Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader

IS there any efficient substitute for religion in character-building? If so, what is it?

These questions have more to do with current fiction than casually appears. For the upheaval in the foundations of faith that affected many people between thirty and forty years ago is just beginning to show its appropriate results in literature. Character-building is quite as interesting and even more necessary than formerly, but it is not considered, in fiction at least, so directly a matter of divine concern. The struggling soul, like a drowning man, clutches at this and at that for support, at times laying hold of things fixed, at times of things floating.

This is vividly exemplified in three of the better new novels, one American, one English, one, to all intents and purposes, French: Home¹ by George Agnew Chamberlain, The Business of a Gentleman² by H. N. Dickenson, and The Making of an Englishman³ by W. L. George. Attacking the problem from standpoints differing as the nations differ, these three books furnish three apparently diverse solutions of the ancient question: What shall a man do to be saved? Each writer seems quite unconscious of any universal solution to this problem, which each works out in his own way.

Says the author of Home, in substance, ‘Let him be born of good stock, preferably the old stock that laid the foundations of our nation; let him be reared in an old home in the country, one of those homes that have grown with the growth of generations and fitted themselves to the habits of a family. Then, though he wanders in many a far country and lies with swine and feeds on husks, in the end the blood of his fathers will speak, the house of his fathers will call, and he will arise and go home, saved by the decencies that were bred in the bone.'

The book is a study in prodigals. Alan Wayne and Gerry Lansing, whose stories are most prominent, are sons of the Connecticut Valley. But to make the application broader there are others, notably an embezzler from Pennsylvania and a cowboy from New Mexico. The embezzler builds him a palace in Pernambuco which he fails to enjoy because for fifteen years he has been remembering the lay of the woodpiles and the color of the wallpapers at his father’s house. The cowboy, who starts out to look for the ‘pu’ple cities’ that are the haunts of dream, takes to orchid-hunting and learns that ‘ ’ceptin’ in a man’s mind, the’ ain’t no pu’ple cities. What a man’s got to find ain’t pu’ple cities but the power to see one when he’s got it.’ ’Home’ says the exiled embezzler, struggling with that loneliness which seems to blot out one’s very being, ‘is the anchor of a man’s soul. I want to go Home.’ Wayne and Lansing, being more highly sophisticated, do not phrase the conclusions of their bitter wanderings so tersely, but at the end their souls drop anchor in the desired haven. They can do no better than to be what their fathers were, and dwell where they also dwelt.

In The Business of a Gentleman, Sir Robert Hilton, better known as ‘Bobby,’ is fully saved before he is born, because he is born on land that his ancestors have tilled before him for generations, and held for generations as a trust. After the moderate percentage of Bobby’s income necessary to pay his taxes and keep up his house in a comfort adequate to the dignity of the demesne was spent, the rest of it went back to the estate ‘ in whatsoever manner best increased the amenity and productivity of the land from which all drew their living and for which Bobby was responsible to his own honor.’ His grandfather taught him that he had no right to his own dinner unless all the people on his land had their dinners in peace and comfort. He believes himself responsible for his own people, and the author believes fully, and perhaps truly, that he took much better care of them than they could take care of themselves.

His unformulated creed is not to flinch from the strong, or trouble the weak, or turn from a dependent or a friend. He finds it creed enough to keep him busy, especially after his wife inherits a manufacturing plant and he is thereby brought into direct contact with industrial unrest, riots, labor agitation, selfish fomenters of class-hatred, and social theorizers of all kinds. He applies the old principles to the new problems with results which are, at least, better than those obtained by other methods. Perhaps the author is not wholly fair to those ‘intellectuals’ who stick a finger into everybody’s pie in the name of social justice. Surely they cannot all be as pestiferous and desolating as Miss Baker, Mrs. Hope, and Mr. Trevannion. The agitatorwoman, Miss Baker, tells Bobby, ‘If you had made your sacrifices in the days of the great Mr. Cobden, we should have had no Mr. Cobden then and no Socialists to-day. But you missed your opportunity, and now your class has rotted and you will keep the sheep no more. . . . Ichabod, your kingdom has passed to those who have the brains to govern.’

‘ I thought the kingdom was passing to people with votes who have n’t got brains at all,’said Bobby.

‘No — it is passing to people like myself.'

All of which is entirely true, though generally unobserved as yet.

