Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical—we are dead in earnest—it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.
It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is evidenced for everybody in the contrast between The Blue Envelope and its successor from her pen, The Golden Block.
The Golden Block is part of the life story of a business woman, Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman—a much better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most skillful thing in that admirable story The Golden Block is the way in which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of course the surest way to promote their happiness is to succeed herself.
Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She speaks and thinks only for herself—not of herself except when asked to explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”
If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep growing.
Books by Sophie Kerr
Love at Large, 1916.
The Blue Envelope, 1917.
The Golden Block, 1918.
The See-Saw, 1919.
Painted Meadows, 1920.
One Thing Is Certain, 1922.
Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H. Doran Company, New York.
CHAPTER XIX
MARJORIE BENTON COOKE
OF course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative introspection—by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look into your heart and write.”