Mr. Wright has here written one of the most penetrating and unusual novels of this generation. Its conception, its point of view, its frankness, its freedom from all prejudice, and its form are in accord with the highest standards of the best Continental fiction. The central character—“the man of promise,” despite his potentialities of genius, is an intensely appealing and sympathetic figure. In his nature are combined weakness and strength, cruelty and tenderness, virtue and viciousness. In short, he is inherently human, capable of ascending the heights, yet capable also of sinking to the depths of life’s degradations.
The story, which takes him from early boyhood to middle age, is centred about his affairs, psychological and sexual, with the many women who touch his life. Not one of these women is able to assist him in his great work or to attain to his high and solitary ideals. In not one of them can he find an “inspiration.” They are not necessary to his intellectual development. To the contrary, each tends to drag him down to the mediocre level of the world’s criterion of greatness, to sap his vitality, to curb his heresies, to make of him a commonplace man. The book, in short, is an undogmatic refutation of the theory that great men need the influence of women. It shows how women, by their conservatism and social conventionality, interfere with true greatness and conspire instinctively and unconsciously against the higher nature of the men they love.
First Mr. Wright shows the cramping influence of mother love, the maternal efforts to inculcate conventional and religious ideals into the child. Then we are given a glimpse of the influence of the man’s boyhood romance. Next we see his college sweetheart, in love with life’s pleasures and gaieties, turning his mind from his work. Later we have the young man’s mistress, a selfish and calculating woman, ready to sacrifice his career to her personal ends. Still later, his wife, a sweet, loving and admirable woman, hinders him by her conservatism and constant attentions. In a final attempt to find a woman who can wholly appreciate his exalted desires and follow him to the heights he has in mind, he deserts his wife for what he thinks is an advanced and intellectual woman. But she in the end proves little different from the others. She exhibits the same petty jealousies and makes the same demands on him, and he sends her away in a last desperate attempt to consummate his aspirations. But at this time his daughter, now a young woman, appears; and he is forced to make the final sacrifice to her future.
“The Man of Promise” goes deep into the undercurrents of life, and it is not a novel any man or woman can afford to miss reading. It is a powerful story and in many ways a ruthless one; but both in conception and execution it marks a new epoch in American fiction.