Fault-Findings of a Novel - Reader

ON laying down some well-written recent novel, the reader often sighs, and wonders why he sighs. For the characters are drawn with discrimination, and seem to look and live; situations are handled competently, events happen reasonably, the local color is persuasive. The whole is sometimes even overflooded, as a final grace, with that philosophic afterglow which so charms the seasoned reader. And yet something is missing, or else whence comes that listless air of the latter pages? To use the academic phrase of a decade ago, “It’s not inevitable enough.” Or, in the words of a recent article in the Atlantic, current fiction conveys “an impression of fragmentariness — of evanescence.”

Mr. De Morgan writes with a mellow retrospective wisdom, a warm sympathy, a very acute observation. The openings of his books promise greatly. The reader gladly sinks into absorption, only to wonder why the characters appear to dwindle toward the close? The fine opening of Joseph Vance seems to imply a powerful climax; but the loss of Joseph’s wife at sea is slurred and hurried over as if the author had little liking for dramatic events, and when they perforce intruded upon his narrative, made them sing as small as possible. Similarly the endless delays in unraveling the very engaging mystery in Alice-For-Short, seem to sap it bit by bit of half its power. Readers fancy in Mr. De Morgan a too fastidious dread of the theatrical. In fact, hundreds of us share that dread, and would not that an effort to overcome it should impair the pleasing calmness of these tales. We may well be grateful for them as they are, bright stars in the abundant and brilliant fiction of our day. That the climax rather sinks than rises seems natural to their quiet art.

It is otherwise with Miss Sinclair’s noble tale, The Divine Fire. Where is the climax in the touching and endearing story of Keith Rickman, if it is not the delightful confession of Mr. Spinks that he loves the marplot Flossie? Miss Sinclair has written in that passage a piece of significant as well as charming humor, and has indicated by it a large experience of life. Yet while he admires the art. and nature of the climax, the reader confesses to a disappointment. The scale of greatness on which the novel was begun has not been here kept up. The climax seems too much of “a happening,” as the phrase goes. We are almost always affronted by a climax, or a close, of diminished importance. “It is what human nature itself can’t endure.” Tommy and Grizel, which charmed so many readers, left nine out of ten incensed and sore at its ending. Stevenson’s remarks on this subject, in his essay on the realists, are well known, but few readers of his letters seem to remember his apt protest to Mr. Barrie, “The Actual is not the Real!”

The habit, in which our best novelists indulge, of taking their chief characters down a peg or two, is undeniably fresh, pleasant, and amusing. And yet it is driving near a precipice. We are all somewhat thin-skinned as regards heroes and heroines whom we like, and we resent a tendency to belittle them. After all, if their creators will not take them seriously, why should we? When they are to be laughed at, we should like it done as tenderly as Mrs. Tulliver is laughed at in the immortal scenes where she pleads with her sisters to “ buy in” her teapot and tablecloths.

Mr. James and Mrs. Wharton depict with ease and charm a set of persons about whose fate they are obviously indifferent. Chilled by such an attitude in their creators, these delicate beings “ come like shadows, so depart.” On her first introduction to Mr. James, an inveterate reader of his novels begged to know why none of his characters ever ate anything? The subtlety, the care, the thought, the fineness, of these portrayals stops something short of appearing really human.

The novel, as we all learned glibly in school, should present typical human nature in a dress of local color and individual manners. In other words, it should deal with life both by wholesale and retail. Is the fault of our present fiction, in general terms, that it attends too assiduously to the retail trade, and is conceived altogether on a too petty scale? Have we in literature the tendency, so reprehensible in commerce, of overbearing individualism ?

A fine example of a typical man was Alan Breck, in Kidnapped; and again, very lately, Lin McLean and The Virginian have risen in somewhat statuesque proportions upon the novel-reading world. If one swallow could make a summer, Kidnapped surely would rank as a great novel, and The Virginian as a very important one; and this not chiefly because of their excellent styles, or their plots, or their bracing atmosphere; but because in Alan Breck, and in the nameless cowboy, we perceive at once a broadly typical man in a local habitation.

