19
No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious essay with some observations on the one per cent. of books which call for swift surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult for the reason that the same operation is never called for twice.
In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects certain principles and follows a careful technique. That is all.
We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an actual instance. In 1918 there was published a novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her to the designation “a genius.”
Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her first four books—nay, her first two, the second being To Have and to Hold—placed her firmly in the front rank of living romantic writers. The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in human affairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose. History—romance; it did not matter. She could set either movingly before you.
Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels, The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experimented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediæval France. The Wanderers was a more decided venture, but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes.
Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a story of friendship transformed into hatred and the pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreaking Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Considered as a novel, Foes is a terrible failure.
Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel anything more than “a good story, well told”? Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it.
The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond the “good story, well told” has a just grievance against any one who asks anything further. But against the novelist who has endeavored to make his story, however good, however well told, the vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical speculation, the reader has a just grievance—if the endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy is unsound.
Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a particular philosophy every reader must pronounce for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the basis of Miss Johnston’s novel was this: All gods are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it matters not. “There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light. The glorified—the unified. Union.” Upon this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes.