A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him, once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in prosperous soil which will nourish the "sacred seed" of the race abundantly. Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for their own sake. He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one of its valuable sources of stability. What he assails is a national conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial, unenlightened forms.
His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In The Common Lot, in The Memoirs of an American Citizen, in Clark's Field, and in certain of the strands of Together it is the women who demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is always trying to pull men and women down. Integrity in love, integrity in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs—this Mr. Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which has both worried and limited his readers. Integrity in love leads Margaret Pole in Together, for instance, from her foolish husband to her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents it, seems a serious offense against integrity—springing from a failure to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth and cut a false figure in the world.
Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as sensitive as he has been to the atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil. Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk with opportunity.
Is it the scholar in him, or the New Englander, or the moralist which has compelled him to count the moral cost of material expansion? In the first of his novels to win much of a hearing, The Common Lot, he studies the career of an architect who becomes involved in the frauds of dishonest builders and sacrifices his professional integrity for the sake of quick, dangerous profits. The Memoirs of an American Citizen, a precious document now too much neglected, follows a country youth of good initial impulses through his rise and progress among the packers and on to the Senate of the United States. This is one of the oldest themes in literature, one of the themes most certain to succeed with any public: Dick Whittington, the Industrious Apprentice, over again. Mr. Herrick, however, cannot merely repeat the old drama or point the old moral. His hero wriggles upward by devious ways and sharp practices, crushing competitors, diverting justice, and gradually paying for his fortune with his integrity. In the most modern idiom Mr. Herrick asks again and again the ancient question whether the whole world is worth as much as a man's soul.
That mystical rigor which permits but one answer to the question suggests to Mr. Herrick two avenues of cure from the evils accompanying the disease he broods upon. One is a return to simple living under conditions which quiet the restless nerves, allay the greedy appetites, and restore the central will. The Master in The Master of the Inn, Renault in Together, Holden in The Healer—all of them utter and live a gospel of health which obviously corresponds to Mr. Herrick's belief. When the world grows too loud one may withdraw from it; there are still uncrowded spaces where existence marches simply. Remembering them, Mr. Herrick's imagination, held commonly on so tight a fist, slips its hood off and takes wing. And yet he knows that the north woods into which a few favored men and women may withdraw are not cure enough for the multitude. They must practise, or some one must practise for their benefit, honorable refusals in the midst of life. The architect's wife in The Common Lot, Harrington's sister in The Memoirs of an American Citizen, the clear-eyed Johnstons in Together—they have or attain the knowledge, which seems a paradox, that selfishness can fatally entangle the individual in the perplexities of existence and that the best chance for disentanglement may come from intelligent unselfishness.
Clark's Field amply illustrates this paradox. The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a well-meant law has grown malevolent, resolve to break the spell by surrendering their selfish interests and accepting the position of unselfish trustees to the estate until—if that time ever comes—some better means may be devised for making the earth serve the purposes of those who live upon it.
The solution does not entirely satisfy, of course. At best it is a makeshift if considered in its larger bearings. It comes near, however, to solving the problems as individuals of Adelle and her cousin, who save more in character than they lose in pocket. And it might possibly have come nearer still were it not for the handicap under which Mr. Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an artist. That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his imagination. His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing intelligence is always present at their birth. Nor do his narratives, once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural to born story-tellers. His imagination, not quite continuous enough, occasionally fails to fuse and shape disparate materials. It is likely to fall short when he essays fancy or mystery, as in A Life for a Life; or when he has a whimsy for amusing melodrama, as in His Great Adventure. The flexibility which reveals itself in humor or in the lighter irony is not one of his principal endowments. Restrained and direct as he always is so far as language goes, he cannot always keep his action absolutely in hand: this or that person or incident now and then breaks out of the pattern; the skeleton of a formula now and then becomes too prominent.
It is his intelligence which makes his satire sharp and significant; it is his conscience which lends passion to his representation and lifts him often to a true if sober eloquence. But in at least two of his novels imagination takes him, as only imagination can take a novelist, beyond the reach of either intelligence or conscience. Together, a little cumbersome, a little sprawling, nevertheless glows with an intensity which gives off heat as well as light. It is more than an exhaustive document upon modern marriage; it is interpretation as well. Clark's Field, a sparer, clearer story, is even more than interpretation; it is a work of art springing from a spirit which has taken fire and has transmuted almost all its abstract conceptions into genuine flesh and blood. That Clark's Field is Mr. Herrick's latest novel heightens the expectation with which one hears that after a silence of seven years he now plans to return to fiction.
4. UPTON SINCLAIR
The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly confident. His first character—the hero of Springtime and Harvest and of The Journal of Arthur Stirling—belonged to the lamenting race of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died because it went unrecognized. Mr. Sinclair, though he had created Stirling in his own image, did not die. Instead he began to study the causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to chronicle—if there had not been so much for him to discover—he must have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought.