Recent Reelections of a Novel-Reader

ARE the publishers right in assuming that we need large numbers of ‘summer novels’ for summer reading? My own notion is that the hotter the day, the more gripping and vital is the tale required to divert our attention from ourselves, the heat, the mosquitoes, the irritating tendency of butter-balls to squashiness and of iced tea to tepidity. One needs the great novels and the breathless novels to lift one’s spirit across the pitfalls laid for it by heat and humidity. When the mercury is below zero and every breath an exhilaration, one can encounter gayly those gentle, pleasant tales commonly known as ‘summer novels.’ A young acquaintance defines these as ‘ books you can’t imagine a man reading from choice’; but this is perhaps too drastic. We all have our devitalized hours. However, as these stories take from our mental vigor rather than add to it, why not reserve them for the vigorous days and brace ourselves during the languorous season with the most thought-compelling fiction that the publishers’ tables afford ?

As dissent is exhilarating, I confess to detecting with delight a ‘tendency’ worth combating in certain of the season’s novels. It runs through a group of tales as widely various in setting, character, and style as The Declension of Henry D’Albiac,¹One Woman’s Life,²and Comrade Yetta ³ The one thing these volumes seem to say in common is that the Futurist Novel is knocking at our doors. They are all written under very modern influences, political, economic, sociological, and they break with the tradition of good novel-writing in that their preoccupation, consciously or not, is chiefly with types and symbols, instead of with breathing figures of flesh and blood.

For instance, in The Declension of Henry D’Albiac, the heroine is a militant English suffragette from the lower-middle class. A young French marquis, returning on foot from a dinner-party one moonlit night, chances to rescue her from the grip of a policeman even more militant than herself. Later, a formal introduction is brought about between them, and Henry D’Albiac finds the gay intelligence and comradeship of Flora Evans so much more fascinating than the great physical beauty and mental heaviness of the well-placed English girl to whom he is suitably affianced, that he ceases to love the latter and woos the former most abjectly — but in vain. The story is written with ease and with a certain dry incisive wit that enlivens it delightfully, but it fails as a whole for the very simple reason that the author did not say to herself, ‘I will create three characters, Henry D’Albiac, Patrice Beaufoy, and Flora Evans, who shall be as far asunder as the stars, yet tangled together in the net of circumstance, and I will show their mutual influences and reactions as vividly as though they were the only human relations in the world that matter.’ Instead, she said something like this: ‘I will “do” a fighting suffragette, a spoiled beauty and a French nobleman. The first shall win the last, hands down, from the second, and thus I shall prove conclusively what is in great need of proof — that sex-attraction will not be decreased but rather increased by granting the franchise to women!’ Parenthetically, this logic is purely feminine and quite indefensible.

The result of this method of approach is to vitiate the reality of the characters. Henry D’Albiac comes nearest being human because he is inconsistent, suggestible, and enthusiastic, but the wonderful Flora, who should be the strongest character, is quite thin and unconvincing. We fail to get that charm in her which, if felt, would at once take the book out of polemics and into life. I do not profess to state what the human quality is, nor how to get it as a literary effect. Each author must have his own definition and his own recipe, but it is as well demonstrated as the law of gravitation that the human quality is the one thing that cannot be omitted from a novel.

Milly Ridge, in One Woman’s Life, is a little more definite than Flora Evans, yet almost equally unsatisfactory. Robert Herrick is a seasoned and admirable novelist. For the sake of The Real World, which turned upon a very deep and genuine insight into the meaning and worth of moral struggle,

I always approach Mr. Herrick’s novels with respect and expectation. Here, I say to myself, is a book by a man who, once at least, saw to the ultimate core of things. How fortunate for him and for me if he has done it again! But in One Woman’s Life, no such luck! We go through it wondering why we do not really care what happens to Milly Ridge, only to learn the reason in the final pages. To the author she has not been Milly Ridge at all but merely the type. ‘She’s Woman — the old-fashioned kind—just Woman.’ She is the Parasite, in short, the Mollusc, ‘the little grafter’ — for it is thus that Mr. Herrick professes to see woman as the ages have made her.

Now the process of successful generalization necessarily moves from the individual to the abstraction. A very forceful presentation of a single Milly Ridge might drive us to generalize, ‘The Parasite must go ’; but the somewhat languid presentation of a Parasite does not drive us to say, ‘The Milly Ridges must go.' Personifications, one suspects, are usually pale argument.

