The Makers of Plots

MANY of us would doubtless confess, in despite of the canons of criticism, to a liking for certain stories which are not, properly speaking, stories at all, but lingering, anecdotal sketches of character, innocent of climax, uncertain as to “ beginning and middle and end.” The charm of good portraiture, human and other, which we find in Rab and his Friends, in Cranford, in Miss Jewett’s delicately sketched New England types, appears in slighter degree in the work of many a minor writer, and our interest is in direct proportion to its fidelity. One wonders if, in those mythical days when literature is said to have come into being through the chanted exploits of heroes, primitive folk did not sometimes sit round their campfires telling hero tales when there were no great deeds to tell, only characteristic little acts and minor happenings. Surely some of the slighter touches in the great epics are as full of power to interpret a distinctive personality as are the more conspicuous ones.

The character sketch is even more refreshing to us, perhaps, than in earlier days, now when, in our own country at least, machinery dominates the minds of story-tellers and story-readers, when any fresh invention floods the magazines with tales centring in the new mechanism. The motor-car has already monopolized our fiction to such an extent that the word ‘action’ has grown ambiguous, becoming almost synonymous with speed, and the aeroplane is threatening to make this change of meaning permanent. While the new type is so conspicuously present, as in The Sovereign Power,¹ in which the human interest is strictly subordinated to the management of monoplane and biplane, it is a comfort to find a volume of old-fashioned tales, such as Later Pratt Portraits,² devoted to the delineation of character. A sane and gentle philosophy of life lies back of these sketches, which are full of humorous appreciation of oddities, and full of sympathy. After all, we say, in laying down a book of this kind, the workings of human nature are really more important than the working of brakes and levers.

An interesting interpretation of the life of young folk appears in Phœbe and Ernest,³ a series of crisp sketches showing keen insight into boy and girl nature, and the power to trace, in close and significant detail, successive stages of growth.

When Caroline was Growing⁴ brings before us a charming, imaginative child, who appeals to us deeply in the earlier sketches, but in the later tales, which are a bit more perfunctory and artificial, grows less poetic and original. The type is one which has frequently been rendered, but we are glad of every new interpretation in these days when modern educational methods are threatening its very existence.

We should welcome The End of a Song,⁵ — the work of a college professor, — if for no other reason, for the evidence it brings that academic life does not always dry and corrode human nature. These are tenderly conceived and delicately executed sketches of folk in a small Welsh village, and the blending of their lives with the lives of animals, of mountain and of stream, is suggested throughout. There are new and picturesque touches in presenting the old, old facts of human life and human affection, and the book is full of humor — humor that is often very near to tears.

Something of old-time charm is revealed in The Corner of Harley Street,⁶ a series of letters purporting to be written by a London physician. In these letters to many people, Peter Harding sketches his own fine personality, his friends, his family, his London, so that, without any plot at all, a whole section of modern life is presented. The author, with his humanity, his simple affection, his humor, his lack of egotism, often reminds the reader of the beloved Dr. John Brown; but the finer instinct and the higher faith of the earlier physician betray a lack here. Again and again one is compelled to stop short at the blank wall of material things to which modern thought and especially modern science has led us, and one longs for the keener eye and the clearer vision of the Scotch physician. A chance literary observation on the part of the author illustrates the point as well as any phase of the story could do. ‘Given Meredith’s humor,’ says Peter Harding, ‘how Hardy, with his first-hand observation, his extraordinary detachment, and the beautiful lucidity of his English, would have loomed above the creator of Sir Willoughby.’ When one remembers Meredith’s constant insistence on the triumphing struggle of spirit through matter, and Hardy’s crass doctrine that matter is the whole of life, might not one be justified in saying that the author of The Corner of Harley Street shows himself here, to use Meredith’s own phrase, ‘bull-blind to the spiritual ’ ?