The Making of a Englishman is an extraordinary and brilliant performance, though it is safe to say there are few English writers who would care to be responsible for it. Lucien Cadoresse, the hero who tells his own story, is a French lad, son of a shipbroker of Bordeaux. With his dawning intelligence there develops in him a passionate enthusiasm for England and the English. After military service Lucien becomes a clerk in the London house his father founded, and the rest of the book consists in the reactions of England upon a vivacious and perfectly Gallic mind immensely predisposed in favor of that country. The English are power and order to this youth; they are dignity, reason, restfulness; they are sanity and generosity. ‘You are the splendid people of the earth for me! ’ he cries. ‘You’re the handsomest race. You’re strong and yet gentle. You never swerve from your purpose. You never know when you’re beaten, yet when you’re beaten you take it well. You’re truthful, honourable — I want to be like you! ’ In comparison, his own people with ‘their perpetual French talk’seem to him futile marionettes.

We are shown the whole inner fife of a typical temperament conscious of its racial defects and desiring to replace them by the weightier virtues of a more substantial nation. Lucien begins with hats, boots, neckties, for he would resemble his Sacred People in all things. He accepts hints from Hugh Lawton, who is Apollo and Galahad in one. Certain things ‘ are not done ’ and Lucien strives to leave them undone. He too will be ‘silent, self-reliant, purposeful, in brief, Olympian.’ He learns to take chaff without offering a duel; he gets a glimmer of the value that may be set upon physical purity as well as cleanliness. Hugh Lawton tells him that ‘a man can’t be big unless he’s straight.’ It does not occur to Lucien, as it well might, to correlate this with his own clear perception that the sensuous French are merely revolutionaries, never being creative save in art, while the English are fundamentally constructive. However, he perceives that Hugh’s ideals have a value, ‘the samurai began to struggle with the voluptuary in his heart’ and sometimes triumphed, for, he asked himself, ‘what’s the good of being an Englishman unless you can be an English gentleman, too?’

The book is brilliant because it is written by one for whom, in Gautier’s well-worn phrase, the visible world exists. Everything that is seen at all is seen with immense lucidity and described with immense vigor; the book is also extraordinary because it actually does set forth the English qualities entirely from the outside. This keen and perpetually coruscating perception applied to an alien people, strongly suggests Taine. Had he written fiction instead of criticism it would have been silkier and more suave, indeed, but otherwise might have resembled this.

Lucien is a clear-cut personality, essentially Gallic throughout. He is especially so in dealing with his intrigues, his intimate degradations, when he falls into the gutter after he is rejected as Edith Lawton’s suitor. The English gutter has found its de Maupassant at last. It has never been described, analyzed, criticized after this fashion. Simply, ‘it is not clone’ in English fiction. Lucien masters the problems of English neckties and hats, English business and politics, but the English reticences will remain forever a sealed book to him, — yet give him credit for what he achieves. To Lucien Cadoresse, the man who would be saved must become an English gentleman. Confessedly this Lucien has no religion, no ideals, and few principles save this of being as good an Englishman as he can; but because he holds this one desire with passion, it does work out; it does produce salvation of a sort.

I said that these three books furnish apparently diverse solutions of the problem of salvation for the man who has no religion. But careful scrutiny shows that these solutions are finally identical. The author of Home throws his characters back upon their good inheritance for rescue; the author of The Business of a Gentleman exhibits a man so entirely redeemed by ancestral virtues that he needs no further help; the author of The Making of an Englishman shows a youth so obsessed by the virtues of an alien race that they re-create him. All derive their virtues from those stronger ones who have gone before. But, the reader asks, what made strong those Puritans on whose blood the Lansings and the Waynes of to-day rely? What shaped those honest English squires who were Bobby Wilton’s forbears? What, finally, gave the English people such ideals of chastity, endurance, and uprightness that the mere contemplation of them sows the seeds of these qualities in a man of different race?

Perhaps it would be still more to the point to ask — for how many generations can we be redeemed by dilutions of our fathers’ faith? How long will salvation by legacy endure? Is the modern world, which boasts of having everything, so truly poor that it can work out no salvation of its own ?

Certainly there are no faintest traces of anything like salvation in such a typically modern character as The Titan.⁴ In this book Theodore Dreiser pursues the history of Frank Cowperwood, introduced to us in The Financier. The latter was absorbing and indubitably great; its continuation is neither. One does not make out whether this is partly Mr. Dreiser’s fault, or wholly that of his hero. The Financier was kinetic. Cowperwood developed before our eyes from a shrewd lad into a financial magician. He rose, then fell, melodramatically, into prison, only to rehabilitate himself again. The author scorned the element of contrast, and gave us no character to admire or love, but he took infinite pains to show the zest of youth and crescent experience. What feeling the book contained was genuine and strong, though lawless and primitive.

