Sentimentalist, Satirist, and Realist: Notes on Some Recent Fiction

NOTES ON SOME RECENT FICTION

BY WILSON FOLLETT

I

IN English, where fiction has won splendor through distinguished particular excesses more than through the perfect balance and matching of all qualities, the novel has naturally been much subject to headaches and heartaches; so that he who would shortly and straightly tell any episode of its general history must speak in terms of a prolonged duel between the man of reflection and the man of feeling, between Fielding and Richardson and their descendants to the nearest yesterday. The novel has grown, as Dean Briggs says colts and young boys do, ‘one end at a time,’ and its major prophets are those who have obviously thought more than they felt or felt more than they thought. There is of course no intention here of blaming Richardson and Fielding for all that strews the cluttered modern field, however prototypical they seem of much of it. But there is no escaping the sense of what they broadly represent — the general contest between feeling and thinking, the everlasting tug-of-war between temperaments that in each generation pulls at fiction and stretches it more or less out of shape, giving it here a decided bulge toward the emotional, there an opposite bulge toward the intellectual, as sentimentalism or satire predominates.

Give, provisionally, these two words ‘ satire ’ and ‘ sentimentalism ’ whatever large lax meaning they can strain to. Let them stand for criticism and sensibility, the will to analysis and the will to sympathy, the general influence of Fielding and that of Richardson, or — more broadly still — the ascendancy of the intellect and the ascendancy of the emotions. Is this to call things too wildly out of their names? The warrant lies in a cluster of simple facts. We remember and identify Fielding by what he disliked, Richardson by what he enjoyed. Dislike is more intellectual than enjoyment, because it implies categories, discriminations. You may love, as Richardson did, with no argument beyond the intensely personal one of a quick and quivering, perhaps a neurotic, sympathy; but you may not hate without some show of impersonal reason. Thus Fielding, the satirist who fights, is more intellectual than Richardson, the sentimentalist who basks. And from Fielding on, the intellectualist in fiction is a person whom we measure first by his aversions, the things he makes war on. He chooses his side of some issue and defends it by intellectual assault and battery on the other side; and this is, roughly, the excuse for naming him satirist. The propagandist side of Dickens, the Victorian ‘ novel of protest,’ the late Samuel Butler, and the muck-raking fiction of a decade ago make straight the dotted line of his ancestry.

But there comes then a perceptible bend in the line. Sentimentalism and satire converge and cross, and the line of satire points straight to the new realism, which is both and neither, which seems as sympathetic as the one and is at bottom far more analytical than the other. The novel used to be intellectual about in proportion as it was polemical: it thought and fought, or it felt and waxed irresponsible. The modern realistic spirit makes it at once less polemical and more intellectual. The new sympathy is more analytical than the old satire, besides being far more inclusive than the old sympathy. This, the triumph and diffusion of the realistic spirit, is the great change which has lately come over the disposition of the novel — a change, now all but decisively accomplished, which waits for the logic of criticism to give it somehow a shape and a name.

In a way this unwritten and unfinished chapter is the most logical of the whole history of our fiction, because it involves a pact of peace after a long feud. The realist— let us try still to see him as the spirit of his time, peering if we can through the dust raised by lesser conflicts of fashions and personalities — the realist is the legitimate child of satirist and sentimentalist. He thinks with his sensibilities, feels with his intellect; criticism and enjoyment fuse. Sentimentalism dealt with the egocentric life, the seemings of things; satire with the ethical life, the possibilities of things. Our realist records the possibilities and the seemings. But he identifies himself with neither; for he sees them as incidental to the more probing question of what life is — even though he can provide only a fuller documentation, not an answer.

