Lying Like Truth

IN turning over the few pieces of early fiction which have survived the wrack of things, one marvels constantly as to what it is that has preserved them, for, to the great limbo of ideas and emotions where that which has striven to be art has not yet come to be, prose fiction has, perhaps from the very elasticity of its form, contributed more than any other form of art. What right perception of life has found expression here, we ask, in taking up the unforgotten novels; what fortunate accident of form has given such perception tangible shape, crystallizing experience into a fine definiteness of outer shape which keeps these tales from melting back, as so many thousand others have done, into the uncreated? Up to a certain point the question is not hard to answer, as we think of mere line and texture; beyond that it is mystery, as the ultimate charm of creative work must always be. As the line of immortal story-tellers files past, with Cervantes at the head, one can detect in each a certain keenness in observing human life, a certain sweetness in interpreting the bizarre spectacle, and a gift of presenting in very great detail this sane and balanced view of things.

Of Defoe it was said, in a phrase which admirably defines the true art of fiction, that he had the gift of ‘lying like truth,’ and Defoe has captivated the imagination of all generations between his time and ours. His was the art of making the unreal, perhaps even the impossible, more evident than that which happens before your very eyes, because amazing improbabilities are told with such close attention to immediate detail that you can but believe; and, by the side of his fictitious tales, newspaper accounts of actual happenings seem, in their sketchy presentation, unreal and improbable.

How many ways they had of ‘lying like truth,’ those earlier English writers of fiction! In Gulliver, the effect of reality is extraordinary, through the minute psychological record of every shade of perplexity, as the hero faces his astounding adventures among small people and great; while in Sir Charles Grandison we seem to share all phases of emotion of all the characters, for Richardson was as accurate an instrument as any lately invented by the psychologists to register the exact flutter of the human pulse. From that realism of petty, practical detail which delights us in Robinson Crusoe, from the crude rendering of emotion in Richardson’s work, down to the subtle intellectual processes of Meredith’s characters, one marvels at the many and the varied ways in which our novelists have learned to ‘lie like truth,’ making the very stuff of daily life visible and tangible, and tracing, thought by thought, the processes of the mind. As one ponders on the deeper aspects of the question, thinking of the inner truth or vision thus wrought out into concrete form, of Jane Austen’s finely balanced sense of things, of Thackeray’s pungent sweetness of interpretation, of Meredith’s penetrative wisdom, the sanity and depth of our elder novelists become as true a measure of our later work as does their creative power or gift of presenting their ideas in concrete form.

Searching, among the novels of the last six months, for the truth that comes from close observation, one finds it nowhere more apparent than in Myra Kelly’s Little Aliens,¹ a book of tales, like her others, dealing with children of the East Side in New York. It was granted to this author, through her gift of insight, to become the interpreter of a generation of young Americans of alien blood and alien faiths, and it is largely to her sweet and sane sympathy that we owe our knowledge of how nearly they are kin to what is best and finest in us; how often they are, in their untutored gentleness, our betters. This author’s gift of creeping to the very inner consciousness of these small folk is one not likely to be granted to another, and her early death is the more to be regretted as it means the loss of one who could help bridge the gulf between races. The humor and the pathos of the tales delight us, and the skill in rendering minute shades of thought and of feeling gives the work always high artistic veracity.

Close study, careful use of detail, are evinced in Alice Brown’s Country Neighbors,² and many faithful touches of description and characterization make time, place, and people real. One finds here a certain monotony of emotion, for the author, wisely perhaps, keeps to the minor key, and there is more suggestion of phases of life which her people have escaped, or have lived through long ago, than of those which they are living.

The same quiet sentiment and gentle humor that characterize these tales are found in her latest novel, John Winterbourne’s Family³ Here is free play of fancy, affectionate picturing of whimsical character, and a picturesque combination of homely New England experiences with hints of Greek myth. The book is longer and more elaborate than most of Miss Brown’s tales, yet the gain in dramatic interest does not seem proportionate to the length, and the novel confirms the belief that she is at her best in writing short stories.

Searching further for those who can ’lie like truth,’ we take up The Depot Master,⁴ by Joseph C. Lincoln. Here the homely sights and sounds of shore life are pictured, but, as the author turns over his stock-in-trade of oldsailor qualities and sailor words, one cannot help feeling a lack of freshness in the presentation. A certain zest and originality must go to the making of fiction that will live, and it is well not to use too often details used many times before. As one surveys the same articles cooking in the same utensils, the same nets drying on the shore, and listens to the same rustic expressions, the sky of New England seems unnecessarily contracted, and the thought suggests itself that possibly the material and the art of Myra Kelly point the way in which freshness may come back to our fiction, through the study of other nationalities coming into contact with our own.

Keeping in mind the one idea, the firmness and closeness of detail that bring in fiction an effect of reality, one finds cause for wonder in turning over the books of the season. More than one starts out admirably, giving the very stuff and substance of life, then falters into commonplace generalization, as, possibly, the author’s memory, and keen sense of childhood’s experiences, give way to fancy. The Right Stuff,⁵ for instance, by Ian Hay, is quite the right stuff in the first chapter and the last, vital, close to reality; but all between is the wrong stuff, a tale of society life in London, having no special charm, and bearing no trace of the first-hand knowledge and observation that mark the beginning and the end.

More deeply disappointing, because failing in more ways, is Poppy,⁶ by Cynthia Stockley, with its most interesting opening chapters. The very look of the sunburnt land of South Africa, with its still air, the bare ‘kopje,’ the mimosa trees, and the very soul of a child, hurt, tired, overworked, are revealed, and the reader feels that he is about to share a genuine record of human experience worth sharing. Then, suddenly, the tale loses its hold on the concrete, and turns into a bit of decadent literature, fortunately far less vivid than the early part, with one or two chapters which make one sorry to see upon the book the imprint of the fine old firm whose clean-minded literature was the solace of our childhood. As the new heroine with ‘tendrilly’ hair replaces the passionate child, we pass from the realm of real observation and real experience, and enter a made-up world, where much is generalized and much is borrowed. Luce Abinger is an absurd combination of Charlotte Brontëe’s Mr. Rochester and Mrs. Voynich’s hero in The Gadfly. The manners of the former, the distorted face, the scar, the stammer of the latter, make up a rather formidable creature who possesses all gifts save that of reality, to quote I know not whom. Have our later novelists not patience enough to go on observing for themselves, that they must thus rifle earlier stores?

It is partly a lessening of this quality of close study which makes Miss Montgomery’s Kilmeny⁷ less appealing than Anne of Green Gables. There was a distinctness about the former, an artistic truth in the portrait of the quaint child with individual fancies. This story is pretty and fanciful, in the green and gray setting of a Prince Edward Island orchard, but vagueness replaces the close rendering of real things, and, in spite of the poetic touch, the tale does not hold the reader. Only the genuine poet, one to whom the invisible is more real than the visible, dare write the story ‘all made up of the poet’s brain.’

Something of the glamour attending the stirring tales of brave knights and lovely ladies attaches to Mr. Chambers’s story of the Civil War, Ailsa Paige.⁸ Highly spiced to suit the popular taste, both in the rendering of sentiment and in the presentation of the horrors of war, it betrays more effort to produce a sensation at all costs than to achieve a fine quality of artistic truth, and falls short of being among the best.

A new story by the author of The Inner Shrine⁹ is sure to rouse interest this year, if not. next year or the next. This tale, like the earlier one, begins in a tensely dramatic situation, full of sensational elements; then drifts into a narrative whose chief interest lies in the character-development. This novel is, on the whole, better than the earlier one, though neither is of especially fine quality, and the character-study is none too profound. Both are full of what might be called a ’light seriousness,’ well fitted to make a popular appeal. Giving the life-history of a man wrongly accused of murder, and of the woman who loves him throughout, it employs somewhat hackneyed materials with a certain air of freshness. The heroine, in her scorn of man-made laws, and her deep insight into real laws of action, betrays more originality than does anything else in the book, but the hero’s character is so blurred and indefinite that her fine loyalty seems often to lack dramatic point. How far removed is most of the workmanship in the book from close picturing of reality! How evidently it lacks the specific touch that creates! It belongs with those bits of pottery whose edges begin to crumble before they leave the maker’s hand, and which slip back easily, after brief use, into the elements from which they emerged.