The Titan is static. Here Cowperwood is an established magnate, an established libertine. He but adds million to million and seduction to seduction. In both cases the details are infinitely dreary. Like taking candy from a child is the process of diverting other men’s gains to his own purse, while the wives and daughters of his associates are such easy captives of his magnetism that it becomes nauseating. Were there, then, no virtuous women or able men in Chicago? As Cowperwood becomes less and less human, the reader becomes more and more impatient. The framework of the story rises to an appropriate climax, but the reader’s imagination refuses to rise with it. We are asked to believe that Cowperwood at fifty conceives so disinterested a passion for a young girl that he considers her an objet d’art and is willing to house and provide for her indefinitely as such. After living for some years upon his bounty she chooses to come to him with the offer of her heart and life in the hour when he has just met his most serious financial defeat.

Here is sentiment, not to say sentimentality. Probably Balzac, with the French genius for ‘slush,’ could have made us feel the situation sympathetically. But Mr. Dreiser is not in such thorough accord with his hero as to be able to do this. He knows perfectly that Cowperwood’s heart has by this time about the freshness and value of a sucked orange-peel kicking about the dusty street, and he knows readers do not yield sympathy to sucked orangepeel. Therefore he does not, perhaps cannot, try his hardest to convince. What he tells may be entirely true to fact, but it also fails entirely of that deeper reality which alone holds our interest. So we come back to the query — is Cowperwood or Dreiser to blame?

On the one hand, Cowperwood’s historian is certainly a little afraid lest he be caught moralizing, or deviating from a tolerant, man-of-the-world attitude toward his subject. Now, the artist must not be moralist first or chiefly; nevertheless a failure in moral perception is ultimately a failure in both psychology and art. No writer, realist or not, can afford this.

On the other hand, could any writer possibly make the middle age of a Cowperwood appetizing? The inner life of the strong man who takes for motto ’I satisfy myself’ lacks that element of struggle which the dullest audience demands in its drama. How make a hero of a monster? Here is no success other than the success of a gorged animal in obtaining its prey. However, The Titan is only the second volume of a proposed trilogy. It is too soon to speak with finality either of Cowperwood or his chronicler.

Mr. Dreiser may refuse to the end to draw ethical conclusions — it is his right if he cannot see life as ethic — but there are others more clear-sighted, even if less able and painstaking. The author of Horace Blake⁵ does not lack spiritual insight and acuteness, and her book is remarkable in that it presents a thoroughly bad man and a genuine religious experience. These simple phenomena, once so popular, have entirely lost favor of late years, and few writers have any longer the courage to affirm or the skill to depict them. Mrs. Humphry Ward’s first success was based upon her able handling of the second element, but one hardly knows where to turn for satisfactory rendition of the first. In Horace Blake Mrs. Wilfrid Ward courageously assails both propositions at once, with a success the more remarkable because the workmanship of the book does not always escape mediocrity.

Horace Blake is a dramatist — reared in the Roman Church. Under the influence of his father-in-law, a highminded, well-balanced materialist, he frees himself not only from his early religion, but from all moral or even decently human restraints. He breaks all laws, blaspheming as he breaks them. The reader never doubts for a moment that this most unpleasant person is thoroughly a genius and thoroughly bad.

Through it all his wife remains devoted and loyal, serving his genius, in which she believes fervently. Facing death at last, he offers her the final insult by going away to die without her, and takes with him the illegitimate daughter whom Kate, the wife, has brought up as her own. She had so feared the influence of his debased mind and character upon this girl that she had, long before, claimed his promise to let his child entirely alone. However, there is no convention she will not violate for his sake; so Horace, Trix, and Roberts the nurse, settle themselves in Brittany, where Blake with one tremendous effort finishes his last and most sacrilegious drama. After this comes reaction,—physical torture, mental anguish and, finally, strange peace before death in the church that shaped his early years.

This may sound like the crude outline of a Sunday-school book, but the tale itself seems invincibly real. Blake, repentant, writes commanding his wife to burn the play which he sent her to publish, but she, believing him to be mentally weakened and played upon by priests, pays no heed to the order.

Some months after his death there is sent her a notebook in which he made entries during the final weeks of his life. The objective account of his conversion as it appeared to his daughter, the nurse, and the curé, was perfectly convincing of its kind, but these few pages where the keen mind analyzes itself and its experiences, rehearsing point by point the subconscious preparation it underwent for the final mutation of spirit, constitute a wonderful piece of writing. How Mrs. Ward arrived at it, or acquired it, one can only guess. It is no more invented than any of the world’s great confessions. It has the ring of the veritable human document. We see a man marshaling, piece by piece, the evidence that proves to him that a greater Spirit has sought to touch and salve his own. This is breathless action, this is drama, if you like!

If Mrs. Ward had seen the other characters as clearly as she saw Horace Blake and Providence, this would have been one of the religious novels that break all records. For the reading world is not weary of religious experiences. Only it will have the real thing or nothing. And small blame to it!

The foregoing are distinctly seriousminded books, and there are yet more of them. Reformers all are the authors of The Flying Inn,⁶The Goldfish,⁷The Congresswoman,⁸Idle Wives,⁹Vandover and the Brute,¹⁰ and even What Will People Say.¹¹ Each assails the thing that to him is anathema with such wit and adroitness as his brains allow. One is bound to say it seems a good sign that a third of these books are directed against unwise reform. If you ever sicken, as you sometimes must, of national prohibition, woman suffrage, Montessori, vegetarians, white slavers, eugenics, and the simple life, take refuge in Chesterton’s delicious diatribe, The Flying Inn. Shall not a man take his ease in his inn? There are those, it seems, in England, who would abolish the ancient friendliness of that institution by making it a place where man may no longer gossip over his mug of stout. Chesterton’s quiver is full of arrows. Pseudo-Buddhists (under the thin guise of Mohammedans) and vegetarians receive a few of the flying shafts. G. K. C. is for roast beef and brown October ale forever. As usual when he argues, he talks like an angel from Heaven and an imp from Hades; he coos and roars, chortles and cajoles, argues, storms, laughs, blasphemes. Also, he sings, and it is impossible to be sad when he sings such drinking-songs as that ascribed to Noah in flood-time: —

The problem of alcohol is more acute in our own country, where the question is one of entire prohibition. The average citizen feels confusedly that cocktails tend to combativeness and highballs to a red nose; he has read John Barleycorn and Dr. Williams on alcohol and efficiency. But he also knows how lobster Newburg should be made and has experienced the inconvenience of living in a dry town and smuggling in the family invalid’s alcohol-rub and the brandy for the mincemeat. His attitude may not seem heroic when he says, ‘Well, it’s blamed uncomfortable sometimes, but if it’s for the good of the race, I’ll try to put up with it.’ Yet this and no other is the attitude that may eventually make national prohibition possible. This meek acceptance of the entire elimination of alcohol is perfectly compatible (so illogical are all really good citizens) with glorying in Chesterton’s raid on temperance sharps! It is a gallant raid, and as for the raider he is gorgeous beyond description. While G. K. C. is left to literature and humor to humanity, this world cannot become wholly a museum of cranks and quacks.

Its gentle humor is one of the pleasures of The Congresswoman, a peculiarly satisfying story of woman in public life. Cynthia Pike, who succeeded in going to Congress, but failed both in politics and home-making while in Washington, returns to Oklahoma to marry a man who ran for Congress five times without success but has the incomparable gift of making any old house feel like home. This sane and diverting tale should be carefully studied by all the clubs in the General Federation.

There is no humor in Vandover. Written when Frank Norris was a college boy, it is little more than a medicomoral treatise of the school of Brieux. In its present shape it is too mediocre to be efficient or interesting, save as showing the writer’s bent from the beginning.

Neither is Idle Wives humorous. There are strong evidences that Mr. James Oppenheim has a perfectly good talent for something, but it does not seem to be novel-writing. Yet this is a clearer-cut and better-written novel than his first. The ‘idle wife’ deserts her husband and family to do rescue work in the slums, chiefly because she is jealous of the influence of the nursery governess over the children. There might be a woman so foolish as to discharge herself from her own job under these circumstances, instead of ousting the governess and caring for the children herself; it is conceivable — you can imagine anything about human nature especially when you aim to reform it — but it is too improbable to make good reading except for the artless.

The Goldfish concerns the disadvantages of wealth. The anonymous author says he is a New York lawyer who finds living on $70,000 a year impossible, though he admits that more than half this sum adds nothing to comfort. ‘The economic weakness of the situation lies in the fact that; a boiled egg only costs the ordinary citizen ten cents and it costs me its weight in gold.’ The book is crammed with common sense, though one may politely doubt if it is autobiography. For one thing, by the time Midas, or near-Midas, has impaired his health and spirits so that he finds his ‘only genuine satisfaction’ in the first flush of his afternoon cocktail and the preliminary courses of his dinner, he usually becomes inarticulate from fatty degeneration. Autobiography or not, the book presents squarely the fact that you can buy more life and joy for seven thousand or less than for seventy, if only you know how. This doctrine is not exactly new — see the Greek myth of Midas and the Hebrew Proverbs — but The Goldfish brings it down to date with vigor and veracity. It ought to make converts— and yet, imagine The Goldfish preaching to The Titan! Nothing doing there, one knows!

Mr. Rupert Hughes as a reformer is clever, almost diabolically so. His book, What Will People Say ? is all about a popular young woman who refuses to give up the prospect of diamonds, automobiles, yachts, at the call of love and a young lieutenant with ‘two thousand a year, and forage.’ But love proves stronger than she had expected, and the degenerate husband whom she married for money is ultimately justified in killing her with the carvingknife at the dinner-table. Now Mr. Hughes is in earnest as a preacher. He believes that one should scorn worldly considerations in marriage and mate for love when love’s hour strikes, and his sermon is forcible and up-to-the-minute. But of what avail is it t o preach if the tempted do not listen? Obviously none. So he proceeds to rival Robert Chambers in setting forth the emotional possibilities of luxurious philandering. As he is really sincere in his sermon, he ‘catches them coming and going,’as the vernacular has it. For the sternest moralist cannot say that he is not in earnest, or that he does not hit from the shoulder, while the frivolous will find a distinct pleasure in having tango-teas and similar amusements of last winter so fully interpreted to them at the same time that they are reading a novel with a moral that smarts.

This is fighting the devil with fire. As a reformer, Mr. Hughes doubtless settled the advisability of this with his conscience before he began, and no one who has noticed the type of interest aroused by What Will People Say? will aver that his sermon did not reach its proper audience. Nevertheless —the author is obviously capable of performances so much finer that the judicious are entitled to grieve a little over this one.

Robert Herrick also may be numbered among the reformers. If he did not so despise so many imperfect institutions, — American education, private property, and human nature among them, —he would be more efficient. Nevertheless Clark’s Field,¹²a tale of unconsidered acres on a city’s edge, is very good work indeed. It might count as the author’s best if it were not for his perceptible reluctance to be interested in the fate of individuals. Adelle Clark, a strong, simple, self-willed character, overcomes her creator’s prejudices against folks long enough to engage our interest in her salvation. Clark’s Field saves her from poverty; unhappiness saves her from riches — and these are the great salvations. In the end, like Bobby Wilton, she gives her time and her money to ‘those who live upon her land.’ One hopes that Mr. Herrick notices how strongly his story implies that only the individual will ever really help other individuals.

By way of a change from reformers, it is good to consider The Women We Marry¹³ and Burbury Stoke.¹⁴ Mr. Hopkins’s pleasant, leisurely stories have more than one charm. They whimsically persuade the reader to use his own imagination, and they never introduce him to any one who, by any remote possibility, can need reformation. This latter virtue is especially grateful after prolonged saturation in, say, The Titan. To feel one’s self in a world where the Titan could never come is, for the hour, enough of happiness! And Mr. Pier’s characters inhabit the same world. It is true that the ‘ women we marry ’ do, superficially and gingerly, lay finger upon the same temptation that brings Rupert Hughes’s heroine to the carving-knife, but one is not disturbed for an instant by this approach to peril. Their characters so attenuate the temptation that it is powerless. They would be hopelessly out of it in any kind of misdoing, and will never be guilty of anything so alien. They are well drawn, with the faintly humorous affection that suggests Howells’s mastery of the same attitude.

The Precipice¹⁵ is another careful study of women, this time of very modern type. Given as heroine one of the dozen women of a generation who are doing work that counts for social betterment in a large way; given as hero a man with work of his own; let her work lie in Washington and his in Colorado, and what is the answer? Shall the woman, as heretofore, follow the man? Mrs. Peattie’s characters are fine, energetic, human people who need each other and know it; therefore they compromise. Kate will put the ‘Bureau of Children’ on its feet at one side of the continent, while Karl, unless he gets sent to Congress, will struggle with mining problems in the Rockies. They will meet when they can, and look forward to one roof and fireside when their careers admit. With this decision the story ends, but it needs a sequel, for the process of putting such a compromise through would surely he more illuminating than the process of reaching it.

Perhaps our readiness to accord Kate and Karl the importance they have for themselves is due to the writer’s skill in handling the subsidiary story of Honora Fulham, an adorable girl with a clever mind who marries a rising biologist and sinks herself in his work. They live in the laboratory and all the house is chilly and austere, save only the nursery where a competent woman mothers the twins. Honora neglects clothes, coquetries, and domestic atmosphere to help David win the Nobel prize. Comes a cousin of Honora’s own physical type who does not overlook these matters. Presto! Honora is a deserted wife and David an exile. Honora has the insight to see and the courage to say that it is all her own fault. The undeniable, though often denied, fact that woman is man’s complement, not his supplement, could not be shown more precisely. Mrs. Peattie holds no brief for or against the modern woman, but she knows that some things can, and some cannot, be done. This simple fact is entirely overlooked by the feminists.

There is much agreeable matter for those who would take their reading more lightly still. For instance, Booth Tarkington has ‘come back.’ Penrod¹⁶ is about a real boy, and it is unremittingly funny from first to last. For light-hearted people who desire to remain so, it is perhaps the best book of the summer.

There are numerous open-air stories, and you can choose the summer climate that suits you best. The Light of Western Stars¹⁷ portrays the deathless lure of the great Southwest. Overland Red¹⁸ does the same thing for the eternal charm of California, not the California of towns and cities and smug boulevards, but the real California of the ranches, the canyons, the hills. Besides this, Overland is a ‘two-gun man’ scrapping with sheriffs and shooting up towns. Cross-Trails¹⁹ has to do with a Hudson Bay Company’s logging-camp, and The Forester’s Daughter²⁰ dwells among the untrodden ways of the great Colorado peaks. The author of North of Fifty-Three²¹ is haunted by the free, unpeopled spaces of British Columbia. We meet improbable folk in some of these tales, but they all breathe oxygen, which is more than can be said for the characters in most realistic novels.

There is something about oxygen in the atmosphere that makes otherwise insignificant books acceptable. Conversely, the work of the wise and talented is often spoiled by the reader’s consciousness that the writer has breathed too much soot and smoke, and walked too long on dull, depressing streets. Cities may stimulate talent, but they no longer nourish it. Rather, they poison the finer perceptions and check creative effort. It is slightly aside from the point, but I know a man who avers that if all editors were compelled by law to sleep in pure country air, the debasing sensationalism which has tainted all but the staunchest of American magazines in the last two years would be utterly impossible.

English authors are especially subject to city-dweller’s melancholia. One suspects that many of them make the fatal mistake of writing in London. Miss Sinclair, for instance, who is always conscientious, sincere, and highly intelligent, is of late depressing with the depression born of too many urban contacts. The Return of the Prodigal,²² her new book of short stories, is interesting, for Miss Sinclair could not be otherwise, and full of acute perceptions, for the same reason; but it is far from helping one to feel better about life. Uplift, of course, is not what we are entitled to demand of those who pleasantly tickle our intellects, but certainly we have the right to ask that the mental stimulus they give shall be such that we forget for the time being that we have other needs. The best work of Henry James invariably does this for the entranced reader, and most of Mrs. Wharton’s short stories have a like power.

A perfect short story must be so good that it does n’t matter in the least what it is about! Miss Sinclair’s present deficiency in this magic may be partly because her talent needs space, needs room in which to turn, a thing the short story does not provide, but one is also obstinately sure that it needs more sun, and dew, and country air. See what a long vacation has done for Arnold Bennett! The Price of Love²³ has not the impressiveness or bulk of the Old Wives’ Tale, but it has more of the zest and therefore the captivation of that book than anything the author has since produced.

On the other hand, the atmosphere of The Duchess of Wrexe²⁴ is absolutely devitalized. We have a delirious vision of the unfortunate author, like a mouse under a bell-glass in the popular experiment, spinning and gasping for air. He has conceived the big idea of incarnating the Victorian era and the twentieth century and setting them to hate one another in his pages. In order to carry this out, it is rather necessary to know what the Victorian era was and what the twentieth century is, and to vitalize both. With all respect for Hugh Walpole’s ambition and for his talent, he has not succeeded in a task at which better men might well fail. Such a book needs ten years of brooding study, and then oxygen — and more oxygen.

An idea strikes me — can it be not so much London smoke as the shadow of H. G. Wells that glooms depressingly over the work of the younger Englishmen? Wells is gradually working his own way out of the gray cloud that cloaked so much of his earlier work, but it still lowers over his pupils, who probably admire him for his defects — as pupils have a trick of doing. Whereever in a young writer you meet mention of the ’hinterland’ of our consciousness, or much talk of ‘muddleheadedness,’ you may know it is the brand of Wells on his brain.

Mr. Gilbert Cannan is another morethan-promising talent quite shrouded in what a Celt might term The Gloom. But about his work there is a definite maturity and independence both of conception and execution that forbids one to hope that he will cast the gray cloud aside. His new novel, Old Mole,²⁵ is strikingly conceived and very cleverly produced, for Mr. Cannan’s ability to write is unquestioned, but — but — well, it will never find any man where he lives, because so few men live on that street! If the average reader finds anything human alien to him, that thing is probably the inner life of an agnostic intellectuel. The audience of Old Mole’s story not only will not be very large, it will not be very enthusiastic. The book will arouse enthusiasm only in other agnostic intellectuels, most of whom are too busy writing books of their own to care much for this careful, competent study of one of themselves. The present critic’s feeling about this admirable piece of work is clearly crude, but comes to this: Cannan’s characters do not live. This seems to be because they have no souls. One does not know what the author can do about the matter. Probably nothing, as he obviously suspects souls of being a Victorian superstition. But they are, still, a necessary ingredient in compelling fiction. For there is a deep-rooted instinct in every reader that says to claimants for his attention, ‘If you are n’t going to live to-morrow, what do I care how you behave to-day?’ In other words, the appetite for serious fiction is, really, rooted deep in a conviction of the fundamental significance and permanence of Man.

If Old Mole’s hemoglobin is below seventy, that of Joe Munta in Storm²⁶ is one hundred plus. He once runs amuck for more than an hour with a hole in his skull the size of a half-dollar. The picture we get of a dark, troubled, slow-moving mind poisoned by a rage slowly mounting to white fury, is a little diffused but very impressive.

The theme is such a one as Joseph Conrad used to delight in. Chance²⁷ indicates that the latter is now choosing subjects somewhat closer to everyday life. He has been turning out admirable fiction for the last eighteen years or so, and is only now coming into his reward. Popularity tarried, because at first he wrote of elemental passions and strange lands with the psychological acuteness and complex style of Henry James. People who wanted adventure stories shied at his style and his psychology; people who wanted style and psychology shied at his elemental stagesettings, supposing them appropriate backgrounds for melodrama only. But the elect read him and rejoiced. It has just occurred to his publishers to advertise his new novel inside a halo of quotations showing what the elect think of him. The result is so satisfactory from the counting-room standpoint, that one wonders they did n’t think of it long ago. Lord Jim was a more astonishing piece of work than Chance, yet the latter is subtle, deft, and strong. It also takes the reader into the novelist’s laboratory and shows him how the trick is turned. The myriad acute deductions from a few observed facts remind one of the sublimated guesswork of The Sacred Fount, but unlike that masterpiece of intangibility, they do not make one’s head swim. The author’s place is high among the halfdozen novelists of the era who offer intellectual stimulus rather than emotional relaxation.

The publication of Vain Oblations,²⁸ Mrs. Gerould’s first collection of tales, marks the formal entrance into our literature of a new and striking talent. The book demonstrates anew the extraordinary American gift for the short story as well as the author’s personal facility in that, difficult art. Not since Mrs. Wharton’s first appearance in this field have we had anything so wholly satisfactory. Mrs. Gerould’s style has the same carefully wrought complications, all tending to full and final illumination, which we note in Mrs. Wharton. That is to say, her work belongs to the school of Henry James, but it has great precision, definition, brilliancy. The brilliancy of Henry James is that of ‘indirect lighting,’ it is diffused and mellow; the author of Vain Oblations flashes the electric lantern of pointed phrase here and there upon her subject, picking out its saliencies with vivid lightnings. As yet her perceptions are largely ironic. One says ‘as yet’ because, while many writers begin there, few of the first order cease their explorations of the universe in that particular frame of mind.

Mrs. Gerould’s themes range from the bitter ironies of fate to the hideous malignancies of warped human nature. Stripped of their graces of style, her themes sound melodramatic enough. In one, a woman, hidden and remote, gloats over the headlines detailing the trial and execution of her hated husband for alleged murder of herself. In another, a man who romantically marries a woman that he may assist in her pious search for the grave of a fiancé killed in an African expedition, stumbles upon the lover still alive, just as the relations between his wife and himself have become vital. In the title-story, the ironic horror is too great to handle in any sentence of description. One might say that jungles obsess Mrs. Gerould’s imagination: the actual jungles of Africa with their terrors for the body; the unillumined jungles of Chance with their fatal pitfalls; the impalpable jungles of the spirit where the hideous things of human nature lurk. Such subjects require sanity and balance in handling, and these our new artist has in such large measure as to quiet all apprehension concerning the satisfactory evolution of her talent. She has, if she so wills it, come to stay.

Another new writer whose work has the finer and more lasting qualities is Miss Margaret Lynn. A Step-daughter of the Prairie²⁹ is not fiction. It is biography touched with just that quality of perception which transforms the personal and fleeting into the universal and enduring. We have in it the picture of a prairie-child who despised her familiar prairies, looking elsewhere, as children will, for romance and interest. All the little incidents of childhood, amusing and adequate in themselves, fit into the development of her final consciousness of her life as springing from the prairie, colored by it, belonging to it, although that prairie disappears beneath the plough and exists no more forever on the face of earth. This is the way Nature makes the child her own; this is why the country child has stamina and character that the city child will always lack. Out of her own early experiences Miss Lynn develops a fundamental race-truth delicately and delightfully. It is not an easy thing to do.

Merely as an educational measure, is there no way of compelling young novelists to read one another’s books? It is well known that usually they have n’t the time and don’t care to take the trouble, yet, granted a certain patience with one another, they could thus accumulate really priceless information. Here, for instance, is a heap of tales — The Milky Way,³⁰Gray Youth,³¹The Salamander,'³²The Masques of Love³³ — whose writers might advantageously confer together. All these books are about what used to be called in the middle eighties ‘the revolting daughters.’ We thought we knew something about them then, these bachelor-maids, these damsels-errant who scorn domestic duties and set forth to see life for themselves, like their brothers; but thirty years ago they were namby-pamby, unenterprising, level-headed creatures compared with their sisters of to-day. At that time no publisher’s reader would have passed favorably upon The Milky Way, not because the heroine is so daring but because she is so foolish.

Out of respect for that much-written-about object, The Child, Miss Viv Lovel, wandering artist, picks up a stray one, casually, — in a boat-accident to be exact, — and tucks it under her arm as she travels. In the same casual way she annexes a ‘pal’ named Peter Whymperis, and a half-witted maid. The maid is necessary because as ‘ Viv’ must wander hand-in-hand through Provence with the ‘ pal,’ making sketches for a book he is to write, some one must occasionally wash the adopted baby’s face. The half-wittedness is equally necessary, as an ordinary intelligence would find itself painfully out of place among these light-hearted reformers — for they are all social theorizers of course.

Now, if Miss Tennyson Jesse could have read Gray Youth before writing The Milky Way, she might even have left it unwritten. Oliver Onions knows a surprising number of things that are really true, none of which have yet occurred to this very, very young greatgrand-niece of Tennyson — to whom be dreamless peace in his deep grave! For instance, he knows that people who talk too much, especially art-students, ‘end by not knowing a word they have been saying,’ and by becoming unable to do any work worth mentioning; ‘word-sodden’ is the way he describes this alarming and rather prevalent condition.

Perhaps also if Owen Johnson had read The Masques of Love before writing The Salamander, he might have realized, for he is quick and clever, that he was not representing the heroine of that sensational story as she saw herself, even when intending to give her point of view. The two books present, one a masculine and one a feminine view of a girl who seeks to go on the stage because she wants to ‘ taste life.’ Mr. Johnson, while admitting in his title and his preface that his heroine goes through fire unscathed, concentrates upon the fire, how hot and how red it is, how nearly it scorched her and how passing wonderful it is that she emerges, like the three Children of Israel from the fiery furnace, with no smell of smoke upon her garments. The author of The Masques of Love has very little to say about the fire. She gives a pleasant story of a nice girl who gets some hard knocks and a good deal of enlightenment, but it remains a pleasant story of a nice girl throughout. In tasting life she takes only ladylike bites, though her behavior at times is rather unconventional. In comparison Mr. Johnson’s Doré seems to gobble and choke. And yet one suspects that if a real Doré told her own story instead of having it told for her by an outsider, a mere man, she would not represent herself as a sensational Salamander, but rather as a twin to the heroine of The Masques of Love. For it is precisely because she sees herself as a nice girl that any Salamander walks through furnaces unscathed. That is the amulet, that is the shield. So long as the nice girl cannot see herself otherwise, she cannot be otherwise, and it is greatly to be hoped that she will retain that vision through all her scorching experiments.

People who know what they think about the world may excuse themselves from reading any of these tales; people who don’t know what they think may be helped to illumination by Gray Youth. Mr. Onions is not only the cleverest, he is also quite the most advanced of the younger English novelists. He sees that the next step forward is a long step back. For most talk is futile, and most theories are trash. The Conventions, and Duty, and Goodness, all those Victorian notions, are due to come in again. They will shortly be the mode in moralities, the very latest thing. If there were no other reason, —but the author of Gray Youth knows all the reasons, — they are absolutely essential to a colorful and interesting life, and youth without them is drab indeed.