Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader

THE human heart has an unlimited appetite for tales with triumphantly happy endings. Not in cheap melodrama alone are thwarted villainy and rewarded virtue beloved. I sometimes please myself by fancying that this taste, like most of our deep, unreasoned preferences, may be both a forecast and the means of its own fulfillment. Certain schools of ‘new thought ’ claim, I believe, that the Universal Mind of our long belief is a subconscious mind, compelled by the law of its being to respond to human suggestion almost as unerringly as our own submerged selves may respond. While this notion strikes us old-fashioned folk as distinctly impious, a kind of magic not to dabble in rashly, it yet has the fascination of suggesting to audacious wits a plausible method of remoulding this sorry scheme of things closer to the heart’s desire. Perhaps we all would be glad to believe that novelists, by setting Providence a frequently repeated example of stories with happy endings, were really doing something toward making this world a place where such endings are the rule.

All this is prefatory to saying that in the matter of suggesting to Providence the great desirability of confounding vice and recompensing virtue, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett has long been one of the most active of our writers of fiction. Her earliest efforts appeared on the ‘sitting-room’ tables of the late sixties, between the covers of Peterson’s and Godey’s. Unreasoned and immature as they were, those very girl-y stories of Fanny Hodgson were warmed with the same optimism that warms T. Tembarom¹ to-day. If there was a slight falling-off in that cheer later, it has returned, mellow, seasoned, assured, comforting. We may find this world a region of a very different quality from the straightforward place of rewards and punishments which she represents it to be, and yet enjoy that representation to the full.

T. Tembarom, who is a self-supporting and self-respecting waif on the streets of New York, from the tender age of ten, rises from selling newspapers to writing for them. Just as he achieves this brilliant success, he inherits a large fortune and a fine old English countryseat. Of course there is a missing heir, who turns out to be Tembarom’s own protégé, a man who has forgotten his own identity. Of course, too, while helping the heroine’s father to sell an invention, Tembarom makes a fortune for himself that renders him independent of the inheritance he is destined to lose. These outlines sound crudely romantic, but the book is written with so much energy and affection, such a lavish amount of good detail and characterization, that the skeleton of the story is draped almost as closely as Dickens used to drape it, and with something of the same beguilement. No modern writer would dare to trifle with his reader’s patience as the master-magician did, nor does Mrs. Burnett attempt it, but her unstinted detail is all cheerful,comforting, humanly pleasant stuff. One feels the better for it, just as one feels the better for a cup of hot tea in front of a blazing fire after a cold and windy walk. Good cheer, of which the Victorian age made so much, is, in fact, the prevalent note of her work.

This good cheer has ‘gone out ’ of late years in life as well as in literature. It has been done to death by steamheat, apartment-houses, over-eating at restaurants, and feminism. Reading Miss Johnston’s Hagar,² one says to one’s self, ‘especially feminism.’ For never was there a book by so able a writer more lacking in vitality, spirit, fresh air, faith, and charity than this. It is excruciatingly uninteresting.

The present writer is merely a critic and is saying nothing about the feminist cause; its strength and its weaknesses are all beside the point. But as a critic, one is entitled to complain bitterly if a favorite artist, becoming entangled in the parasitic mesh of a ‘cause,’ loses vision, loses charm, loses touch. Everybody who reads at all, knows of what admirable work Miss Johnston is capable. I have not seen To Have and To Hold since it came out in the Atlantic fourteen years ago, but across those years, and among two thousand odd novels read since then, there remains to me still the sense of its grace and wit, its gay excitement, its intensity. The diction of Audrey was even more distinguished and beautiful, while Lewis Rand was a fine, substantial piece of work. But Hagar — there are no living people in Hagar, no adorable phrases, no joy of life or art, not even any sadness that is poignant and compelling. Hagar is a Southern girl of talent, at war with her environment and its traditions. She is pictured as a graven image, a solemn prig. She does her domestic duty with an injured air, and successfully secures a ‘life of her own ’ on the side. We are told that she enjoys this, but there is no atmosphere of enjoyment in all the dreary book. It is infinitely sad to get so little fun out of doing your duty as Hagar does. Ultimately she becomes a feminist propagandist. The hero first enters on page 345 of a book of 390 pages. He makes a very pallid appearance, and it is just as impossible to see why anybody should love him as to see why he should love Hagar. He vanishes, to reappear on page 383, when impending death leads Hagar to mention that she is glad they are going to die together. Unfortunately this does not occur. Presumably they live to marry.

This is Hagar’s idea of an adequate love-scene: ‘I wish a child. While it needs me and when it needs me, I shall be there. . . . Generally speaking, the Woman Movement has me for keeps.’

The immediate answer of normal man to such a pronouncement at such a moment should be: ‘It is entirely welcome to you so far as I am concerned ! ’

I am not saying that the Creator could not make a feminist whom a man could love, — his power is infinite, —but that Miss Johnston has failed to do so. Surely one must continue to prefer, as a specimen of vows exchanged, the classical example offered by the Prayer-Book: ‘ To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do parti.'

Do not these words knock at the door of the heart more strongly than Hagar’s mitigated pledge? And will it not be a day of doom for all the hearts of all the world if they shall cease to do so? One is tempted to say to Hagar’s sponsor, —

‘Dear Miss Johnston, whose work we have loved in the past and hope to love in the future, why do you suppose God creates artists? The subject deserves your reflection, since He has made you one!’

The note of feminine revolt recurs insistently in the winter’s fiction. The clever girl in A Modern Eve³ says, ‘Freedom is the word I like best in the world, as the word constitution is the one I hate best.’ Her not-at-all-clever father answers simply, ‘ God and nature are very constitutional,’ — a statement which revolters would do well to investigate carefully. There may be something in it. The book also contains an admirable picture of a Victorian mother, frail and dying, who wonders wistfully who will pick up her little domestic burdens, ’too trivial and too many for masculinity or for splendid strong young women like Ellen.’

In Anna Borden’s Career,⁴ a wellplaced and attractive girl who has had social success on two continents, wrecks her life in a fevered search for those marvelous ‘ moments ’ that come to all young things. She is a spectacular example of the misery a maid’s free will may make for her. The author’s material is very interesting, but not as yet entirely plastic in her grasp. Nevertheless she achieves a presentation of caprice that is rather terrifying to the reader, who asks himself in a panic if the whimsical and attractive girls he knows in the actual world can really be so destitute of an inner life and guiding principles as this one.

In Fatima’s career,⁵ Rowland Thomas works out an amusing inspiration. He translates militant modern womanhood into Egyptian, with distinguished success. Fatima is one of the restless, self-seeking dames who must be served. They are much alike, whether they flower on the banks of the Nile or the Charles, these tiger-lilies. Fatima marries a Fool who can amuse the populace, that he may earn money for her, but she makes the mistake of teaching him to admire her, which is fatal to his unconscious art. What other things Fatima does and how she achieves contentment with her life and her Fool are recorded with a satire too humorous to be biting. The flavor of the book is a compound of Arabian Nights, La Fontaine’s Fables, and the Saturday Evening Post! The mixture is decidedly unlike anything else we have had. It can be recommended to any masculine reader with whom Hagar has disagreed.

Undeniably, there is literature in revolt; undeniably also the revolt should be seen with a certain humor and detachment in order to make anything worthy the name of literature, unless of course, you happen to have the passion of a prophet, which, however, is as rare as humor among our feminine reformers.

The Coryston Family,⁶ Mrs. Ward’s new novel, literally seethes with revolt of every description. Lady Coryston, the fine old self-willed mother, is up in arms because her children are not more obedient and considerate. All the children rebel more or less against their mother’s tyranny; but Lord Coryston, the eldest son, also revolts with equal violence against property in general and against the fact that his mother withholds from him the estates in her gift. This is inconsistent, but not more so than revolutionaries usually are. Marcia, the daughter, revolts against the deep spirituality, tending to fanaticism, of her fiancé. The youngest son berates his mother like a bargee because the girl he loves refuses to marry him. This girl, the daughter of a politician who began life as a pit-boy, revolts against the ordered traditions of English society, yet delights in achieving a personal and political standing in that society while she plays gadfly to as many of its members as she may. John Betts and his wife revolt, to the point of giving up their lives, against the logical outcome of the sacramental theory of marriage. All this tumult and shouting which arrive nowhither, Mrs. Ward transcribes faithfully, without taking sides. Each point of view is shown to have its own justice; the things that are Cæsar’s are rendered unto him. No one can say that Mrs. Ward preaches, in this novel. Faintly across the background trails the mist of the author’s own belief that love is the fulfilling of the law and will appease the quarrel between the young generation and the old as well as between the warring classes of society; but even this preëminently justifiable view is not insisted upon.