Or perhaps it is only the masculine personification of a feminine type that is likely to be so? For in Virginia⁴ Miss Glasgow presents a picture of the Woman-Who-Was, vastly different from Mr. Herrick’s portrait. Virginia Pendleton is an extreme example of the saintly, self-sacrificing woman, a type once found everywhere but quite probably brought to its highest perfection, as Miss Glasgow believes, on Southern soil. While she is frankly presented as a type, however, the author has drawn her with such strong appreciation, combined with such a fury of conviction as to the disadvantages of this utter self-abnegation both for a woman’s family and for herself, that the selfless Virginia takes very real shape before our eyes; she refuses, in fact, to remain a type and steals softy into the domain of the definitely individual, — whereby she is temporarily removed from the present discussion.

Comrade Yetta, which opens strongly with a very individual little Jewish girl brought up in a second-hand bookshop on the East Side by a fine old father, promises at first to be vital and personal. But Mr. Edwards begins to lose power as soon as he begins to lose perspective, and the book trails away into ineffectiveness. One suspects the author may be more interested in the development of socialism and the work of the labor unions as an antidote to industrial evils, than in the development of the individual case he presents. At all events, he loses his grip upon his characters, and therefore upon his readers, just as he would do if this were the case. The novel divided against itself can never ‘arrive.' This is an axiom for modern novelists to consider.

The classic example in American fiction of a novel which effectively attacked an intrenched evil is, of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Read it again, you gentlemen who would use the novel as a vehicle to propagate economic and social theories! See how closely and forcefully it sticks to the argument of the individual instance; see how vivid and vital the individual is made, Can you hew characters, thus red and dripping, out of the life-stuff? Thus and not otherwise must your work be done, based on the one enduring foundation for a novelist’s achievement, if you, too, would move a nation!

Whether a writer seeks art or propaganda in his fiction-making, nothing can be clearer than this: the best method for art is also the only method for propaganda. It behooves you to be a better artist than your fellows, not less skillful and less creative, if you would command the convictions of your audience.

It may be that novelists yet-to-come will create types and symbols whom we will laugh and cry with, love and hate, whose histories we will buy as freely as we buy Shakespeare and Dickens; but current fiction has not yet proved this. Even the Creator of the Universe (in order to keep up his interest and ours in the story) found it advisable to make each one of us individual and human. The creative writer, too, makes a world, and so far, and so far only, as he can follow that vast example of putting personality into each created thing, his world also is good.

Other arts appear to be in the same case as literature in this matter. Consider the novels which attempt to deal with types, masses, abstractions, in their relation to the painting of the ful lire as it was prophesied in the International Exhibition last winter. Out of all that tumult of work, some of which was simplified to stupefaction while some was complicated to the same point, the canvases of one man emerged, clear and compelling. Whether you personally enjoy the painting of Odilon Redon or not, you must admit that he paints the thing as he sees, or imagines, it with a significance, concentration, and carryingpower beyond all words. He presents to your eye the portrait of a little red geranium in a clay pot, and does it so that you, regarding it, see there the soul of all the red geraniums that ever bloomed, caught and made visible for all time. To be able to see thus clearly and represent thus vividly is the supreme test of the artist. To have this vision is to be great, for — I devoutly believe it — it is to see for the moment that one thing as God himself must see it.

It is this vision that all creative talent, more or less blindly, seeks. That same International Exhibition presented instance after instance in which it was sought unsuccessfully or with half-success. Often, one could almost name the drug or stimulant under whose influence the search was impiously made! Certain painters other than Redon almost achieved that wonderful penetration — but not quite. At the critical instant the lines waver, the vision breaks and curls, and the spectator shudders and turns away with the feeling that he has seen a divine thing profaned. It is a more serious matter to fail in representing the soul of a thing than the body. And nothing is more obvious than the inadequacy of cocaine, absinthe, or alcohol as adjutants to that vision which is, perchance, reserved in its fullness for the pure in heart. Shall they not see Man as well as God?

Assuredly every novelist would do well to hang Redon’s little red geranium on the wall of his mind, questioning it daily until its secret becomes his own. Do not tell me that novelists have no time for such rites! In the sacred depths of its being, as Henry James somewhere says, all Art feeds upon example. Curiously enough, the painter’s art is almost better than the writer’s own as food for literature-about-to-be, so that one masterpiece of brushwork may help create an hundred masterpieces of the pen.