Careful study of local conditions, people, scenery, appears in more than one novel of the season. Cavanagh, Forest Ranger,¹⁰ brings to us something of the mountain heights, the clear air, the distances of the West. Roaring Fork, Nebraska, and the mountains that guard it are the scene of a tale full of picturesque and stirring incident, dealing with the struggle between the old West and the new, the lawlessness of the old order, and the fine patriotism that means obedience to law. Fierce struggles for land and pasture are depicted; murder, by supposed reputable citizens, of Mexican sheep-herders, carnage, recklessness, fidelity, perfidy, struggle in civic chaos; and athwart it all, embodiment of the nation’s determination that law shall prevail, rides Cavanagh, the Ranger. It is an interesting story, with a certain vitality, much realistic detail, and often beauty of line and color. Even if we find here no new and original nature-sense, no new interpretation of human character, there is a breeze-like quality of enthusiasm in the tale, and there is pleasure in sharing the wide spaces of the range.

Another local study appears in By Inheritance,¹¹ by Octave Thanet, a story of the South. Despite its charm, it is frankly polemical, a plea against thrusting upon the Negro the white man’s lot, and everywhere, expressed and unexpressed, runs through it the thesis that, at any cost, the races must be kept distinct. The author has the genuine story-teller’s gift, and here artistic definiteness lends itself in unobtrusive ways to the interpretation of grave matters. This truth-telling observation might well give pause to far-away theorists and idealists, stoutly maintaining lofty abstract views upon a basis of invincible ignorance. The subsequent misery of the young colored man who was educated at Harvard does not, perhaps, convince the stubborn Northern mind that all purely intellectual education for the Negro is wrong; but the author brings, even to those who disagree with her, an uncomfortable sense that she knows more about some aspects of the matter than they do, and that those who plan for the future of this unfortunate race would do well to learn from those who have lived with it. Meanwhile, the book is an interesting example— in its record of actual word and phrase, act and thought, of the people it depicts — of ’lying like truth.’

An unusual kind of reality may be found in The Thief of Virtue,¹² by Eden Phillpotts. Looking back at the author’s earlier tales, one detects a growing subtlety in his peculiar identification of human lives with the life of nature. In this lingering study of experience, the little group of people of whom he writes are almost completely swayed by the same forces that dominate moor and peat and cloud, yet the act of wrong in which the book centres becomes sin because of dim spiritual forces, differentiating them from the earth to which they are closely akin. It is the story of one Henry Birdwood, whose slight grip on the things of the spirit is loosened by an act of passion and of revenge; of Philip Ouldsbroom, hero of the tale, a very incarnation of physical forces, who faces in bewilderment the tragic issues of life; and of his wife Unity, in whom natural instincts, greater than herself, work out transgression. The hero’s pathetic effort to father the child that he thinks his own makes one feel the depth of the natural tie, and realize anew how deeply rooted is human life in the soil.

This is a close rendering of human experience, ‘a dream of life mating with matter.’ It is not mere intellectual truth that is worked out, but organic truth, the facts of plant-life reproduced in human life, and all subdued to art. The tardy sense of wrongdoing, the lingering consciousness of reaping the fruits, are rendered with such an effect of reality, that you feel as if grass and rock were growing sentient. If Mr. Phillpotts takes you constantly ‘back to hours when mind was mud,’ he also carries you all the way from clod to rudimentary soul. It is this gleam of forces other than purely physical which differentiates his work from that of his master, Hardy, in whose novels man and his nature are identified with the soil, having a weed’s choice, no more. In The Thief of Virtue a slow evolution, reaching even to spirit, is suggested; and the very beauty and vastness of the moor, constantly kept before you, help bring before you something of Mother Nature’s final sweet philosophy in the harmony which works out from even the blunders and the sin. You are aware of ruined sheepfold, cromlech, menhir, of human life and of earlier life that have come and gone, and you share the gray and green ancient wisdom crowning the waste.