But enough of sketches! After all, the instinct for plot is an unappeasable one; and children keep us constantly aware of the depth and the fundamental nature of the demand that a story shall be a story. This, by the way, is the hardest thing to make it, and the student of fiction is constantly surprised to find how few are the great plots as compared with the number of the really great novels, so often does the causal chain of inevitable consequence break and fail in the dramatic type; so often does some favorite personage, growing almost too much alive, run away with the plot. Fiction, and especially English fiction, is, as we all know, far more distinguished by the creation of great characters than by the working out of great plots; and Thackeray’s confession that the trend of his story often depended on the mood of the morning, he, if in good humor, being inclined to make his characters do admirable deeds, and if in a bad humor, being tempted to thrust them into villainy, may well be considered the unspoken confession of many another great novelist.

If we were to try to state what a plot should be, learning this wisdom not from critical treatises, but from treasured memories of novels, and from the reproving mouths of children when one fails to tell a story aright, we should say that the laws of plot are as simple as they are difficult to obey. The narrator should keep on telling the same story, in more or less the same fashion, about the same people; he should tell it all, and no more. If he must go back, let the past help and not hinder the present; if he must have more than one strand to his tale, let them be necessary to each other. Any one who, in a bedtime hour, has confused any part of the tale of Red Riding Hood with that of the Three Bears, has failed to tell either in full, or changed the outcome, or has attributed to Jack’s giant any of the characteristics of Bluebeard, must have learned from the small auditor precepts as deep as Aristotle ever taught about the requisites of plot, the reversal of fortune, the necessary consistency of character.

With something of the single-mindedness of children we older listeners delight in the writer of fiction who can plot well; who can separate, in the miscellaneous stuff of life, that which is essential to his purpose from the nonessential; can give us, through his presentation of the human spectacle, his thought of it. We ask of him, not only that his work shall be true in detail, but that he shall see the meaning of the facts that he depicts, and shall marshal them toward the outcome so that we shall know his interpretation. It is a hard task, almost the hardest that any artist has to face, to keep on telling the same story, in the same fashion, about the same people; to focus the interest on the chief personages, bringing out subtle interrelations; to choose only those phases of character that are essential to the tale, and to trace the flowing of character into action. When novelist or dramatist can present, in individual lives, the clash of great forces, following the line of cause and effect through the moment of greatest strain, the supreme crisis, on to the catastrophe, and can make us feel that he is giving us a profound interpretation of human experience, we know that we are in the presence of a master. It is hardly necessary to say that the fiction of the last six months gives us no example of the supremely great.

In these days when creative power is much less in evidence than is the power to analyze, when more and more in fiction the study of character and the treatment of event are differentiated, the former tending toward the expository sketch, the latter toward haphazard adventure and external action, it is a pleasure to find a plot so deftly wrought as that of The Patrician,⁷ with the dramatic motif kept clearly before you, unfolding story that is also character development, the inner issue and the outer being one and the same. In the tangle of motive, of emotion that clashes with class instinct, as Barbara, the daughter of a noble house, finds her interest too deep in a socialist reformer not of her class, as Miltoun, the noble son of the house, is overcome by passion for a woman not free to marry him, the informing idea is never blurred, though it is never expounded, save in a sentence at the end. By deft selection and subtle emphasis the author works out his theme, letting the reader watch the mental and moral bewilderment of the characters, but not making him share it, as is the way with many a lesser artist. The plot moves on inevitably toward crisis and catastrophe, as the moulding forces of tradition work out through character, and character flowers into action.

It is seldom that one finds to-day a novel that delights us, as does this, by its shapeliness, finish, form. A classic severity and restraint are combined with a poignancy of suggestion and depth of appeal known only to romantic work, and often the veriest trifle reveals the depths of silent passion at work under the calm surface of conventional life.

The grouping of the characters and the study of their growth shows an artist’s skill. To take the two types, the patrician and the plebeian, not at their worst but at their best, as the author has done in Miltoun and Courtier, was in itself a fine thing; and the ascetic Miltoun, with his ideals, his faiths, and his terrible concentrated passion, is hardly more real than the plebeian, whose fine act of choice in its loyalty and delicacy almost surpasses the patricians’. Just enough of Mr. Galsworthy’s former tendency toward allegory remains to give the suggestion of type in each of these strongly individualized characters. In the clash between tradition and individual desire, you feel that they are patrician in least things and in great, in their demands and in their renunciations, for the old marching orders of caste are everywhere heard. Their consistencies and their inconsistencies bring them before us in the very complexity of life; their fate seems to lie in their own hands and destinies, for you nowhere feel the author manipulating them.