Believing with all one’s heart in this intense creative concentration upon the individual case as the novelwriter’s only method of .salvation, one must still admit that at least one novelist has just carried a different contention to a splendid conclusion. Of all the recent novels, Widecombe Fair,⁵ by Eden Philpotts, is easily the greatest. And it is really great. It is the last of the author’s cycle of Dartmoor novels, completing a twenty-year’s work which he asks his fellows to judge as a whole and as an attempt ‘to say “yea” to life even in its most difficult problems.’

In Widecombe Fair itself we have a whole vale of Dartmoor with all its manifold life, its thousand interests, set down before us. We learn its physical conformation as though our very feet had trod those ways; we see its lifting or lowering skies, its manors, farmsteads, inns, and mills, with all the intense and individual life of them. We go in and out of every household, and not one withholds its secrets from us. From our knowledge of the individual lives so masterfully and richly presented, there is distilled, as a kind of precious essence, our apprehension of the life of the community itself. Hardy never did anything on so large a scale as this, or with a truer touch, and it is better than Balzac, because it is sane and tender and our own.

In a noble and moving preface the author sets forth many things. Meeting the criticism often passed upon his work, that he makes his scenery as important as his people, he frankly admits that to him the phenomena of man’s environment are as interesting as man himself. If he chooses, therefore, to make a river a protagonist or depict a forest ‘ more portentous than the human beings who move within it’ none has the right to deny him. But going further than this, in a marvellously worded passage, he suggests that we have yet to learn ‘what is the veritable personal good and evil’ of the unconscious life that surrounds us, and that when it is learned we shall presently be able to formulate our discoveries in terms of art, a proceeding which would infinitely enlarge the field of the novelist and the sympathies of his readers. So wonderfully does he wield his words that we thrill with him to his vision of a cosmic art.

‘We may incarnate the seasons and set them moving, mighty and magicfingered, upon the face of the earth, to tell a story laden with unsleeping activities, mysterious negations and frustrations, battles and plots, tragedies and triumphs. Before such an immense spectacle, man’s exact significance in the warp and woof will be found to change; his thread becomes relegated to its fair place in the loom, and we discover mightier stories than his hugely outlined on the tapestries that hang between the stars.’

Notwithstanding this miracle of woven words, such art is still in the womb of Time. Widecombe Fair itself, great achievement as it is, deals not with seasons, suns, and systems, but chiefly with the little lives of little men, made warm, human, rich in detail and in interest. The perceptive reader is bound to feel immensely respectful and enthusiastic toward both Eden Philpotts’s theories and his practice, but is not bound to admit that the two can ever entirely coincide. Granting, even, that he has gone successfully beyond the individual life for matter of interest, still is his success based primarily upon his handling of that life. Success is always valid, but, in art at least, it proves few theories.

Mr. Snaith, who does not take the public into his confidence at all, and, apparently, has no theories, since, as yet, he has written no two books to which the same theory could possibly apply, has just published a novel which goes further toward carrying out Eden Philpotts’s ideas than that author’s own work has done. An Affair of State⁶ is, distinctly, a book in the transcendent manner. One sees in it the passing of a wonderful political pageant; one watches the movements of parties as the secret strings of statecraft are pulled; one observes a nation moving toward its fate. The story is based upon a very possible crisis in English politics. It is carried on almost entirely by conversation between the leading characters, so that each succeeding crisis is staged before the reader’s eyes and is as if it were projected upon a screen at some distance from him. The whole thing is set forth with great clarity and detachment, and with precisely that slight austerity and chill which we have just declared to be inevitable when the human interest is superseded by something larger. It will be a long while before we see a more finished specimen of a novel wholly in the grand style.

One might almost say that sexantagonism is one of thesummer modes in fiction. The Flirt,⁷ by Booth Tarkington, an unusually vivid and brilliant piece of work, recalling in its dash and vigor his early successes, is obviously based upon no broader-minded sentiment than the author’s hatred for the kind of girl he is painting. Cora Madison, as he draws her, is intensely alive and altogether diabolic — too much so, in fact, for perfect realism. The soil of Indiana is fertile, but hardly of a quality to produce that particular flower — the perturbing, restless, sensual, utterly heartless and unprincipled beauty. Marriage and a tincture of Slavonic or Latin blood usually go to the making of such products, which belong, essentially, to the boulevards rather than the prairie-capitals. We are not likely to find these luxuriant, unwholesome growths blossoming in old-fashioned Middle-Western gardens alongside such lily - maids as Cora Madison’s sister Laura. The latter is as much too good for human nature’s daily food as the former is too highly spiced for the same end, and thus both escape entire probability, though their power to interest is undeniable.

