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A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION
A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a
cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the
opposite quarter. It is so divinable if not so perceptible
that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the
turn in every tide which is sure sooner or later to come. In
reform it is the menace of reaction; in reaction it is the
promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose heart from
it. A few years ago when a movement which carried fiction to
the highest place in literature was apparently of such onward
and upward sweep that there could be no return or descent there
was a counter-current in it which stayed it at last and pulled
it back to that lamentable level where fiction is now sunk and
the word "novel" is again the synonym of all that is morally
false and mentally despicable. Yet that this too is partly
apparent I think can be shown from some phases of actual
fiction which happen to be its very latest phases and which are
of a significance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as
surely as romanticism lurked at the heart of realism something
that we may call "psychologism" has been present in the
romanticism of the last four or five years and has now begun to
evolve itself in examples which it is the pleasure as well as the
duty of criticism to deal with.
I.
No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism
now decadent than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at
its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its
worst because he was a poet of undeniable quality and because
he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the
powers which charm though they could not avail to save it from
final contempt. He saves himself in his latest novel because
though still so largely romanticistic its prevalent effect is
psychologistic which is the finer analogue of realistic and
which gave realism whatever was vital in it as now it gives
romanticism whatever will survive it. In "The Right of Way" Mr.
Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules where
there is nothing but the happening of things and where this one
or that one is important or unimportant according as things are
happening to him or not but has in himself no claim upon the
reader's attention. Once more the novel begins to rise to its
higher function and to teach that men are somehow masters of
their fate. His Charley Steele is indeed as unpromising
material for the experiment in certain ways as could well be
chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said who
said so many quotable things was that pure intellectuality is
the devil and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure
intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind and does
the effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength.
Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically he
is from time to time a drunkard with always the danger of
remaining a drunkard and you have a figure of which so much may
be despaired that it might almost be called hopeless. I confess
that in the beginning this brilliant pitiless lawyer this
consciencelessly powerful advocate at once mocker and poseur
all but failed to interest me. A little of him and his monocle
went such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of him
by the end of the trial where he gets off a man charged with
murder and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and
I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in
his drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of
drunken lumbermen and begins his second life in the river where
they have thrown him and where his former client finds him.
From that point I could not forsake him to the end though I
found myself more than once in the world where things happen of
themselves and do not happen from the temperaments of its
inhabitants. In a better and wiser world the homicide would not
perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of the
advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this as one
consents to a great deal besides in the story which is
imaginably the survival of a former method. The artist's affair
is to report the appearance the effect; and in the real world
the appearance the effect is that of law and not of miracle.
Nature employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go
through life without seeing one and some of us contract such a
prejudice against miracles that when they are performed for us we
suspect a trick. When I suffered from this suspicion in "The
Right of Way" I was the more vexed because I felt that I was in
the hands of a connoisseur of character who had no need of
miracles.
I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life as
far as I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the
principal pleasures for me. He may not have his habitant his
seigneur or his cure down cold but he makes me believe that he
has and I can ask no more than that of him. In like manner he
makes the ambient physical as well as social sensible around
me: the cold rivers the hard clear skies the snowy woods and
fields the little frozen villages of Canada. In this book
which is historical of the present rather than the past he gives
one a realizing sense of the Canadians not only in the country
but in the city at least so far as they affect each other
psychologically in society and makes one feel their interesting
temperamental difference from Americans. His Montrealers are
still Englishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the
frank expression of character of eccentricity Charley Steele is
like a type of lawyer in our West of an epoch when people were
not yet content to witness ideals of themselves but when they
wished to be their poetry rather than to read it. In his second
life he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied
spirit might have if it could be made known 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 been drowned in
the river. When after the term of oblivion in which he knows
nothing of his past self he is restored to his identity by a
famous 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 for him by appointing him to a life of unselfish
labor illumined by actions of positive beneficence. It is
something like the solution which Goethe imagines for Faust and
perhaps no other is imaginable. In contriving it Mr. Parker
indulges the weaker brethren with an abundance of accident and a
luxury of catastrophe which the reader interested in the
psychology of the story may take as little account of as he
likes. Without so much of them he might have made a
sculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as "The
Scarlet Letter"; with them he has made a most picturesque
romantic novel. His work as I began by saying or hinting is
the work of a poet in conception and I wish that in some
details of diction it were as elect as the author's verse is.
But one must not expect everything; and in what it is "The Right
of Way" satisfies a reasonable demand on the side of literature
while it more than meets a reasonable expectation on the side of
psychological interest. Distinctly it marks an epoch in
contemporary noveling and mounts far above the average best
toward the day 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
stories by another poet. "The Ruling Passion" Dr. Henry Van Dyke
calls his book which relates itself by a double tie to Mr.
Parker's novel through kinship of Canadian landscape and
character and through the prevalence of psychologism over
determinism in it. In the situations and incidents studied with
sentiment that saves itself from sentimentality sometimes with
greater and sometimes with less ease but saves itself the
appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul in the
reader and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe
that I like best among these charming things the two
sketches--they are hardly 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 is because I find in the two pieces named
a greater detachment than I find in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's
delightful volume and greater evidence that he has himself so
thoroughly and finally mastered his material 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 most liable to for he
is above all a lyrical poet and such drama as the chorus usually
comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces in fact are
so many idyls and their realism is an effect which he has felt
rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than
intentional. 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 the poetry of the stories plays through
them and the milde macht of sympathy with everything human
transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from
their native woods and waters. Canada seems the home of
primitive character; the seventeenth century survives there among
the habitants with their steadfast faith their picturesque
superstitions their old world traditions and their new world
customs. It is the land not only of the habitant but of his
oversoul the good cure and his overlord the seigneur now faded
economically but still lingering socially in the scene of his
large possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many
books about them which at present there seems to be no end to the
making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a
likeness of them which if 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. If he has held his hand anywhere the reader does not
suspect it for it seems with its relentless power of
realization to be laid upon the whole political life of Kansas
which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating so comprehensive that
the reader does not quite feel his own vitals free from it. Very
likely it does not grasp the whole situation; after all it is a
picture not a map that Mr. White has been making and the
photograph itself though it may include does not represent
everything. Some years ago there was a silly attempt to reproach
the true painters of manners by calling them photographic but I
doubt if even then Mr. White would have minded any such censure
of his 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 the inwardness as well as the outwardness of
men that he photographs and if the reader does not know it the
worse for the reader. He is not the sort of reader who will rise
from this book humiliated and fortified as any reader worthy of
it will.
The author has put his best foot forward in the opening story
"The Man on Horseback" which when I read it a few years ago in
the magazine where it first appeared seemed to me so perfect in
its way that I should not have known how to better it. Of
course this is a good deal for a critic to say; it is something
like abdicating his office; but I repeat it. It takes rather
more courage for a man to be honest in fiction than out of it
for people do not much expect it of him or altogether like it in
him; but in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White is at every moment
honest. He is honest if not so impressively honest in the
other stories "A Victory for the People" "A Triumph's
Evidence" "The Mercy of Death" and "A Most Lamentable Comedy;"
and where he fails of perfect justice to his material I think it
is because of his unconscious political bias rather than
anything wilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself
in his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to
any sort of movement and whose unfaithfulness does not
necessarily censure the movement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully
good as the portrait of Dan Gregg is it wants the final touch
which could have come only from a little kindness. His story
might have been called "The Man on Foot" by the sort of
antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning and I
should not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilessly
hard which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not or any of
the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to the
author's nature but not tenderness especially that sparing sort
which gives his life to the man who is down.
Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down as most men
in the struggle of life are. Few of us can be on top morally
almost as few as can be on top materially; and probably nothing
will more surprise the saints at the judgment day than to find
themselves in such a small minority. But probably not the saints
alone will be saved and it is some such hope that Mr. White has
constantly in mind when making his constant appeal to conscience.
It is of course a dramatic not a didactic appeal. He preaches
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