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No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious essay with some observations on the one per cent. of books which call for swift surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult for the reason that the same operation is never called for twice.
In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects certain principles and follows a careful technique. That is all.
We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an actual instance. In 1918 there was published a novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her to the designation “a genius.”
Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her first four books—nay, her first two, the second being To Have and to Hold—placed her firmly in the front rank of living romantic writers. The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in human affairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose. History—romance; it did not matter. She could set either movingly before you.
Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels, The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experimented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediæval France. The Wanderers was a more decided venture, but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes.
Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a story of friendship transformed into hatred and the pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreaking Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Considered as a novel, Foes is a terrible failure.
Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel anything more than “a good story, well told”? Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it.
The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond the “good story, well told” has a just grievance against any one who asks anything further. But against the novelist who has endeavored to make his story, however good, however well told, the vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical speculation, the reader has a just grievance—if the endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy is unsound.
Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a particular philosophy every reader must pronounce for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the basis of Miss Johnston’s novel was this: All gods are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it matters not. “There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light. The glorified—the unified. Union.” Upon this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes.
This perfectly comprehensible mystical conception is the rock on which the whole story is founded—and the rock on which it goes to pieces. It will be seen at once that the conception is one which no Christian can entertain and remain a Christian—nor any Buddhist, and remain a Buddhist, either. To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the philosophy of Foes was unsound and the novel was worthless except for the superficial incidents and the lovely prose in which they were recounted.
It might be thought that for those who accepted the mystical concept Miss Johnson imposed, Foes would have been a novel of the first rank. No, indeed; and for this reason:
Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be arrived at and embraced by a dour Scotchman of about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed to transform the whole nature of that man so as to lead him to give over a life-long enmity in which he had looked upon himself as a Divine instrument to punish an evil-doer.
Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring and inspiriting the mystical idea may have seemed to any reader, he could not but be fatally aware that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility. Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above all else. They were, if you like, savage Christians; some of them were irreligious, some of them were God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-inclusive sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The idea that Christ and Buddha might possibly be nothing but different manifestations of the Deity is an idea which could never have occurred to the eighteenth century Scotch mind—and never did. Least of all could it have occurred to such a man as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine.
The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It is a historical anachronism, if you like, the history here being the history of the human spirit in its religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no matter how willing he may have been to accept the novelist’s underlying idea, was aware that the endeavor to convey it had utterly failed, was aware that Miss Johnston had simply projected her idea, her favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one of her characters, a Scotchman living a century and a half earlier! But the thoughts that one may think in the twentieth century while tramping the Virginia hills are not thoughts that could have dawned in the mind of a Scottish laird in the eighteenth century, not even though he lay in the flowering grass of the Roman Campagna.
... And so there, in Foes, we have the book in a hundred which called for something more than the intelligent and accurate work of the book reporter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it. It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as swiftly and as economically as possible—and as dispassionately—to the root of the trouble. For if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of performance her reputation would suffer, not to speak of her royalties; readers would be enraged or misled; young writers playing the sedulous ape would inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers would be spoiled; publishers would lose money;—and, much the worst of all, the world would be deprived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work she did do.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the blunder in Foes was the fact that there was no necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together. Of course, it would not have been intellectually so exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional appeal, and it is not always base; there are emotions in the human so high and so lofty that it is wiser not to try to transcend them....
The appearance of part of the foregoing in Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, brought a letter from Kansas which should find a place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted answer, may as well be given here. The writer is head of the English department in a State college. He wrote: