TWO NOVELS OF THE YEAR
I read two novels by two women not long ago. I believe I should say what my critical deductions were:
Too many novels are a dangerous thing and two a year are pabulum enough for a man. For men must fight the life around them. Women may dream, thank God, and right beautifully do they dream.
These novels were “The Awakening of Helena Richie,” by our country-woman, Mrs. Margaret Deland, and “Fenwick’s Career,” by Mrs. Humphry Ward, an Englishwoman. There are two kinds of writers: one is retrospective and gets his food from without—absorbs from what is seen, heard, copied; what others say and do; creates, but the creation is imitative; there is lacking the great, broad highway of initiatory genius. It may be clever but it is never genius—versatile, but never great.
The other is introspective—grows from within. The best definition of it, is, I love to think, God-given; and its genius is limited only to what God has put there in the beginning. It copies from no man—it is Master. Its flow is limitless, like the great tides of the greater ocean, and, like them, it grows as it goes. It does nothing twice the same way—every book is different, every poem, every mood.
For books and poems are merely the moods of Genius.
There is no place in literature for the practical, the poised, the balanced, the consistent, the saving, the so-called sound men and women of the world. To these God gave the all-sufficient talent of taking care of themselves. To Genius he gave the greater gift of caring for all humanity.
“Helena Richie” is introspective. “Fenwick’s Career” is retrospective, and between them is a gulf boundless.
Woman, by nature, writes the spiritual novel. Men write the novels which do.
Neither of the novels above, in the man-sense, do. Because they were not written by men.
Compare “The Awakening of Helena Richie” with “The Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne’s woman and her preacher did things—people did things all through his masterpiece. And they reaped all the infamy and anguish of it—the illegitimate child, the pillory—death. And yet Hester Prynne and her preacher-lover had more excuse for their real wrong-doing than the business love-pair who set up their convenient and quasi establishment in the village of Dr. Lavendar. For the Puritan people had the excuse of youth—of passion—and the greater man-excuse of nature and by them called nature-given. But they forget that since the beginning God has been improving on nature. Helena and her lover merely played with passion; the others were passion. In Mrs. Deland’s people the fires were out—it was a weak, sordid, dissatisfied, half revengeful spoiled child determination to be naughty for naughty’s sake. They were a materialistic pair of polite adulterers, doing no harm to society, for they left no scarlet track, and none to themselves, for they were incapable of being hurt. No man writer would care to have picked up their miserable and naughty little affair; and instead of ending as it did, they might as well have been permitted to go on into the society of some city near them among those of their kind and claimed they had been married.
And not a gossiper of their set, had she found it out, would have gone two blocks to tell it to another.
Mrs. Deland is not Hawthorne, it is true, but she is great—her novel is great. It is introspective, virile, uplifting, beautiful. Some of its characterization is superb and one of its characters, that of the old man who knew things, who spotted character when he smelt it as a setter dog the unseen quail, is the best drawn of any book of the year. The idiosyncratic mood of the author—the only mood by which genius may be known—for it alone makes clear the line between man and men—that cosmic idiosyncratic insolence which stamps individual authorship—if it be real authorship—in this, no woman writer of the year has approached her.
In the glow of the warmth of this house of her soul genius, “The House of Mirth” is a brilliant ice-castle in the Klondike, and “A Fighting Chance,” that mongrel thing brought to life by the union of “Lady Rose’s Daughter” and “The House of Mirth”—a thing so clearly marked in its genealogy that one can easily trace each separate lineament of its doughy countenance to either parent who is responsible for its existence—this thing of cigarette-smoking, russet-legged quail-hunting, burning women, and drunken, lewd-doped society adulterers with not a real man or woman in its pages, is the Dakota sod-hut of novel houses.
But if “Helena Richie” suffers in comparison with its great prototype, Mrs. Ward’s book is wiped off the map. In her book nobody does anything and the years of marvelous anguish they go through doing it should give the sweet-sixteen readers who glory in it enough sniffle-nose sufferings to last them till next vacation.
This author glories in heroines a little off-color in their moral make-up with an over-weening desire to do something naughty but never game enough to score down to it. We would love every silly one of them more had they sinned and been sorry. For the sack-clothed sins of real men and women add most to their growth and bigness.
Our sins make us.
Mrs. Ward’s books are all alike, with a little variation in plot and people. She cannot get away from the illegitimate cross in her moral pedigree. Her people are oftener paste-boards, her characters the half-harmonized personalities of incongruous vaporings and she has made her literary fame and money on the sad but decadent frailty of that large, honest, well-meaning, but common lot of us who “do dearly love a lord.”
And these are my deductions: Between Mrs. Deland’s and Mrs. Ward’s novels have we not greater geniuses at home? And between the unspeakable Castellane and Marlborough—haven’t we—honest now, ladies! better husbands here?
John Trotwood Moore.