanaticism. It opens, on the contrary, at a late nineteenth-century breakfast table in an English hunting shire. From the first moment Mr. Snaith makes your attention his willing slave. You read with that rare vacillation which urges you to hurry forward for the story, and to linger for the detail. No one has done fuller justice to that class so perennially amazing to outsiders, the ugly, shabby, stupid, yet indomitably thoroughbred English sisters of one beautiful English brother. Mr. Snaith’s portrait of the six little Miss Brokes, “the chestnut fillies,” is as oddly charming as some quaint family group by Ramsey. They may be a little hard and stiff, but there is the same sense of race, of training, and of dim potentialities restrained by cumulative weight of tradition. How deftly he uses the six as chorus, never boring you to learn them apart, yet incidentally making sufficient impression to enable you to identify each one as her rôle demands it. The story contains a text, points a moral, but only as all tales must which face life and mirror it. While reading, you think neither of method nor conception, of what Mr. Snaith has done nor how he may be doing it. You are aware of nothing but a disinclination to lay down the book. It is not in the least original, but, for that matter, has originality ever been an essential to good fiction ? The essential trait which we often mistake for originality is spontaneousness, and with this Mr. Snaith is abundantly supplied. The whimsicalities of life, its pain and laughter, he sees personally and freshly, at times with an almost eighteenth-century freshness. These things may have been in the world a million eons or so, but never before have they struck the retina of this particular young Englishman.

After Broke of Covenden I chanced upon one more story highly encouraging to optimism. Chanced, because any mortal reviewer must feel prickings of reluctance in facing six hundred closely printed pages, a strange name, a title not without pretense, poor type, poor paper, and an absent-minded proofreader. On the other hand, there can be no more grateful mortal than the reviewer who unexpectedly finds dogged plodding changed to interested approval, finally merging in unqualified satisfaction. The Divine Fire²⁷ has an acceptable style, in all ways suited to the matter it embodies, a style with flexibility and humor, employing a large vocabulary, cultivated and agreeable. The story is not remarkably original, merely telling of a cockney poet with syncopated aitches and inordinate capacity for response to developing influences. The point is that our author has the light touch, the seeing eye. She succeeds beyond belief with her poet. She means him to be charming, aitches and all. You arc not only charmed, but ready to accept his poetic gift. You love him, you grieve for his errors. The affection with which he inspires his varied milieu is comprehensible. His perverse poetic sense of honor, his moments of folly, his impatience, are established beyond doubt or question. You see why the dreary boarding-house parlor (every boarder a clear vignette, no uncertain lines, no blurs) grew delightful with his presence, sordidly dull when he abandoned its inmates to their own dreariness. It is a really successful study of the temperament of genius, not the cheap wouldbe bohemianism of Mürger’s imitators, but the true quality, with its underlying austerity, force, and the occasional ruthlessness without which there can be no accomplishment. You feel the throbbing of Rickman’s nerves, you understand his equally untoward reticence and frankness. Although his figure dominates, all the characters are solid, you see the air behind them as they move in skillfully arranged perspective. The five contrasted women, the Junior Journalists, a world of shopmen, the scholar, old Rickman, the magazine men, all these crowd the canvas without confusing the composition. Such description as there is could hardly be better; it is always structural, never padding. Long after reading, scenes rise to your mind’s eye, clear and lovely, as if you had lately walked on Hampstead Heath, fingered Elzivirs in the dim, rich library of Court House, or stumbled through mists along the path up Muttersmoor. Miss Sinclair has but one drawback. The word is harsh; how can that be a drawback which only gives too many good pages to linger over ? As yet, she lacks that final touch of mastery by which a line condenses the whole result of ingenious mental processes. You accompany her through certain paths and byways, instead of leaving her the toil and meeting your guide where the path joins the road. Personally, I found the byways well worth while, since, though undeniably long, they were never dull, never led through ugly, common scenes; and these scenes are neither ugly nor common, simply because of the color of Miss Sinclair’s mind. She does not keep you to heaths or old country houses. You follow her through dirt, smells, fumes of whiskey and tobacco, through sorrow, disappointment, poverty, pettiness, and vice, but she is kind, human, without rancor. Above all, Miss Sinclair is perfectly unafraid. Where Mr. Hope fumbles a risky situation, she firmly grasps it with entire delicacy. Only later,ruminating upon The Divine Fire, you realize that she has stated one of the universal problems of youth. You cannot even be sure that she has meant to state it, that her version of L’ Éducation Sentimentale is conscious, that the turmoil of young blood in general at all concerns her. She may be solely moved by the case of one Savage Keith Rickman. That his physiological experiences should fit those of a whole class is, after all, only the key to prove her sum correct. Neither key nor calculation has to do with your excitement over the fate of Mr. Rickman of Rickman’s. Miss Sinclair probably paints even truer than she knows. That comes from an odd faculty called intuition, the faculty which distinguishes creative gift from clever observation.

To sum up, I can do no better than steal from Mr. Chesterton a quotation which in one respect exactly defines another quality that Miss Sinclair possesses, in addition to her keen and solacing sense of humor. Speaking of Jane Eyre, Mr. Chesterton says, “Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one’s breath. For it is not true to manners which are constantly false, or to facts which are almost always so; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible medium, the indestructible germ.” Not that Miss Sinclair, except in that one point, resembles Charlotte Brontë. Our young lady, so far from being morbid, has a very joyous tolerance of life. Intensity with her forms only a part. There is laughter, both kindly and malicious, and her observation of manners is that of a cultivated mondaine with eyes, not of a fanciful country woman evolving naïfs viveurs and fine ladies from the depths of a lonely parsonage.

Here then at last, in spite of rampant commercialism (one hears that money is also valued in England), the whole gamut of unfavorable conditions which might lead us to fear that the halcyon days of fiction have gone by, we suddenly come upon both promise and fulfillment. Here are pockets of that which in the past we did not hesitate to call genius, that curious and unexplained phenomenon which follows no rule. It neither increases nor decreases in ratio to population; it may thrive upon discouragement, or perish for lack of recognition. The critic can no more predict where it will flash out than a fisherman can tell in what quarter to look for ambergris. Your skiff may bump into it, almost in harbor, or you may vainly search the whole Pacific for an ounce. At the present hour, we have seen that whatever the cause, this irresponsible will-o’-the-wisp tends rather to alight across the sea than here. This cannot be due to our newness. Surely we are older than those Boston magnates who first commissioned W. W. Story to model a life-size statue of his father and then sent him abroad to learn sculpture. We have had time to ripen since the days when Mrs. Bancroft sadly discovered the inadequacy of her best high black silk to the demands of court, life in England. Yet that same unsophisticated society gave birth to the perfection of Hawthorne, also fostered the undisciplined genius of Mrs. Stoddard, forever kept from her rightful place by a deficient sense of form, but even so leaving three fragmentary books of priceless worth.

Whether it be that among us the most vigorous creative imagination now seeks outlet in commerce, and that such poetic gifts as Mr. Nikola Tesla’s are absorbed by “the fairy tales of science,” certain it is that in all our new fiction I have found nothing worthy to compare with The Divine Fire, nothing even remotely approaching the same class. We have, no one can dispute it,brains, education (of sorts), industry, observation, enterprise in opening up new territory to fiction. Can it be that,beside not happening to produce a genius, which is chance, we are also deficient in something like character ? That our literature is simply suffering from a distaste to leisurely contemplating, to quiet exploration in those long-traveled and never-illumined regions, the heart and soul of man ? While our restless, optimistic fiction is racing over the globe, digging mines,projecting deals, promoting railroads, ferreting out quaint localities, shadowing the divorce court, does it not perhaps merely need chastening at the hands of inquisitors, savages, or pirates, to grasp the futility of these external, peripatetic methods, and after all, wiser for experience to discover, with Candide, that “Cela est bien, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin ” ?