Not a little of Thackeray’s old Lady Kew and of Ethel go to the making of Granny and of Barbara, yet the character studies are both vivid and original. The haunting charm of Barbara follows one long after reading the book: Barbara with her modern wisdom, her wit, her keenness, her bounded recklessness, her feminine helplessness. The tremendousness of the forces that make her suffer is all the deeper in effect because of her humor, and her illuminating, ironic sense of the whole situation. You cannot get rid of the feeling that she is sharing it all with you, in subtle sympathy, and one finds her, in her spiritual detachment, a fascinating companion. Hereditary courage shows in her revolt, as the hereditary sense of values ends it; and in all the book she is the most delicate gauge of the spirit and of the limitations of the patricians.

In its deft nicety of management, its fitness of word to place and person, its significant and dramatic trifles of speech and of action, The Patrician might well serve as a measure or standard in the art of making fiction; and it has — something rare in our contemporary work — distinctive style. There are deeper depths in life than it betrays, greater hurts and greater consolations; but within the limits that the author sets for himself he handles his theme superbly well. Like Barbara, he enjoys the irony; he is an amused spectator of the game of the gods, — hurt too, but perhaps not hurt enough to be stung into that action of the spirit that means searching out the interpretation. It is a pity that, with such power to make you feel the inevitability of the tragedy, of character that is destiny, he has so little of the Shakespearean power of making you feel that the tragedy is not in vain. There is no gleam of light at the end of the struggle.

With memories of the leisurely pleasure derived from Nathan Burke, one welcomes Mrs. Watts again to the world of fiction. The Legacy,⁸ like The Patrician, deals with hereditary forces, presenting the development and the inner crises in the life of one Letty Breen, child of an American family of long tradition, now beginning to fall into poverty. It is also a study of social growth and change in a city on that border line where the poorer class begins to encroach on the old preserves of the aristocracy; and a mild and pleasant social satire is worked out through the study of the ramifications of the family pride, and in the emergence of the washerwoman’s son into the multimillionaire who ends by marrying the daughter of the proud but decaying house. Mrs. Watts makes you feel social complexities and interrelations; and her sketching of the family as a whole, with all the varieties and the contradictions in the dominant traits, as that which is strength in one proves to be weakness in another, shows many a subtle stroke.

The book, with all its quiet humor, is serious and gives pause for thought. Mrs. Watts seems to be saying: This somewhat enigmatic woman, with the heritage, from the great-grandmother whom she resembles, of much that is wild and bad, in the crisis of her life makes, after all, the choice that her own mother would have made, the selfsacrificing, high-minded mother. That quiet influence, hardly realized by the girl during her mother’s life, is really the dominant thing in her life; and her choice of the better and harder course is the more noteworthy because she is nowhere helped by strong emotion, for deep feeling never comes to her.

One wonders why certain reviewers compare this novel unfavorably with Nathan Burke. It is not on so large a scale, being less epic, but in many ways it presents finer workmanship. The strength of the book lies in its character-study; of action and event there is perhaps little. The depth and reality of the treatment of the girl’s development delight the reader, who lives from page to page with the child in the antique house set amid the encroaching slums; the surroundings are as tangible as the experiences are vivid. Jim Hatfield, the washerwoman’s son, is admirably pictured, and the fine and silent way in which he is sketched in later years is both amusing and impressive: his going back, from the glory of multimillionairedom, to marry, for pity, the little lame playmate of his childhood being the surest key that we have to the real character of this unscrupulous financier. The heroine’s mother, ’Lisbeth, the loyal servant, the futile Mr. Edward Breen, who embodies the fine uselessness of the family, are as distinct as living personalities. Less convincing, and a bit too obviously reminiscent of Thackeray, is the worldly old aunt of continental experiences, rouged, dyed, and given to French phrases; but for the most part the character-study suggests close and original observation.

The book confirms our suspicion that Mrs. Watts is a wise woman. There is in her work a depth and richness, a ‘veined humanity,’ rare in American fiction, which is rather given either to over-French finish in the matter of form, or to wild defiance of all considerations of form and taste; both varieties being a bit superficial, viewed as interpretations of human life. With this writer, both thought and feeling cut deep into the heart of real things.

Queed, by Henry Sydnor Harrison, is an interesting and original study of the development of a youthful scholar into a human being. The quick, journalistic style gives vividness, not only to the delineation of the central personage, but to the background picture of the Southern city. This, unlike the Southern city most common in fiction, is astir with new life, not fading into decay; and its problems of civic righteousness, of intellectual integrity, its newspaper fights in the struggle of right and wrong, the hero is called upon to share. The book is virile; and throughout one is aware of the sting of growth, both in the central personage and in the city with which his fortunes are closely involved.

The detailed and realistic study of the hero’s development, a modern prose epic of character, is set in a romantic comedy plot, involving the mystery of the hero’s parentage, and the heroine’s loss of fortune through her father’s traitor friend, who finally is discovered to be the hero’s father. From humblest beginnings, in a city slum, trained only by the Irish policeman who is his benefactor, Queed emerges, winning his way into the world of scholarship, only to realize slowly, through his contact with people, that, as a human being, he has yet to be born. In execution the book is most uneven, combining real observation with touches from worn types of fiction and drama. Much of the character-study of Queed is fresh, full of feeling and of original humor; much is borrowed from the stock pedant of the comic stage, who goes back as far as Latin comedy and, it may be, further. The suggestion of caricature that comes from presenting the hero at first as absolutely unhuman is unfortunate; it disobeys one of the wise and simple canons of fiction as held by childhood, that the hero, from his first appearance, must be in some way recognizable as the hero. Even if he comes in rags, a bit of the gold trappings of the fairy prince must shine through.

Some of the processes whereby the pedant becomes human are finely and closely traced, the best part of all being connected with the little girl Fifi. The scenes in which she, by her appealing helplessness, rouses the reluctant manhood in the hero are much more effective than the scenes which present the heroine’s influence over him. The later stages of growth are at times obscure, and toward the end Queed seems to leap, after the fashion of a Dickens character, into his new personality. The lack of process in this part of the novel is disappointing; there are gaps in the portraiture, and the physical growth, like the moral, seems too sudden and too complete. In a way we should almost be justified in an outcry to the effect that the author is not telling the same story about the same person, were it not for the strong link found in the hero’s passion for truth, which, shown at first only in matters intellectual, persists, applying itself later to human affairs. The romantic tale of concealed relationship lends an interest that does not entirely blend with the main interest of the story, though at one point it greatly helps the study of Queed’s character, showing his loyalty and his truth in the treatment of the old professor who is revealed as his father.

The book contains much of promise. It is full of vitality, and of clean and wholesome humor. There is in it no shade of weariness, no touch of decadence, but a contagious faith in life and in the good of human nature. In workmanship it lacks the finish and charm of The Patrician, but its ringing assertion of the worth of human experience will rouse militant courage where the other will give an added sense of the deepening sadness of fate.

The New Machiavelli⁹ deals with the life of an English statesman engaged in great political affairs, and it presents, to quote the author, ‘the subtle, protesting, perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire against too abstract a dream of statesmanship.’ The story of the hero is carried from earliest boyhood through his years of education and his political activity, through his change from radical to conservative conviction, to the time when, at the age of forty-two, he ruins his career by deserting his wife and going to Italy with a woman who has wakened a deeper love in him.

In spite of its well-nigh five hundred pages, the book lacks body; the political part hardly carries conviction, perhaps partly because there is not enough close detail; there is about it something of the airy unreality of Mr. Wells’s earlier style. The development of the hero is blurred and uncertain in its progress and its outline; it is as if the writer not only did not have in mind an interpretation of his material, but were not even searching for it. It may be legitimate, it may even be desirable at times, for the scientist to present facts with no clear idea of their significance; not so the novelist; and the pseudo-scientific method, which we find in many a novel, in the presentation of an array of closely observed, but meaningless facts, has grown well-nigh unendurable. Art cannot do without informing ideas, and in it the non-assorted, miscellaneous stuff of life has no place. ‘The relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual character and weakness’ is a most interesting theme, but neither through the action nor by comment does the author make his interpretation clear. The meaning evades you; the facts are not marshaled so that you must understand. You share the bewilderment in the hero’s mind, and are as completely involved in it as he, without getting the artistic significance. For all that he says about himself the hero never grows clear, and, in watching him, you feel as you would if a portrait-painter should crowd his canvas with details of costume and of feature, but should draw no person.

The wild invention of Mr. Wells’s early tales made no demand for the presentation of character in action; the careless epic manner of Tono-Bungay was reinforced by humorous comment, so that the reader got a fairly clear idea of the hero’s way of stumbling on with some sense of a goal. Here, with more exacting material, the lack of dramatic gift on the part of Mr. Wells becomes clear; cause and effect are not made apparent. It is not that one would quarrel with the theme: the theme as stated is a good one; or with the outcome, which is quite humanly possible. It is the inconclusiveness that leaves one unsatisfied; the story might have been written by Kipling’s Tomlinson, so uncertain is it in its treatment of the great problems involved.

One misses here Mr. Wells’s usual humor, but some compensation is to be found in pages here and there of sound wisdom, set forth in expository fashion, and betraying the active thinker.

If The New Machiavelli disobeys the stern demand of childhood that the story-writer shall know what his story is about, there are several others that disregard the equally cogent law that he shall keep on telling the same story. Why should that interesting tale, A Sinner in Israel,¹⁰ closely centred in the inner struggle of a Jew who finds that he is not really a Jew, that he has no claim upon the title and the fortune of his supposed father, but is free to usurp all if he will,— why should this story of the inner life, with a crisis, a wrong act of choice and its consequences, sudddenly dash off at the end into a Prisoner-of-Zenda kind of tale, and direct the issue to the Istrian struggle of a Pretender for supremacy? We who read want to stay in that London which the novelist has pictured so fully and so sympathetically, that London of intelligent and devout Jews, whose faith, whose reverent customs, rouse deep interest. Here the struggle of conscience has an individual significance, because of the special training that has moulded and colored the boy’s mind, and we want a genuinely dramatic outcome, not an adventurous escape, from the situation.

The picture of contemporary Jewish life has so much depth of appeal; the sketches of the learned Jewish father and of his wayward son are so good; the satire on the unscrupulous art-dealer is so like a Whistler portrait in its effectiveness, the description of Jewish ceremonial so full of charm, — why change both scene and theme at almost the end of the story?

Another instance of changing motif appears in One Braver Thing,¹¹ a South African story, with an encompassing action of the Boer War. Here it is difficult to see how the theme of the latter part of the novel fits the earlier part. The unspeakable injury to the orphan child results in a dedication of herself to a great purpose; but her later story, that of the wife who slowly, and long after marriage, learns to love her husband, is in no way vitally connected with the early part. The development of the central personage with her tragic early experience is disappointing; here is a great opportunity, but who, after all, would be wise enough to use it? Among the other characters the saintly and heroic Catholic sister proves the most appealing, and the maternal passion which she bestows upon the child of her dead lover is full of beauty. To the credit of human nature be it said that her flawless goodness seems more possible than does the flawless wickedness of the accomplished villain in the tale, who is too perfectly furnished with many kinds of villainy for anything but an eighteenth-century novel. The book is not without strained and melodramatic diction, fitting the touches of melodrama in the story; yet much of it is novel and interesting, and the desolate South African background is presented with intensity and significance.

Again, in taking up The Price,¹² we shall be disappointed in regard to the continuity of story. A young theorist robs the rich for the sake of the poor, and the improbable tale of the way in which the theft is accomplished is plausible enough. But when the reader is asking how the Robin Hood motif is to be carried out, the hero falls ill, and the love-story that follows proves disappointing in ignoring the problem with which the book begins. One lays it down with a wistful feeling of wanting to know how the real story would have come out.

Esther Damon¹³ affords another instance of lack of continuity in the presentation of material. The underlying idea is an admirable one: the man and woman, who are village sinners and outcasts, are brought together by a kind of affection that is fine and high, but the story shifts from one to the other; the hero’s socialistic schemes are hardly a vital part of the plot, and the whole suggests a lack of solidarity, of fusion of the different parts. Close observation and deep feeling are shown in the character-study of the heroine, her Methodist father and mother, Robert Orme, and the elderly Universalist, Mrs. Brewster, who brings her New England heterodoxy to dismay the little New York village. Work so sincere in its endeavor to penetrate the springs of human action is full of promise.