Yet the author’s art is often blurred, and in method he is sometimes one of the ‘Children of the Mist.’ At times he seems striving to reveal the lightning flash of soul through matter; at times the tale so wavers as the hero fumbles blindly along the ways of life, that the reader becomes as uncertain of the way as he, and wonders whether, after all, the author had the deep meaning divined earlier in the book. Yet Mr. Phillpotts’s work grows clearer as the years go on, his manner more masterly and more reserved. His style has richness and depth, often great beauty.

It has been, in many ways, an unfortunate year in the world of fiction. A number of so-called ‘genuinely American’ stories have appeared, in all their futile smartness of phrase and of adventure; the impossible has happened in that Mr. W. J. Locke has written a romance ¹³ almost without charm; and Mrs. Gertrude Atherton has produced an epoch-making novel that places her, her admirers say, among the immortals. When Mr. Locke pauses to expound his peculiarly happy philosophy, which heretofore has seemed a divine accident, he destroys its potency, and Simon the Jester is a very tired jester, content to go labeled lest the hearers should not understand. As for Mrs. Atherton, there are immortals and immortals; Dante, it will be remembered, recognized several kinds. The four hundred and sixty closely printed pages of her Tower of Ivory¹⁴ tell the story of a young English diplomat who meets at the Bavarian court Margarethe Styr, an opera-singer, is interested in her, then marries a shallow young American girl, whom he finally deserts for Margarethe Styr.

The tale, wide in scope, is intended to be tremendous in motif, and has been so pronounced by more than one critic. It must be remembered, however, that a great part of our public, lashed by the scorn of many a cosmopolitan, Mrs. Atherton among them, would perhaps be ready to welcome as ‘strong’ any novel which presents a husband’s desertion of his wife at her hour of supreme need of him. We should remember, however, that this act in itself does not constitute greatness, either in life or in fiction, and that to tell this tale so that it would rouse, in finer minds, anything except disgust, the power of a supremely great master of tragedy would be necessary. This power Mrs. Atherton does not possess. Now and then in literature appears a study of human experience which makes one feel the irresistible power of the great tides of life. From the old Tristram tale, down through some of the master dramas of the days of Elizabeth to Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, the type is familiar, and we are indeed purged by pity and terror as we follow breathlessly the working of passion that is fate. We do not feel this here. The author fails to make the impelling force of passion real, and the tale turns, at the end, where its power should be greatest, into a revolting spectacle of cold-blooded brutality. There is little in the character of John Ordham, there is nothing in the march of events, which makes inevitable this ending when the wife and new-born child lie dead. When the hero goes to Paris, on his way to Margarethe Styr, instead of northward, as he had said, to his brother’s sickbed, one cannot tell whether it is anger with his wife that makes him change his plans, or love for the other woman, or inability to manage the railway timetable. There is no possible reason why the singer should not have ridden her horse to death a few days earlier, and so have spared a deal of trouble. That inevitability which alone justifies such an ending is lacking both in character and in event.

This is preëminently the kind of fiction in which the second-rate will not do, and second-rate the book is, in management of motif, in character-delineation, and in style. The fine truth-telling of which we have been speaking is absent; here is none of the pitiless veracity in detail which gives Anna Karenina its peculiar power, nor is there that underlying sense, which the Russian novel shares with great tragedy, that artistic truth, in the last analysis, harmonizes with ethical truth. In The Tower of Ivory there is a remoteness about the characterization; the hero is vaguely and negatively done, and, in spite of all that is said about John Ordham, you do not at the end know him better than you know any selfcentred and reticent English traveler with whom you may have shared a railway carriage. The minute rendering of character in thought and act which would make his manner of choice at the end seem inevitable is lacking, and one can but conclude that the author has not had the opportunity for close observation, from which a characterstudy can be built up point by point, and that she lacks the fine quality of penetrative imagination which can project a character in its wholeness to act in least things and in great as a personality.

The tale makes the impression of being morally and artistically underbred. This shows in the characterization, in the dramatic scenes, and in the style. ‘She wept, she had hysterics, she bit several handkerchiefs to pieces’; and again, ‘She tore and gnawed her handkerchief until her gown was strewn with lint.’ This seems an artistic as well as an economic extravagance. ‘ The handshake and smile, the challenging glance at herself, caused the depths of the desperate woman to swarm with fighting devils, rushing on their armors, and polishing their swords!’ Poor lady! Surely here we are wandering out of the realm of tragedy, which this tale purports to be, into the region of melodrama.