Chivalry is not the business of a novelist, but the square deal to all characters should be one of the rules of the game of artistic creation. The zest with which Tarkington pursues Cora Madison through the jungles of her undisciplined will, and the relentlessness with which Robert Herrick hunts down Milly Ridge on the open ground of her serene selfishness, are too biased to seem quite virile. How different, even, from the attitude of Thackeray toward Beatrix Esmond!

One must deplore the fact that in this new combat the men are the least scrupulous fighters. Comparing Mr. Tarkington and Mr. Herrick in their pursuit of their victims with Miss Glasgow as she hunts down Oliver Treadwell, the errant husband in Virginia, one observes that she punctiliously uses only honorable methods of warfare and gives the man the benefit of every possible excuse. What are we to make of this reversal of traditional attitudes ? What, indeed, are we to conclude about the whole matter? This intense sex-antagonism, at its lowest point approaching spitefulness, is a new attitude in literature. Born, doubtless, of the new attitude of women toward the world, what does it presage? Is romantic love and all its courtesies and ideals about to die out of fiction? The question, we surmise, is one that concerns the race somewhat closely.

At all events, the old-fashioned type of woman is not going to die out of fiction if Mr. Richard Pryce can help it! All old-school readers will bestow on him the Irish blessing, ‘More power to your elbow!’ for they believe that if Mr. Pryce could make that neglected lady popular again as a national ideal he would be doing more for the Race, the Future, the Child, the Family, — in short, all the abstractions we capitalize so lavishly nowadays, — than any other gentleman competing, be his sociological reputation what it may. He would qualify for a Nobel prize, if not a Carnegie pension, — at all events for the gratitude of humanity. But it is to be feared that he will not thus succeed.

Elementary Jane⁸ is a lonely little Londoner who makes a modest-wildflower success in the London musichalls. She is a modest wild-flower in fact and to the core of her soul. She is the Woman Constant. She loves — a little; she marries — the wrong man. Having married, she continues to love, and to love more. Mr. Pryce considers that change is not possible, neither shadow of turning, to this elementary type of woman, once she has been a wife. The sociologists who are harking back to the matriarchate as an excuse for all current feminine foibles, from militancy in politics to recreancy in marriage, would disagree with Mr. Pryce. They would tell you that good, simple little Jane, perfectly monogamous, perfectly adoring, is a freak and a sport, besides being a tame and spiritless person whose social value is debatable — as perhaps it is if decency, honor,and self-respect are also debatable values. It all depends on the point of view. Of course Jane’s little story is not a happy one, but one does not wish it so, for it is better to be Jane than to be happy.

The sub-title of Mr. Pryce’s novels might be Portraits of Good Women. Happily the theme is susceptible of many variations, and the author will never thrum on one string to monotony. Jezebel ,⁹ high-spirited, tempestuous, beautiful, cut from the same cloth as Di Vernon, gallantly fights Destiny, including her sponsors in baptism, for her goodness, but she never has to fight herself. Mary Redwing, in The Burden of a Woman¹⁰ fights her own true love for recognition of the fact that a woman who has gone astray may be a pure woman still. The author makes her the maternal spirit incarnate and sets her over against a technically pure specimen of very common clay. The contrast is finally convincing even to the hero.

Mr. Pryce does not moralize; he simply tells his story, always an adequate and interesting one, and tells it persuasively and well. But he never loses sight of the meaning of his own work, and that meaning is a brave one. Elementary Jane is, perhaps, bloodsister to Amelia Sedley; and Mary Redwing is related, not so much by her circumstances as by her quality, to some of the fine, calm, maternal women of George Eliot. But if the author is reproached with being mid-Victorian in the way he feels character, the obvious answer is that, as yet, no better way to feel it has been demonstrated.

Mr. Pryce is English and masculine; Miss Glasgow, American and feminine. The women in whom he most delights are of the type of her Virginia, whom she deplores. As he sees the problem, by selflessness the woman retains the love of God and of all men worth mentioning. As she sees it, by selflessness the woman is like to lose her husband’s love and her up-to-date daughters’ consideration, but her son she attaches to herself forever. It is a pretty quarrel as it stands, — but what man shall finally judge a woman if not he who is fruit of her body? By this test, whose finality Miss Glasgow is too sincere to evade and too truthful to deny, her deserted, piteous Virginia is still mater triumphans. Is there a better thing to be?