The emergence of the realist is first of all, then, the triumph of impersonality. The sentimentalist chooses his characters by the strength of his own predilections for them. Exactly so the satirist chose his ideas; and he was the better thinker principally by virtue of having them at all. But the realist either has no philosophical predilections, or else has them only to deny them as consistently as he can. Both sentimentalism and satire are very comfortable postures in an orthodox universe, governed by law and dedicated to ultimate order. The sentimentalist knows that everything is already settled and that he has but to enjoy; the satirist knows just how everything is settled, and, understanding the law, can do no less than lay it down. But either attitude seems childish when the decay of faith turns the universe into a stupefying enigma, its truths into appearances, its fixed laws into mere truisms about animal behavior. The intellectual man then is he who senses the relative, provisional, and impermanent status of all that is thought or known. Our realist escapes all prejudices by respecting all opinions, and rejecting all. He has the open, inquiring mind, the steeled heart. He believes in everything as a phenomenon, and in nothing as a meaning; his mind is a sensitized plate for all that is actual, for every experience, thought, memory, impression, or dream. He receives these into himself precisely that he may be outside them. For all his unremitting effort is to get outside the world, outside himself; to see everything from the outside, whence only, he tells himself, it is possible to see through everything.

So much for his impersonality, or universal tolerance in the realm of ideas. More important still is its corollary, the very crown of the realist’s separateness, his universal tolerance of people and of things. The argument will have gone as far as it dare go without illustration, when it adds that this modern spirit strangely fulfills the commandment to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. The reason is not so much moral as intellectual; but the result is largely the same. Why blame things for being what they are, when everything is simply what it can’t help being? ‘To understand is to forgive.’ Although the universal forgiveness of the realist is pure scientific impersonality, it is not to be confused with pure indifference. Mr. Galsworthy expresses the modern spirit, in a brave if slightly discouraged essay, The Inn of Tranquillity, when he says that it is wrong for one of us to despise another because ‘we are all little bits of continuity.’ ‘To despise one another is to deny continuity; and to deny continuity is to deny Eternity.’

So, because we feel that only the sum-total matters, and because each thing has its inevitable place, we make the best of each separate thing. We breathe beneficence. Satire was criticism with a bias; realism is criticism without a bias. It is as though the realist had concluded, with St. Paul, that charity really is greater than faith and hope: hopeless agnostic, he practises none the less the charity that suffers long and is kind. By this measure, his freedom from the old prides and hates, he is the first democrat, the first Christian. And he is an intellectual majority. So little faith remains in any fixed standard that there are no intelligible reasons left for hating anything; and, in fiction at least, there is hardly a good hater living. The only thing left to protest against is protest itself.

So at least one may generalize a spirit so pervasive that it gets itself served, however little it may have to do with any one writer’s reasons for taking up his pen. There are crosscurrents of exception in the stream — but it is easy enough to tell which way the stream is flowing. Of sixty novels on this desk representing the cisatlantic fiction of a half-year, but two are in purpose strikingly polemical. The Abyss,¹ first volume of a trilogy of the underworld, constitutes a passionate indictment of our punitive system, which is represented with a great deal of crude power, and all in the ‘hysterical ’ present tense, as making criminals instead of reforming them. The BottleFillers,² a rousing story of sailors afloat and ashore, makes its chief claim through a bill of particulars filed against an iniquitous system that wrecks ships and men—‘the stupid load-line and stupider deckload which we tamely adopted at the bidding of our competitors,’ and the virtual trial of seamen by assessors who know little or nothing of the sea. Told by an author who seems to say, ‘ I am only a plain blunt sailor, but as well as another I know who are my friends,’ the tale is in itself a moving one. In both these is the spirit of Dickens, trying by spurts of high indignation to put the world to rights one corner at a time. The indignation is really high, the spirit a fine one. And each time we applaud — but only an anachronism, the challenge of an undismayed fighter leveling a broken lance.

II

If impersonality is not in the modern air, how explain the gradual infection of the literature which has always been, and ought always to be, most innocent of ideas?

There is, first, the ‘unofficial sentimentalism, which, like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of’ (Mr. Conrad’s label); well, perhaps it is not surprising that we should find reflection gnawing at — the pen had said ‘ its vitals,’ if these were n’t precisely what it lacks. No, not very surprising — for what has the popular sentimentalism always done but utter platitudes with gasps of ecstasy, as though they were oracles? Even Mr. Basil King, always one of the most readable practitioners of the sentimental cultus, thinks it desirable, in The Side of the Angels,³ to formulate a doctrine of modern poverty and its cure; also an intensely ethico-metaphysical interpretation of love, a sort of cardiac galvanometer of definition. One does not mind these paraphernalia in themselves: but why pretend that they have anything to do with the squabble between the quixotic brother and the hot-tempered, the rent between two generations of a family, the patient forlornness of a wife married out of duty, the dispossession of a business man by his nimble-witted partner — in fine, the story?