The many ways in which the style of the book falls short of fineness might be instanced as a reason for doubting its immortality. It is possible to find ungrammatical sentences, but perhaps that is a minor point. English, wherein three adjectives are used where one would do, three phrases, where one would be far better, will, fortunately, not endure. Lengthy prose descriptions are added to the already complex texture of the Wagner drama, and Wagner dramas set to adjectives are hard to bear. A great theme should command something of the severity of the grand style, but there is nothing of that here, only a lashing and straining of language to an impotent fury of ink. The lack of fastidiousness in thought and in language would alone bar the book from the first rank. The constantly reiterated ‘revealing gown,’ and ‘a more perishing languor’ might well date from the days of debased English and debased morals of the time of Charles II, while, ‘If their brains were not in a state of toxic poisoning from this love secretion’ betrays a vulgarity which could date only from our own century. Possibly all the points suggested in regard to the style could be summed up in one further quotation: ‘But when the rich soil of a woman’s nature, long covered with the volcanic ashes of old passions, is sprouting with the roses and the toadstools of a new passion — ’ Ah, when that is happening, would it not be well perhaps to wait for a saner moment in the life of the heroine before writing a book?

This book, with its effort to be cosmopolitan in material, cosmopolitan in point of view, gives pause for thought. There has been of late much discussion by Mrs. Atherton and others of the narrow provinciality of our taste. Scoffed at for domesticity, timidity, innocence, and other defects, we are hastening to make good our lack, for, full of a sense of uncertainty as to right critical standards, we are greatly afraid of not being up-to-date in matters of culture. As the fashion of these later days points to decadent literature, literature in which the sins and shortcomings of humankind are dealt with admiringly, or flippantly, as the case may be, we strive to achieve a taste for it, and are greatly abashed when we cannot.

No race has ever achieved great literature by following foreign fashions; and a greater fear than the fear of not being up-to-date might well possess us, the fear of forgetting our own point of view, the fear of failing to find expression in literature for that which has been best and finest in our experience. Looking at the world’s great pieces of fiction bequeathed to us by the past, one realizes that each, from whatever country, is fundamentally true to raceconsciousness; each contains some fine rendering of the heart of life as this people has discovered it. Don Quixote is Spanish to the core; the very soul of the country is revealed here so clearly that, in chance meeting with a Spaniard of to-day, you understand him better for having known the Don. How essentially English are Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe! How vastly, in each case, the wonders gain because of the practical, stolid character of the hero who faces them! How Russian in every fibre, un-English and un-French, is Anna Karenina! In each case the close rendering of an individual’s sense of things, through this detailed ’lying like truth,’ expresses also something of this people’s peculiar contribution to human experience, and so takes on a larger meaning and a greater value.

Pondering this truth, one is inclined to take issue with Mrs. Atherton as regards both her theory and her practice. Our own tradition will serve us better as a starting-point than a borrowed one; it may be a poor thing, but it is our own, and it is our only legitimate basis for art. I do not mean that we should confine ourselves to American material or to American soil, but that we should not borrow a point of view, nor imitate the thought or the emotions of other peoples. I doubt if we shall ever be able to deal with the sins and the shortcomings of humankind admiringly or flippantly. There is, happily, enough of morality and of decency in our tradition to forbid our thinking this way, and our race-consciousness under all the shift and change of fashion is as true as is great drama to the underlying laws of life. As for studies of human passion, what American has done, or can do them, in the French way, the German way, the Russian way ?

It is well that our artists, for the most part, confine themselves to those phases of human life which they have had the opportunity to observe, those aspects of experience that they understand. Keen observation, close analysis, delicate psychological detail in dealing with moral and mental and physical dilemmas, one finds in the best of our fiction, and we have had more than one writer capable of telling a good story that is all story; but passion, simple and entire, has been greatly rendered and dramatically rendered by no American. William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Henry James, — the very names that stand highest on our brief roll of fame, — illustrate and prove the point; and the lesser American novelists would do well to avoid that of which our best and wisest have fought shy. Even Hawthorne, who comes nearest to passion-study in the one great romance which our country has produced, The Scarlet Letter, begins the tale at the point where the modern novelist would leave off — the moment when passion is over. How deeply, in its spiritual interpretation of experience, does The Scarlet Letter embody the soul of old New England! How inevitably, like an unerring finger-post, does it point the way in which our novelists must deal with these themes if they are to interpret our finer sense of things.

