But, really, the serious thing to be considered just now is not so much what we like to read as what we have to, if we want to be amused. For that which we write depends upon that which we are, of course, and we reap in fiction what we sow in society. Therefore, being rather commercial, rather frivolous and rather in search of new sensations, we get all our business, and small talk, and scandal back again, faithfully reproduced, from the book sellers’ counters, and must go all over it once more with as good a grace as may be.
If taste and idealism are to prevail over hard facts, somebody must see pretty strenuously to it, ere long. In the meantime we may as well settle down to a thoroughly American literary atmosphere, relieved here and there by bits of nebulous romancing which pass for idealistic production. We really don’t object. We love ourselves too well to want company. Anthony Trolloppe, and Miss Yonge, and Mrs. Oliphant, William Black and Thomas Hardy could introduce us to scores of pleasant English people, but their heroes and heroines belong to a different world altogether, and are laid on the shelf nowadays, probably never to be taken up by the mass of readers except as refreshing antiquities when American repetition finally palls on us. The best we can do for an occasional let-up is to hunt up odd people or places, now and then, and write them up. Let us hope the supply will remain inexhaustible, and that the batch of novels for this season may give us a view of life outside of prescribed limits.
“The Orchid,” by Robert Grant, Scribner’s, might be an authentic biography of a twentieth-century society woman, including a faithful delineation of her environment. It is not, strictly speaking, a study of character or society, but rather a photographic reproduction of people and conditions. In this fact is to be found the book’s only defect as a literary work. There is no weighing of motives or analysis of character; nothing but a plain recital of facts as they are found to exist.
Lydia Arnold, who marries for money, is divorced, and remarries for love, is cold-blooded and unscrupulous as many a social queen in real life; and her device for securing the means to support her position as the wife of her lover, revolting as it is to sensitive people, is not entirely unprecedented. It may be that the type to which she belongs is an extreme one, but the fact that she shocked her friends and associates indicates that they had not entirely outgrown their natural impulses rather than that her enormities are absolutely unknown.
We can understand the pessimism of Mrs. Andrew Cunningham when she exclaimed: “The only unpardonable sin in this country is to lose one’s money. Nothing else counts,” but the facts thus far do not justify it; there are some former leaders of society who may be supposed to wish that the generalization were true. They have not found it so.
“Wall Street” has a significance, not merely as the name of a famous thoroughfare, but as epitomizing the forces which produce the profoundest effects upon the industrial and even political and social life of America. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the activities which it represents should be resorted to for a supply of material for interesting stories.
The latest fiction on this subject is Edwin Lefevre’s book, “The Golden Flood,” published by McClure, Phillips & Co. The author, who has to his credit quite a list of short Wall Street stories, is thoroughly familiar with his ground, and possesses, besides, a genuine gift of story-telling. “The Golden Flood” may possibly be criticised as dealing with a somewhat impossible theme—an attempt to corner the gold supply; but the description of the manner in which it affects “the richest man in the world” is so absorbingly interesting that probabilities are forgotten. The mixture of innocence and guile in young Mr. Grinnell, assumed for the purpose of mystifying Mellen and Dawson, is a good bit of character drawing. But, though these men in the story were worked up to the point of believing that Grinnell practised alchemy, it is doubtful if their prototypes in real life could be so affected. The explanation, however, turns out to be a practical one, and it is so timed as to sustain the interest to the end.