From The Side of the Angels (quite the highest altitude reached by sentimentalism in the first half of 1916) one descends through the flats of such stories as Mr. and Mrs. Pierce,⁴ in which the conjugal misunderstandings are palpably trumped-up and the personæ too immature for interest, down to nameless abysses where one bathes in glutinous rivers of emotionalism. In the bare existence of these different levels, sentimentalism betrays its permanent artistic dilemma. At the bottom, where it is without ideas, it merely drones old formulæ of lost meaning or none; at the top, it is constantly tortured by ideas which, if assimilated, would turn it into something else.

But other and more honest impulses in the literature of escape — love of mystery, zest of hot physical struggle, delight in pure farce, the invincible ‘will to romance’ itself — why should these types of innocence be so often corrupted, unless we are all growing responsible together ? The romancer at least should stick to his trade, as all critics agree: we shall need him until no man is a boy and no woman a girl.

Sometimes, of course, he does stick to his trade, and then we sit up late. Nan of Music Mountain⁵ is girl-andgun romance in its purest distillate, though a slight thing after Whispering Smith. The Grasp of the Sultan,⁶ a tale of love across the barriers of a Turkish harem, is sophisticated only in its local color, which is painted on so thick that in some places it scales. And The Shepherd of the North⁷ is a vigorous story told with a proper regard for the conventions of romance; even for that unwritten convention that the hero among a religious folk shall eventually embrace the faith of the majority. Mr. Maher, by strict avoidance of the fulsome-sentimental, brings off the conversion without prejudice to the man and the maid, the Adirondack forest fire, or the exciting war between farming community and land-grabbing railroad. If any reader doubts the difficulty of this achievement, let him read Behold the Woman!⁸ the story of an’ Alexandrian courtesan of the fourth century, her career and her conversion; a thing as ugly as a bill-board, and rendered so expressly by fulsomeness.

‘ Eldritch nocturnal flowers [of rhetoric?] distilled and saturated the atmosphere with inebriating essences,’ a passage typical of the style, were better written of the book than of a night in Alexandria. As for the woman, one tries in vain to behold her. The style gesticulates, makes evocative passes; but she declines to ‘materialize.’

The first three books named in this group are honest old-fashioned romances. The test is their power to make us thrill even in that realm of convention where, we know well, no evil can befall a good man.

But consider what Gertrude Atherton has done in Mrs. Balfame⁹ Here is a detective story with so many subjects that it has, properly speaking, no subject. It never makes up its mind whether it wants to be an analytical study of a wife who has meant murder but done none, or the love-story of a man who gradually survives his infatuation for the accused woman, or a detective story with the maximum of ‘spinal shiver.’ Not even the author’s skill in minutiæ can contrive a harmony out of this jangle. Eventually the detective story thunders down all competition. But, mark, the key-note of the detective story is sounded only as an afterthought: the solution occurs in the ante-mortem statement of a supernumerary character who has barely been presented at all! The outcome is simply not among the possibilities of the interesting case. — We speak of course of the economy of fiction only. — And, mark again, it is the detective story that we are finally asked to take hold of by this quaint handle of feminine logic: Men, not women, made murder unlawful; but men, who are now engaged in murdering each other by thousands daily, are ‘a complete and pitiful failure’; therefore I, a woman and not a man, did well to murder my friend’s unlovely husband. Accommodating friend! This is a sample of the havoc made by an ill-digested impersonal idea in a highly specialized misapplication.

Those About Trench,¹⁰ a first novel, is almost as skillful in detail and even more scattering in emphasis. It starts every kind of hare known to fiction, and catches a few of them, but by unrecognized and unsportsmanlike methods. It does at last snare in the moment of its quasi-conversion a modern rationalistic and skeptical soul, —

‘ poor discarded name for something,’ — but only after having deserted it through many chapters for other and more sensational quarry.

Mr. Jack London is another distinguished author who can evidently write beneath his privilege. In The Sea-Wolf and The Call of the Wild he welded his material into shapes of austere beauty. The Little Lady of the Big House¹¹ reproduces merely the facund — nay, glib — erotomania of three persons who ‘ fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism,’ and whose very continence is a mere voluptuous refinement upon desire. In-growing concupiscence, if a subject for the novel at all, ought at least not to masquerade as tragic passion. Is this perverted gusto the halfsurrender of one more artist to the baser demands of his market? Or only the resort of a thinker too sophisticated for the old naive and cleansing intensities, too undisciplined for the new impersonal meanings of things?

III

Critic or casual reader, one turns with relief from fiction where general ideas are interlopers, and where the struggle between them and the story is often droll, sometimes pathetic, and always a waste of good energy. Perhaps the war has something to do with the incontestably low average of this year’s literature of innocence. The romancer’s irresponsible creativeness, once a gift from the skies, seems more and more, after two years of the shedding of human blood, a pose of stupid insensibility. And so perhaps it seems to the romancer himself. At all events, explain them how we may, there are the results, —

It is at the other end of the bookshelf, where the ‘emotion of surprise’ gives way to that off ’recognition,’ — in other words, where the realistic spirit consorts with realistic material and method, — that we find the more direct service, both of our momentary logic and of appreciation in general.

Because the substance of current realism has the sociological slant more often than any other, it is to the sociological element, that we turn for sanction of our main thesis. And sanction is there. Wherever the novelist follows conflicts of society and class, of class and individual, of individualism and convention, wherever his general spectacle is political or industrial, he leads us straight back to our text, the pervasive and self-forgetful charity in which, at its best, the modern spirit expresses itself. The novel has begun to ask the questions it lately undertook to answer by fiat. In short, it is most non-committal in precisely those directions where, a few years since, it was most violently propagandist.

For example: A decade ago the wicked financier could find hardly any one to love him — hardly any one, that is, behind a pen. The reaction crystallizes in a short novel by ‘G. A. Birmingham.’ In Gossamer,¹² a story of the war, the capitalist forswears his personal loyalty to the land of his birth, because only so can he go on spinning the web of credit which covers the whole civilized globe, and on which, in the author’s view, civilization itself depends. And Mr. Meredith Nicholson, in a slight but charming story, The Proof of the Pudding,¹³ takes a fortune away from his heroine and then, when she has learned to prefer being without it, unsentimentally forces it back upon her. So she has her cake — the sweet American cake of self-dependence — and dutifully eats it too. This outcome is an expression of the duty not to be poor, Samuel Butler’s doctrine of forty years ago. Could n’t some one write a jolly little satire in which a great fortune goes about looking for a claimant, and being refused by one person after another, just because of the universal abhorrence of unearned capital? Or is that abhorrence already too far gone for telling ridicule?

It has remained for Miss Alice Brown — whose nicely modulated accent, by the way, is anything but that of ridicule — to voice in one fine story all the most urgent impulses of the modern expansiveness. Jeffrey Blake, the pivotal character of The Prisoner,¹⁴ is a young embezzler who, on being pardoned out of the Federal prison, resumes his broken life in the small provincial city of Addington, and, by patience and unfailing sense, finds himself once more on terms with life, even with love — a man irrevocably scarred, but also strengthened. He learns to sustain himself with a philosophy of fortitude. ‘As he saw life then his judgments softened and his irritations cooled. . . . He must, he knew, hereafter see things as they are. And they would not be tragic to him. They would be curious and funny and dear: for they all wore the mantle of life.’

It is difficult to remember at just what point one’s recognition leaps out to accept Jeffrey Blake as any man of enough imagination to see that there are prison-bars for the soul, too. Certainly that point is many pages before Miss Brown draws the analogy in deliberate words. Blake’s durance is only an image, its conditions so heightened and stressed as to make it crucially representative, of the common human servitudes — to cant, prejudice, fear, ‘untended impulse,’ ‘the sorcery of nature.’ His second liberation, that of the spirit, is alone important. And he achieves it through the old, old paradox of self-fulfillment through self-abnegation, freedom through obedience to the law. This, seemingly the author’s ultimate principle of conduct, is stated squarely again and again. Blake ‘meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible paradox of binding himself to the law.’ Tempted to pluck his happiness before it is ripe, he feels the inhibition of a code men have made together, and cannot break that larger tryst: ‘To kiss a woman’s lips was a madness or a splendor that passed. He knew there might be, almost incredibly, another undying passion that did last, made up of endurance and loyalty and the free rough fellowship between men.’

