"Then, Miss Menemon, you must know the penalty which is paid for success." He straightened himself, the awkwardness had left him, and he seemed taller than when he entered the room. "Yes," he continued, "the door to success is very low, and the greater is he that bends the most. Let a man succeed in any one thing, and whatever may be the factors with which that success is achieved, Envy will call a host of enemies into being as swiftly as Cadmus summoned his soldiery. And these enemies will come not alone from the outer world, but from the ranks of his nearest friends. Ruin a man's home, he may forget it. But excel him, do him a favor, show yourself in any light his superior, then indeed is the affront great. Mediocrity is unforgiving. We pretend to admire greatness, but we isolate it and call that isolation Fame. It is above us; we cannot touch it; but mud is plentiful and that we can throw. And if no mud be at hand, we can loose that active abstraction, malice, which subsists on men and things. No; had I an enemy I could wish him no greater penance than success—success prompt, vertiginous, immense! To the world, as I have found it, success is a crime, and its atonement, not death, but torture. Truly, Miss Menemon, humanity is not admirable. Men mean well enough, no doubt; but nature is against them. Libel is the tribute that failure pays to success. If I am slandered, it is because I have succeeded. But what is said of my father is wholly true. He did make shoes, God bless him! and very good shoes they were. Pardon me for not having said so before."
Again, here is another character speaking, and it seems a continuation of what we have quoted. It is not; there are nearly a hundred pages between the two, and a world-wide difference in sex. Now read:
"Before I met you I thought myself in love. Oh, but I did, though. And it was not until after I had known you that I found that which I had taken for love was not love at all. How did I know? Well—you see, because that is not love which goes. And that went. It was for the man I cared, not the individual. At the time I did not understand, nor did I until you came. Truly I don't see why I should speak of this. Every girl, I fancy, experiences the same thing. But when you came life seemed larger. You brought with you new currents. Do you know what I thought? People said I married you for money. I married you because—what do you suppose, now? Because I loved you? But at that time I told myself I had done with love. No, it was not so much for that as because I was ambitious for us both. It was because I thought Wall Street too small for such as you. It was because I discerned in you that power which coerces men. It was because I believed in the future; it was because I trusted you. Yes, it was for that, and yet this afternoon—"
The advance made in this brilliant book, for such it is with all its faults, from that grotesquely immoral work called The Truth about Tristrem Varick, justifies our expressed faith in the ability of Edgar Saltus. This novel is clearly highly dramatic and intensely interesting. There is the making of a foremost master of fiction in the young man when he shall have shaken off his affectations.
His Way and Her Will, by Fannie Aymar Mathews (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—This is a vivid picture of our supposed New York social life, as seen by certain writers of fiction through the plate-glass window of a fashionable modiste in an atmosphere heavy with the cheap scents of a barber-shop. We are introduced to most elegant people of high birth and culture through many generations. The villain is a villain because he is the son of a lowborn and base stonemason.
We have two sorts of fiction affected mainly by our American novelists. One is of the English sort, not Braddon, but Trollope and Miss Austen, where the interest, of a mild sort, turns on the social law of caste. "The hero and the heroine paddle about in the shallow sea of affection, never out of sight of the church-steeple," and it is a poor plebeian girl beloved by a lord, or a noble lady, rich and well-born, who is sought for by a lover of base origin. The other, or French method, is to have the characters tossed upon an awful ocean of passion, where the rag of chastity is torn in shreds by the lurid storm.
The novel before us is of the English class. As we have no aristocracy, one is created. It is, of course, one of birth. The old Knickerbockers and the Puritans of the Mayflower furnish the lofty pedigree, and chivalrous gentlemen and silken dames appear in or come out of elegant drawing-rooms, and love and make love in a most refined and lofty sort.
The stories are not only imaginary, but the foundations for the same are of the stuff dreams are made of. There is no such social life in this land of ours. The aristocracy we have here is one of wealth, and of necessity is without culture. Money-getting, in its best aspect, is a mere instinct. As we have to get our living from the hard crust of earth on which we are born, nature has given us the instincts necessary to that living, and a man gathers the good things about him very much as swine seek shelter and make a bed before a viewless coming storm. As we cultivate the animal we destroy the instinct; hence it is that when a man ceases to accumulate and goes to spending he loses the power of accumulation.
We do not mean to say by this that a man may not, through an exercise of his reason, accumulate property also. The goose that flies a thousand miles on a line due north is emulated by the mariner, who, by the use of a compass, will sail with the same accuracy. But the goose carries its own stomach, and the sailor a rich cargo of silks and velvets. The rule, or rather, the law, is that when reason takes the place of instinct, the instinct is lost. The man who from natural impulse and motive makes his money is unable to enjoy what he has made. He is a mere animal, and of these animals is our aristocracy made.