This surplusage of speculation and rebellion in the winter’s fiction tempts one to issue a Bulletin of Tranquilizing Tales, — for a few such may still be found. Very comfortable, as well as substantial, are Weir Mitchell’s Westways,⁷ Meredith Nicholson’s Otherwise Phyllis,⁸ and Mrs. Watts’s Van Cleve.⁹

Westways, which has an especial interest as the last work of a most genial and versatile mind, is a leisurely story of companionable people of good quality who lived in Pennsylvania during the fifties and sixties. Westways is a typical country home of that period, and it is good to linger there with a simple, dignified, likable family. These consoling characteristics belong to Mr. Nicholson’s dear modern Indiana people also. It is elderly and old-fashioned to like nice people in novels, and one steels one’s self to accept a great many other kinds, sedulously concealing one’s taste for the decently born and behaved; but the taste will out occasionally. Those who are conscious of a similar weakness should read the volumes just mentioned. The author of Van Cleve admits more foibles and exposes more pretensions than Dr. Mitchell or Mr. Nicholson, but the social scheme of which she writes is founded on the stability of the Van Cleve Kendricks and the Lorrie Gilberts as on a rock. They are as fine-grained as good black walnut, and have the wearing qualities of the excellent body-Brussels upon which they were reared.

One is tempted to add to these volumes about nice people, The Truth About Camilla,¹⁰ for, while Camilla is frankly an adventuress and undeniably a liar, she is so hard-working, devoted, reliable and patient, that these qualities stand her instead of more shining virtues, while the restrained and delicate humor with which her tale is told achieves for her unusual distinction.

All these books offer a carefully wrought realism as well as refreshment. There are several stories of slighter texture that are sane and sweet. The Taste of Apples,¹¹ boldly avows wholesomeness in its very name, and the flavor does not belie the title. Mother’s Son¹² is the brightest love-story of the season. Dave’s Daughter¹³ is a billiondollar girl whose happiness is wrapped up in a three-thousand-dollar man. It takes two romantic New England spinsters to pilot them across the desert of dollars between, and bring them to their joy. Merrilie Dawes¹⁴ is also, approximately, a billion-dollar girl, but she is able to bring her own love-affair to a satisfactory conclusion by using up her fortune to support a ‘bear’ market when her lover’s stocks are raided. The House of Happiness¹⁵ bravely proclaims that sanitariums for ‘Resters,’ and even ‘Tubers,’ need not be wholly destitute of cheer. The Golden Rule Dollivers¹⁶ are rampant optimists and very good company.

Jack London and Robert Hichens have not hitherto pointedly aspired to be classified as sweet and sane, but The Way of Ambition¹⁷ and The Valley of the Moon¹⁸ undeniably deserve these gentle adjectives. Shall an orchid bear apples? — inquires the puzzled reader of The Way of Ambition. Here is nothing flame-spotted, unholy, decadent. It is domestic literature, a forcible exposition of the fact that an artist’s work, to be impressive, must be direct from his spirit; the way of ambition being the path of failure.

I would not make oath that The Valley of the Moon is not something of a fairy-tale, yet if it is not true, it ought to be. Billy Roberts, a sweet-tempered teamster who occasionally works at prize-fighting, and his wife, a pretty girl who does ‘fancy starch’ in an Oakland laundry, sicken of the town. The wife discovers that ‘poor people can’t be happy in the city where they have labor-troubles all the time,’ so, being of sound country stock, the two set out with knapsacks on their backs to find their way home to the soil. They are not yet, you see, true city-dwellers, or they would throw stones, explode bombs, and demand that somebody better their condition. The book is a chapter from the pilgrimage of our nation back to the land, which it has so lately, yet already so disastrously, left. There are many thousand chapters to be written in that book. The more convincingly they are indited, the better for us all. Perhaps Jack London paints the blessings of ranching in California in high colors, but the subject is one that tempts to emphasis. The book is the most refreshing its author has written, and even if over-roseate, it is really practical. When Billy Roberts remarks, after sleeping a few nights in the open, ‘Gee! I don’t care if I never see a moving-picture show again!’ he puts his finger in one sentence upon the disease of our city-ridden age and its cure. Only as we escape the horrors that we ourselves have created in the towns can we free ourselves from need for the opiate we have devised to deaden them.

The serious-mindedness so marked in the winter’s fiction implies a falling-off in the quantity and quality of novels that are merely entertaining, as compared with the output of a year ago. There are only a few of them this year. Rex Beach has a new adventure-story, The Iron Trail,¹⁹ and Francis Lynde a lively story of Western politics, The Honorable Senator Sage-brush.²⁰The Poison Belt²¹ by Conan Doyle gives a hair-raising account of the earth’s passage through a streak of tainted ether. Grant Richards has another graceful and amusing story, Valentine.²² This does not read as if the author found it such a lark to write as Caviare, but it is light-hearted and entertaining.

Maurice Hewlett is not usually reckoned as a stern moralist, but the final effect of Bendish²³ is to sicken the reader of egotism. The book is a study of the Byronic type and period. To the twentieth century, both seem remote and alien. What a tiny world it was, one reflects, in which a character of such imperceptible substance could create so much disturbance as the real Byron did, or as Hewlett attributes to the imaginary Bendish. But perhaps the real Byron weighed more than Bendish. The latter is Sir Willoughby Patterne greatly enfeebled. We are told that Bendish has brains and ability, but we remain unconvinced. He appears merely a shallow egotist living in a world of one dimension. It takes a novelist as great as Meredith to interest us very keenly in such a personality. Even Hewlett’s customary allurements of style fail to engage the reader’s loyal attention.

Has any one said that Galsworthy is not a novelist at all, but a poet? The life of man is a complicated piece of tapestry made up of many interwoven threads; a novelist usually attempts to convey something of the pattern, coloring, and intricacy of the whole; a lyric poet unravels and holds up to view a detached filament. We encourage in the poet the single eye that we deprecate in the novelist. The Dark Flower²⁴ is an attempt to isolate the passional life of a man from all the other elements that go to make up normal human existence; to present a moving-picture of the heart of an individual of temperament and talent under that influence sometimes so sinister, sometimes so benign, but always, while it endures, so potent. All objective interests, affairs, art, the world of men, are practically eliminated from consideration. The book divides itself into three episodes, spring, summer, autumn. It exhibits Mark Lennan the lad, waking to his first knowledge of the authority of sex under the influence of a woman much older than himself. Her personality is nothing to him — for a pair of tearful blue eyes and a mass of gold hair turn his heart from his first worship as smoothly as the rising sun turns the sunflower’s head. In the tragic passion of Mark Lennan’s maturity we are left in doubt as to whether personality really counts as a determinant; and, assuredly, it does not so enter into the autumn incident, where his blood is stirred to answer the adoration of a girl because she is young, and because he too would fain be young again, — did the gods allow, — or, failing that, would draw Youth to him and drink again from its enchanted cup.

For the purposes of The Dark Flower, Anna, Olive, and Nell are but vessels that hold the wine of feeling. This is in the classic tradition. Galsworthy here signifies allegiance to the Greek view of passion; the breath of the gods blows in from the void, and man goes mad in consequence. A poet is always entitled to this view, I take it, but to argue its validity for a twentieth-century novelist is to proclaim a paganism that humanity has fought long, if intermittently. The flesh of man with its vast desires has been moulded by the slow effort of the centuries upon a frame-work of duties, principles, and occupations, even as these our muscles are moulded upon our very bones. If you withdraw that skeleton, the helpless tendons, the strings of flesh remaining, are left quivering, shapeless, unseemly. They no longer keep the likeness of a man.

The fault of The Dark Flower as a novel, then, is that Mark Lennan is not drawn in the image of complete, active man. None of his passions save the last are represented as holding any imperative relation to the rest of his life. If it be argued that this lack of relation is the cachet of passion, the answer is obvious. His case is not typical, for not many men are called upon to fight the call of the blood with sheer, unaided will. Doubtless if they were, life would contain even more such tragedies than we already know it to have; but in the hour when a man’s will is as the wind’s will and reason weak as water, there are thousands of unconsidered stays and ties, threads in the tapestry or tendons in the flesh, whichever simile you like, that serve to hold him if he chooses so to be held, until the ‘brief madness ’ has blown into the void again.

Of course a lyric poet may unravel whatever thread he selects for contemplation, but a candid novelist must admit that into the very texture of life there are still woven more restraints than emancipations. The authors of Youth’s Encounter²⁵ and The Garden Without Walls,²⁶ who occupy themselves with themes somewhat similar, are more novelists than poets, by which token their work is less poignant and moving than Galsworthy’s, although truer to the whole aspect of life.

If Mark Lennan’s loves are in the classical tradition, the love of Melicent and Perion, brought together from scattered fragments in old chronicles and retold by James Branch Cabell in The Soul of Melicent,²⁷ is a very perfect specimen of mediæval love. The real content of classical love is subjective, its effect on the lover; the real content of mediæval love is objective, the service rendered to the beloved. And the logical climax of the former is the piercing instant in The Dark Flower when Olive Cramier’s husband and her lover crouch at the head and feet of her drowned body, ‘like dark creatures of the woods and waters over that which with their hunting they had slain.’ The logical climax of the latter is the instant when Perion and Melicent come face to face at last, after long hardships suffered, death outfaced and dishonor endured in the name of their young love, and Perion, seeing in her another than the wondrous girl whose image he had cherished through hard years, is disappointed first, and then is swiftly smitten with a new and finer love, reward of his suffering and hers, which may safely be counted on to recompense the faithful and unselfish servants of an ideal.

The solid value of romance, its actual worth in increasing the efficiency and stability of human nature, is very clearly indicated in the contrast between these two studies of two widely varying ways of love. One would prefer, on the whole, for the good of the race, that young lovers should imitate the case of Perion and Melicent. Mr. Cabell is more than a very cunning artificer in lovely words and a student of old chronicles. He knows, one guesses, why God made artists — that high deeds may not be quite forgotten, that high loves may be kept alive, that the way of the flesh may sometimes be shown as a sun-path to us, not always as a dull morass beneath the moon.

It is H. G. Wells’s chief crime against humanity that he also is utterly ignorant of the civilizing value of romance! In The Passionate Friends,²⁸ he essays the theme of a man’s whole life as, looking back upon it in maturity, the man writes it out for his young son to see some day. It is a book of conclusions. It is a little mellower, more nearly stable, than anything Wells has yet offered us. And yet, with all the man Stratton’s cogitation over his own history, and his desire to record its meaning clearly, he misses what is, for the American reader, the crux of the whole story. One wonders if Wells did not miss it too?

As a boy, Stratton loves a girl who refuses, later, to consider him as a marriageable possibility, because of his limited means. They are comrades in mind and spirit, perpetual refreshment and stimulus to each other, yet she deliberately marries a man of great wealth who is repugnant to her, because she wants a life splendid with all the richness, variety, and interest that wealth added to position can command in England. She accuses Stratton of being ‘greedy and ignoble’ because he desires marriage with her. They do not meet for years, but become lovers when they are finally thrown together. The jealous husband demands an entire separation of their lives, which is necessarily accorded. Time, travel, the effort to help other people to a better understanding of life than he himself possesses, finally restore Stratton to a certain poise. He sees at last that ‘all our lives we must struggle out of our pits; that to struggle out of our pits is this life. There is no individual life but that, and there comes no escape here, no end to that effort but the release of death. Continually or frequently we may taste salvation, but never may we achieve it while we are things of substance. Each moment in our lives we come to the test and are lost again or saved again. To be assured of one’s security is to forget and fall away.’

This is greater insight than any other of Wells’s characters has yet attained. Stratton finds work to do and a woman to love; he marries, has children, makes a life and a home. Later an accidental meeting with Lady Mary Justin is misinterpreted by the jealous husband, who begins suit for divorce. The ‘splendid life’ for which she married no longer satisfies Lady Mary and the scandal would ruin Stratton’s political career, so she kills herself. The husband and Stratton, meeting, realize that between them, they have done her to death, torn her to pieces no less than if they had murdered her with their hands. Stratton arraigns jealousy for having done this thing, arraigns woman’s position in the world, ‘ the vast tradition that sustains and enforces the subjugation of her sex.’ He therefore devotes his life ‘to the destruction of jealousy, and of the forms and shelters and instruments of jealousy, both in my own self and in the thoughts and laws and usages of the world.’

This is impressive, but not rational. For if woman is really to be man’s equal, she must accept, no less than he, the burden of her own mistakes. She must pay her own penalties. In the beginning of her sordid story, Lady Mary deliberately chose to sacrifice young love and comradeship to her conception of what was a suitable life for a person of her birth and capacities. In the end she paid the price demanded for that initial mistake. Her life was not thrown away because she was a woman and her husband was a jealous brute, but because as a girl she was avid and greedy of splendid living — and greed in those who should know better is the unpardonable sin. Stratton never suspects this fundamental truth, and neither, one judges, does Wells. For all the free play of her fine intelligence, for all her birth, breeding, bravery, and ability, Lady Mary is blood-sister to Undine Spragg of Apex, Mrs. Wharton’s latest heroine. Undine wants things; Lady Mary also wanted things, but she paid for having them as Undine did not do. The mighty merchant with whom we do our bargaining has no fixed price. He asks most from those to whom most has been given.

No doubt Wells would scorn mediæval love and the fantastic loyalties of Perion and Melicent, but out of his own work we may convict him. It was a wiser than Wells who wrote of Romance, —

In The Custom of the Country,²⁹ we have neither revolt nor passion. The emotion lying under Mrs. Wharton’s powerful lens is feminine greediness. Undine Spragg is embodied, indiscriminate appetite. From first to last, her desires are the only determining factors in her evolution. Undine not only did not have a soul, but, unlike her namesake, she never acquired one, although if the love of mortal man could have bestowed this grace upon her, she might have possessed an indefinite number. Her marital career she began in Apex, with one Elmer Moffatt for a partner, so early in life that her rich but respectable parents were able to have the marriage dissolved speedily by sheer force of their objections to the match. After three divorces and a death, the cycle of Undine’s experiences returns upon itself, and in the end she remarries Elmer Moffatt, who has become a railroad king.

In lavishing her undoubted competence as a novelist upon this unseemly history, Mrs. Wharton exercises a restraint that is really marvelous. She reports without comment and without rancor a checkered career, leaving it for the reader to say that Undine is a monster because nothing she achieves is valued by her after she discovers that other people have things they value more. Undine herself always believes that she ‘wants the best.’ Strange doors open to her beauty. Her second marriage allies her to a poet and places her in the inner circle, ‘dowdy and exclusive,’ of old New York; and her third gives her assured position in the Faubourg St. Germain. But she understands the prejudices of the latter community as little as she understood the principles and passwords of the former, and only her fourth marriage gives her what she really desires, namely, the power to buy everything in the world that can be bought. On the last page she is seized with a sudden ambition to be an ambassadress, and learns to her discomfiture that neither beauty nor influence nor millions can procure for her this distinction, because ‘they won’t have divorced ambassadresses.’ The author leaves her gnawed by the conviction that the rôle denied her is the one part she was really created to play. Not all Mrs. Wharton’s art can make Undine agreeable company. She is a horrible warning, but perhaps will only seem so to those who need no such admonition.

Down Among Men³⁰ is one of those books whereof the perceptive critic speaks eagerly yet reluctantly. There is so much real fire in it — the fire of youth that has seen and suffered — so much vitality and passion, that one grows chary of petty comments. When you visit a sick soldier in a hospital, you do not tell him that he is unshaven or that he would be a better warrior if he had a different hair-cut. And yet words and phrases are the weapons of him who wars with the pen, and, especially in the first quarter of this book, before the writer thoroughly warms to his work, there are so many instances of the wrong word carefully sought for, so many sentences made awkward and difficult with the evident intention of making them piercing and impressive, that the reader cries abruptly to the writer, ‘ Man! Sharpen your tools! Don’t try to carve with dull chisels! You want to do a big thing. You have here a big thing to do. Don’t mess about with inadequate instruments!’ As the story sweeps on, however, the reader forgets his carping; the style becomes simpler and more vivid, the affectations fall away. About the author’s conception there is never any lack of vividness.

This is the story of the making of a man from a youth of extreme sensitiveness and talent. Being a war-correspondent in Asia, he is made by the roughest and hardest means Asia has at command. War shapes him, and hardships; insults and injustice; the sight of blood and death and corruption; wounds, fever, and fear of failure. He is steeped in the unspeakable mire of the Orient, trampled under the feet of herded coolies, fouled with their loathsome rags. Yet he experiences also friendship and favor; he achieves the thing he is fiercely struggling to achieve, and, later, he is shaped by success, by clubs and comrades, cards and alcohol; later still by God’s out-of-doors and the gift of a great affection. All this brings him to a conception of God’s fatherhood and man’s brotherhood. Up to this point all the emotion of the tale is genuine and very strong. The writer offers us the cup of life, and there is blood in the cup. But the latter part of the book rings false.

The girl who loves this youth — and their idyl is as genuine as John Morning’s suffering — is told by a man who believes that John Morning has in him the making of a ‘world-man,’ that love, marriage, and consequent contentment (yet why assume contentment as the sequel of marriage?) will ruin the work of brotherhood to which he is called, while the torture of a withheld love will complete his experience of human suffering. At the cost of melancholia and finally death to herself, the girl offers him, as she believes, to humanity. He is an unwilling and uncomprehending victim of this experiment, but one feels that the writer accepts the sacrifice for him and has faith in the arbitrary making of prophets after this fashion. This climax is repellent and unreal, mawkish, in fact. Because of it, the reader refuses to believe in John Morning as a world-man, and the reader is right.

I am not going to tell the author of Down Among Men how God does make his prophets. For one thing, it would take too long; for a second, I do not profess to know all the facts; for a third, he would not believe me. But I can tell him that the finishing touches are not put on competent prophets in the fashion he represents. To be indeed a brother to all the world, one must share in all respects the common lot. If he knew this and falsified the values of his story purposely, he deserves the abatement thus occasioned in his work’s worth. If he does not know it, one can only be sorry that he wrote this book now instead of a dozen years hence, when the mental ferment will be over and the wine of his thought run clear from the lees. Nevertheless, one does not cavil in this fashion at insignificant or feeble work. Whatever distortions or diminutions one may perceive in Down Among Men, it has much of both beauty and virility. The writer is searching for an explanation of life and comes close to finding one that has satisfied many saints and many sages.

The author of The Yoke of Pity³¹ perceives very clearly that philosophers are created by one process and prophets by another, but, unlike the historian of John Morning’s development, he has small use for prophets. The book is a wonderfully vivid presentation of the simple fact that profound mental activity of the creative type cannot coexist with that strong, selfless emotion for which we have no better name than pity. The hero twice experiences pity as a passion. In the first instance, he suffers vicariously for the mistress he has ceased to love, but, aided by natural fickleness he overcomes his own compassion and pursues his intense mental life, undisturbed, through marriage and fatherhood, until his only child becomes a victim of hopeless, though not fatal, disease. Then, indeed, the heart takes its revenge. In spite of himself, he lives in and for the child. The concentrated life of the mind becomes less and less possible to him as he gives himself more and more to paternal love and passionate sympathy. He accepts this new and selfless life, acknowledging that as love wills, so it must be, but in his secret soul he is still of the school of Nietzsche. Had it been possible for him to remain self-centred, neglectful of the child, he would be glad, for the old life of ideas calls him still, and seems to him more beautiful, more valuable, than the existence of abnegation he has accepted in his own despite.

Many of M. Benda’s French and English critics have denied the lifeand-death opposition he maintains between ‘the religion of ideas’ and ‘the religion of pity,’but such denial is really a confession of ignorance as to the conditions of intellectual creation and the selfless life. The plain truth is that one must pay the price demanded for any supreme experience, whether intellectual or emotional. Choose as Nietzsche did, and you will doubtless end as he in the mad-house. Choose as M. Benda’s hero, and you will never be an epoch-making philosopher. On the whole the race needs tender fathers more than mad philosophers, and what the race needs, we become. Why, then, such a fuss about it? M. Benda is in revolt, as Nietzsche was, against the laws of the spirit’s very life. It is possible to pick a very pretty quarrel with these conditions, but it is not possible to overthrow them.

When books are like these, full of the color, the sharpness, the pang of living, criticism of them speedily passes into criticism of life itself—which, perhaps, is always vain. To turn from The Yoke of Pity to Roads from Rome³² is to pass from a sun-beaten, white high-road into the coolness and peace of a high-hedged, ancient garden. If you tire of reading-matter that surrounds you with the atmosphere of crude revolt, of feministic egotism, of half-baked altruism, of pitiful greed, of spiritual uncertainty and feebleness, of the philosophy of self-assertion,— in short, if the faithful reflection of our modern world wearies you, as well it may, take up this little book. It is exquisitely written; it has the disregarded charms of delicacy, simplicity, and ethical certainty; it handles fragments of the life of ancient Rome somewhat as Pater handled them in Marius. Mrs. Allinson is more tenderly human and less fantastic than the Pater of Imaginary Portraits, whom she of course recalls. One does not know how many readers there are left upon our noisy, dusty, smoke-stained, hotel-and-factory-spotted earth for little books like this one, but one hopes, wistfully, that there are more than casually appear.