If certain novels by virtue of something in their attitude predispose us, as the foregoing have done, to reflection upon the problems of life, certain others plunge us as surely into reflection upon the problems of art. Consider, for instance, The Judgment-House of Sir Gilbert Parker. Here is a novel upon which it is not possible to pass any but a favorable judgment, yet it reminds one, somehow, of the young man in the Gospel story who had great possessions. It has almost all the points that a novel may have; clearcut characters, picturesque settings, exciting, not to say sensational, incidents, with great national events in the background; finely written passages, much elevation of feeling and a distinct ethical trend, the effort, that is, to present what Stevenson calls ‘God’s moral.’ With all this, why has one no greater enthusiasm for it?

One asks one’s self the same question about a very different book, the Fortitude-¹¹ of Hugh Walpole. The development of this young English writer is one of the most interesting things now going on in current literature. One is at liberty to infer that the process is likely to be as lengthy as it is interesting. His Prelude to Adventure was a work of pure imagination, concise, restrained, quite wonderful within the well-defined limits the writer set himself. Fortitude is an attempt at life, showing how a young man stripped of all that ordinarily makes for happiness, falls back upon the lasting joy of sheer courage. The book is inchoate here, too definite there; it sprawls somewhat, it is ill-digested, it weakens its aim by too much insistence upon it. Yet in all this it reflects faithfully enough the soul of youth which shows, as in a glass, these same phenomena. It is less of a performance than the earlier book, but even more of a promise. If there are things in it which the writer has heard from others, there are also some things which the gods themselves have whispered in his ear. Of the former, one suspects, is his central truth, ‘It is not life that matters, but the courage that you bring to it.’ This is vital fact, but, quite frankly, it is only those who have been crucified who dare write of crucifixion.

Imagination does not help one here. Of the things the writer himself knows beyond all peradventure are the words of the old writer to the young one: ‘ You are here for one thing and one thing only ... to listen. The whole duty of Art is listening for the voice of God.'

When two novels, each unusual and very different from the other, fail in arousing just that degree of emotion in the reader which the reader would gladly feel and almost thinks he ought to feel, then it is likely that there is something wrong in what Sir Gilbert deftly terms ‘ the power-house.’ In each case the thing that subtly lacks is poignancy, that pang which is art’s very soul. This last creative gift we only demand from those who are capable of it. That the author of Fortitude knows the secret, there is little doubt, while Sir Gilbert himself said somewhere recently that no book ever greatly moved many readers which was not the result of concentration, of protracted subconscious effort. The somewhat intangible complaint we have to make of both these admirable performances is that this subconscious effort was not, in either case, sufficiently profound, sufficiently protracted.

Of stories of excitement and adventure, the summer’s best were The Shadow,¹² The Woman in Black ¹³ The Scarlet Rider,¹⁴The Penalty,¹⁵The Amateur Gentleman,¹⁶The Right of the Strongest,¹⁷ and The Sixty-First Second.¹⁸Of these, The Scarlet Rider and The Amateur Gentleman are historical romances so-called. The history may be scant but the romance is heaped full measure. Both are high-spirited tales, uncomplicated with probability, that step as gayly into favor as a leaf dances in the wind. The Shadow deserves a paragraph to itself for it is one of those striking stories in which the psychology is as penetrating and accurate as the incident is exciting and varied. It deals with a man-hunt, lasting for years and leading around the globe, but the most startling thing it shows us is the effect of ‘sleuthing’ on the soul of the sleuth. What an obsession this becomes, stretching the man on the rack of his long suspense, shaping him utterly to his work until he responds to no other stimulus, Mr. Stringer shows in a manner ill-calculated to recruit the detective service.

The Sixty-First Second is one of Owen Johnson’s experiments with his own talent. If it were all as exciting as the first chapter, we should be breathless and panting at the end. The author of The Right of the Strongest is new to the work and has not yet complete mastery of her tools, but the book is full of force and an interest that goes deeper than mere incident. It. is real as well as exciting.

It is with regret that one pronounces The Penalty a very fair ‘shocker.’ It is sensational and nothing else, and one dislikes to surrender wholly to sensation the pen of Mr. Gouverneur Morris, to whom much is still possible. One fears sensation will ultimately assail his gayety, eat away his delicacy, and destroy his ‘touch.’ But what can one do about it ?

