One Increasing Purpose
by . Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1925. 12mo. xiv+446 pp. $2.00.
THIS is an exasperating book. Fo condemn it is impossible without appearing to condemn much that is fine and true. To praise it is difficult without appearing to admire much that is cheap and shabby. The author presents a great theme with perspiring zeal and inadequate artistry.
The novel is in the main an account of the experiences of Simon Paris, his growing sense of a divinely ordained mission, his corresponding dissatisfaction with the futilities of the worldly life, his groping search for perdurable truth, his final conviction that the truth he has been seeking is the presence of the divine in every soul, and his mission the labor of bringing men to a realization of that truth. Simon’s life is, indeed, a kind of pilgrim’s progress, and the underlying conception, whether it be accepted or not, is of the noblest. In some respects it is a conception of life not at the moment fashionable, but never negligible. It gives expression to that gnawing discontent with the lust of the eye and the pampering of the flesh that continually drives men and women to crucify appetite and desire in the hope of attaining spiritual peace. It preaches the enfranchisement of the soul. In all this there is little novelty; but the essential value of a truth is hardly dependent upon its novelty. ‘ Man shall not live by bread alone’; ‘My kingdom is not of this world’; ‘ We are the children of God’— these are old sayings, but they still glow with life.
It is merely stupid, then, to dismiss the book as worthless because its fundamental ideas are familiar. John Bunyan’s ideas were common-places to his fellows, yet he gave them form so dynamic as to carry them through many generations. Why is it that the story of Christian is still vital, while the story of Simon Paris is as dead as a Victorian Sunday School tract? Possibly it is because John Bunyan was able to incarnate his ideas in symbols so vivid, so distinctive and compelling, that they can defy time; whereas Mr. Hutchinson bodies forth his ideas in persons and events too thin and worn for their task, and then entangles them in a fuzz of words from which escape is hopeless. To conceive of a man all aflame to establish the kingdom of God on earth is a promising beginning; to have him set about his mission by itinerant preaching and the distribution of purple rosettes to converts betrays a fatal lack of imagination.
The same defect is revealed in minor phases of the narrative. Alice, Simon’s sister-in-law, almost shatters her life through giving way to her yearning for the emotional titillation of romance. One thinks of that other woman who craved romance with the ardor of a drug addict; and at the very recollection of Emma Bovary, Alice fades into pallid insignificance. The idea is not enough. It depends for effectiveness upon the creative power of the author’s art.
Mr. Hutchinson smarts under the reproofs of his critics. He halts the narrative occasionally in order to retaliate. Probably his critics have been undiscriminatingly severe. Yet, if he insists upon choosing a theme for cathedral chimes only to play it upon a cottage organ, he must not be resentful if others scoff at the inappropriateness of the instrument, and even question his sincerity in his choice of theme.
GEORGE B. DUTTON