Now the basis of this general attitude is an incurable sentimentality, and Miss Brown is not sentimental but sanative, made so by a gift of humor and laughter. She is, it is true, rather deeply interested in ideas as ideas, and in The Prisoner she has packed a few more than can be found in any American novel of the last dozen years. The root idea is that expressed by the prisoner—or ex-prisoner—himself. As Jeff says, with a flash of insight (prisoners learn to look within), the real difficulty is not that a man is in prison, but that he’s outside the law. And on the last page of the book the same idea is paraphrased, put even more perfectly, by Miss Brown, who says of Lydia that she knew by her talk with Jeff and reading what he had imperfectly written “that he meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible paradox of binding himself to the law.”
This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K. Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is “outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one of us any longer if he ever was.
At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor to make this very clear, for otherwise The Prisoner will be, in its real import, lost on the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in which we try to keep every one in the fellowship—for society is essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make laws simply to state what is not in that creed, the whole creed itself being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make laws about.
And the only hope of getting a man who has got “outside” to accept the creed and reënter the fellowship is to convince him that only by so doing can he achieve freedom, that only by binding himself to the unwritten law can he become “eternally free.” If you can make him see that, you have salvaged him for society. As the surest way to make a man see a thing is to let him discover it for himself we have invented prisons. Do not be deceived by the stupid notion that prisons are to punish men or even to protect society from their evil depredations. Prisons are the result of a deep, very sensible, entirely unshakeable piece of knowledge which we collectively possess, namely, that the man who has put himself beyond the pale must himself bring himself within it again. To that end we enclose him in four symbolic brick walls. We give him no physical or bodily escape. And so, after a time, he makes a mental escape and finds himself still essentially free, though physically in jail! So at last he comes to understand and accept the paradox that he can be free in no other way—ever.
The idea deserves expanding, but the reader will probably consider that we have intruded unpardonably with it in this chapter anyway. However, we can see no other means of making clear the philosophic basis of Miss Brown’s fine novel. Of its other features we shall not even bother to speak. It is well written, of course; it offers persons and situations that are both metaphysical and melodramatic and therefore, in this indissolubility of thought and feeling, life-like, amazing, comical, thought-provoking—why heap up adjectives? The character drawing is simply superb and a better executed figure than Madame Beattie cannot be found in the whole range of American fiction. Miss Amabel is hardly inferior. Weedon Moore, Alston Choate, the rigid and motionless but perfectly well grandmother in bed, Rhoda Knox—there is no gainsaying the fidelity of these people to observed facts and existences. If Henry James had had Madame Beattie’s necklace in place of his golden bowls and sacred founts his art would have been expended on really worthy material, but he could not, nor could any one, have done more with it than Alice Brown has done.
On the strength of this one story Miss Brown must be placed very high on the roll of American novelists at least as high as we place, among the men, Owen Wister, by reason solely of that incomparable novel of the West, The Virginian.
Books by Alice Brown
Fools of Nature.
Meadow-Grass.
By Oak and Thorn.
Life of Mercy Otis Warren.
The Road to Castaly.
The Day of His Youth.
Robert Louis Stevenson—A Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney).
Tiverton Tales.
King’s End, 1901.
Margaret Warrener, 1901.
The Mannerings.
High Noon.
Paradise.
The County Road, 1906.
The Court of Love, 1906.
Rose McLeod, 1908.
The Story of Thyrza, 1909.
Country Neighbors, 1910.
John Winterbourne’s Family, 1910.
The One-Footed Fairy, 1911.
The Secret of the Clan, 1912.
My Love and I, 1912.
Vanishing Points, 1913.
Robin Hood’s Barn, 1913.
Children of Earth, 1915.
Bromley Neighborhood.
The Prisoner, 1916.
The Flying Teuton, 1918.
Homespun and Gold, 1920.
The Wind Between the Worlds, 1920.
Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Some of the earlier books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.