The average reader flies at once to the circulating library for Mrs. Ward’s latest novel; and on finding it impossible to secure (despite the thirty, or the fifty, copies provided), unable to wait, buys the book for himself. He reads it all, he reads it carefully, and only leaves it wishing that these well-conceived, thoughtfully delineated characters had been a little more alive and inconsequent. Mrs. Ward lacks only gusto and spirits. We cannot help feeling that she has performed her task well — a desperate state of mind in us. There is a tell-tale evenness in her work, a mark of mediocrity as a storyteller; and that this weakness in narrative should leave her still the favorite of so many and such thoughtful readers, speaks eloquently for her powers as a describer and critic of society.

The spirits lacking in Mrs. Ward are superabundant in Mr. Hewlett. Like the author of The Virginian, he seems born for fiction. The joyousness of his mood on opening infects the reader. With a feeling of enchantment, we peruse the first chapter, which we may always confidently expect to have “the come-hither” in its eye. The reviewer of The Stooping Lady in the New York Times Saturday Review last autumn, carried away by their charm, quoted entire the opening paragraphs. How many inquiries at libraries and booksellers did not that quotation induce!

Mr. Hewlett is preeminent in this art of enticing. He seems to take, in fact, too great a delight in his own characters, and hampers their subsequent movements by a too detailed and caressing introduction. They seem to lose, by these too careful portraits, the indispensable air of being their own masters. Mr. Hewlett is too paternal with them. This, with his diction smelling of the lamp, impairs his hold upon us; and when we find him, as we do, taking a fond pleasure in the least agreeable traits of Ins inscrutable heroines, we acknowledge a fickleness in our admiration. Yet how delightful is that gossiping tone, that air of having been at (he party himself, and joined in the conversations which he reports !

Mr. Howells seems to have inherited his quizzical, sincere, and unillusioned way of looking,.at life, from t hat favorite of the judicious of the last generation, Mr. W. E. Norris. Indeed, the very title, No New Thing, had it not been preempted, might have pleased the fancy of our great realist. The essential uninterestingness, however, of such a character as Margaret Stanniforth, would be, I think, impossible to Mr. Howells, who somehow lacks the capacity to be dull. Marescalchi, too, if conceived by the American, would have proved a humaner figure, we may be sure. One great and unfailing delight in reading Mr. Howells’s books, is that his openings imply exactly the sort of tale he is to give us. No hintings here of a brighter romance than he means to weave. All is fair and above board. We read, and wish for the next one. Perhaps we pine a very little for the presence of youth in all these pleasant and discerning stories. We crave the mercurial spirits of the young — their tragic gloom and bliss alternating as we all remember that they do. Mr. Howells has scattered through his pages many so-called young people. But they seem too much of a stripe with their elders. Even in his masterpiece he has made Irene and Penelope talk together with the deliberation and caution of middle age. Even Lottie, in The Kentons, has a dreadful calmness about her. Occasional school-girls, it is true, are every whit as practical, as unillusioned, as is this terrible infant; but neither they nor she are young. Ellen Kenton is younger than Lottie; as witness her fine reply to her sister; that lovable reply for which alone The Kentons would be worth reading: “I’d rather be queer in Europe than queer in Tuskingum.”

This carping spirit that we manifest toward the clever, powerful, and thoughtful fiction of our clay is perhaps but the fractiousness of the child who has too many toys. Yet let us hope that the phenomenon is capable of another explanation. As the drama in Shakespeare’s day, so the novel is in ours, the leading form of current thought and art. May we not, then, be justified in our censorious mood, and special jealousy for its greatness?

And there are limits to our audacity. We do approach the works of Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy with some respect. If we find a teasing quality in the former’s thought, of which his labyrinthine language is but the outward sign; if the sense of mystery, that great element of romance, is often absent from his brilliant and immortal pages; we cannot remember it when we read the end of Dahlia Fleming, or watch the diagnosis of Sir Willoughby Patterne. Nor can we find it in our hearts to judge that unhappy creed which, latent in Mr. Hardy’s earlier and finer novels, rises to a shriek in Tess, when we recall the description of Casterbridge, as Elizabeth and her mother approach it; or hearken to the singing at the harvest supper of Bathsheba’s men.