A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION. 

by

William Dean Howells

It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems acataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the oppositequarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presencemay usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tidewhich is sure, sooner or later, to come. In reform, it is the menaceof reaction; in reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may takeheart as we must lose heart from it. A few years ago, when a movementwhich carried fiction to the highest place in literature wasapparently of such onward and upward sweep that there could be noreturn or descent, there was a counter-current in it which stayed itat last, and pulled it back to that lamentable level where fiction isnow sunk, and the word "novel" is again the synonym of all that ismorally false and mentally despicable. Yet that this, too, is partlyapparent, I think can be shown from some phases of actual fictionwhich happen to be its very latest phases, and which are of asignificance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as surely asromanticism lurked at the heart of realism, something that we may call"psychologism" has been present in the romanticism of the last four orfive years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples which it isthe pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with. 

I. 

No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, nowdecadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worstjust because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because hewas a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to itsintellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though theycould not avail to save it from final contempt. He saves himself inhis latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, itsprevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue ofrealistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now itgives romanticism whatever will survive it. In "The Right of Way" Mr. Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there isnothing but the happening of things, and where this one or that one isimportant or unimportant according as things are happening to him ornot, but has in himself no claim upon the reader's attention. Oncemore the novel begins to rise to its higher function, and to teach thatmen are somehow masters of their fate. His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromising material for the experiment, in certain ways, as couldwell be chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, whosaid so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is thedevil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pureintellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does theeffects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength. Add tothese conditions of his personality that pathologically he is from timeto time a drunkard, with always the danger of remaining a drunkard, andyou have a figure of which so much may be despaired that it mightalmost be called hopeless. I confess that in the beginning thisbrilliant, pitiless lawyer, this consciencelessly powerful advocate, atonce mocker and poseur, all but failed to interest me. A little of himand his monocle went such a great way with me that I thought I hadenough of him by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man chargedwith murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; andI do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in hisdrunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of drunkenlumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where they havethrown him, and where his former client finds him. From that point Icould not forsake him to the end, though I found myself more than oncein the world where things happen of themselves and do not happen fromthe temperaments of its inhabitants. In a better and wiser world, thehomicide would not perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the lifeof the advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as oneconsents to a great deal besides in the story, which is imaginably thesurvival of a former method. The artist's affair is to report theappearance, the effect; and in the real world, the appearance, theeffect, is that of law and not of miracle. Nature employs the miracleso very sparingly that most of us go through life without seeing one, and some of us contract such a prejudice against miracles that whenthey are performed for us we suspect a trick. When I suffered fromthis suspicion in "The Right of Way" I was the more vexed because Ifelt that I was in the hands of a connoisseur of character who had noneed of miracles. 

I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life, as far asI have known it; and in this novel it is one of the principal pleasuresfor me. He may not have his habitant, his seigneur or his cure downcold, but he makes me believe that he has, and I can ask no more thanthat of him. In like manner, he makes the ambient, physical as well associal, sensible around me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. Inthis book, which is historical of the present rather than the past, hegives one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the countrybut in the city, at least so far as they affect each otherpsychologically in society, and makes one feel their interestingtemperamental difference from Americans. His Montrealers are stillEnglishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the frankexpression of character, of eccentricity, Charley Steele is like a typeof lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were not yet content towitness ideals of themselves, but when they wished to be their poetryrather than to read it. In his second life he has the charm for theimagination that a disembodied spirit might have, if it could be madeknown to us in the circumstances of another world. He has, indeed, made almost as clean a break with his past as if he had really beendrowned in the river. When, after the term of oblivion, in which heknows nothing of his past self, he is restored to his identity by afamous surgeon too opportunely out of Paris, on a visit to his brother, the cure, the problem is how he shall expiate the errors of his past, work out his redemption in his new life; and the author solves it forhim by appointing him to a life of unselfish labor, illumined byactions of positive beneficence. It is something like the solutionwhich Goethe imagines for Faust, and perhaps no other is imaginable. In contriving it, Mr. Parker indulges the weaker brethren with anabundance of accident and a luxury of catastrophe, which the readerinterested in the psychology of the story may take as little account ofas he likes. Without so much of them he might have made asculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as "The ScarletLetter"; with them he has made a most picturesque romantic novel. Hiswork, as I began by saying, or hinting, is the work of a poet, inconception, and I wish that in some details of diction it were as electas the author's verse is. But one must not expect everything; and inwhat it is, "The Right of Way" satisfies a reasonable demand on theside of literature, while it more than meets a reasonable expectationon the side of psychological interest. Distinctly it marks an epoch incontemporary noveling, and mounts far above the average best toward theday of better things which I hope it is not rash to image dawning. 