Jane Oglander,¹⁴ unlike the tales that waver in the telling, is an instance of a direct, centred plot, which, in both the major and the minor strands, clings to the same theme. The heroine, a woman of fine inner charm, is betrothed to General Lingard, whom she deeply loves; he falls victim to a foolish, beautiful woman of the vampire type, Athena Maule, whose disillusioned husband, cynic and philanthropist, administers to her an overdose of chloral to save the situation. Athena has ruined other men, and the story of one of them, Bayworth Kaye, a young soldier, runs side by side with the main plot. The book is not extraordinary, but it has interesting character-contrasts: the silent, loyal Jane; the foolish, selfish Athena; and Mrs. Kaye, whose dry and wordless affection for her son makes one of the most appealing phases of the book. The plot is as daring as it is logical, a rather startling instance of consistency in character, and of character manifest in action that seems plausible, for the outcome is artistically, if not ethically, justified.

The author of The Broad Highway¹⁵ has very cleverly united two kinds of story, both of which have strong popular appeal: the spiritual type of swashbuckler adventure, with the idyllic tale of the open road. The novel has the charm of the story of the disinherited knight and of Little Boy Blue besides. There is plenty of good fighting in this account of Peter Vibart, cast off by his uncle with ten guineas unless he will marry within a year Lady Sophia Sefton; lovely ladies in distress are not lacking, nor is the villain, here the hero’s cousin, who at the end meets death at the hand of one of his victims. There is plenty of hard work and good blacksmithing in the rustic tale of the hut, where Lady Sophia is entertained unawares. The novel is very much a unit, in spite of its varied elements, and in spite of the many literary influences that it suggests. One detects here a trace of the Vicar of Wakefield, there the influence of Maurice Hewlett; Beatrix Esmond and Mrs. Burnett’s Lady of Quality are more than once brought to mind by the heroine, and there is much of Dickens in the delineation of the common folk; yet what the author has borrowed he has made his own, and the romance is spirited, consistent, and sustained.

Much of the rustic part of the tale is genuinely poetic, not in the pseudopastoral way, for the dust of the highway is real dust, and the hedgerows are real hedgerows. The stars and the wind and the open road, the inn with its ham and eggs, await here the lover of the simple life; and many a page gives you a feeling as of grass fresh and cool under your feet.

Nature herself is protagonist in Dr. Mitchell’s new novel,¹⁶ and the quietly told story of the way in which John Sherwood, Ironmaster, won not only health of body but health of soul from the Maine woods and the sea is especially refreshing in this iron age. Something of a materialist, like many another successful manufacturer, the hero is won back to his better and his earlier self by the ministry of wind and wave; and the later story of his gentle deeds recalls in vital fashion the sensitive child of the initial chapters. There is, throughout the woodland life, a fresh and exquisite sense of Nature’s beauty, and of her healing power.

Many kinds of story appear in The Prodigal Judge,¹⁷ a novel large, diffused, and difficult to classify. Among the many tales which try to achieve French finish, and are more artificially than vitally unified, it is a pleasure now and then to find a rambling, humorous story, containing less of art than of human nature. We have here interest of haphazard event, romance, a story of a lost legacy, of a child abandoned, neglected, finding its own at last through the agency of the Judge. This character, the central personage of the book, is humorously and sympathetically rendered, something of a rascal, something of a gentleman, like Tartarin a bit meridional, but genuinely American in speech and in act.

