Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very memorable characters. The author of ten novels, immensely popular for more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single figure—man or woman—generally accepted by the public as either a type or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis personae from without and—doubtless for that reason—has apparently felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple of The Crisis, above all something both tough and quaint in the up-country politician Jethro Bass in Coniston resisted the argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from the artificial characters of fiction.
For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be called the arithmetic of his art: he has thought of men and women as mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the fictive operation. Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some measure from history, with their individualities already more or less established. Without achieving fresh or bold interpretations of John Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or Lincoln, Mr. Churchill has added a good deal to the vividness of their legends; whereas in the case of characters not quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro Bass, he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding American politics with his sense of spaciousness and color in the American past.
After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill's successive studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances. He possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic—almost a true epic—instinct. Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question or rejection into his broad tapestry. A naturalistic generation is tempted to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too truly to good traditions of literature to be overlooked.
A national past has many uses, and different dispositions find in it instruction or warning, depression or exaltation. Mr. Churchill has found in the American past a cause for exaltation chiefly; after his ugliest chapters the light breaks and he closes always upon the note of high confidence which resounds in the epics of robust, successful nations. If in this respect he has too regularly flattered his countrymen, he has also enriched the national consciousness by the colors which he has brought back from his impassioned forays. Only now and then, it must be remembered, do historical novels pass in their original form from one generation to another; more frequently they suffer a decomposition due to their lack of essential truth and descend to the function of compost for succeeding harvests of romance. Though probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's books—perhaps not even one—can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country in one real way if not in another.
3. ROBERT HERRICK
If the novels of Robert Herrick were nothing else they would still be indispensable documents upon that first and second decade of the twentieth century in America, when a minority unconvinced by either romance or Roosevelt set out to scrutinize the exuberant complacence which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense potentiality in it.
Small wonder then that the prevailing literature gave itself generally to large proclamations about the future or to spacious recollections of the past in which the note was hope unmodified. Small wonder either—be it said to the credit of literature—that the same period caused and saw the development of the most emphatic protest which has come from native pens since the abolition of slavery—not excepting even the literary rebels of the eighties. Much of that protest naturally expressed itself in fiction, of many orders of intelligence and competence and intention. Various voices have been louder or shriller or sweeter or in some cases more thoroughgoing than Mr. Herrick's; but his is the voice which, in fiction, has best represented the scholar's conscience disturbed by the spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are too much undisturbed.
In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be all of a woman's life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers. He knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has become for the most part a hollow language. The pioneer woman earned all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her laborious world. Her successor in the comfortable society which the frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first women did. But the energy thus happily released, instead of being directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself upon the complex arts of the parasite.
Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage after centuries of disadvantage—ascribe it to whatever one will, the fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks—although here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle her—the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual, irrespective of her peculiar functions. It must be remembered, of course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women, who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how empty she really is. He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul.
At times he writes with a biting animus. In One Woman's Life Milly schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born, lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries to help her. In The Healer the doctor's wife continually drags him back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her beauty to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally comprehends the danger and escapes her. And in Together, its epic canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type. Other novelists may be content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral development. Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and she tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child.