Those readers who require absolutely problem-proof fiction and are indifferent to adventure were also well-provided for last summer. To begin with, Mrs. Humphry Ward actually wrote a ‘summer-novel.’ The Mating of Lydia¹⁹ is a charming love-story, expertly told. It has ethical implications, to be sure, for that is the aspect under which Mrs. Ward sees life; but they are far from burdensome and the book moves lightly but firmly to an appropriate end. In The Heart of the Hills,²⁰one of Mr. Fox’s studies of mountaincharacter is mingled with an able exposition of Kentucky’s political complications, which are always difficult for the outsider to understand. Mr. Pratt’s Patients²¹ is one of Joseph C. Lincoln’s perennially amusing tales of Cape Cod. Pippin²² is a pleasant, vivacious English story with a much-diluted flavor of Dickens; and Mr. Hobby,²³ an equally pleasant, vivacious American story with a flavor of its own. The Life-Mask²⁴ recalls the romantic novels of the early seventies, Mary J. Holmes’s and Mrs. Southworth’s, to be exact, but its style is brought up to date. Bobbie, General Manager²⁵ is a quite delightful book for young girls, but are there any young girls left to read it, one wonders. The Wings of Pride²⁶ which is adapted to the same audience, is written with much freshness and enthusiasm. These adjectives also apply to Ever After²⁷ by Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, an optimistic study of early married life when the man is poor, Irish, and an artist, the woman, rich, New England, and ‘a leetle near.’ There is always a bright sanity and a breezy unexpectedness about this writer’s work, frankly produced for the domestic journals as it is, that carry it to a wider audience. In The Candid Adventurer²⁸ we have again the inter-play of Puritan upon artistic temperament when the bank-balance is heavily on the Puritan side. The stinginess of this graceful heroine, however, is emotional, not financial.

The Opening Door²⁹ and The Invaders³⁰ coquet, indeed, with problems, but not to a disturbing extent. Mr. Forman would prove that an ardent suffragist may work for her cause without upsetting the comfortable tenor of domestic life or alienating a perfectly good husband; while Mrs. Allen believes that the immigration problem, at least in the Connecticut Valley, will be well on its way to solution when the nice girls of old New England families marry the nice men among those invaders who own most of the still-fertile acres in that adorable locality.

E. F. Benson, who customarily avoids problems, presents in The Weaker Vessel³¹ an extraordinarily strong and searching study of the man who yields to the devil and the flesh. Whoever desires, without personal experiment, familiarity with the mechanism of surrendering to temptation, cannot do better than to consider the ways of the hero.

Lovers of the short story will find The Nest,³² Vanishing Points,³³The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon,³⁴ and Roast Beef Medium³⁵ a singularly varied and stimulating collection of tales. It is permitted novels to set forth biased and distorted views at times, but short stories are seldom successful among us unless they are crisply sane. Common-sense in tabloid form is very dear to the American reader. Roast Beef Medium and The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon are instances very much in point. Miss Ferber’s incidents in the life of a ‘lady-drummer’ are crammed with the cheerful, every-day reasonableness by which our nation chiefly lives. Most of Mrs. Bacon’s clever stories of jangled nerves and tottering brains proffer, delicately but clearly, the priceless lesson that healthy occupation, preferably housework, would empty half the sanatoriums. This is good doctrine, which might well be proclaimed more stridently.

Miss Brown’s stories are always based upon sublimated common-sense, and though the title Vanishing Points deliberately warns us t hat she has gone to the end of certain old horizons, the sensitive reader will find her work herein four-square to the Universe and in harmony with the kingdom of heaven. As compared to them Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s adorable tales may well be called worldly, for the ultimate authority to which they subtly refer is not the custom of the kingdom of heaven, but the custom of the nicest people. There is, even yet, some difference between the two. One always sees this finished writer as a slightly more melancholy Jane Austen with a wider world to depict. She is also slightly more merciless. The gentle Jane laughed gayly at feeble human nature, but Miss Sedgwick takes foibles with a certain gravity and deals justice with no frivolous hand. Her insight into the tortuous current of the feminine spirit is as wonderful as is her dexterity in expressing what she sees. In The Nest, the title story is most striking in this respect. Its penetration is so deep and keen that one wonders why women of the heroine’s type do not mob the author for giving away the secrets of their construction. Perhaps it is not quite fair, so long as men usually exhibit a more durable esprit de corps. Barring George Meredith’s Egoist, I do not at the moment recall any revelation of man by man so deft and merciless. The irony of that very delicious story The White Pagoda is more comfortable, inasmuch as the foible it derides is less serious. It is ridiculous, however, to cavil at any of the offerings of a talent capable of these two tales. There is nothing in the language with which to compare them save certain of those short stories which will always stand as the best achievement of Henry James. One wishes Miss Sedgwick might be persuaded to indulge oftener her talent for the conte. The only objection her readers will offer is a sigh at the thought that the number of her novels might thereby be diminished.