Singularly enough, the next book at hand is a satire, and an exceedingly clever one, on our American fear of not being abreast with the world in matters of culture. Franklin Window Kane¹⁵ is quite in line, in its fine analytical work wherein minute shades of individuality are recorded, with the best that has been achieved in American fiction. It has been written that the disciple shall not be greater than the master, yet there are moments when the pen of Anne Douglas Sedgwick weaves a more potent charm than that of Henry James. Her work, more restricted in range, is now and then, if one dare whisper it, keener in insight, while the incisive workmanship sometimes betrays by contrast the labyrinthine nothingnesses of the master’s work in some of its lesser phases. With an almost uncanny insight into certain failings of humankind, this author combines unusual delicacy of perception of shades and values. Her American heroine, cultured far beyond her ability to receive culture, groping for standards, afraid of not showing the finest judgments, might be regarded as a symbol of our national tendency to imitate in all matters of the mind.

‘ She had . . . so little stuff in her; it was as if she had to find it all the time in other things and people. . . . She wants something, but she does n’t know whether it’s what other people want or what she wants, so that she can’t want anything very definitely.’ Her way of appealing to the Englishwoman for her opinion, changing her attitude toward her would-be lover, Kane, as she knows the other’s esteem for him waxes or wanes, is a bit of character-delineation as subtle as it is painful, and the fashion in which the Bostonian setter of standards is betrayed as having none of her own is masterly.

There is here a keenness of insight that must hurt the author; if it were not for Kane, one might say that she was unsympathetic, and indeed one does not find here a tender Thackerayan sympathy with the very failings of humankind that are being exposed. As for the hero, he is done too much in extremes, being a shade too homely and a shade too good. We should feel more akin to him if he had some touch of inner defect to match the outer; there is a Grandisonian perfectness about him that irritates, and one regrets that there could not be as delicate a shading in this picture of extreme goodness as in the picture of feminine weakness.

Nowhere does Miss Sedgwick’s skill show more clearly than in developing the predicaments of her plots from the inner characteristics of her people. The causal relationship between character and event is, of course, the final test of dramatic work, and this author has rather unusual power in tracing the flowing of will into action. The touch of character on character, the fine play of shifting emotions that result in choice are subtly rendered; and here the entanglements where the two sets of lovers weave and interweave dramatic complications bring a delight in the artistry to mingle with the human sadness at the pathos of it all.

Miss Sedgwick’s style has always great charm in its clearness of stroke and its deftness of expression. Its distinction makes the English of many of the other books of the season seem either slipshod or tawdry. The intellectual and moral fastidiousness of the author result in a kind of work greatly needed in the America of to-day, and it will make for fine things, for in it life, character, and motive are held steadily to a standard of reality, of honesty, the ‘comic spirit’ working in sad sincerity, separating the true from the false, the honest from the dishonest, the fine from the less fine.

It is with a certain refreshment of spirit that one welcomes Enchanted Ground,¹⁶ by Harry James Smith, which brings with it a breath of fine, clear air from the New England hills. Something of the best that was in our older life is in this tale, set against a background of contemporary New York, — a sense of the worth of the struggle, of the greatness of the end. The workmanship is uneven; there is perhaps too much of that light sketchiness of method that characterizes many of our writers; but humor and pathos mingle in more than one episode in the book as naturally as they do in life, and talent is evinced which will doubtless work out in more sustained efforts. Above all, one feels thankful for an honest attempt to build up fiction upon our own, not upon borrowed, standards. The story is finely American, in the best sense of the word.

