10. The Mode in New Fiction
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If only books were like hats and gowns it would simplify matters a good deal. I could say: “Ostrich feathers are being much used,” or “Egotism is usually the center of the design.” But although there is an observable tendency to buy books like clothes, because some novel or other is all the rage, the tendency grows weaker from year to year, I think; and if in the title of this chapter I use the word “mode” it is phrasemaking.
Phrasemaking has its excuse in convenience, but it must be abandoned in the discussion of some of the fiction I am going to talk about. Among these books just one is a first novel. Because it has this distinction, because of its human quality, and because it borders a theme of great significance, I want to speak at once of Marjorie Barkley McClure’s High Fires. Mrs. McClure, the daughter of a Detroit clergyman, has laid her story principally in that city, in the period from 1905 to about the present. Angus Stevenson is a minister of the gospel who sticks by the letter of a somewhat rigid, old-fashioned creed. His sons and his daughter are young people of today. They cannot see why they should not do what other boys and girls of their age are doing. But their father will not for one moment countenance such things as dancing and card-playing and Sunday baseball.
The struggle is tempered and made human by Angus Stevenson’s goodness. He loves his children; especially is his daughter the apple of his eye. But he cannot sacrifice one inch of his principles. They are just as effectual in one direction as another. He voluntarily reduces his own salary when it seems to him that the act is called for. If he is intolerant, he is Christ-like.
Of several crises, the one that cuts into him most deeply is his daughter’s falling in love with a young man whom Angus Stevenson is constrained to regard as an atheist and an infidel. I have said that he loves his children; I should add that even when they are most rebellious against their father, they love him no less. The intensity and depth of Mrs. McClure’s portrait of Angus Stevenson fully realizes the feeling on all sides. You are made to see and to acknowledge the claim to justice of conflicting creeds, the rare courage and noble faith and life-long devotion of the father, the right to happiness and a certain self-fulfillment of the children. I know scarcely a novel of this year in which the human element is so strong; none in which it is stronger; none in which the lessons of a right feeling are more clearly conveyed or are more capable of a direct application in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Here lies the flesh that tried
To follow the spirit’s leading;
Fallen at last, it died,