II. 

I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of storiesby another poet. "The Ruling Passion, " Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls hisbook, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker's novelthrough kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through theprevalence of psychologism over determinism in it. In the situationsand incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself fromsentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, butsaves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soulin the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believethat I like best among these charming things the two sketches--they arehardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Dight, "though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it isbecause I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I findin some others of Dr. Van Dyke's delightful volume, and greaterevidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered hismaterial that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it. That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is mostliable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as thechorus usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, infact, are so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he hasfelt rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather thanintentional. It is none the worse but all the better on that account, and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse for being frankly, however uninsistently, moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as thepoetry of the stories, plays through them, and the milde macht ofsympathy with everything human transfers to the pleasant pages theforesters and fishermen from their native woods and waters. Canadaseems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survivesthere among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, theirpicturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their newworld customs. It is the land not only of the habitant, but of hisoversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now fadedeconomically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his largepossessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many books aboutthem which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; andsuch a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a likeness of them, whichif it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not by attribution. 

III. 

Mr. William Allen White's method is the reverse of Dr. Van Dyke's. Ifhe has held his hand anywhere the reader does not suspect it, for itseems, with its relentless power of realization, to be laid upon thewhole political life of Kansas, which it keeps in a clutch sopenetrating, so comprehensive, that the reader does not quite feel hisown vitals free from it. Very likely, it does not grasp the wholesituation; after all, it is a picture, not a map, that Mr. White hasbeen making, and the photograph itself, though it may include, does notrepresent everything. Some years ago there was a silly attempt toreproach the true painters of manners by calling them photographic, butI doubt if even then Mr. White would have minded any such censure ofhis conscientious work, and I am sure that now he would count it honor. He cannot be the admirable artist he is without knowing that it is theinwardness as well as the outwardness of men that he photographs, andif the reader does not know it, the worse for the reader. He is notthe sort of reader who will rise from this book humiliated andfortified, as any reader worthy of it will. 

The author has put his best foot forward in the opening story, "The Manon Horseback, " which, when I read it a few years ago in the magazinewhere it first appeared, seemed to me so perfect in its way that Ishould not have known how to better it. Of course, this is a good dealfor a critic to say; it is something like abdicating his office; but Irepeat it. It takes rather more courage for a man to be honest infiction than out of it, for people do not much expect it of him, oraltogether like it in him; but in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White isat every moment honest. He is honest, if not so impressively honest, in the other stories, "A Victory for the People, " "A Triumph'sEvidence, " "The Mercy of Death, " and "A Most Lamentable Comedy;" andwhere he fails of perfect justice to his material, I think it isbecause of his unconscious political bias, rather than anythingwilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself in histreatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to any sort ofmovement, and whose unfaithfulness does not necessarily censure themovement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully good as the portrait of DanGregg is, it wants the final touch which could have come only from alittle kindness. His story might have been called "The Man on Foot, "by the sort of antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White forscorning, and I should not say anything of it worse than that it ispitilessly hard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, orany of the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to theauthor's nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sort whichgives his life to the man who is down. 

Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down, as most men in thestruggle of life are. Few of us can be on top morally, almost as fewas can be on top materially; and probably nothing will more surprisethe saints at the judgment day than to find themselves in such a smallminority. But probably not the saints alone will be saved, and it issome such hope that Mr. White has constantly in mind when making hisconstant appeal to conscience. It is, of course, a dramatic, not adidactic appeal. He preaches so little and is so effectively reticentthat I could almost with he had left out the preface of his book, goodas it is. Yes, just because it is so good I could wish he had left itout. It is a perfect justification of his purpose and methods, butthey are their own justification with all who can think about them, andthe others are themselves not worth thinking about. The stories are sobravely faithful to human nature in that political aspect which is butone phase of our whole average life that they are magnificently aboveall need of excusing or defending. They form a substantial body ofpolitical fiction, such as we have so long sighed for, and such as someof us will still go on sighing for quite as if it had not beensupplied. Some others will be aware that it has been supplied in aform as artistically fine as the material itself is coarse and common, if indeed any sort of humanity is coarse and common except to those whothemselves are so. 

The meaning that animates the stories is that our political opportunityis trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it by our greed andfalsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr. White offers thestrongest contrast to that of the latest Russian master in fiction. Maxim Gorky's wholly hopeless study of degeneracy in the life of "FomaGordyeeff" accuses conditions which we can only imagine withdifficulty. As one advances through the moral waste of that strangebook one slowly perceives that he is in a land of No Use, in an ambientof such iron fixity and inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma'swillingness to rot through vice into imbecility is as wise as anythingelse there. It is a book that saturates the soul with despair, andblights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in thecircumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in whichTurgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate thevolition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depthsbeyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that BottomlessPit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is likewaking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully falliblehuman beings, but we are no longer among the damned; with the worstthere is a purgatorial possibility of Paradise. Even the perdition ofDan Gregg then seems not the worst that could befall him; he mightagain have been governor. 

IV. 

If the human beings in Dr. Weir Mitchell's very interesting novel of"Circumstance" do not seem so human as those Russians of Gorky andthose Kansans of Mr. White, it is because people in society are alwayshuman with difficulty, and his Philadelphians are mostly in society. They are almost reproachfully exemplary, in some instances; and it iswhen they give way to the natural man, and especially the naturalwoman, that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthornebegins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she findsKitty wearing her dead mother's pearls, and even takes hold of her in away that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she isdelightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has "pinched" her, sheis adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and inthat moment of nature the thick air of good society seems to blow awayand let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are better thanthe good people, and the good people are best in their worst tempers. They are so exclusively well born and well bred that the fitness of themedical student, Blount, for their society can be ascertained only byhis reference to a New England ancestry of the high antiquity that canexcuse even dubious cuffs and finger-nails in a descendant of goodprinciples and generous instincts. 

The psychological problem studied in the book with such artisticfineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs. Hunter, who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty Morrow towork her way to authority in the household of Kitty's uncle, where shedisplaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place odious to all the kithand kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is a clever woman, or rather, she is a woman of great cunning that rises at times to sagacity; butshe is limited by a bad heart and an absence of conscience. She isbold up to a point, and then she is timid; she will go to lengths, butnot to all lengths; and when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keephim from changing his mind about the bequest he has made her, she hasnot quite the courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does notdo it, and it is in this point she becomes so aesthetically successful. The guilt of the uncommitted crimes is more important than the guilt ofthose which have been committed; and the author does a good thingmorally as well as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter still somethingof a problem to his reader. In most things she is almost too plain acase; she is sly, and vulgar, and depraved and cruel; she is all that amurderess should be; but, in hesitating at murder, she becomes andremains a mystery, and the reader does not get rid of her as he wouldif she had really done the deed. In the inferior exigencies shestrikes fearlessly; and when the man who has divorced her looms up inher horizon with doom in his presence, she goes and makes love to him. She is not the less successful because she disgusts him; he agrees tolet her alone so long as she does no mischief; she has, at least, madehim unwilling to feel himself her persecutor, and that is enough forher. 

Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I am notsure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Ofcourse, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she hasnot met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so shehas the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious;she is cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself goin an outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without havingassured herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked ather making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am notsure but the case would have been a little truer if she had won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the morecontent because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession toreality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of theheredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well bornand as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration ofher, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to thehigher beauty of Mary Fairthorne's character. She is really a goodgirl, and saved from the unreality which always threatens goodness infiction by those limitations of temper which I have already hinted. 

V. 

It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to that ofthe half-caste heroine of "A Japanese Nightingale" and the youngAmerican whom she marries in one of those marriages which neither theOriental nor the Occidental expects to last till death parts them. Itis far, and all is very strange under that remote sky; but what is trueto humanity anywhere is true everywhere; and the story of Yuki andBigelow, as the Japanese author tells it in very choice English, is ofas palpitant actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door. If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki, though she lovesBigelow, does not marry him because she loves him, but because shewishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through collegein America. When this brother comes back to Japan--he is the touch ofmelodrama in the pretty idyl--he is maddened by an acquired Occidentalsense of his sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a feverand dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness ofthe young wife and husband. There is enough incident, but of the kindthat is characterized and does not characterize. The charm, thedelight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki. Herfather was an Englishman who had married her mother in the same sort ofmarriage she makes herself; but he is true to his wife till he dies, and possibly something of the English constancy which is not always soevident as in his case qualifies the daughter's nature. Her motherwas, of course, constant, and Yuki, though an outcast from her ownpeople--the conventions seen to be as imperative in Tokyo as inPhiladelphia--because of her half-caste origin, is justly Japanese inwhat makes her loveliest. There is a quite indescribable freshness inthe art of this pretty novelette--it is hardly of the dimensions of anovel--which is like no other art except in the simplicity which isnative to the best art everywhere. Yuki herself is of a surpassinglovableness. Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girlcould, I should think keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana's bookfrom going out and marrying Japanese girls. They are safe from this, however, for the reason suggested, and therefore it can be safelycommended at least to young men intending fiction, as such a lesson inthe art of imitating nature as has not come under my hand for a longwhile. It has its little defects, but its directness, and sincerity, and its felicity through the sparing touch make me unwilling to notethem. In fact, I have forgotten them. 

VI. 

I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of anauthor who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us as theJapanese, but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not ourinterest. Mr. Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary quality inacquiring literary quantity, and though his book, "The Marrow ofTradition, " is of the same strong material as his earlier books, it isless simple throughout, and therefore less excellent in manner. At hisworst, he is no worse than the higher average of the ordinary novelist, but he ought always to be very much better, for he began better, and heis of that race which has, first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, ifit will not suffer from a smile far more blighting than any frown. Heis fighting a battle, and it is not for him to pick up the cheap gracesand poses of the jouster. He does, indeed, cast them all from him whenhe gets down to his work, and in the dramatic climaxes and closes ofhis story he shortens his weapons and deals his blows so absolutelywithout flourish that I have nothing but admiration for him. "TheMarrow of Tradition, " like everything else he has written, has to dowith the relations of the blacks and whites, and in that republic ofletters where all men are free and equal he stands up for his ownpeople with a courage which has more justice than mercy in it. Thebook is, in fact, bitter, bitter. There is no reason in history why itshould not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and yet it wouldbe better if it was not so bitter. I am not saying that he is soinartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor foibles may be, he is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans may well be proud of;but while he recognizes pretty well all the facts in the case, he istoo clearly of a judgment that is made up. One cannot blame him forthat; what would one be one's self? If the tables could once beturned, and it could be that it was the black race which violently andlastingly triumphed in the bloody revolution at Wilmington, NorthCarolina, a few years ago, what would not we excuse to the white manwho made the atrocity the argument of his fiction?

Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel, andshows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a legalgovernment and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not paint theblacks all good, or the whites all bad. He paints them as slavery madethem on both sides, and if in the very end he gives the moral victoryto the blacks--if he suffers the daughter of the black wife to havepity on her father's daughter by his white wife, and while her ownchild lies dead from a shot fired in the revolt, gives her husband'sskill to save the life of her sister's child--it cannot be said thateither his aesthetics or ethics are false. Those who would questioneither must allow, at least, that the negroes have had the greaterpractice in forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favorhis interpretation of the fact. No one who reads the book can denythat the case is presented with great power, or fail to recognize inthe writer a portent of the sort of negro equality against which noseries of hangings and burnings will finally avail. 

VII. 

In Mr. Chesnutt's novel the psychologism is of that universalimplication which will distinguish itself to the observer from thepsychologism of that more personal sort--the words are not as apt as Ishould like--evident in some of the interesting books under noticehere. I have tried to say that it is none the less a work of art forthat reason, and I can praise the art of another novel, in which thesame sort of psychologism prevails, though I must confess it a fictionof the rankest tendenciousness. "Lay Down Your Arms" is the name ofthe English version of the Baroness von Suttner's story, "Die WaffenNieder, " which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on thecontinent of Europe. Its success there has been very great, and I wishits success on the continent of America could be so great that it mightreplace in the hands of our millions the baleful books which havelately been glorifying bloodshed in the private and public wars of thepast, if not present. The wars which "Lay Down Your Arms" deals withare not quite immediate, and yet they are not so far off historically, either. They are the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussianwar of 1866, and the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whosepersonal relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrianlady of high birth. She is the daughter and the sister of soldiers, and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with her own, whomshe first marries, makes love to her just before the outbreak of thewar first named, she is as much in love with his soldiership as withhimself. But when the call to arms comes, it strikes to her heart sucha sense of war as she has never known before. He is killed in one ofthe battles of Italy, and after a time she marries another soldier, notsuch a beau sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, whofights through that second war from a sense of duty rather than fromlove of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that hequits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris. There thethird war overtakes him, and in the siege, this Austrian, who hasfought the Prussians to the death, is arrested by the communards as aPrussian spy and shot. 

The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion of theintense passion of grief which fills it. Neither does it convey a dueimpression of the character in the different persons which, amidst theheartbreak, is ascertained with some such truth and impartiality aspervade the effects of "War and Peace. " I do not rank it with thatwork, but in its sincerity and veracity it easily ranks above any othernovel treating of war which I know, and it ought to do for the Germanpeoples what the novels of Erckmann-Chatrian did for the French, in atleast one generation. Will it do anything for the Anglo-Saxon peoples?Probably not till we have pacified the Philippines and South Africa. We Americans are still apparently in love with fighting, though theEnglish are apparently not so much so; and as it is always well to facethe facts, I will transfer to my page some facts of fighting from thisgraphic book, which the read may apply to the actualities in thePhilippines, with a little imagination. They are taken from a letterwritten to the heroine by her second husband after one of the Austriandefeats. "The people poured boiling water and oil on the Prussiansfrom the windows of the houses at ----. .. . The village is ours--no, itis the enemy's, now ours again--and yet once more the enemy's; but itis no longer a village, but a smoking mass of ruins of houses. .. . Onefamily has remained behind. .. An old married couple and their daughter, the latter in childbed. The husband is serving in our regiment. .. . Poor devil! he got there just in time to see the mother and child die;a shell had exploded under their bed. .. . I saw a breastwork therewhich was formed of corpses. The defenders had heaped all the slainwho were lying near, in order, from that rampart, to fire over at theirassailants. I shall surely never forget that wall in my life. A manwho formed one of its bricks was still alive, and was waving hisarm. .. . What is happening there? The execution party is drawn out. Has a spy been caught? Seventeen this time. There they come, in fourranks, each one of four men, surrounded by a square of soldiers. Thecondemned men step out, with their heads down. Behind comes a cartwith a corpse in it, and bound to the corpse the dead man's son, a boyof twelve, also condemned. .. . Steep, rocky heights; Jaegers, nimble ascats, climbing up them. .. . Some of them, who are hit by the enemy'sshot, suddenly stretch out both their arms, let their muskets fall, and, with their heads falling backwards, drop off the height, step bystep, from one rocky point to another, smashing their limbs to pieces. I saw a horseman at some distance, obliquely behind me, at whose side ashell burst. His horse swerved aside and came against the tail ofmind, then shot past me. The man sat still in the saddle, but afragment of the shell had ripped his belly open and torn out all theintestines. The upper part of his body was held to the lower only bythe spine. From the ribs to the thighs nothing but one great, bleedingcavity. A short distance farther he fell to the ground, one foot stillclinging in the stirrup, and the galloping horse dragging him on overthe stony soil. .. . Another street fight in the little town of Saar. .. . In the middle of the square stands a high pillar of the Virgin. Themother of God holds her child in one arm, and stretches the other outin blessing. .. . Here the fight was prolonged, man to man. They werehacking at me, I laying about me on all sides. .. . A Prussian dragoon, strong as Goliath, tore one of our officers (a pretty, dandifiedlieutenant--how many girls are, perhaps, mad after him?) out of hissaddle and split his skull at the feet of the Virgin's pillar. Thegentle saint looked on unmoved. Another of the enemy's dragoons--aGoliath, too--seized, just before me almost, my right-hand man, andbent him backwards in his saddle so powerfully that he broke hisback--I myself heard it crack. To this the Madonna gave her blessingalso. "

VIII. 

It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like thefacts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they are imaginedrather below than above the real horror of war, and represent theminadequately. The incidents of another book, the last on my list, areof the warfare which goes on in times of peace, and which will go on aslong as there are human passions, and mankind are divided into men andwomen, and saints and sinners. Of all the books on my list, "Let NotMan Put Asunder" is, narrowing the word to the recognition of theauthor's intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest. Thestory is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond thewont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author, whocannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel theirreality. But he does make us feel this in most cases, the importantcases, and in the other cases his power of interesting us is so greatthat we do not stop to examine the grounds of our sensation, or toquestion the validity of our emotions. The action, which ispositively of to-day, or yesterday at the furthest, passes in Bostonand England, among people of such great fortune and high rank andtranscendent fashion that the proudest reader cannot complain of theirsocial quality. As to their moral quality, one might have thought theless said the better, if the author had not said so much that ispertinent and impressive. It is from first to last a book with aconscience in it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience. It isso very nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it iswith a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of surpriseat its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not shortcomings thatimpair its supreme effect. This, I take it, is the intimation of amystical authority in marriage against which divorce sins in vain, which no recreancy can subvert, and by virtue of which it claimseternally its own the lovers united in it; though they seem to becomehaters, it cannot release them to happiness in a new union through anyhuman law. 

If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly dramatic)no more than this, he would have established his right to be takenseriously, but he has done very much more, and has made us acquaintedwith types and characters which we do not readily forget, and withcharacters much more real than their ambient. For instance, the OldCambridge in which the Vassalls live is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are the Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral hallsin which they dwell are of a baroniality difficult of verification. Their honor, their righteousness, their purity are veracious, thoughtheir social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionaryexperience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; itsdifference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finelysuggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in whichit is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the heroine, isderivatively of the older Boston which has passed away, and actually ofthe newer Boston which will not be so much regretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdy Boston, the decadent Boston. It is, of course, a Boston much worse in the report than in the fact, but itis not unimaginably bad to the student who notes that the lapse fromany high ideals is to a level lower than that of people who have neverhad them. As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it, she is so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that Iam tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book, thoughit does not make one hold one's breath like some of the dramaticepisodes: "Whatever religious instinct had been in the family hadspent itself at least two generations before her time. She was apagan--a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful pagan. .. . But she wasnone the less a Puritan. Certain of her ways of thought and habits oflife, had survived the beliefs which had given them birth, as an effectwill often outlive its cause. If she was a pagan, she was a seriousone, a pagan with a New England conscience. "

This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said ofPetrina's sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are mightywell, too. "She had inherited a countenance whose expression was likethe light which lingers in the sky long after sunset--the light of someancestral fire gone out. If in her face there were prayers, they hadbeen said by Pepperells and Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusettschurchyards. If in her voice there were tears, they had been shed bythose who would weep no more. She mirrored the emotions she had neverfelt; and all that was left of joys and sorrows and spiritualaspirations which had once thrilled human hearts was in that plaintiveecho they had given to this woman's tone, and the light of petitionthey had left burning in her eyes. "

No one who reads such passages can deny that the author of "Let Not ManPut Asunder" can think subtly as well as say clearly, and the bookabounds in proofs of his ability to portray human nature in its lighteraspects. Lady de Bohun, with her pathetic face, is a most amusingcreature, with all her tragedy, and she is on the whole the mostperfectly characterized personality in the story. The author gives youa real sense of her beauty, her grace, her being always charmingly in ahurry and always late. The greatest scene is hers: the scene in whichshe meets her divorced husband with his second wife. One may suspectsome of the other scenes, but one must accept that scene as one ofgenuine dramatic worth. Too much of the drama in the book is theatrerather than drama, and yet the author's gift is essentially dramatic. He knows how to tell a story on his stage that holds you to the fall ofthe curtain, and makes you almost patient of the muted violins and thelimelight of the closing scene. Such things, you say, do not happen inBrookline, Mass. , whatever happens in London or in English countryhouses; and yet the people have at one time or other convinced you oftheir verity. Of the things that are not natural, you feel like sayingthat they are supernatural rather than unnatural, and you own that atits worst the book is worth while in a time when most novels are notworth while. 

Footnotes

"The Right of Way. " A Novel. By Gilbert Parker. Harper & Brothers. 

"The Ruling Passion. Tales of nature and human nature. " By Henry VanDyke. Charles Scribner's Sons. 

"Spoils and Stratagems Stories of love and politics. " By Wm. AllenWhite. Charles Scribner's Sons. 

"Foma Gordyeeff. " By Maxim Gorky. Translated from the Russian byIsabel F. Hapgood. Charles Scribner's Sons. 

"Circumstances. " By S. Weir Mitchell, M. D. The Century Company. 

"A Japanese Nightingale. " By Onoto Watana. Harper & Brothers. 

"The Marrow of Tradition. " By Charles W. Chesnutt. Houghton, Mifflin& Co. 

"Lay Down Your Arms. The autobiography of Martha von Tilling. " ByBertha von Suttner. Authorized Translation. By T. Holmes. Longmans, Green & Co. 

"Let Not Man Put Asunder. " By Basil King. Harper & Brothers.