This same general idea, of law as the only liberation, governs Miss Brown’s sociology — for The Prisoner is a soundly local and contemporary book, and Addington a very real, very complete city. Blake’s first task is to fight a demagogue who has flattered and inflamed the laboring population of aliens and taught them to ‘riot over the rights no man on earth could have unless men are going to fight out the old brute battle for bare supremacy.’ ‘We’ve got to teach ’em to be citizens,’ says Blake. ‘They’ve got to take the country on our plan, and be one of us.’ Not, he explains, because safety and the placid virtues are everything, — Blake is no timid reactionary, — for the one stable thing in a world of flux is the one hardest thing, the pact of law. One must be inside that, Spartan as it is, or one is outside everything.

The fine artist that Miss Brown has been from the first never before gave us anything comparable, for abundance, to The Prisoner. The author will be said, in a pampered phrase, to have ‘come into her own.’ Well, an artist’s own is what he takes, no more, — and to be surprised and gladdened by the really wonderful amount of growing Miss Brown has secretly contrived to do is a prettier compliment than to say, ‘We knew it all along!’ After which tribute, perhaps a humble but not servile admirer may be pardoned for wondering why there is so much in The Prisoner about a certain rather silly necklace (paste, after all!), and whether the author who makes so much of a purely factitious element is showing quite the proper confidence in the reader’s discrimination — or in her own best. Not every novelist can take Henry James’s philosophy of renunciation through the refined and quickened sensibilities and make it so simply pocketable; and the novelist who can has no need of a merely specious artifice of plot.

The only other American novel of anything like the same power and finish is The Shadow Riders,¹⁵ a great panoramic study of contemporary civilization where its development is most rapid and bewildering — that is, in the Canadian Northwest. In this full yet uncrowded reproduction of an industrial, political, and social epoch, Mrs. Isabel Paterson has made one of the finest cisatlantic novels of recent years.

To begin with, two considerable sources of interest, the regional and the historical, are inherent in the subject. The setting is provincial, remote, and hitherto unexploited; and it is changing so rapidly as to compress within a few years all the phenomena of a fairly intricate modern community. Land multiplies its value, politicians rise to eminence and fall to obscurity, elections are won and lost, parties reorganize, social cliques form, newspapers make and unmake reputations and are themselves made and unmade, franchises are schemed for, quarrels fought out and shoved aside, Reciprocity becomes first a momentous and then a dead issue; and presently the war comes to swallow up a thousand such matters in the feeling of a common disaster, the need of a common loyalty — all within the term of a single human love! The people remain the same people, little gray in their hair or none: yet how the world has gone on! It is an impressive and absorbing exhibition of ‘blind force acting necessarily’ in a multitude of human lives.

Yet blind force is not the chief propulsive agent of the story, nor is the multitude its hero. The Shadow Riders owes half its distinction to its grasp of these; but it owes the rest to its author’s skill in making them contribute to the compact drama of four lives, each of considerable character, and to the author’s own admirable philosophy and wit. Channing Herrick goes to the scene of the story — Calgary, perhaps?

— for his health; but he remains to give himself whole-heartedly and cleanly to the public life of the New West. In his comradeship with Lesley Johns

— a comfortably unsentimental relation which he does not know for love until the war has claimed him — two fine personalities open to each other. Mrs. Paterson obviously intends this girl as the very best and bravest the New World can show in womanhood; and few will find fault with her ideal. Chan’s uncle Ross Whittemore and his young wife are the other chief personæ. Drawn at full length in firm, deft lines, all four live with us far beyond page the last — and is not this the supreme magic?

The spirit of the book is impersonal, balanced, mildly and mellowly ironic, never censorious. Piercing vision, a voice of sympathy, and rigid self-command — these are the author’s equipment. She says at the outset, ‘There is an old proverb that one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. It is doubtless a true saying; I only wonder what one does with the flies after having caught them.’ There is no honey in Mrs. Paterson’s bait. Neither is there any vinegar. But there will never be any difficulty about the flies!

IV

What The Prisoner and The Shadow Riders are to other recent novels by American authors, that and more The Accolade¹⁶ is to the very recent British fiction published in this country. It is difficult to measure the superiority of these three stories to all others of their season, nor shall it be attempted here. The Accolade gives us Miss Ethel Sidgwick at her very best; and the season that can furnish tired readers and reviewers with even one such book as this latest of hers, is already forgiven its trespasses. If this is fulsome, the fault is chargeable to Miss Sidgwick, who has so rewarded us for being difficult to satisfy elsewhere.

The Accolade and Clipped Wings¹⁷ introduce us to the most interestingly focused and coherent group in the season’s fiction, its cluster of stories dealing with various aspects of the artistic life. Both are searching and persuasive records of histrionic genius in exactly the circumstances that render it most accessible to the probe — that is, the circumstances that thwart its natural and public use and turn it into a solitary obsession.

In this volume of her Ingestre trilogy (by the way, some one should write an article about the recrudescence of the trilogy) Miss Sidgwick shows us a country house and a family such as Mr. Galsworthy portrays; only Miss Sidgwick’s portrayal is sprightly where Mr. Galsworthy’s is ironic and melancholy. The son and heir, John Ingestre junior, is born exceptional. At eighteen he refuses Oxford for the stage. His mother accomplishes, by falling ill, everything that his father’s threats have failed of. He comes home, consummates the surrender by marrying himself off to an eligible, rather colorless girl, and settles down to manage his estates — an exceedingly ornamental young man, whimsical, mocking, urbane, informal to the last degree, something short of eccentric; pliable enough to a certain point, but beyond that stiffened as by more than a touch of chilled steel in his moral composition. We feel from the first his capacity for tragic life. For a time the most real part of his life is his unfulfilled dream of art — and that is tragic.

Suddenly its place in his imaginative history is taken by a girl, Helena Falkland. An aspirant for the honors of the stage, she lacks the essential gift; but the stifled actress in her pours itself out upon Ingestre in pure radiance of womanhood. — Only three or four among the living can create such women. — She and Ingestre all but lose their heads; but his mother checks him once more, this time by dying, and a kind of exalted sportsmanship restores him to his lifelong practice of making the best of things. If one were to praise him for self-sacrifice, ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ would be his ready and contemptuous answer: yet it is quite clear that he has twice martyred himself, and not winced, simply through playing the benevolent despot in the lives of his friends. His arrangements for them devastate, as it turns out, his own heart — but he is much too preoccupied in their behalf to think of that until afterward. Only to Henry James — from whom, next to Thackeray, Miss Sidgwick seems to have learned most — could one look for a piece of self-immolation at once so beautiful and so credible.

Sheila Kemble, the heroine of Clipped Wings, is a successful young actress who leaves the stage soon after her marriage to a conventional and somewhat obtuse young man who has saved her life. With all the will in the world to make the best of her bargain, she begins to droop. Nor can anything bring her back to mental and bodily health until her husband bows his head under the bludgeon of the truth about her, and gives her back to the stage. She makes her reappearance in a tremendously great play written by a dying man who had loved her without hope; and the conclusion is, as fitness dictates, triumphant. Sheila is a valuable exhibit in the trial of the artistic conscience and its workings. Her story is written, to be sure, in a flippant style, to Miss Sidgwick’s as the syncopation of Mr. Berlin is to that of Beethoven; and there is a little arrant sentimentality, as in the symbolism of the birchtree that would not live when transplanted from its native hill. Also the book is largely without high spiritual values: one feels that the specialized histrionic impulse is its centre, rather than the human imagination and mind and will. But Sheila herself is true and fine. And Mr. Hughes has given good measure of useful and exhilarating talk about the stage and ‘the profession.’