Mr. Robert Herrick’s A Life for a Life¹⁷ is a book of large scope, and of serious interest. American in subjectmatter and in setting, it seems, at first glance, to contain much of our early fine and stern idealism. It is an arraignment of present social conditions in our country, and, through the shifting scenes of which Hugh Grant, the hero, forms the shifting centre, our numberless weaknesses are exposed: the luxury of the rich, the misery of the poor, the questionable rights of property, the corruption of our banks, the manysided oppression of working women, with emphasis on the way in which they are mutilated by machinery and driven on the streets, the dishonesty of promoters, the venality of our courts and of our national government, the consciencelessness of universities, our passion for intellectual fads, discord between parents and children, between husbands and wives, the selfishness and lack of honor of both parties in the labor controversy, the wrongs of our tariff, the petty pilfering in our trade.

The accusations are true, and we who live in a country which has promised a fairer hope to humankind cannot hear too often, ’lest we forget.' a recital of the countless ways in which we have failed; but here too many points are attacked at once. The real general concentrates his forces; this is a kind of guerrilla warfare all up and down the line. One is reminded of the little girl in a South African mission school who chose as a subject of an essay, ‘History, Geography, and the Earth,’ and began by saying, History, Geography, and the Earth just do go together.’ So they do, but one is occasionally singled out for special attention. There is in A Life for a Life a Victor Hugo scope without a Victor Hugo grip. So many and so various are the themes discussed that all is blurred and confused, and one wonders that a book so apparently noble in motive can be so singularly ineffective in result.

Possibly this comes, in part, from a lack of the balance and sanity of judgment that one finds in the great masters of fiction. Mr. Herrick has enumerated, in a series of episodes, nearly all our sins, but, inasmuch as he is endeavoring to put in the whole, he ought, in fairness, to admit that there is another side. As one reads, one cannot help feeling how incomparably potent above a mountain of foreboding is a grain of faith. That fire of the spirit which thrills Victor Hugo when he presents human wrongs, that insistence on the soul, is not here. There is not enough resistance in the book; the novelist, like his hero, Hugh Grant, goes down too easily before the wrongs he faces, and Hugh Grant sinks like a discomfited marionette before the swords of tin arrayed against him. He is no fighter, and can tell us nothing of the battle. Not thus did our ancestors wrestle with Satan; they faced their warfare as those who meant to win. What if, after all, even in machine-ridden America, life be

Nowhere in this book is there any dramatic presentation of the age-long struggle wherein the Spirit is at strife, for the acting forces are all on one side. Only here and there some reflection suggests chance vision of the light, and a momentary sense of higher things, which one wishes the author could make integral. Note the fine passage where, after the fire, Venable points out the way in which, when trouble comes, the spirit is released, and men ‘become themselves, large and free,’ not the beast, but man emerging from agony. If Mr. Herrick can see this truth, if he can write The Master of the Inn, one can but wish for him the powder to work out this finer vision in his dramatic presentation of human life.

There is, in truth, in his fiction more analytic than dramatic power, and he is more often the academic man searching for themes about which to write problem-novels than the man possessed by insight, conviction, emotion which he must voice. His work covers a large range of subjects, is extensive rather than intensive; and his novels, like the themes in this special book, succeed one another too rapidly. This one is half treatise, half story, wavering between nothingness and creation, in the limbo of uncreate art. Mr. Herrick tells much abstract truth, and it is perhaps profitable to read him, but artistic truth he does not tell in this book, wherein the somewhat vague characterization, the indefinite detail, fail to convince us of the reality of that concerning which he writes.

Oddly enough, this work of a professor of English betrays a most careless prose. Even if it stops short of being ungrammatical, it is often slipshod. His ubiquitous short sentence fails of the Hugo effect perhaps intended, and the constant use of the dash, with swift breaking of the thought, is most annoying. The disintegrated sentence becomes an all-too-fitting symbol of disintegrated thought and purpose.

Nathan Burke¹⁸ takes us back to days when machinery counted less in our lives than it does at present; when, possibly, the individual counted for more. It is refreshing to find a book which so contradicts the present trend of fiction, wherein most of our story-writers, adopting the pace set by the secondrate magazines, are eliminating every shade of meaning and of character-interpretation which do not bear on the next accident, and are producing work stripped of inner interest and of all psychological significance. There is an air of Olympic, or of Early Victorian, leisure about Nathan Burke, an old-fashioned tale which, in the manner of an elder day, follows the hero from boyhood, through all phases of his development, into ripened manhood. It deals with the growth of an Ohio lad during the years preceding the Mexican War, and portrays country life, and life in a small town, with close and excellent local color. The book has at the core a fine Americanism, far removed from the cheap vulgarities of Blaze Derringer,¹⁹ and the superficial smartness of The Fortune Hunter,²⁰ and it makes one realize, with all the Spartan plainness of country life, its heroic and silent idealism.

This is the kind of interpretation of American life that we most need, not that which shouts our sins through the market-place, but that which erects above the market-place, for all men to see, the figure of one full of fine practicality, of humor, of humanness, yet incorruptible enough to shame the sin. It may be that this book will take its place among those pieces of fiction which, through masterly interpretation of an individual, have become the interpretation of the inner heart of a race. One takes it up and lays it down with a fresh sense of patriotism, remembering that this country which has produced corrupt politicians and conscienceless financiers has produced also Lincoln, and an unnamed host of those who share his humor and his integrity.

At first glance it would seem as if the author had chosen an unfortunate moment to depict. It would take genius to make the Mexican War interesting, yet that is what Miss Watts has done, and Nathan’s experiences here are as absorbing as are his earlier ones as choreboy, grocer’s clerk, lawyer. Interesting pictures are given of some of the early phases of life in this country; the career of the old uncle, George Marsh, is especially notable, in showing how a shrewd type of American was made out of Englishmen by the necessities and the opportunities of frontier life. The story is firm in texture, real in its solidarity, with a Thackerayan power of making you feel the complexities of a social community, ‘the boundaries wherein life inheres.’ There is here a most unfeminine thoroughness in attention to detail, and the slight happenings that give fine shades of meaning are recorded as the story meanders on, ignoring sensational incident, slowly and surely developing the characters. Nathan, Mrs. Ducey, Francie, and the weakling George, stand out with great distinctness, wearing that lifelike air of reality which some of our earlier English novelists could create, and which makes most of the people in the fiction of to-day seem to have been made, like paper-dolls, in two dimensions only. There is, too, about this novel, a masculine breadth of sympathy and an underlying sweetness in interpreting human nature which go far in giving the tale the indefinable quality that endures.

The most curious thing about Nathan Burke is the way in which it is haunted by Thackeray. Rarely is an author’s way of perceiving human life so inspired by an earlier thinker, the very tricks and turns of thought, as well as of expression, being like Thackeray. It is as if this later writer’s eyes had been opened by the former to the meaning of the human spectacle, and she must forever after see in something of his way. The influence shows most clearly in the minor characters: Jim is an Americanized Warrington; Mary Sharpless is Thackeray’s sylph type; Francie is a younger sister of Amelia. Certain scenes are too nearly like some of those created by the great Englishman, notably those about Jim’s sick-bed, recalling in matter and in manner the illness of Pendennis, with his mother and Laura at his side; while whole paragraphs of reflection sound like Thackeray’s very own. The odd thing about this imitation is that one does not resent it, though it would seem wiser for the author to outgrow it; it is a very fresh and vital perception of life which here borrows much of another’s manner, and even when the cadence of the sentences makes one feel that he is listening to the master’s voice, it seems only as if a beloved grandchild had inherited something of the ancestor’s very gift.

Even with the admission that the author has not yet quite found her own manner, Nathan Burke must be pronounced the best novel in the pile of fiction of the last half-year. Setting aside for the moment the deeper aspects of the story, the sweetness and the sanity of its interpretation of life, and coming back to the humbler task with which we started out, we realize that Miss Watts’s gift for close and realistic work is remarkable. Detail is quietly given, not with the air of the writer of treatises, alert for fact wherewith to prove abstract statements, nor with the self-conscious manner of the professional novelist, industriously searching for touches wherewith to embellish certain points in the story, but with an exceeding naturalness, as of life itself. Here is a gift which cannot be taught; it comes by divine right, and it is rare. One cannot at this moment ask, for American fiction, anything better than that Miss Watts will go on interpreting other individuals and other periods, and, in the deeper, inner sense, as in that relating to outer fact, ‘lying like truth.’