Several recent novels recall another demand on the part of the small auditor of a story, perhaps the most important demand of all, that it shall be real. The plot does not need to be probable, it needs only to seem so, and, as we all know, some of the most impossible tales, told by the great story-tellers, have been the most plausible. Just what this magic gift or charm may be, it is impossible to say, but he who would practice upon us the delightful deceit of fiction must have it in large degree. There is in the fairy tale of the princess who changed every night into a frog a simple and convincing quality lacking in Mr. Hichens’s Dweller on the Threshold,¹⁸ in which one clergyman changes into another. One would rather read the reports of the psychical society in their original form, as the bare narrative of supposed fact might well bring more of faith in the improbable than does this profoundly unimaginative bit of creative work. This tale of transformation has the same lack of illusion that gives to Mr. Hichens’s novels dealing with the sense side of life their heavy quality. Here you do not for a moment lose your questioning attitude, in momentary belief that it was so. Instead of sharing in fearful awe the experience of one person who is changing into another, you are aware only of puppets pulled as by wires. As for the narrative within the tale, which the author says might be mistaken for a bit of Stevenson, it would be a dull person who could so mistake it, as a swift rereading of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will prove. This kind of tale demands imaginative power of a high order, and such imaginative power Mr. Hichens does not possess.

If the preposterous story must seem plausible, what can be said of The Lever,¹⁹ which presents a world-controlling trust of gigantic benevolence? Grown folk are perhaps as exigent as children in their demand for truth to type: when the latter learn to accept with faith a kindly stepmother or a well-intentioned witch, perhaps the former can believe in a disinterested trust. In this novel the failure to convince is not due wholly to the integral improbability of the theme, but largely to the lack of realistic detail. A child would want minute particulars as to how a well-intentioned witch would act; the grown reader would wish to know exactly how a benevolent trust would act; but the inner workings of this organization are of the vaguest. Mr. Gorham, its creator, is something of an automaton, and his stilted way of speaking adds to the effect of unreality in the character.

Small folk are undoubtedly helpful in determining standards of story and of character presentation, but there is one aspect of fiction in which their judgments fail the older reader. They like to have the moral broadly and didactically stated, while mature people, or at least the more thoughtful among them, prefer to see some phase of the human spectacle set before them dramatically, that they may ponder it and seek out its meaning at their leisure. Careless of this fact, in The Glory of Clementina,²⁰Mr. Locke, like the author of that amusing and edifying book, Keeping up with Lizzie,²¹ has resolutely shaped his material to the teaching of a lesson which, to the author, seems a wise one. That the kindly Jester should even momentarily forsake the small company of the artists, to join the over-full ranks of the teachers, is in itself a disappointment; and the message that he reiterates throughout, that no woman should be a supremely great painter, seems unnecessary, in the light of the fact that history reports among womankind only one. Over-didactic, the book is still entertaining, but one misses in the carefully manipulated Clementina the golden charm of The Belovèd Vagabond, which, by the way, in its immorality and its seeming irresponsibility, contained a far finer and deeper teaching than this. There was a largeness about it; it was full of the sweetness that may come from broken lives, and a great love of human kind shone through its gentle suggestiveness. In the new book, the minor theme seems more important than the major, and the stupidity of wickedness which Quixtus discovers in his ineffectual attempts to achieve badness is made delightfully real. One hopes that Mr. Locke’s wise lightness of touch and his humor will not desert him, and that he will not turn his mind too much toward the need of putting an erring world or an erring sex on the right path.

After all, the charm of good novelwriting, for all that we can ferret out about it, remains to a great extent a mystery; and, in spite of the wise advice printed in handbooks and in magazine articles, giving instructions as to how a novel must be written, — as explicit in telling what to do with the hero in any given dilemma, as, according to Ruskin, the Academicians were in telling the artist where to place his brown cow, — the problems of plotmaking are as puzzling and almost as interesting as the problems of life itself. Deeper than questions of structure, deeper than questions of probability in the characters, of plausibility in detail, lies some unspoken demand that has to do with sub-conscious humanity, with immemorial habits and feelings of the human race. The love of children for old types and new adventure may help the novelist to meet the demand for that which is the same, yet is ever combined with something fresh and different. Nowhere, perhaps, so well as from the months of youngsters can one get a right idea of the proper proportions in which to mix the wellknown with the novel and unexpected. A good story and a good play demand both, and the charm of the oft-told tale, the charm of the new, must be in every good plot: the familiar blending with the unfamiliar, the typical personage and experience revealed in the individual. In all that they have to say about mingling the long-accustomed with the unknown, the little folk are formulating for themselves, and for posterity, laws worked out from dateless experience, and destined for enduring life.