The year’s novels about novelists, and artistic creators generally, are thin and feeble beside these two stories of the actor manqué. Mr. E. F. Benson, in The Oakleyites,¹⁸ makes room for interesting literary chit-chat, including an apologia for the novelist who has superficial skill and nothing much by way of message. What story there is gets its wires crossed: its beginning is local color, its middle farce, its end pathos, and there is nothing to make the three ‘jell.’ In Twilight¹⁹ the late ‘Frank Danby’ makes a woman novelist, ill and under the influence of drugs, evolve the story of another woman novelist and her lover — a performance very much in the vein of Marie Corelli. Willard Huntington Wright affects, in The Man of Promise,²⁰ the gloomy and brutal naturalism which we have learned of late to associate with Mr. Dreiser. It must be an affectation, else The Man of Promise would be a better book, more logical, more certain of what it means and wants. Mr. Wright is one of those thinkers who seem to believe that slavery to the sexinstinct is transformed into glorious freedom as soon as one calls it by a lot of fine names. In John Bogardus²¹ the creative instinct is a trifling part of the subject, a mere convenience to the narrative; though there is some admirable fine fooling in caricature of the modern American College. Even the more readable of these illustrate a certain kind of inadequacy, the failure to correlate the story with the artist as an artist, however sufficient he may be as a person. We find the same fault with The Amateur.²²

The Whirligig of Time²³ betrays a slightly different weakness: after a wise and witty prelude for introduction of two brothers and their different educations, and after a truly plausible account of the making of a playwright, the story abandons its real theme, the relation of the brothers, and becomes a long digressive loop of love story. And even so fine a craftsman as Miss May Sinclair is guilty of leaving a theme derelict in order to bring her plot into port. In The Belfry,²⁴ after she has breathed life into her vulgar little cockney novelist and got him married into a gentile family, she makes him bridge the social chasm between himself and that family, not by anything that he is or becomes, but by the heroic rescue of his brother-in-law from a bombarded town — a dènouement stirring in itself, but brought off by the coercion of pure accident. Naturally one cannot refuse to shake hands with the savior of one’s life: but why destroy the problem of social disparity, instead of solving it or pronouncing it insoluble?

The importance to our argument of these tales of the artist incarnate ought to be instantly clear. The intellectualization of the novel is essentially the intellectualization of its characters. The ultimate resort is bound to be analysis of the creative mind itself, not alone because it is the most highly specialized type, but equally because it becomes, when made an integral part of the story, a microscope for other and secondary ideas — the character’s, not necessarily the author’s. Since Diana of the Crossways and The Tragic Muse novels of this order have increased in frequency, though hardly in merit. Once they were prophetic: now they are symptomatic. And, whatever their individual merits or defects, they do have collectively the significance of all high aspiration. Records necessarily of discontent with materialism, ‘bigness,’ mere sordid doing and getting uninformed by noble dreaming, they can but mean a reaction from these, a renascence of faith in profound impalpable realities — the things that count among the aristocracy of fine minds and consciences.

V

One may well find one’s self sufficiently occupied with describing and reporting the tendencies named, to the definite and logical embodiment of which, as it seems, we have but just come. And yet one must be not wholly uncritical. ‘ Whatever is, is right ’ may be a true saying, and it translates easily enough into ‘Whatever is, is inevitable’; but there still remains the fair and pertinent question of what we want.

Perhaps we want, as Mr. Galsworthy does, more of the feeling of continuity — the sense of universal human kinship as we contemplate man and his affairs, the sense of cosmic unity as we contemplate the whole of nature, including man. Mr. Galsworthy has said that we must deny ourselves contempt, which is the destruction of continuity. Well, then, we must rejoice at whatever tends to lessen the number of things that evoke contempt from the human heart in its natural state — for it is still improbable that the human heart can ever be made completely new. Contempt grows by what it feeds on; and there is at least as much chance of purging the soul of hate by destroying hateful things and making a better world, as there is by educating the soul to look indulgently upon the hateful things. From this point of view, one can hardly count it for a demerit in art if, in addition to its ministry to pure delight, it tends to carry the will over into the deed — in short, to get something accomplished.

This sounds, of course, like a plea for crass cloddish didacticism. But never mind if it does. If any member of ‘the ineffable company of pure æsthetes’ has complained against Nicholas Nickleby because it had a reformatory effect on English private schools, or against Hard Cash because it called attention to the need of reform in English private asylums for the insane, he is a person for whom one is not obliged to throw away one’s own conscience.

Admitting then that a possible use of the novel is to direct the will and inspire it to action, one may go on to ask whether it is the fiction of satire or the fiction of realism that has brought things to pass. And one has instantly to concede that it is the fiction of satire. Why, even the ‘unofficial’ sentimentalism, with all its ignorance and bias, has done more than impartial realism — as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and All Sorts and Conditions of Men exist to prove. Modern realism has not, to be sure, been operative so long; but since Gissing it has partly made up for that by attaining its competence with unusual speed. The longer we balance these general platitudes, the more reasonable becomes a perturbing suspicion that only violent likes and dislikes are really dynamic. Can it be that animal matter reacts most decisively to antipathies pointed with scorn? and that all our serenely intellectual modern charity is of necessity and forever sterile, static? So Mr. Chesterton concludes, comparing Dickens and Gissing. And there is plenty of corroboration in other quarters — politics, religion.

But this point must not be elaborated at the expense of another, A second implication of the patient impartial scrutiny of everything in the field of vision is that it results at length in a curious optical defect — not so much a blurring of the sight, as a loss of proportion and distance. The realist, who is interested in everything, tends to become equally interested in everything: actuality, and not worth, becomes his test of values. And the lamentable consequence is the temporary disappearance of great and likable characters, or the presence of weak, unreal, and tawdry characters who are treated as though they were great and likable. There is no predicting an illustrious or even a safe future for the novel, if it is losing the art of criticism through the positive and unmistakable bestness of its personte. If it lose that, it loses all. Let us by all means have intellectual analysis; but let us first have something for it to work upon.

If we fear, it is because some of the most skillfully written novels of the past months are full of the dreariest folk. Life and Gabriella²⁵ is Miss Ellen Glasgow’s account of a really admirable Southern girl, and of her brave struggle to manage her own life when an unlucky marriage has left her adrift. But Gabriella’s intelligence is not what we are asked to believe it: else how could she have been so long blind to the real character of her husband? how, above all, could she have cherished for so long her idealized version of Arthur Peyton, from the beginning an effeminate prig? Another story of a marriage that failed is The Strangers’ Wedding.²⁶ As a sociological investigation of what marriage can mean to a sensitive young university-bred man and an average girl of the laboring class, this is more than ordinarily keen and thorough. But what shall be said of it as an attempt to give us a prolonged personal enjoyment in the society of these two and their acquaintances? Seventeen²⁷is a diverting record of calf-love; but Willie Baxter will be a calf at twentyseven, or fifty-seven — and he will never be called anything but ‘Willie.’

In The Rudder²⁸ Mrs. Watts creates one delightful personage — Marshall Cook the novelist; he is an American cousin of Mr. Do Morgan’s Alfred Challis. But he is there as observer and interpreter, not as protagonist; and his keenness is expended upon people in whom we half cease to believe as soon as we see them in important actions.

In only one novel, The Dark Forest,²⁹ is there a valid artistic reason for working out large problems in terms of relatively insignificant persons. The Dark Forest, a tale of Galician battle-fronts, is primarily the treatment of an obsession so gigantic that before it the greatest is as the least — the idée fixe that makes men under the strain of battle idealize and covet death, surround it with superstitious glamour, rival one another in seeking it, and shudder in their hearts to think that they may not die. In this dreadful and superb fantasia of prolonged battle, it makes little difference what characters are dwarfed, or how great they were originally, so long as their common humanity recommends them to our compassion.

Something must come out of so much striving and groping and piercing of the veils of reticence. It is unthinkable that all this conscience, this selfless and unwearying devotion to truth, should come to naught. The means may be slow; but the end may also be sure. Perhaps the imperceptible increase in understanding, in appreciation, may result in great and sweeping changes, in which fiction shall bear its creditable part. So it has been with the social history of woman, whose life marked time for many generations, only to accomplish a prodigious stride in two. There is too little in our fiction for confidence, certainly too much for despair. Meanwhile, there is cheer in some words of Meredith, written nearly thirty years ago: —

I think that all right use of life, and the one secret of life, is to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us. . . . Close knowledge of our fellows, discernment of the laws of existence, these lead to great civilization. I have supposed that the novel, exposing and illustrating the natural history of man, may help us to such sustaining roadside gifts.’