Do you believe in fairies? Maurice Hewlett does, and James Stephens, and Algernon Blackwood. If you question this assertion, read Lore of Proserpine ,³⁶The Crock of Gold,³⁷ and A Prisoner in Fairyland.³⁸ As no two of these competent writers believe in the same kind of fairies, you may take your choice unchallenged. Personally, I repudiate the fairies of Mr. Hewlett and all their works. In a clever preface he says he hopes nobody will ask him whether his incidents are true, for it will then be his humiliating duty to reply that, he does not know. ' They seem to be so to me waiting them; they seemed to be so when they occurred, and one of them occurred only two or three years ago. That sort, of answer satisfies me and it is the only one I can make. As I grow older, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish one kind of an appearance from another and to say, that is real, and again, that is illusion.... If a thing is not sensibly true, it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true, it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see substance, so to speak, in the idiom of the senses. That, I take it, is how the Greeks saw thunderstorms and other huge convulsions. . . . They saw natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual conflict or of spiritual calm, and within the appearance apprehended the truth. So it may be that I have done.’

This shows Mr. Hewlett in line with Eden Philpotts’s intention. It well may be that such Natural Facts as winds, trees, hills, flowers, brooks ‘have an underlying Idea or Soul whereby they really are what they appear,’ and that ‘these souls can be discerned by mortal men.’ Anyhow no canny critic would deny to an author such a working premise. However, the real point is this: can the author so write of these Indwelling Souls as to make them more interesting than the Natural Facts they represent ? One has yet to hear of a dryad half as attractive as a tree. Certainly Mr. Hewlett’s dryads are not so! But if the alleged soul of a thing has less beauty, delicacy, and significance than the thing itself, may we not safely doubt it to be the soul it is affirmed? These Hewlett fairies are remote and arid as so many fragments of tissuepaper, yet they are tainted with the things of sense, steeped in the bitter flavor of mortality. They will not pass the pragmatic test; they are not good to believe in.

The sub-human and super-human folk in The Crock of Gold are droll, unreasonable, utterly delicious creatures. After all, the Irish are the only people in the world witty and tender and inconsequent enough to own real fairies. Mr. Stephens’s book is a fantasy, but a striking exception to the rule that fantasies are usually dull. It does n’t matter what it means, or whether it means anything. It is like sunlight, ozone, and high spirits. You splash in it as in a summer sea. There is no book in the world in the least like it, and probably there will never be another, which is the best of reasons for making the acquaintance of this one before it is out of print.

Mr. Blackwood’s fairyland may seem at times ‘wumbled,’ to use his own word, but it is finally coherent. He has dreamed a ‘soft-shiny’ dream of the starry, radiant power of thought, working its own miracles in the subconscious realm, where all of us spend half our time. That his dream is at least half-true is one of the things this generation is learning rapidly; that ‘thinking things straight’ will ever take the place of reform legislation, organized charities, women’s clubs, the suffrage movement and all the rest of the tangible machinery by which we strive to put the world to rights, is highly improbable, but there will always be people who can use the thinking method more easily than the working method. Why not try both at once? Our ‘wumbled’ old earth needs all the re-creating we can give it. Pending further discoveries, it is not safe to dogmatize about the limits, in either direction, of those sub-conscious powers with which Mr. Blackwood plays so prettily, yet it is certainly not unsafe to ‘think starlight’ — if one can! Incidentally, and seriously, it is only a generation that has relaxed its hold on the meaning of prayer to which the basic idea of ‘God’s Fairyland’ would be novel.

It is a hopeful sign for to-morrow that to-day’s interest in the immaterial world takes such a wide sweep. Mr. Blackwood’s tale, with all its fantasy, is not so far removed as at first glance it seems from such forceful and serious books as The Inside of the Cup³⁹ and V.V.’s Eyes,⁴⁰ for he has tried to do for the soul by way of the fancy what their authors have tried to do for it by graver means.

