Here lies his best province and here appears his best art. It is an art, as he employs it, no less subtle than humane. Warm, firm flesh covers the bones of his chronology. He imparts reality to this or that occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from something besides bare memory. He rounds out the characters of the persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his persons are, betray the habit of creating characters. He enriches his analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the "large, unconscious scenery" in which it transacted its affairs. If it is difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with which the chronicle was set down.
2. WINSTON CHURCHILL
The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than those which first lifted him above the flood. He came during a moment of national expansiveness. Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been slowly stiffening since the Civil War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating in it, not to say wallowing in it.
In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who might fear or suspect that the country's history did not quite match its destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable "thickness" to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or upland New England. He had a sense for the general bearings of this or that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which imparted to them the look of moral significance. Richard Carvel by the exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in The Crisis by his simple Yankee virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels—who, however, are gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in The Crossing leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in Coniston, though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden's hand.
To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt. Is not The Crossing—to take specific illustrations—connected with the same central cycle as The Winning of the West? Is not Coniston, whatever the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience? In time Mr. Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and American politics they were of one mind. "Nor are the ethics of the manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal," wrote Mr. Churchill in 1918 in his essay on The American Contribution and the Democratic Idea, "wholly defensible from the point of view of international democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our own development, but for that of the civilization of the world." And again: "The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of growth."
Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like him Mr. Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national feeling—believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by any adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally he has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naïve and belated. Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first and the critic afterwards.
And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed nearly a score of years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly striven to keep up with the world by thinking about it. One novel after another has presented some encroaching problem of American civic or social life: the control of politics by interest in Mr. Crewe's Career; divorce in A Modern Chronicle; the conflict between Christianity and business in The Inside of the Cup; the oppression of the soul by the lust for temporal power in A Far Country; the struggle of women with the conditions of modern industry in The Dwelling-Place of Light. Nothing has hurried Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken two or three years for each novel, has read widely, has brooded over his theme, has reinforced his stories with solid documentation. He has aroused prodigious discussion of his challenges and solutions—particularly in the case of The Inside of the Cup. That novel perhaps best of all exhibits his later methods. John Hodder by some miracle of inattention or some accident of isolation has been kept in his country parish from any contact with the doubt which characterizes his age. Transferred to a large city he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in the fall begins relentless war against the unworthy rich among his congregation. Thought plays but a trivial part in Hodder's evolution. Had he done any real thinking or were he capable of it he must long before have freed himself from the dogmas that obstruct him. Instead he has drifted with the general stream and learns not from the leaders but from the slower followers of opinion. Like the politician he absorbs through his skin, gathering premonitions as to which way the crowd is going and then rushing off in that direction.
If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does it recall those of Mr. Churchill. Once taken by an idea for a novel he has always burned with it as if it were as new to the world as to him. Here lies, without much question, the secret of that genuine earnestness which pervades all his books: he writes out of the contagious passion of a recent convert or a still excited discoverer. Here lies, too, without much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill's success in holding his audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off alone.
Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his lights. If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither has he listened to the voice of the mob. The sounds which have reached him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill.
In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in some mounting aspiration opposed to a static régime, whether the passion for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised already—the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance, his epic of matrimony, A Modern Chronicle, with such a penetrating—if satirical—study as The Custom of the Country. Mrs. Wharton urges no more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the Custom is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the Chronicle has little more to say than that after two exciting marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning. In A Far Country a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool in the hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely turns his face toward a new order. In the same precipitate fashion the heroine of The Dwelling-Place of Light, who has given no apparent thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth. In these books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments; the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought.