The Wind Between the Worlds
by . New York: The Macmillan Company. 1920. vi+258 pp. $2.00.
‘IT was a foregone conclusion that this whole matter’ — the question of life after death and of communication with the dead — ‘ would be the theme, one day, of a great novel.’ So we are assured by the publisher of The Wind Between the Worlds. It is a perfectly true, if somewhat belated, assurance. It ought to have been composed as a sort of retroactive acknowledgment of Howells’s Undiscovered Country, or of Robert Hugh Benson’s more recent, hardly more modern, Necromancers. For it has, properly speaking, nothing to do with The Wind Between the Worlds. Miss Brown has not written a ‘great novel’; she is a shrewd and self-critical-enough artist to know that she has not; and it is only the simplest critical justice to her to perceive that she was trying to do nothing of the kind. What she has written — and, inferentially, intended—is a rollicking melodramatic farce, constituting a trenchant, deliberately popular statement of her strong personal conviction (shared long ago by Howells, and later by Benson) that the attempt to communicate with the dead, whatever the prospects of success, is mentally and morally poisonous to the living. Some reviewers have attacked this book as if it were a fatuous and vain attempt to settle the question of survival. This is a fatuous and vain mode of attack. Obviously, nothing is proved about survival by electing to expose one automatic writer as a fraud and one scientist as a self-deluded quack. Even about, automatic writers in general and the possibilities of science in general, nothing is proved by such means. Miss Brown, who presumably understands as well as her critics that nothing whatever is to be proved by imagined evidence, is here playing a different game entirely. She is trying to illustrate piquantly, in terms of normal living folk, the disastrous effect of credulous self-abandonment to the various winds of psychic dogma and speculation and experiment — the effect which ensues whether the revelation sought be true or false. A bogus revelation happens, in this instance, to be one of the donneés. But if the revelation were authentic, or if its authenticity were left in doubt, the scatterbrained wife would still have forgotten her living son, her living husband, and her living mother in the obsession of contact with her dead son; the scientist’s daughter would still have been ready to play havoc with her future, her lover, and her own soul, in order to gratify her father’s insatiably devouring tyranny over her life; in short, the same corrosion of sanity and well-being would occur in the same degree.
Miss Brown’s point is that of the humanist always and everywhere: that when our preoccupation with the dead involves us in disloyalty to the living, we have played false with both life and death. The livingness of life is the one reality which exerts upon us all a claim anterior to every other claim.
The astonishing and novel aspect of Miss Brown’s tour de force is that she has made this point in a plot of frank melodrama unfolding in an atmosphere of frank farce. The quaint result is a popular ‘thriller’ done with perhaps a shade too much distinction for the utmost popularity. It is as if Mr. Sargent were to unbend and do a Sunday page in the idiom of the comic supplement. H. T. F.