Granted that you are a thoughtful man, it is impossible for you to go through this world without a theology as well as a religion. Whatever else life withholds from you, it gives you these. Generally you find, in the long run, that your personal experience enables you to see what St. Paul meant; more fortunately, what Christ meant; and you see that the thing they meant — which may not be at all what the Church has been teaching as their meaning — coincides with the uttermost truth you yourself are able to grasp. Thus, for you also, dogma becomes alive. What Winston Churchill has done for the readers of The Inside of the Cup is to give them his own theology as he has hewed it out of life. The greater part of it is your theology and mine. There are some points as to which we differ from him, but we may be reasonably sure that twenty or thirty years hence he will agree with us. For life treats all the open-minded very much alike. We who are no longer young agree with him that there will be no socialistic society until all men are vitally Christian, and that, when this comes to pass, any form of society will be quite good enough; we disagree with him when other utterances seem to contradict this lucid attitude and when he says that the individual is the unit of human society. The individual is the unit of the Kingdom of Heaven, assuredly, but on earth that unit necessarily will remain the family until such day as in very truth ‘the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’

Mr. Churchill believes that the hypocritical over-rich, such characters as his Eldon Parr, are the Church’s great drawback to-day, and that if the clergy dealt with them as faithfully and vigorously as they should, most of the problems of the Church would be solved. One fears the matter is not quite so simple as this, but we would be glad to see the remedy tested.

What Winston Churchill has tried to do for the soul by way of the intelligence in The Inside of the Cup, Henry Sydnor Harrison has tried to do for the soul by way of the emotions in V.V.’s Eyes. The two methods are as old as Christianity and should go hand in hand. Mr. Harrison’s book is, simply, the story of a very Christ-like life lived in the person of a self-effacing city doctor. It makes vivid the creative influence of such a personality upon the souls of others, actually bringing them to life, as such men do, in remote and unexpected ways. Mr. Churchill attempted the same creation in the character of Mr. Bentley, but as his constructive interest was greater in the intellectual part of his work, Mr. Bentley lacks the great appeal of V. Vivian. The book is beautifully done. One yields one’s self to its intention, its execution (after those first few chapters which always seem hard for Mr. Harrison!), its emotional sweep —and yet, fine as it is, and inspiring, I confess that I turned away from Queed with a greater, more vital desire to make life happy for my fellows. — My dear Mr. Harrison, can you, from your inside knowledge of these two books of yours, both of them so conscientious and worth while, explain this effect upon a reader who followed you willingly, surrendering himself in each instance to your spell? One confesses a desire to understand why the more powerful book affects one least, and if one, then others, of your audience.

New Leaf Mills⁴¹ which in its objectivity and reticence is at the other pole in many ways from Mr. Churchill’s book and Mr. Harrison’s, is like them in this — it, too, has a very pertinent lesson for the twentieth-century spirit. Not obviously didactic, as they are, it subtly unfolds its intent. It is a book of the greatest limpidity and delicacy, something a part from the obstreperous current of our fiction. In it Mr. Howells brings old memories to light, of early days when parts of Ohio were still almost pioneer communities with a flavor at least of pioneer hardships and virtues. Against such a background he draws tenderly, with exquisite, fine touches, the character of a man of those days who might, as well, be a man of t he present hour. He was so courageous that he never believed in danger, so serene that no ill-fortune daunted him. He unconsciously shed disaster by denying it, as so many in our own day are consciously fain to shed it. This was a man of large, benevolent intention, one who ‘had inextinguishable faith in mankind as a race merely needing good treatment, to become everything that its friends could wish.’ He plans, as such temperaments are prone to do, a communistic experiment which never flowers into actuality, but comforts him with its imagined imminence, almost as natural beauty comforts him. With the lapse of years he accepts the imperfect conditions of human life, realizing that they are as the upward-striving of ages has made them, and serves men as best he can, beginning always with those of his own household. He ceases to demand a new form of society, but never relinquishes the belief that a higher type of civilization would eventuate, could all men hold a different conception of the State. In other words, he works without violence and without folly, as each man may in his own place, for the coming of a fairer day.

Put forth without accent or emphasis, this little book, to which one somehow is fain to apply the intimate adjectives gentle and loving, is not only a tribute to a type of character whose beauty becomes clearer with our increasing perception of men’s limitations, but it is also the sunset-comment of one long-lived, and kind, and wise, upon the social ferment of these latter days. Each generation as it swiftly passes is prone to think itself the first that has travailed quite so earnestly to bring forth peace and righteousness for all men. This book holds a reminder that in our hopes and struggles,

We but return upon our steps although they seem so free;

The thing that has been is that which shall be.

To whatever is paralyzing in this thought, we have Mr. Howells’s own antistrophe: —

Dark Prophet, yes! But still somehow the round Is spiral, and the race’s feet have found The paths rise under them which they have trod. Your facts are facts, yet somewhere there is God,